Tweet
In 1941, a Harvard University anthropology professor named Carleton S. Coon traveled to Morocco, ostensibly to carry out field research. His true mission was to smuggle weapons to anti-German rebels in the Atlas Mountains, on behalf of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime precursor to the CIA. The following year, as the United States prepared to invade North Africa, Coon and an OSS colleague, Gordon Brown, drafted propaganda pamphlets intended to soften up local reaction to the coming swarms of GIs. They settled on a religious idiom: “Praise be unto the only God…. The American Holy Warriors have arrived…to fight the great Jihad of Freedom.”
The pamphlet was signed “Roosevelt.”
Nazi Germany’s leaders also harbored half-baked ideas about messaging to North Africa’s Muslims. Heinrich Himmler was the Third Reich’s most influential advocate of the instrumental use of Islam in war strategy. In the spring of 1943, as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s army in North Africa stumbled to defeat, Himmler asked the Reich Security Head Office “to find out which passages of the Qur’an provide Muslims with the basis for the opinion that the Führer has already been forecast in the Qur’an and that he has been authorized to complete the work of the Prophet.”
Ernst Kaltenbrunner of the Head Office replied with the disappointing news that the Koran had no suitable passages for such a claim, but he suggested that Hitler might be advertised as “the returned ‘Isa (Jesus), who is forecast in the Qur’an and who, similar to the figure of the Knight George, defeats the giant and Jew-King Dajjal at the end of the world.” Ultimately, the office printed one million copies of an Arabic-language pamphlet that sought to persuade Muslim Arabs to ally with Germany:
O Arabs, do you see that the time of the Dajjal has come? Do you recognize him, the fat, curly-haired Jew who deceives and rules the whole world and who steals the land of the Arabs?… O Arabs, do you know the servant of God? He [Hitler] has already appeared in the world and already turned his lance against the Dajjal and his allies…. He will kill the Dajjal, as it is written, destroy his places and cast his allies into hell.
Such propaganda “may seem absurd today,” writes David Motadel in his comprehensive and discerning history, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War. And yet one need only review the awkward, cartoonish texts of American propaganda pamphlets dropped on Afghanistan before the US-led invasion of that country in 2001 or the similarly naive pamphlets dropped on Iraq before the US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003 to recognize that the history of ill-considered Western hypotheses about how to mobilize or co-opt Muslim populations during expeditionary warfare is a long one.The record of World War II is that the Allied and Axis powers both invested substantially in strategies to win over Muslims and that both succeeded only partially and temporarily. Even these limited achievements were informed by cynical expedience on the part of the invading European forces and the adapting Muslim populations in their way. For many Muslims living in the path of German, Italian, or British tank divisions, after all, the war was best understood as a conflict among colonial oppressors—a war best waited out, to the extent possible.
German strategy for Muslim mobilization remains of special interest in part because the rise of Nazism’s ideology of Jewish extermination coincided with Arab nationalist mobilization of anti-Semitism in Palestine. Infamously, Amin al-Husayni, an Arab nationalist whom the British had appointed as the grand mufti of Jerusalem, and whom Motadel describes as “peacock-like” and “an ardent Jew-hater,” accepted refuge in Berlin in late 1941. He met with Hitler and collaborated with Nazi propagandists during the remainder of the war. Nazi messages emphasized that Germany would liberate Muslims from British colonialism and Bolshevik atheism by rooting out the supposed controlling influence of Jews.
These claims certainly found receptive audiences in Palestine and in the wider Arab world. But the extent of Nazi influence on Arab attitudes toward Zionism is impossible to measure, not least because Nazi power in the Arab world proved to be short-lived. “Overall,” Motadel judges, “German propaganda failed.” Muslims ultimately fought in large numbers for Britain in North Africa and across the Middle East.
There were a few places where Muslims in territories occupied by Germany had to consider how to act amid the gathering Holocaust. In Nazi-occupied areas of the Balkans, some individual Muslims participated in the violence. Some stole copper from the rooftops of abandoned synagogues. Others courageously sought to protect potential pogrom targets. Overall, the role of Muslims in the killing of Jews and Roma, Motadel writes, “cannot be generalized, ranging, as elsewhere, from collaboration and profiteering to empathy and, in some cases, solidarity with the victims.”
At the outbreak of World War I, German intelligence studied how best to stir Islamic revolts against Britain from India to Egypt. At German urging, in Constantinople, the Ottoman sultan, Mehmed V, issued fatwas calling on all of the world’s Muslims to rise up against the Entente powers. The sultan assured those who might fall to British rifles that they would be glorious martyrs. In Berlin, the Intelligence Office for the Orient sought to foment jihad in as much enemy imperial territory as possible.
Max von Oppenheim, the office leader, outlined the campaign in a 136-page paper entitled “Memorandum on the Revolutionizing of the Islamic Territories of Our Enemies.” His staff included a “vast” number of “academic experts, diplomats, military officials, and Muslim collaborators,” Motadel writes. Their incitements “caused no end of trouble,” a French army report noted during the war, and yet, Motadel concludes, the entire German effort was founded on “a misconception.” It assumed that there was fertile ground for a pan-Islamic revolt when there was none, and it failed to disguise Germany’s self-interested manipulations. “The Muslim world was far too heterogeneous” to respond to a single blueprint for revolt, and in any event, “it was all too clear that Muslims were being employed for the strategic purposes of the Central Powers, not for a truly religious cause.”
