Nazi Policy and Islam

Comparing the policies of interaction of the Nazi forces with Muslim communities when they invaded North Africa, the Caucasus or the Balkans, in order to draw out the salient aspects and propose a critical analysis, anchored in chronology, of a “Muslim moment” (1941-1942), such are the objectives, fully achieved, of this work. David Motadel’s ambition is great: he investigates the “Muslim belt, from the Sahara desert to the Balkan peninsula, to the borders of the Soviet Union and beyond” (p. 11), and draws up a panopticon of the terrains where Nazi policy was applied in the lands of Islam, terrains most often isolated from each other in historiography. Based on abundant and difficult-to-access documentation, Motadel’s book fills a significant gap in our knowledge of the relations between Nazi Germany and the Muslim world.

The author first recalls the major questions that historians have asked on this theme, the subject of numerous studies. These have focused on personalities – the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, particularly focusing attention because he was the leader of the anti-colonial protest in Mandatory Palestine before finding refuge in Berlin in the early 1940s –, on the impact of German colonial policies on Nazi enterprises, or on the relations between the Arab-Muslim world and the Nazi authorities. While each of these works has helped to understand this or that dimension of the interactions between Islam and Nazi policy, no one claimed to achieve the effort of synthesis proposed here. These limitations were largely due to the linguistic inadequacies of the authors. David Motadel, directly or through translations, has been able to gather documentation in eight languages, shedding light from as many different perspectives on the experiences of the Nazis in the land of Islam, the refinement and modifications of the discourse held by the Nazis. This feat alone more than justifies the reading of this major work.

The “Muslim moment” of the Nazi regime

Three deep breaths animate the story. First, the author recalls the imperial legacies and the experience of the First World War, and attempts to measure their weight on the “Muslim moment”. Before returning to this notion, let us salute the author’s cautious approach, which shows how Germany developed a thought of the Muslim world from the first contacts with the Ottoman Empire, made up of archaeological research, diplomatic agreements and sending diplomatic missions. Even more interesting, this chapter follows the emergence, at the crossroads of the academic and administrative worlds, of figures whose thought provided the ideological foundation of the German bureaucracy. Without posing the question in terms of rupture or continuity, D. Motadel thus underlines how orientalists, such as Max von Oppenheim traveling the Orient in the 1910s, framed the Nazi vision of the Muslim world.

The second chapter constitutes the heart of the demonstration. Between 1941 and 1942, under the impetus of different administrations, members of the university, the SSetc., the Nazi regime began to think about the Muslim world. Collusion with Islam in the case of Himmler (p. 69), historical reconstruction of European genealogies making 1683 – the last siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Empire – the turning point in German destiny, and discussion of the Nazi leaders with scholars on the use of Islam for political ends all contributed to the Nazi leadership, and mainly the SSestablishes a strategy for the Muslim worlds as the key to victory. In this perspective, Muslims become the indispensable partners of Nazi Germany to win the war. This chapter on the Muslim moment is all the more fascinating because the author does not mention the great upheaval at work in 1941-1942. The outbreak of Operation Barbarossa is leading to a redefinition of racial categories and to strategies of violence against the Jewish populations. However, the author emphasizes that, at the same time, Nazi dignitaries are engaging in a policy of openness towards the Muslim world. Suddenly, the hierarchy of peoples and races is put on hold to allow rapprochements with the Turks and Iranians, but also with the Arabs, whose Semitic character hardly poses a problem for the Nazis. The “Muslim moment” demonstrates that the war against theUSSR leads to the exclusion of Jews from humanity and Jews onlyand to allow all alliances for this purpose.

Racial thinking or pragmatism

The second breath is geographical. Three major areas of operation and interaction are the subject of detailed analysis in the following three chapters. The Middle East, the Caucasus and the Balkans are all sites for observing competition between services (there is some dispute over who is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Wehrmacht or the SSmust have preeminence), agreements with local actors, or strategies aimed at structuring local Islam. Several common features quickly emerge. Every policy begins with the deployment of propaganda tools, aimed at presenting Germany as the sole defender of Islam. The German armies do not, however, arrive with preconceived plans with regard to the populations in question. Often these populations are initially neglected so as not to offend allied powers (Vichy France or Croatian Ustasha). After hesitations and uncertainties, the occupying German authorities (Wehrmacht or SS) tried to rally the Muslim authorities while being wary of religious counter-powers. Thus the appointment of a mufti for Crimea dragged on. The Nazis’ attention to “Muslims” continued beyond the time of occupation, whether by the appointment of representatives in exile or by welcoming into the territory of the Reich populations who risked, because of their connivance with the Nazis, deportation or massacre at the time of liberation.

