Hitler's Jihadis E-Book

Jonathan Trigg

• Herausgeber: Spellmount
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 393

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

As the West finds itself embroiled in conflict with radical Islam at home and abroad it is fascinating to hear the echoes of militant Islam from the Second World War, and the Nazis attempt to preach 'Jihad' against the British Empire and Stalin.Hitler's Jihadis tells the story of the tens of thousands of Muslims, from as far away as India who volunteered to wear the SS double lightning flashes and serve alongside their erstwhile conquerors. Jonathan Trigg gives insight into the pre-war politics that inspired these Islamic volunteers, who for the most part did not survive. Those who did survive the war and the bloody retribution that followed saw the reputation of the units in which they served in berated as militarily inept and castigated for atrocities against unarmed civilians. Using first hand accounts and official records Hitler's Jihadis peels away the propaganda to reveal the complexity that lies at the heart of the story of Hitler's most unlikely 'Aryans'.

Leseprobe

Contents

Maps

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Text

Introduction

I Nazism and Islam

II The War begins

III The German Army’s Muslim Legions – The Soviet Union and The Middle East and North Africa

IV The 1st East Mussulman SS-Regiment – Himmler’s first Muslim SS (Ostmuselmannisches SS-Regiment 1)

V Bosnian Muslims – The History of the 13th SS Mountain Division ‘Handschar’ (13. Waffen-Gebirgs Division der SS Handschar (kroatische Nr.1))

VI Albanian Muslims – The History of the 21st SS Mountain Division ‘Skanderbeg’ (21. Waffen-Gebirgs Division der SS Skanderbeg (albanische Nr.1))

VII The Last Gasp in the Balkans – The 23rd SS Mountain Division ‘Kama’ (23. Waffen-Gebirgs Division der SS Kama (kroatische Nr.2))

VIII Himmler’s Muslim Brigades – The 1st SS Tartar Mountain Brigade and the East Turkic SS Armed Detachments (Waffen-Gebirgs Brigade der SS (Tatar Nr.1) and the Osttürkischer Waffen-Verbände der SS))

IX ‘Free India’ – Indian Muslims in the Waffen-SS

X Peace and Retribution

XI Legacy

Appendix A The Waffen-SS High Mountain School

Appendix B Waffen-SS Formational Organisation

Appendix C Waffen-SS Ranks

Appendix D Divisional Song of the 13th SS Mountain Division ‘Handschar’

Bibliography

Map

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to a number of people, without whose help and support this book would never have been written. First to the surviving Muslim and non-Muslim veterans themselves from the huge array of formations covered in this book. The fate of many Waffen-SS survivors after the War was often harsh and sometimes arbitrary, but whereas in the West retribution most often came in the guise of judicial punishment such as imprisonment and loss of civil rights, in the East it was a different story. Put bluntly, most survivors of the fighting didn’t survive the peace. Stalin and Tito did their level best to exterminate their fellow countrymen who had fought against them. As those familiar with the first two volumes in the series will know, in them I follow the lives and wartime careers of members of the units I cover from pre-War, through recruitment and training, to combat and the end of hostilities. This has not been possible in this volume, as no single formation is the theme of the book and post-War retribution so seriously denuded the ranks of men able and willing to talk about their experiences. For those that lived through the immediate post-War bloodbath it is inevitable that their numbers dwindle year by year, but as ever, without the help and patience of the veterans in answering endless questions on obscure details that happened more than 60 years ago this book would have been impossible to write. Thanks yet again to Frau Carina Notzke at the Bundesarchiv in Freiburg, and a new friend at the archive in Koblenz, Frau Martina Caspers. My pigeon German is not improving but they still humour me and have been enormously helpful.

To Shaun at The History Press for never stopping pushing, and a massive thanks to the printing version of Gandalf the Wizard, my best friend Tim at County Print on the photographic side, you can make magic out of mud, it really does make all the difference. My research was made much more interesting and easier by the internet. There is a vast community online that is all networked together, and there is almost always ‘someone who knows someone’ who can help with any topic. Some of the best resources out there are military history websites and their users, two of the finest being Troy Tempest’s www.feldpost.tv/forum and Jason Pipes’s team at www.feldgrau.net, to them a heartfelt thanks. One of an author’s greatest challenges in military history is the issue of finding photographs that are both interesting and illustrative of the text, and maybe even to find the ever elusive but always worthwhile goal of pictures that haven’t been published before. As always, people have been very kind with both their time and treasured possessions, so my thanks to the ever informative and knowledgeable James Mcleod in particular, to Mr R. P. Croston and Bruno Beger PhD, as well as Ostbataillon 43, Sandtrooper and Rene Chavez.

Special thanks goes to George Lepre, whose book on the SS-Handschar Division is by far the most definitive text on that misunderstood and little regarded formation, and who in my opinion has set new standards in writing objectively on such a controversial topic.

Several people helped me with proof reading and have helped with the text, made suggestions and amendments and corrected mistakes to improve the writing and flow, for that I thank them, and whilst I have of course made every effort to achieve accuracy if there are any mistakes then they are entirely my own.

