How Nazis courted the Islamic world during WWII
DW: In your book, “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War,” you wrote about the policies of the Nazis towards Islamic political entities. What did these policies look like?
David 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. 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.
Read more: How Nazi policies of expansion led to World War II
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. 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.
German military authorities also made extensive efforts to co-opt Islamic dignitaries. 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.
From 1941 onwards, the Nazi Wehrmacht army and the paramilitary SS recruited tens of thousands of Muslims, mainly to save German blood. Muslim soldiers fought on all fronts. 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.
A widespread assumption exists that Muslims supported the Nazi Regime because they shared an anti-Semitic perspective. This is precisely why the Nazis tried to get Muslims on the regime’s side. What can you tell us about this assumption?
On the German side pragmatic, strategic interests were the most important driving force behind this policy. In its propaganda, however, especially in the Arab world, anti-Semitic themes played an important role. 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.
On the Muslim side one cannot generalize. Some of the Muslim allies of the Nazi regime — most importantly the famous Mufti of Jerusalem — shared the Nazis’ Jew-hatred. In the war zones, in the Balkans, in North Africa, and in the Eastern territories, the picture is more complicated. In many of these regions, Muslims and Jews had lived together for centuries. And in some cases, Muslims would now help their Jewish neighbors, for example hiding them from the Germans.
The Mufti of Jerusalem met with Adolf Hitler in 1941. According to Motadel, some of Hitler’s Muslim allies shared the Nazi leader’s hatred of Jews.
What goals did the Nazi Regime pursue with its attempt to persuade Muslims to join them and what were sympathetic Muslim leaders hoping for?
The Third Reich’s engagement with Islam was not only that Muslim-populated regions had become part of the war zones, but also, more importantly, that from 1941 to 1942, Germany’s military situation had deteriorated. In the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg strategy had failed. As the Wehrmacht came under pressure, strategists in Berlin began to seek broader war coalitions, thereby demonstrating remarkable pragmatism. The courtship of Muslims was to pacify the occupied Muslim-populated territories and to mobilize Muslims to fight on the side of Hitler’s armies.
Many of those Muslims who worked with the Nazi regime had pragmatic reasons. They believed that Nazi Germany in 1941-1942 was victorious and that it would determine the future world order and that the Nazis could help them being liberated from, for example, British imperial rule.
Historian David Motadel has authered two books and various articles on Islam, Europe and Germany
The motives of these soldiers varied considerably. Of course some recruits were driven by religious hatred and anti-Bolshevist, ideological fervor. Overall, however, Muslims often had rather profane motives for enlisting.
Did the Nazis really see Islam as something inherently positive or were the Muslims only a means to an end?
Overall, I think that Muslims were means to an end. Nazi policies towards Islam were informed by pragmatism. Some leading Nazis, particularly Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, repeatedly expressed their respect for Islam. Whenever denouncing the Catholic Church, Hitler routinely contrasted it with Islam. While he denounced Catholicism as a weak, effeminate religion, he praised Islam as a strong, aggressive, martial religion. Overall, however, it was strategic considerations, not ideology, that led to Nazi Germany’s campaign for Islamic mobilization.
Read more: The ‘good German doctor’ who saved Greek lives during WWII occupation
Wasn’t Nazi racism a major obstacle for collaborating with Muslims?
Hitler had already postulated the racial inferiority of non-European peoples in “Mein Kampf.” Once in power, however, German officials showed themselves to be more pragmatic: Non-Jewish Turks, Iranians and Arabs had already been explicitly exempted from any official racial discrimination in the 1930s, following diplomatic interventions from the governments in Tehran, Ankara, and Cairo. And during the war the Germans showed similar pragmatism. Muslims everywhere, it was clear to every German officer, were to be treated as allies.
The realities on the ground were by no means straightforward. In the first months of the Nazi invasion of Russia, SS squads executed thousands of Muslims on the assumption that their circumcision showed that they were Jewish. Eventually, Reinhard Heydrich, chief Nazi security officer, sent out a directive cautioning the Task Force executing squads to be more careful. On the southern fringes of the Soviet Union, however, German killing squads still had difficulties distinguishing Muslims from Jews. Moreover, in North Africa, the Balkans, and on the Eastern Front, German soldiers were confronted with diverse Muslim populations, including Muslim Roma and Jewish converts to Islam.
