Jack Cal

Bosnian Muslim recruits from the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar pray. Many Muslims were recruited to the Nazi Waffen-SS due to the efforts of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti Of Jerusalem. November 1943. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, traveled to Bosnia in spring 1943 at Heinrich Himmler's request to help recruit Bosnian Muslims for the 13th Waffen-SS Handschar Division, which signed up roughly 24,000–27,000 men. The recruitment pitch was officially anti-communist — fight Tito's Partisans. However, the division also participated in the mass murders of Jews and Serbs in Bosnia. Al-Husseini was also given an office in the SS Main Office in Berlin, broadcast antisemitic propaganda to the Arab world, and lobbied to prevent Jewish children from escaping Axis-occupied Europe. The SS accommodated Islamic practice (imams, prayer schedules, fezzes) partly because Himmler believed Muslim faith made for more fearless fighters. Post-war, Yugoslavia specifically sought to prosecute him for recruiting units that killed Jews in Croatia and Hungary. The historical relationship between Nazism and certain currents of Islam was opportunistic, tactical, and rooted in overlapping hostility to Jews, Britain, and communism. Both sides found practical and rhetorical common ground, especially in eliminationist antisemitism. Nazi leaders selectively praised Islam’s martial character while using Muslim collaborators for propaganda, recruitment, and local leverage. Islamic antisemitism, already present in classical texts and historical practice, proved highly receptive to Nazi-style conspiracy theories and genocidal language. Shared enmity toward Jews Nazism’s core was eliminationist racial antisemitism: Jews as a biological threat requiring total destruction. Classical Islamic sources contain repeated negative portrayals of Jews—as treacherous, cursed, transformed into apes and pigs (Quran 2:65, 5:60, 7:166), enemies of the Prophet, and destined for conflict in end-times hadiths (e.g., the Gharqad tree tradition about Muslims killing Jews). Under Islamic rule, Jews were typically dhimmis: second-class subjects subject to the jizya tax, legal disabilities, periodic forced conversions, expulsions, and massacres when political conditions allowed. During World War II, Nazi Arabic-language radio and leaflets systematically fused the two. Broadcasts quoted selective Quranic passages, portrayed Jews as eternal enemies of Islam since Muhammad’s time, and urged annihilation (“Kill the Jews wherever you find them”). Jeffrey Herf’s archival work on Nazi propaganda for the Arab world documents how Berlin taught Arab and Muslim collaborators modern conspiracy theories (world Jewish control, Bolshevism as Jewish, etc.) while amplifying theological hostility. The result was a hybrid “Islamic antisemitism” that outlived the Third Reich. Key collaborations The most prominent figure was Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. After inciting anti-Jewish violence in Palestine and participating in the 1941 pro-Axis coup and Farhud pogrom in Iraq, he fled to Berlin. On 28 November 1941 he met Hitler. German minutes record Hitler promising that once German forces reached the Caucasus, the objective would be “the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere,” with the Mufti as the leading Arab spokesman. Husseini fully embraced Nazi Jew-hatred, broadcast calls to kill Jews, recruited Muslims for Axis forces, and repeatedly intervened to block Jewish refugee escapes to Palestine (including children). He maintained close ties with Himmler and other SS figures, received a substantial stipend and residences, and remained loyal until the end. He was never tried for collaboration. Muslim units in the Waffen-SS were the most concrete military collaboration. The 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Handschar” (mainly Bosnian Muslims) was the first large non-Germanic SS formation; further Muslim formations followed (including Albanian and Soviet Muslim units). Heinrich Himmler explicitly linked 'National Socialism and Islam: common enemies (Jews, Bolshevism, Britain), discipline, martyrdom, and a martial ethos. Imams were trained, Islamic symbols and rhetoric were used alongside the swastika, and the Mufti toured and addressed recruits, framing the fight as a joint struggle against “world Judaism.” These units saw combat mainly against partisans; some were involved in atrocities. Post-war, numbers of former Handschar men later fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Broader efforts included the Free Arabian Legion, propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East, and outreach to Muslim communities in the Soviet Union and Balkans. Nazi officials adjusted racial language—dropping or softening “antisemitism” when addressing Arabs, exempting non-Jewish Turks, Iranians, and Arabs from some Nuremberg-style restrictions—to facilitate the alliance. Himmler and Hitler privately expressed admiration for Islam as a “strong,” practical, conquering faith versus “weak,” soft Christianity, and speculated that an Islamized Germanic empire would have been preferable. This was instrumental and hierarchical: Arabs remained racially secondary. After 1945, Nazism was crushed and repudiated in Europe. The Islamist strand was not. Husseini was welcomed in Egypt and continued to shape Palestinian nationalism and Islamist circles. Hassan al-Banna of the Muslim Brotherhood praised him as a hero who fought Zionism “with the help of Hitler.” Nazi propaganda techniques and conspiracy motifs were absorbed into Islamist literature; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulated widely; and genocidal rhetoric toward Jews remained mainstream in significant parts of the Arab and Muslim world long after the Holocaust. Scholars such as Matthias Küntzel and others document how this fusion helped produce a specifically modern Islamic antisemitism that treats Jews not merely as a local political problem but as a cosmic, existential enemy. The collaboration was real, extensive in propaganda and recruitment, and ideologically facilitated by pre-existing Islamic hostility to Jews. That hostility—rooted in scripture, reinforced by centuries of dhimmi hierarchy and episodic violence, then turbocharged by Nazi methods—proved more durable than the racial ideology that temporarily courted it. The result was a pragmatic wartime partnership whose antisemitic legacy outlived the Third Reich in the Islamist and Arab nationalist spheres.