Thank you as well to everyone who has bought and read Hitler’s Gauls and Hitler’s Flemish Lions, I hope that this third instalment does not disappoint. This has been without a doubt the hardest volume to research and write but that in itself has been hugely rewarding.

As ever I must pay tribute to the amazing resilience of my beautiful wife who I am trying desperately to convert into a fan of military history … one day darling! And specifically for school ‘show and tell’ in Lydgate here is a big mention for our two incredible children, Maddy and Jack, they have even started to read my books and are on page 5 of Hitler’s Gauls, bless them! But as Maddy always says, ‘It’s alright dad but it’s not as good as Paul Jennings!’

Notes on the Text

Military ranks: Waffen-SS ranks are used throughout for Waffen-SS personnel. A conversion chart to comparative British Army ranks has been provided as Appendix B. For officers and soldiers of the German Army (Heer) their ranks are given in firstly their original German and then the British Army equivalents in brackets. Red Army and Partisan ranks are given directly in British Army terms.

Military terminology: As far as possible the military terminology used is that of the time and the army involved, on occasion an attempt has been made to ‘translate’ that terminology into modern British Army parlance in order to aid understanding.

Unit designation: All German orders of battle use the original unit designation of the time and then an English translation e.g. Gebirgs Korps is followed by Mountain Corps in brackets, and this is continued throughout except in certain circumstances where it is further simplified to improve the flow of the text or to establish authenticity, as in the relevant chapter titles. Again, to remain true to the time, Russian and Yugoslav Partisan formations are numbered, while German formations at corps or army level are either written or use the original Roman numerals. Smaller units such as divisions and regiments are numbered.

Foreign words: Where non-English words are used they are italicised unless in common usage and English translations are either given before or immediately afterwards. If then used often in the text they are no longer italicised.

Measurements: Distances are given in miles but weapon calibres are given in their usual metric form.

Place names: Particularly as regards places in the Balkans and the Soviet Union I have stuck with one spelling if there are several, mostly the one in common usage at the time, but have also tried initially to include other derivations in brackets to aid the reader following the ebb and flow of campaigns on any modern maps they may have.

Serbo-Croat: German has its umlauts, French has its accents, and Serbo-Croat has its own inflections as well, however as they are less well known than their western European counterparts I have not used them but have instead used English spelling to indicate the correct pronunciation when appropriate, e.g. the royalist Serb resistance movement led by Draza Mihailovic were the ‘cetniks’, the pronunciation of the ‘c’ is a ‘ch’, so I have spelt it as ‘chetniks’. I apologise to any Serbo-Croat speakers who balks at my simplicity or litany of linguistic mistakes!

Names of peoples: Particularly as regards the names of the Muslim peoples of the former Soviet Union I have tried to use the most commonly accepted name, so I have used the Crimean Tartars, for instance, instead of the other form, ‘Tatars’.

Introduction

This book, the third in the ‘Hitler’s Legions’ series, is a significant departure from its predecessors which dealt firstly with a single nationality, the French volunteers of the SS-Charlemagne in Hitler’s Gauls, and secondly with the ethnic Flemings of the the SS-Langemarck in Hitler’s Flemish Lions. This book, in contrast, seeks not to document a single nation or ethnic group and its contribution to the uniformed German war effort and the Waffen-SS in particular, but to bring together in one volume the entire panoply of different formations and units fighting on a plethora of fronts who shared one common, defining bond: adherence to Islam.

I have done this for several compelling reasons, not least of which is that it was the religion of the different people involved that was key to their recruitment in the first place. The men involved weren’t recruited despite their religion, but primarily because of it. The story of how Nazism, a political ideology entirely based on the absurd belief in north-western European racial superiority, could enthusiastically open its arms to tens of thousands of men from Muslim communities scattered across the Balkans, the southern Soviet Union and through to the Indian sub-continent, is one of the strangest episodes to emerge from the Second World War.

My interest in the Muslims who served in the Waffen-SS was first stirred when reading Rupert Butler’s history of the Waffen-SS, The Black Angels. In it Butler quickly glossed over the Muslims in the Waffen-SS but in a few lines he did write, he made one comment that stood out from the rest: ‘Himmler was later to admit that the only solid achievement of the SS training [in this case referring to the Bosnian Muslim SS-Handschar Divison] was to stop the Muslims from stealing from one another.’

This assertion simultaneously repelled and intrigued me, and has done ever since. As a serving British Army officer, several years after reading this book, I had the good fortune to be posted to a country in the Middle East on what is termed by the British Army, ‘loan service’. For those unfamiliar with this long standing practice it is where officers and senior NCOs are sent to train and support the armies of allied foreign governments. My appointment was initially to head up their NCO Training School, but this soon widened to include the Skill-at-Arms School and various other functions. In this command appointment I was lucky enough to be ably assisted by five incredibly competent British senior NCOs from both the Army and the Royal Marines (one of them, an ex-Household Division Regimental Sergeant-Major, had even converted to Islam) and also by over 80 Muslim instructors from the home nation and from countries across the region. The students of course were all Muslims, mostly Bedouin descendants barely two generations away from their desert-dwelling forebears. Throughout my time working with these soldiers I found them to display certain general flaws, especially as regards lack of discipline, but also to exhibit a strong willingness to learn and be led. Poor native officers were however in the majority. The soldiers we turned out of the training schools may not have been world beaters but neither were they somehow pathologically inclined to military ineptitude or the commission of war crimes.

