Wall Street Journal, NY
Jan 16 2015
Why Hitler Wished He Was Muslim
The Führer admired Atatürk’s subordination of religion to the
state–and his ruthless treatment of minorities.
Holy Warriors
Muslim recruits of the SS Handzar Division pray in 1943. Harvard
University Press; German Archives
By Dominic Green
Jan. 16, 2015 3:55 p.m. ET
‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” Hitler
complained to his pet architect Albert Speer. “Why did it have to be
Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?” Islam was a
Männerreligion–a “religion of men”–and hygienic too. The “soldiers of
Islam” received a warrior’s heaven, “a real earthly paradise” with
“houris” and “wine flowing.” This, Hitler argued, was much more suited
to the “Germanic temperament” than the “Jewish filth and priestly
twaddle” of Christianity.
Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination
By Stefan Ihrig
Harvard, 311 pages, $29.95
For decades, historians have seen Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as
emulating Mussolini ‘s 1922 March on Rome. Not so, says Stefan Ihrig
in “Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination.” Hitler also had Turkey in
mind–and not just the 1908 march of the Young Turks on Constantinople,
which brought down a government. After 1917, the bankrupt, defeated
and cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire contracted into a vigorous “Turanic”
nation-state. In the early 1920s, the new Turkey was the first
“revisionist” power to opt out of the postwar system, retaking lost
lands on the Syrian coast and control over the Strait of the
Dardanelles. Hitler, Mr. Ihrig writes, saw Turkey as the model of a
“prosperous and völkisch modern state.”
Through the 1920s and 1930s, Nazi publications lauded Turkey as a
friend and forerunner. In 1922, for example, the Völkischer
Beobachter, the Nazi Party’s weekly paper, praised Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk, the “Father of the Turks,” as a “real man,” embodying the
“heroic spirit” and the Führerprinzip, or führer principle, that
demanded absolute obedience. Atatürk’s subordination of Islam to the
state anticipated Hitler’s strategy toward Christianity. The Nazis
presented Turkey as stronger for having massacred its Armenians and
expelling its Greeks. “Who,” Hitler asked in August 1939, “speaks
today of the extermination of the Armenians?”
Islam and Nazi Germany’s War
By David Motadel
Harvard, 500 pages, $35
This was not Germany’s first case of Türkenfieber, or Turk fever.
Turkey had slid into World War I not by accident but because Germany
had greased the tracks: training officers, supplying weapons, and
drawing the country away from Britain and France. Hitler wanted to
repeat the Kaiser ‘s experiment in search of a better result. By 1936,
Germany supplied half of Turkey’s imports and bought half of Turkey’s
exports, notably chromite, vital for steel production. But Atatürk,
Mr. Ihrig writes, hedged his bets and dodged a “decisive friendship.”
After Atatürk’s death in 1938, his successor, Ismet Inönü, tacked
between the powers. In 1939, Turkey signed a treaty of mutual defense
with Britain, but in 1941 Turkey agreed to a Treaty of Friendship with
Germany, securing Hitler’s southern flank before he invaded Russia.
Inönü hinted that Turkey would join the fight if Germany could conquer
the Caucasus.
As David Motadel writes in “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War,” Muslims
fought on both sides in World War II. But only Nazis and Islamists had
a political-spiritual romance. Both groups hated Jews, Bolsheviks and
liberal democracy. Both sought what Michel Foucault, praising the
Iranian Revolution in 1979, would later call the spiritual-political
“transfiguration of the world” by “combat.” The caliph, the Islamist
Zaki Ali explained, was the “führer of the believers.” “Made by Jews,
led by Jews–therewith Bolshevism is the natural enemy of Islam,” wrote
Mahomed Sabry, a Berlin-based propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood
in “Islam, Judaism, Bolshevism,” a book that the Reich’s propaganda
ministry recommended to journalists.
By late 1941, Germany controlled large Muslim populations in
southeastern Europe and North Africa. Nazi policy extended the grand
schemes of imperial Germany toward madly modern ends. To aid the
“liberation struggle of Islam,” the propaganda ministry told
journalists to praise “the Islamic world as a cultural factor,” avoid
criticism of Islam, and substitute “anti-Jewish” for “anti-Semitic.”
In April 1942, Hitler became the first European leader to declare that
Islam was “incapable of terrorism.” As usual, it is hard to tell if
the Führer set the tone or merely amplified his people’s obsessions.
Like Atatürk, Hitler saw the Turkish renaissance as racial, not
religious. Germans of Turkish and Iranian descent were exempt from the
Nuremberg Laws, but the racial status of German Arabs remained
creatively indefinite, even after September 1943, when Muslims became
eligible for membership in the Nazi Party. As the war went on, Balkan
Muslims were added to the “racially valuable peoples of Europe.” The
Palestinian Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, recruited thousands of these “Musligermanics” as the first
non-Germanic volunteers for the SS. Soviet prisoners of Turkic origin
volunteered too. In November 1944, Himmler and the Mufti created an
SS-run school for military imams at Dresden.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the founder of Palestinian nationalism, is
notorious for his efforts to persuade the Nazis to extend their
genocide of the Jews to the Palestine Mandate. The Mufti met Hitler
and Himmler in Berlin in 1941 and asked the Nazis to guarantee that
when the Wehrmacht drove the British from Palestine, Germany would
establish an Arab regime and assist in the “removal” of its Jews.
Hitler replied that the Reich would not intervene in the Mufti’s
kingdom, other than to pursue their shared goal: “the annihilation of
Jewry living in Arab space.” The Mufti settled in Berlin, befriended
Adolf Eichmann, and lobbied the governments of Romania, Hungary and
Bulgaria to cancel a plan to transfer Jews to Palestine. Subsequently,
some 400,000 Jews from these countries were sent to death camps.
Mr. Motadel describes the Mufti’s Nazi dealings vividly, but he also
excels in unearthing other odious and fascinating characters. Among
them: Zeki Kiram, the Ottoman officer turned disciple of Rashid Rida,
founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; and Johann von Leers, a Nazi
professor who converted to Islam and became Omar Amin, an anti-Semitic
publicist for Nasser ‘s Egypt.
Some of the Muslim Nazis ended badly. Others stayed at their desks,
then consulted for Saudi Arabia in retirement. The major Muslim
collaborators escaped. Fearing Muslim uprisings, the Allies did not
try the Mufti as a war criminal; he died in Beirut in 1974,
politically eclipsed by his young cousin, Mohammed Abdul Raouf
al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile, at
Munich, the surviving SS volunteers, joined by refugees from the
Soviet Union, formed postwar Germany’s first Islamic community, its
leaders an ex-Wehrmacht imam and the erstwhile chief imam of the
Eastern Muslim SS Division. In the 1950s, some of Munich’s Muslim
ex-Nazis worked for the intelligence services of the U.S., tightening
the “green belt against Communism.”
A revolutionary idea must be seeded before, in Heidegger ‘s words,
“suddenly the unbound powers of being come forth and are accomplished
as history.” Seven decades passed between Europe’s revolutionary
spring of 1848 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The effects of
Germany’s ideological seeding of Muslim societies in the 1930s and
’40s are only now becoming apparent.
Impeccably researched and clearly written, Messrs. Motadel and Ihrig’s
books will transform our understanding of the Nazi policies that were,
Mr. Motadel writes, some “of the most vigorous attempts to politicize
and instrumentalize Islam in modern history.”
–Mr. Green is the author of “The Double Life of Dr. Lopez” and “Three
Empires on the Nile.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-ataturk-in-the-nazi-imagination-by-stefan-ihrig-and-islam-and-nazi-germanys-war-by-david-motadel-1421441724