Dr. David Motadel is an Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He works on the history of modern Europe and Europe’s relations with the wider world. In 2017, Motadel was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Anti-Semitism in 16th-century Prague
One of Germany’s most famous silent films, “The Golem: How He Came Into the World,” was made in 1920. Paul Wegener directed and played a leading role in the film set in 16th-century Prague. The Jewish ghetto is in danger and the emperor order the Jews to leave the city. Only the mythical Golem can help. It’s one of the earliest films to address the persecution of Jews.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Persecution of Jews in 1920s Vienna
Based on a novel by Hugo Bettauer, “The City Without Jews,” is an important example of how films have taken on anti-Semitism. The Austrian-made film is set in Vienna in the 1920s and shows how the residents held Jews responsible for all social ills. Critics, however, have lamented the film’s use of anti-Semitic cilches.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Fine line between tolerance and clichés
Four years earlier in 1916, the American director DW Griffith had created the monumental historical film,”Intolerance.” The story explains historical events over the course of four episodes, taking intolerance to task. Yet in a scene showing the crucifixion of Jesus, Griffith employed Jewish stereotypes. As a result, critics have also accused “Intolerance” of demonstrating anti-Semitic tendencies.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Ben Hur through the decades
“Ben Hur” was first made in 1925, but has been reinvented many time since then. It tells the story of a conflict betweet Jews and Christians at the beginning of the 1st century. Jewish prince Judah Ben Hur lives in Roman-occupied Jerusalem as a contemporary of Jesus Christ. The way the Jewish-Christian relationship is showed in the Ben Hur films remains a topic of discussion today.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
A trial and pogrom in 1880s Hungary
Although hardly known today, GW Pabst’s “The Trial” (1948) is an astounding early example of how the cinema reacted to the Holocaust. Filmed in Austria just three years after the end of the war, Pabst tells a true story set in 1882 in Hungary. A young girl disappears from her village and Jews are blamed. Tragically, a pogrom follows.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Broaching the truth
“The Trial” remained an exception. After the war, it took the film industry in Europe quite some time to deal with the subject. The French director Alain Resnais was the first to address the Nazi genocide in 1956, in the unsparing 30-minute documentary “Night and Fog.”
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Bringing the Holocaust to TV
It wasn’t until the 1978 television mini-series “Holocaust” was made that the genocide was brought to the broader public. The four-part US production directed by Marvin J. Chomsky tells the story of a Jewish family that gets caught in the cogs of the Nazis’ genocidal policies.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’
Fifteen years later, American director Steven Spielberg was able to accomplish on the big screen what “Holocaust” had done for television audiences. “Schindler’s List” portrayed the brutal reality of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism in Germany, but also in Eastern Europe, spotlighting the unscrupulous SS offcer Amon Göth.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Claude Lanzmann and ‘Shoah’
French director Claude Lanzmann harshly criticized Spielberg’s drama. “He did not really reflect on the Holocaust and cinema. The Holocaust cannot be portrayed,” he said in an interview. Lanzmann himself took up the subjects of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in a completely different way – through long documentaries and essay films such as “Shoah” and “Sobibor.”
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Humor and the Holocaust
Italian comedian and filmmaker Roberto Bengini took a daring approach in his film on anti-Semitism and the Holocuast. In 1997, “Life is Beautiful” premiered, telling the fictional story of Jews suffering in a concentration camps. The humor he wove throughout had a liberating effect.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Roman Polanski’s ‘The Pianist’
An equally moving film by Polish-French director Roman Polanski was released in 2002. In “The Pianist,” the fate of Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman during the war years of 1943-44 was brought to the big screen. The project allowed the director, whose mother and other relatives were deported and murdered by the Nazis, to work through his own family’s past.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Anti-Semitism and Jesus the Jew
Films about the life of Jesus Christ often come up in discussions about anti-Semitism in cinema. Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), for example, has been accused of reinforcing anti-Semitic clichés, particularly in scenes in which Jews are indirectly associated with greed.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Mel Gibson’s scandalous ‘The Passion of the Christ’
Much more controversial was the film that Australian Mel Gibson released two years later. Both Christians and Jews accused Gibson of explicit anti-Semitism in the film, saying he didn’t counter the implications in the New Testament that Jews were to blame for the death of Jesus (who himself was Jewish). In public, Gibson likewise used anti-Semitic speech.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Turkish anti-Semitism
Audiences and critics alike decried the anti-Semitism in the Turkish film, “Valley of the Wolves.” The action-packed movie version of a TV series of the same name showed a battle between Turkish soldiers and Israel. The film employed “anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic stereotypes and was inciteful,” according to several organizations.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
WWII still a challenge for filmmakers
Just how difficult it can still be to address the subject matter of World War II is evident in the response to a three-part German TV series from 2013, “Generation War.” The series follows a handful of German soldiers fighting on the eastern front. It was criticized in Poland for anti-Semitism and was said to have represented the Polish resistance.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
Hannah Arendt and ‘the banality of evil’
Margarethe von Trotta’s film about Hannah Arendt was well received in 2012. The director sketched a balanced portrait of the philosopher and publicist who, in the 1960s, grappled with a figure who was largely responsible for the Nazi genocide: Adolf Eichmann. Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to explain anti-Semitism clothed in seemingly harmless bureaucracy.
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Anti-Semitism in film before and after the Holocaust
The ‘Wonder Woman’ controversy
Because the protagonist of the current Hollywood super hero hit “Wonder Woman” is played by Israeli Gal Gado, the film was not shown in a number of Arab countries. Gado herself had served in the Israeli army and defended her experience. Not showing “Wonder Woman” is anti-Semitic, according to the public sentiment in Israel.
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