However the basic tenet of Butler’s commentary on Heinrich Himmler’s attempts to recruit Muslim troops to fight the Nazis’ enemies was that it was a conspicuous and miserable failure. Significantly, not only was it a failure, but more precisely it was a military failure. This clarification is important because the Waffen-SS prided itself first and foremost on its ability and reputation as an élite fighting force. Hitler’s Black Guards were, without a shred of doubt, completely devoted to the pursuit of excellence in arms. Therefore, for them to expend such a significant amount of effort – and make the effort of will – that would be necessary to overturn their own cherished theories of supposed Nordic racial superiority and follow through with the recruiting, training, equipping and leading of more than four entire divisions of Muslim troops for nil military return is simply incredible.

After all, the hard bitten officer and NCO veterans of the Waffen-SS had taken tens of thousands of young men from almost every corner of Europe and forged them into formations such as the SS Divisions Wiking, Nordland and Nederland, all famed for their bravery and superior fighting skills. If Butler is to be believed why then was this not the case for the Muslims in the Waffen-SS? Further to that, why did Himmler and his henchmen not learn from their initial experience if it was a disaster? Those four Muslim SS divisions, as well as several smaller formations, were not all raised at once. The only reasonable answer has to be that the story of Muslims in the Waffen-SS is of far greater complexity than has been previously been acknowledged.

But trying to come to grips with the real story is extremely difficult, to say the least. Any reading of an anthology of the Waffen-SS during the War rarely does anything more than touch on its Muslim formations, and details are scarce, as most works simply parrot the same old tired comments. The picture painted is almost always one of near universal contempt, not only for the idea itself but overwhelmingly for the Muslim combat record, or rather the lack of it. The Muslim SS units are derided not only for their lack of military prowess but also their seemingly appalling record of war crimes. Butler again: ‘When the Division [SS-Handschar] was sent to France, its first action was a flat refusal to fight. Instead, it fell with dreadful glee on defenceless Christians and massacred scores of them.’ If true, this would be a shocking indictment both of Himmler’s policy and the behaviour of the volunteers themselves. But then why would Bosnian Muslims commit mass murder against French Catholics? If Christianity itself were a good enough reason for murder then why did the Muslims volunteer to serve with the ostensibly Christian Germans? Himmler may well have tried to make the Waffen-SS a pseudo-pagan organisation but the reality was that a significant minority of Waffen-SS men stubbornly clung onto their Christianity regardless of Himmler’s ramblings about mystical oak groves. Leaving that baffling inconsistency aside it would seem from most writers that as soon as a Muslim SS formation was given arms they used them not to fight an armed enemy but to butcher the nearest helpless civilians, and that they in fact represented the very worst excesses of the Waffen-SS.

The second, and more controversial, reason I have been drawn to chronicling the Muslim Waffen-SS is that there are some parallels, though by no means are they universal, with the rise of militant Islam in recent years. Al-Quaeda did not spring from the same well as the volunteers in the Handschar, Skanderbeg or any other Waffen-SS formation, but it is probably fair to say that it has tapped into some of the same motivations of real or perceived community persecution, religious suppression, and pan-Islamic solidarity that saw thousands of young Muslim men don Nazi Germany’s field grey in the dark days of the early 1940s.

A third more prosaic and practical reason that played a part is the fact that while there were a large number of Muslim formations both in the Waffen-SS and the German Heer, the vast majority were either formed very late in the War, like the Caucasian Osttürkischer Waffen-Verbände der SS, and so have relatively little history to write about, or the units themselves were disbanded soon after establishment, such as the Bosnian Muslim SS-Kama Division. To write about any one such unit in isolation would be wholly unsatisfactory, and bringing them together enables the full context to be given.

I believe that this book is a first and that there is probably no other text in the English language that covers all of the Muslim Waffen-SS formations and their German Heer predecessors and counterparts, I only hope that the readers believe, as I do, that it was a task worth undertaking.

I

Nazism and Islam

Nazism and religion

At first sight there would seem to be no common ground at all between Nazism and any of the world’s great monotheistic religions; Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The latter was, of course, identified by Adolf Hitler as his movement’s mortal enemy and a scourge that had to be exterminated. Therein lay the reason for the infamy of the Holocaust and the butchery of over six million innocents. As for Christianity, it is a religion that preaches peace, tolerance and forgiveness and these are not traits that are associated with the Nazis. Islam is also a religion of peace and benevolence, and one that has taken root mainly in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. As the Nazis were essentially ‘white supremacists’ it would be too big a leap to think that they would look with anything but contempt on a religion that was overwhelmingly practised by those whom they deemed to be ‘racially inferior’. But throughout its mercifully short lifespan Nazism had something of a schrizophrenic relationship with both Christianity and Islam. Perhaps the answer to the paradox lies in the idea that Nazism itself had many of the characteristics of the extremist fringes of organised religions through the ages, including a hatred of non-believers and the celebration of violence, and many of its adherents were just as fanatical in their beliefs.