A hierarchy slowly emerged between the different occupied areas. Due to the presence of local partners, the integration of population groups into the army, the length of the occupation and its perpetuation in the form of institutions, the Caucasus and the Balkans appeared to be much more important than the Middle East. Apart from the reception of Husseini and then Gaylani, the Iraqi Prime Minister of the national unity government driven out by the British, interactions with the Arab populations were weak. On the contrary, the Nazis changed their approach permanently in the Caucasian and Balkan areas, abandoning their Croatian allies to support and seek the support of Bosnian communities or integrating local troops into their ranks. The only division formed there SS Muslim, Handzar.

These chapters are crucial for understanding the articulation of racial thinking and a highly pragmatic strategy towards Muslim populations who were victims of the policies preceding the German invasion before being victims of the occupation. The reader could have expected some additional developments on the weight of previous regimes. While there are some salient elements for Caucasians and Ukrainians, this perspective is lacking for the Levant, Libya and, above all, the Balkans. A whole literature on colonial policies towards the Muslim worlds could also have been usefully mobilized. The invention of a “Muslim cult”, to use Oissila Saaidia’s term, that is to say the concrete intervention in the practice of worship (by highlighting festivals) or its organization (designating the right clerical representatives), is widely found in the Caucasus and the Balkans. As the author rightly points out, trends are emerging, but the occupation period is too short to see them blossom. Many of them strangely recall the British, French or Russian attitude such as the designation of good Muslim authorities, the use of Muslim symbolism to lead the fight etc. Such a rapprochement would have made it possible to refine the qualification of these policies.

The essentialization of Muslims

Finally, the third part takes up three major themes that run through the study. The first concerns the effective mobilization of Muslims in the German forces. The second returns to the way in which Muslim rituals and practices (absence of pork in the diet, respect for daily prayers) modify the attitude of the German military towards recruits or populations. The third takes up the major themes of war propaganda. On each of these themes, the conclusions underline the paradoxes of Nazi policies. Most recruits participate in the Nazi project not out of ideological adherence, but opt ​​for a career in arms in order to help, as they can, their family at a time of various shortages, which explains the reversibility of the commitment, leading to the dissolution of units in the face of increasing desertions. Similarly, when the balance of power reverses to the detriment of Germany, these troops become autonomous or disperse, not wanting to link their destiny to that of the Reich. Pursuing a Muslim policy to save Germany is therefore a decoy. Furthermore, to claim, as the Nazi authorities did, that there could have been ontological convergences between Islam and Nazism is a Nazi chimera.

This effort by the Third Reich towards Muslims provides information on the plasticity of Nazi categories and strategies. If the effort to present Turks and Iranians as non-Semites remains coherent, this point has not been corroborated in European philology since the XIX^e century, the mobilization of Arabs, and therefore Semites, shows the changes made in racial distinctions. However, this malleability is relative. When it comes to approaching local populations, the confessional criterion prevails: we speak to the “Muslims” of the Caucasus, the Balkans, etc. In this, the Nazi authorities are part of a European tradition essentializing the confessional components of foreign territories. This essentialization is unfortunately found in the author’s pen. The latter tends to designate these subjects of study as “Muslims”. This tendency – pushed to the point of caricature – is found in the captions of the photos where we see “A young Muslim and a German” (p. 129). This enunciative mode would deserve to be rethought in order to refine the analysis.

In conclusion, David Motadel’s book is essential for discussing Nazi policies towards the Muslim world through its brilliant panoptic presentation of the latter. The quality of the demonstration, the volume of documentation and the accessible style make this book essential reading. We may regret the conclusion in the form of an epilogue which proceeds to a long genealogy of the relations between politics and Islam, from the Nazis to the Americans in the 1980s. Perhaps it would have been more judicious to question Nazi innovations in the light of other colonial policies and thus conclude a major work whose real title would rather be “Nazi politics and Islam”.