Friends and enemies ww212/15/2023 On the Muslim side one cannot generalize. According to Motadel, some of Hitler's Muslim allies shared the Nazi leader's hatred of Jews. The Mufti of Jerusalem met with Adolf Hitler in 1941. Anti-Semitic propaganda was often connected to attacks against the Zionist migration to Palestine which had emerged as a main topic in Arab political discourses. In its propaganda, however, especially in the Arab world, anti-Semitic themes played an important role. On the German side pragmatic, strategic interests were the most important driving force behind this policy. What can you tell us about this assumption? This is precisely why the Nazis tried to get Muslims on the regime's side. German army officials granted these recruits a wide range of religious concessions, even lifting the ban on ritual slaughter, a practice that had been prohibited for anti-Semitic reasons by Hitler's Law for the Protection of Animals of 1933.Ī widespread assumption exists that Muslims supported the Nazi Regime because they shared an anti-Semitic perspective. German propagandists in the eastern territories, the Balkans, and North Africa tried to use religious rhetoric, vocabulary and iconography to mobilize Muslims. They politicized sacred texts like the Quran as well as religious imperatives, most notably the concept of jihad, in order to foment religious violence for political ends.įrom 1941 onwards, the Nazi Wehrmacht army and the paramilitary SS recruited tens of thousands of Muslims, mainly to save German blood. German military authorities also made extensive efforts to co-opt Islamic dignitaries. On the eastern Front, the Nazi occupiers ordered the rebuilding of mosques, prayer halls, and madrasas - previously destroyed by Moscow - and the re-establishment of religious rituals and celebrations in order to undermine Soviet rule. In the war zones, Germany engaged with a wide range of religious policies and propaganda to promote the Nazi regime as the patron of Islam. As early as 1941, the Wehrmacht distributed the military handbook "Islam" to train its soldiers to behave correctly towards Muslim populations. Read more: How Nazi policies of expansion led to World War II Nazi Germany made significant attempts to promote an alliance with the "Muslim world" against their alleged common enemies - the British Empire, the Soviet Union, America and Jews. What did these policies look like?ĭavid Motadel: At the height of the war in 1941-1942, when German troops entered Muslim-populated territories in the Balkans, North Africa, Crimea, and the Caucasus, and approached the Middle East and Central Asia, Berlin began to see Islam as politically significant. DW: In your book, "Islam and Nazi Germany's War," you wrote about the policies of the Nazis towards Islamic political entities.
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