Before the outbreak of war, the Nazis’ feelings towards Christianity were characterised by the hostility that dominated their thinking at this time, but were quietly shelved as an impediment to its wider goals once hostilities began. It was Hitler who made this accommodation, and it was entirely in keeping with his modus operandi once he achieved power, as he quietly went about making peace with the establishment in Germany, including the military, big business and of course, organised religion. During their street brawling days Hitler and his party had ranted and raved about remaking Germany in their own image, and the likes of Himmler were allowed to dream about a return to a pre-Christian pagan era. While the strutting and bombastic Ernst Röhm planned the replacement of Germany’s professional army, the Reichswehr, with a ‘people’s army’ based on his brown-shirted stormtroopers of the Sturmabteilung, the SA. On Hitler’s ascension to the position of Chancellor in 1933 Himmler took his master’s hint and did not seriously challenge the churches; Röhm however did not read the runes and his journey ended on 1 July 1934 in a cell in Munich’s Stadelheim prison with a bullet in the head from his old Party comrade Theodor Eicke. Outside the cell door was Eicke’s Adjutant, SS-Hauptsturmführer Michael Lippert, who would go on to be the first commander of the Flemish SS-Legion Flandern in 1941 (see Hitler’s Flemish Lions for more information).

Keeping both the Protestant and Catholic churches on side was an essential policy for Hitler as Germany itself was still a strongly Christian country in the 1930s and ’40s with large and devout populations of Catholics in southern Germany and Austria, and Protestants in the north of the country. A strident anti-Christian policy would have given the Nazis huge problems domestically. The general rule tended to be that as long as the various Christian churches left the Nazis alone to do what they wanted then they in turn would leave the churches in peace. Principled Christian opposition, as exemplified by the likes of the courageous pastor Dietrich Bonhoffer, and the retribution that followed, was rare.

Islam by contrast was a religion that barely figured in Nazi Germany. Modern-day Germany is home to a large Muslim, predominantly Turkish, community but prior to the War there were only a tiny number of Muslims calling Germany home and they were usually foreign diplomats, academics, professionals and their families. Islam was not an issue on the Nazi radar. There was no official stance on Islam and no real references to it in Nazi racial thinking. This was to change radically with the advent of the Second World War. Aggressive war brought the Nazis into contact with large Muslim populations, both in the Balkans, the Soviet Union and in North Africa, and the exigencies of the fighting would see the Nazis hurriedly develop their thinking on Islam. However, to say that the Nazis’ links to Islam and their willingness to use it for their own ends only began with the advent of blitzkrieg would be wrong. The answer to the conundrum of the Nazis’ interest in Islam lay in Germany’s past, and especially in the First World War.

Imperial Ambition

Germany came incredibly late to the business of establishing an overseas empire. By the time Germany was unified under the Kaiser in 1871 most of Africa and Asia had already been taken as colonies by other European Powers. The Portuguese were in southern Africa, the Dutch had the East Indies and even Belgium had the massive African Congo. As for the imperial giants of France and Britain it would be fair to say that the tricolor and the Union Jack held sway over empires that would have made Rome’s Caesars blush. This did not stop Germany from joining in though, however belatedly, and she managed to secure colonies in Africa: German South-West and East Africa (modern-day Namibia and Tanzania) as well as the Cameroons, were far larger in size than the Fatherland itself. In comparison to Britain’s African possessions these lands were relatively small and poor, but German policymakers were content to play second fiddle to Britain in the quest for overseas prestige and power.

World War One and Jihad

Unsurprisingly this delicate balancing act fell apart with the onset of war in 1914. Ottoman Turkey declared for the Central Powers and on 2 November 1914 the Sultan proclaimed jihad (holy war) against the Entente Powers. This announcement sent a shiver through the capitals of Imperial Russia, France and above all, Great Britain. All had significant Muslim populations under their control, but none more so than Britain in India and its Suez Canal lifeline through the Middle East. Germany’s intent was clear; if indigenous Muslim populations could be stirred up to rebellion it would severely hamper the Entente Powers’ ability to wage war and the result could be decisive. After all, if the Raj went up in flames would not the British take badly needed troops from France to secure their Empire?

German action was swift as agents fanned out eastwards spreading propaganda and inciting revolt. They said that the Kaiser had secretly converted to Islam, that Germany would supply them with arms and guarantee their future freedom. Needless to say all these assertions were false, but when Muslims began to desert from hitherto loyal regiments such as the Indian Army’s 129th Punjabis, and four entire companies of the 5th (Native) Light Infantry mutinied in Singapore, then London began to worry. The seriousness of the situation can be gauged by the fact that by the middle of 1915 the British Indian Army refused to send any more Indian troops to the Western Front, for fear of spreading disaffection, and thus forced Kitchener to make his infamous call for mass civilian British volunteers – the so-called Kitchener Army with its Pals’ Battalions. That Army would die in the mud of the Somme a year later.

Coordinated by the Reichskolonialamt (Reich Colonial Office) in Berlin trouble was fomented in the Horn of Africa – Somaliland and still-independent Abyssinia, the Sudan and further north in Egypt, to directly threaten the Suez Canal. At a time when every man and weapon was desperately needed to hold the line in France the War Office diverted considerable forces and material to deal with the very real threat of widespread Muslim rebellion. An invasion of western Egypt in early 1916 by the warlike Sanusi under their leader Sayyid Ahmad was opposed by the entire 1st South African Brigade shipped back to North Africa from England before it could be deployed on the Western Front. A simultaneous attack from Ali Dinar, the Sultan of Dafur in Sudan, was met by Britains’ Western Frontier Force while the ‘Mad Mullah’ of Somaliland, Sayyid Mohammed Abdille Hassan, was countered by the Somaliland Field Force. In a series of campaigns covering thousands of square miles, all three rebellions and incursions were comprehensively defeated by 1917.

However the situation in Abyssinia was of an altogether different magnitude. Here the German government delegate, the wily Leo Frobenius, and his colleague the German Consul in Addis Ababa, von Syburg, encouraged the new Emperor, Lij Iyasu, to ally himself increasingly with Islam and prepare an invasion into British Somaliland. This caused consternation in the War Office particularly as their entire policy in the East had just suffered a huge blow with the loss of 10,000 men under General Townshend at the Battle of Kut in Mesopotamia against the Ottoman Turks. Not for the first or last time it was decided that Britain’s interests were best served by removing a foreign sovereign ruler. The result was a British-backed coup in Addis Ababa that deposed Lij Iyasu in favour of his aunt, Zaudita. There ensued a brief but bloody civil war which culminated in the Battle of Sagale on 27 October 1916, in which more than 100,000 men fought. Sagale was a decisive victory for Zaudita, and in the aftermath Lij Iyasu fled into the eastern lowlands where he was eventually captured in 1921. The threat from Abyssinia was over.

The events of 1916 in Muslim Africa shook the War Office, and coupled with the Easter Rising in Dublin, made the British government feel far less secure in its overseas possessions. The threat of a future jihad would not be underestimated.

For Germany the lack of resources and ability to project their power outside of Europe meant their ability to light a bonfire under the British Empire in particular was always going to be an extremely long shot, but it did sow the seeds of future endeavour. Germany had now established a track record of supporting both a pan-Islamic awakening, and Muslim nationalist aspirations, in order to achieve its goals. It would draw on both of these policies again when Hitler launched his war of conquest in 1939.

Nazi racial philosophy

Having established the precedence for German-Muslim cooperation in World War One there remains the question of race, after all, the entire foundation of National Socialist rule in Germany was explicit racism. This racism was not a badge of convenience or a device to gain temporary political advantage, but a heartfelt belief system that dominated every aspect of Nazi policy and German national life. If a future alliance between Nazi Germany and any Muslim populations was to be viable then this circle needed to be squared. The answer was to come from an altogether surprising source, Alfred Rosenberg and the Nazi policy of Drang Nach Osten – the Drive to the East!

The Nazis’ attitude on race was infamously framed by Hitler in his incredibly turgid book Mein Kampf – My Struggle. Hitler expressed the Nazi Weltanschaung, their World View, as one entirely based on the innate racial superiority of the Germans and their ethnic cousins in north-western Europe who, in the Nazis’ eyes, all sprang from the same ancient Aryan Volk – People. It was the destiny of the Aryans, Hitler’s master race or Herrenvolk, ultimately to rule not only Europe but also to dominate the world, but in order to achieve this it was absolutely necessary for the Aryans to exterminate their most dangerous racial enemies, the Jews, and their political allies, the Bolsheviks. Incredible though it may seem today, this was the founding belief of a political party that was eagerly swept into power in Germany in 1933 by an educated voting populace.

The Nazis’ anti-semitism and delusional conspiracy theories were nothing new of course, but were drawn from a rich vein of similar bigotry that had existed across Europe for centuries. What was new with the Nazis was that they were able to move from being crackpot hate-peddlers operating on the lunatic fringes of society to the very pinnacle of national power. They were able to do this without having to hide their political poison, indeed it was central to their appeal, and thus once in government they could turn it into official policy.

Prior to the 1933 election it was Adolf Hitler himself who fulfilled the role of chief racial ‘thinker’ in the Nazi Party. But after his accession to power he was far less interested in developing Nazi racial theory and far more concerned with its implementation both at home in the Third Reich, and abroad in his war of conquest. This did not mean Nazi racial thinking stopped dead in 1933 however, as there were two senior devotees to the cause in the shape of the bespectacled bureaucrat and head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and the Party’s own rather grandiosely titled ‘racial philosopher’, Alfred Rosenberg. As for the rest of the Party, as one would expect the Nazis had always attracted a whole host of anti-Semites who fancied themselves as intellectuals. The reality was that the vast majority were nothing more than crude Jew-baiters, with the bullet-headed Julius Streicher, as the editor of the the violent and semi-pornographic magazine Der Stürmer, being a perfect example of the type. The Party were not all violent thugs though, and it did attract a number of educated professionals to its ranks. Alfred Rosenberg was in this latter category.

The ‘Reichsheini’ and Rosenberg

Himmler, unflatteringly nicknamed the ‘Reichsheini’ by his detractors on account of his slavish loyalty to Hitler, was a racial fantasist on a grand scale. He held the same core beliefs as his master but was also devoted to evolving and expanding them. Himmler was fascinated by Teutonic paganism and Germanic tribal history and was a firm believer in the outright rejection of Christianity as a source of ‘un-German softness’. With the full resources of the Nazi State at his disposal he established commissions, founded museums, funded scientific expeditions and set up entire departments to research, investigate and irrefutably prove the existence and history of the Aryan race and its genetic superiority. He then used some of the spurious conclusions from this work to determine the recruitment policies of his beloved Waffen-SS, the armed wing of his empire. This policy even included Himmler personally vetting photos of every single prospective Waffen-SS officer to ensure no-one was accepted who did not exhibit the required kind of ‘Nordic features’. This was on top of the requirement, instituted in 1935, for every SS applicant to prove a ‘pure’ Aryan genealogy, dating back to 1800 for enlisted men and 1750 for officers. Even in Hitler’s ‘Aryan Germany’ this meant the rejection of 85 out of every 100 volunteers. Himmler even rebuilt, at vast expense, the medieval Schloss Wewelsburg in the German countryside to become in effect an ‘SS theme park’ with its guest rooms dedicated to historical Germanic heroes such as King Henry the Fowler and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. It was Himmler who tried to map the global distribution of the mythical Aryans and who would later use this information to target the foreign volunteer recruitment for the Waffen-SS. Crucially though, it was also he who would distort and disregard his own ‘racial science’ later in the War in order to try and fill the blood-soaked gaps in the Waffen-SS order of battle, including the large-scale recruitment of Muslims. For Himmler the vision of the Waffen-SS was of a blue-eyed, blond haired order of giants answering the mythical call of their blood and soil, and definitely not a mass of people who answered the call to prayer. This, though, would change.

Alfred Rosenberg, on the other hand, was very different from the pedantic Bavarian Reichsführer-SS. Born on 12 January 1893 (incidentally the very same day as Hermann Goering) in Reval, Estonia’s modern day capital of Tallinn, to Baltic German parents, Alfred was a serious young man who studied architecture in Riga, Latvia and then engineering in Moscow as the First World War raged to the west. After completing his studies he returned to his home city where he worked as an architect, indeed many of the buildings he designed are still standing in Tallinn city centre. Following the Russian October Revolution in 1917 and the defeat of the counter-revolutionary Whites in the ensuing Civil War he and his family, as committed anti-bolsheviks, fled west to Germany and settled in Bavaria. There Rosenberg was swiftly drawn into far Right politics and became an extremely early member of the tiny German Workers’ Party in January 1919. This was before its name change to the National Socialist German Workers Party, and even before Hitler became a party member that October.

As one of the few highly educated professionals in the fledgling organisation Rosenberg was asked to edit the party newspaper, the virulently anti-semitic Völkischer Beobachter (‘People’s Observer’) from 1921 onwards. Under his stewardship the paper steadily built its circulation and allowed Rosenberg to expound his pseudo-scientific racial theories. He went on to briefly lead the Party during Hitler’s imprisonment in Landsberg following the failure of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, before becoming an elected Reichstag deputy in 1930 and publishing his landmark book, Der Mythus des 20 Jahrhunderts (‘The Myth of the Twentieth Century’), which dealt with key issues in the national socialist ideology, such as the Jewish question. No doubt avid reading for some fanatics, this hefty tome even bored Hitler, who called it ‘stuff nobody can understand’.

Rosenberg turns East

Despite his lofty pretensions Rosenberg lacked both personal charisma or any real political skill or drive, and became increasingly marginalised over time as the Nazis got closer to supreme power from 1930 onwards. This loss of influence was compounded by the fact that he was not on good terms with most of the other Party leaders including Himmler and Goebbels, while Goering positively detested him. But he did manage to wield enough influence over Hitler to reinforce his master’s belief that the major threat to the long term future of Nazi Germany lay not in the liberal democracies of the West but in the East. It was the East that Rosenberg saw as the crucible that would decide the fate of the Nazis and where he modelled his ‘racial ladder’ theory. This theory placed all races in a hierarchy, naturally with the Ayrans at the summit and the Jews at the bottom, alongside black Africans. Significantly for later policy in the Soviet Union he was fairly ambivalent towards the Slavs, believing that they were not the Untermensch, the sub-humans, that Hitler thought they were. Indeed he saw them as a potential racial ally. As can be imagined, this was not a popular view in the Nazi Party.

On the Nazis’ assumption of power in 1933, unlike Himmler, Goebbels and Goering, who obtained significant portfolios in government, Rosenberg received very little. He was appointed to lead the Party foreign political office and tried to build bridges with Britain, but was little more than an unwanted appendage to von Ribbentrop as the Foreign Minister. With little to do he was fobbed off the following year with overseeing the educational and philosophical beliefs of the Party. The post was universally held in low regard by the Party leadership but Rosenberg fooled himself into thinking that it was a potential beacon for the evolution of Nazi policy. It was this post he held at the outbreak of War in 1939. His self-delusion was then reinforced when he was made head of the the Centre of National Socialist Ideological and Educational Research the following year. It was in this position that Rosenberg would develop his thoughts on what he called the ‘religion of the blood’ that sought to reject what he viewed as the corrupting influence of Christianity on Germany, and instead draw on aspects of paganism, Zoroastrianism and even Vedic Hinduism. Part of this illusory belief system was Rosenberg’s thesis, first proclaimed by an earlier American writer called Chamberlain, that Jesus Christ himself was a member of a Nordic enclave resident in ancient Galilee who struggled against Judaism.

Despite these wild ramblings Rosenberg’s position as head of the Centre, and a Baltic German to boot, did bestow on him an unearned reputation as an expert on the peoples of the East and allowed him to play a major part in shaping the future policies of Nazi occupation. In this role Rosenberg was an influential player, and his views set the tone for much of the move to recruit Muslims into the Waffen-SS.

The Ostministerium – Ministry for the East

With the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and the advent of Operation Barbarossa, Rosenberg finally got his wish and was granted a government Ministry all of his own – the clumsily entitled Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete – Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. This Ost Ministerium, as it was more commonly known, was intended by Hitler as the central policy instrument for the Nazis in their new lebensraum (Hitler’s so-called ‘living space’ for the Germans) in the conquered East. Rosenberg was to lead this policy formulation but, as became crucial over time, was purposefully given little executive control to turn these policies into practice. Responsibility for that lay with the military commanders in the field and the all-powerful regional governors such as Hinrich Lohse (governor of the Reichskommisariat Ostland comprising Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belorussia) and the incredibly brutal Erich Koch (governor of Reichskommisariat Ukraine). These men theoretically reported to Rosenberg but in reality were loyal to Hitler, appointed by him to rule their designated areas entirely as they saw fit to serve Nazi Germany’s interests. This split between policy and practice was to lead both to the creation of a Muslim Waffen-SS from the Soviet Union’s Muslim minorities and to its eventual failure, with far-reaching consequences for the German war effort.

From the start Rosenberg saw the polyglot Soviet Union as an unnatural construct that had to be split up into its constituent ethnic parts. For the majority Slav populations of Belorussia (White, or Little Russia), the Ukraine and Russia proper, this would mean enslavement and subjugation under German rule. But for hitherto minority peoples in the Soviet Union he foresaw the potential for some form of limited self-government under Nazi domination. Overwhelmingly this second and far more lenient approach was envisaged for the populations of the southern Soviet Union, both Christians such as the Georgians and Armenians, but also for the Muslim peoples of the Crimea, the Caucasus and the vast Turkic steppes of central Asia. Rosenberg’s plan called for the establishment of a ring of buffer states around Russia by granting independence to the likes of the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Belorussia. There would also be independence for the Soviet Union’s Muslim minorities such as the Crimean Tartars and the various Turkic steppe peoples, albeit under German hegemony. In this respect Rosenberg was a clear proponent of encouraging nationalism among the Soviet Union’s ethnic minorities as a counter-balance to Russian central power, even though this line of thinking fell foul of Hitler’s personal obsession with the destruction of the Slavs. For both Hitler and his ever-loyal lackey Himmler, the peoples of the East, with a few exceptions such as the Estonians and Latvians, were nothing more than sub-humans fit only for slavery – they were Slavs, after all – or extermination.

II

The War begins

Nazi war strategy

If Hitler had a grand strategy prior to the outbreak of general war, and this is still debatable, then the West’s reaction in declaring war on account of his invasion of Poland threw it into complete chaos. The counter-reaction from the Reich Chancellory was nothing if not quick and decisive. The Wehrmacht’s Fall Gelb operation (Case Yellow) set in motion a blitzkrieg assault on the Low Countries and France that effectively knocked all of Nazi Germany’s opponents, except Great Britain, out of the War. Hitler could now focus on what he considered to be his true enemy, the behemoth of Soviet Russia. With the British unable to respond following the disaster of the battle for France and Dunkirk, Hitler was confident his rear was secure. Scandinavia was in his pocket and Finland was still smarting from its defeat by Stalin in the previous year’s Winter War and willing to side with Germany to secure its northern flank. The only piece of the jigsaw left was to ensure south-eastern Europe and the Balkans were on side and then Hitler could focus all of Germany’s might on kicking in the Soviet door.

Using a combination of carrot and stick Hitler and his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop managed to win over the majority of states in that traditionally chaotic part of Europe. Despite being the bitterest of enemies, both Rumania and Hungary signed the Nazis’ Tripartite Pact (previously an agreement between Germany, Italy and Japan), and even King Boris’s Bulgaria agreed to cooperate, though interestingly not to turn its troops against its Soviet neighbour. Albania had been invaded by Mussolini’s Italy and effectively annexed several years previously. As for Greece, its diminutive dictator, General Ioannis Metaxas, was pro-Axis but he was also a fierce patriot and the failed Italian invasion of the previous winter necessitated German intervention. But as long as Yugoslavia could be brought into the fold then Greece would remain isolated until overwhelmed. This seemed entirely probable with Yugoslavia having been led from 1935 by the pro-Axis Serb Milan Stojadinovic and his Radical Union Party. Stojadinovic even referred to himself as the Vodja (Serbo-Croat for Führer) and set up his own uniformed paramilitary stormtroopers, similar to the Nazi’s brownshirted SA, to bully opponents. However he had been replaced earlier in the year by Dragisa Cvetkovic who was not seen in such a favourable light by the Germans. Consequently, what passed for diplomacy in Nazi Germany swung into action and the usual mix of bluff and promises overwhelmed the Belgrade government, which duly signed up to the Pact on 25 March 1941.

All was now set to allow Hitler to begin his momentous invasion of Russia at the very start of the 1941 campaigning season and give his troops the best possible chance of defeating the Soviet Union before the onset of the horrendous Russian winter. With everything in place the entire apple cart was knocked over by the trademark unpredictability of the Balkans. Popular revulsion in Yugoslavia at the signing of the Tripartite Pact led to an uprising against the Regent led by the military High Command, and covertly supported by Great Britain, that saw the government overthrown and an anti-Germany administration swept into power just two days after the Pact was signed in Vienna. At the Chancellory Hitler flew into a towering rage and demanded retribution. Yugoslavia’s fate was sealed.

Unternehmen Strafe (Operation Punishment)

The planned German invasion of Greece, codenamed Operation Marita, was hurriedly amended by Hitler’s Führer Directive No. 25 that called for an immediate invasion of Yugoslavia which aimed ‘to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a national unit’. In an incredibly short period of time the existing plans were adapted and on 6 April the invasion of Yugoslavia was heralded by a savage bombing raid on Belgrade carried out by Generaloberst (General) Alexander Löhr’s Luftflotte (Airfleet) IV. In two days of bombardment, reminiscent of the terror bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam, over 17,000 Yugoslav civilians died. Simultaneously, elements of both the Second and Twelfth Armies and Panzergruppe Kleist (Panzer Group Kleist, named after its commanding general) comprising ten corps with 32 divisons, attacked Yugoslavia from Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania and Austria (the Ostmark, as it had been called since the Nazi Anschluss of 1938). Even though the Royal Yugoslav Army was over 900,000 men strong it was no match for Nazi Germany’s modern forces and blitzkrieg tactics and it took the Wehrmacht just twelve days to force the country’s surrender, on 17 April. The end of the campaign saw 6,028 Yugoslav officers and 337,684 NCOs and men become POWs, but more than 500,000 soldiers of all ranks refused to lay down their arms and disappeared either back home or into the mountains. Many of them would later become the enemy against which Muslim Waffen-SS men would fight. For the Germans it was a victory bought incredibly cheaply with a casualty count of just 151 men killed, 15 missing and 392 wounded.

In accordance with Hitler’s wishes the great dismemberment of Yugoslavia was then carried out. In effect a sovereign nation was carved up between the victors, nothing had been seen like this since the great Partitions of Poland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Yugoslavia disappears from the map

The victory belonged to Germany and it was she who divided up the former Triune Kingdom and handed it out to her allies. Montenegro was given to Italy along with most of the Dalmation coast and islands as well as half of Slovenia that lay just across the Italian border. The largely ethnic Albanian Kosovo region was joined with Albania and so in effect also became Italian territory. Bulgaria, who had not sent any troops into Yugoslavia but had allowed the German Twelfth Army to launch its attacks from there, was rewarded with the whole of Yugoslavian Macedonia, while Hungary received the Barania and Backa regions of Yugoslav Vojvodina. As for Rumania, it only acquired some very minor border districts and the ethnic German Banat region which by virtue of its Germanic population in effect became a province of the Reich. Germany herself annexed the remaining half of Slovenia bordering the Ostmark to further extend her borders. As for the rest of the country, Serbia was effectively reduced to its pre-1912–13 Balkan War borders and placed under German control but with its own administration and limited self-defence forces under the collaborationist General Milan Nedic. A new country was also created in Croatia with the amalgamation of the Catholic Croats with the ethnically mixed population of Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of coastal Dalmatia. Although nominally independent the new nation had permanent German and Italian garrisons and was a puppet state. Outside of Muslim Albania it was in this country that lay Europe’s largest indigenous Muslim community.

Bosnia’s Muslims

Since it had burst out from the Arabian Peninsula centuries before, Islam’s contact with Europe had been little but a litany of blood and violence. Charles Martel’s last stand at Tours, Roland at Roncevalles, the Reconquista