None of this stopped von Oppenheim and other Foreign Office officials who oversaw the campaign from advocating for its revival as Hitler launched another great war.
The essential instrumentality of Nazi attitudes toward Islam can be seen in the bizarre lengths to which Nazi propagandists went to amend Nazi racial policies in order to avoid offending potential wartime allies among Turks, Arabs, and Iranians. Privately, Hitler viewed these peoples as racially inferior. Publicly, he interpreted Nazism’s race theories to rationalize his military alliances.
During Germany’s invasion of the Caucasus and Crimea, the Wehrmacht’s initial efforts to revive Islamic culture, in order to undermine the Soviet Union, did have some success. Bolshevism’s repression of Islamic rituals and institutions was less than a generation old. When they arrived in the North Caucasus, Wehrmacht officers carefully staged the reopening of mosques and religious foundations and the reestablishment of religious holidays and celebrations. They allowed displays of Arabic and Koranic script in public, both of which the Soviets had banned. Some Muslim and community leaders in the East embraced German occupation as a way to restore their culture. Up to 20,000 Crimean Tatars fought Soviet forces in purely Muslim formations incorporated into the German 11th Army.
Nazi strategy left another legacy: it suggested a model for the United States during the cold war. In partnership with Saudi Arabia after the war, American strategists considered how a mobilized Islam might counter Soviet expansion in the Middle East. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, President Jimmy Carter authorized the CIA to provide covert aid to Afghan rebels—a revival, in effect, of the OSS’s “Jihad of Freedom.”
William Casey, President Reagan’s first CIA director, embraced the covert action program and took it further. He authorized printing Korans in the Uzbek language, so they could be smuggled by rebels across the Afghan border and distributed to Soviet citizens. Casey also authorized or at least turned a blind eye to guerrilla raids on Soviet territory carried out by rebels loyal to the Afghan Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. (Hekmatyar, who received arms from the CIA, is still fighting in Afghanistan against the Afghan government and the United States.)
The anti-Soviet rebellion offers one of the few cases in history where the external rousing of Muslim fighters against a non-Muslim occupying power succeeded, at least militarily. Of course, that was primarily because the Afghan resistance was indigenous and well underway before the United States and Saudi Arabia arrived to stoke it with dollars and sophisticated arms. The outcomes of American intervention in Afghanistan against the Soviets included a devastating civil war and the birth of al-Qaeda.
Still, as in Berlin between the wars, failure has proven no deterrent to persistence in Washington, where Pentagon planners continue to act as if they can win wars in the Middle East by deftly manipulating and arming tribes, sects, and Islamic leaders in scattered territories they barely know.
Motadel’s sophisticated narrative suggests at least two reasons why such Western strategies typically fail. One is the planners’ ignorance of Islam’s diversity and of the subtle part that faith plays in the daily lives of so many self-identified Muslims. That is, Westerners often overestimate Islam’s coherence and thus its pliability.
The second reason is written across the vast history of colonial and postcolonial European and American interventions in Muslim territories, from the two world wars to the three Gulf wars and now to the campaign against the Islamic State. Muslim populations called to arms by Washington, London, or Berlin on the grounds of common enemies and common interests have heard it all before. They have seen countless promises betrayed and one traumatic outcome of Western intervention after another. It is little wonder that so many find the summons to alliance unconvincing.
Steve Coll
Islam and Nazi Germany’s War
by David Motadel
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 500 pp., $35.00
Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination
by Stefan Ihrig
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 311 pp., $29.95
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/hitler-and-muslims/
The pamphlet was signed “Roosevelt.”
Nazi Germany’s leaders also harbored half-baked ideas about messaging to North Africa’s Muslims. Heinrich Himmler was the Third Reich’s most influential advocate of the instrumental use of Islam in war strategy. In the spring of 1943, as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s army in North Africa stumbled to defeat, Himmler asked the Reich Security Head Office “to find out which passages of the Qur’an provide Muslims with the basis for the opinion that the Führer has already been forecast in the Qur’an and that he has been authorized to complete the work of the Prophet.”
Ernst Kaltenbrunner of the Head Office replied with the disappointing news that the Koran had no suitable passages for such a claim, but he suggested that Hitler might be advertised as “the returned ‘Isa (Jesus), who is forecast in the Qur’an and who, similar to the figure of the Knight George, defeats the giant and Jew-King Dajjal at the end of the world.” Ultimately, the office printed one million copies of an Arabic-language pamphlet that sought to persuade Muslim Arabs to ally with Germany:
O Arabs, do you see that the time of the Dajjal has come? Do you recognize him, the fat, curly-haired Jew who deceives and rules the whole world and who steals the land of the Arabs?… O Arabs, do you know the servant of God? He [Hitler] has already appeared in the world and already turned his lance against the Dajjal and his allies…. He will kill the Dajjal, as it is written, destroy his places and cast his allies into hell.
German strategy for Muslim mobilization remains of special interest in part because the rise of Nazism’s ideology of Jewish extermination coincided with Arab nationalist mobilization of anti-Semitism in Palestine. Infamously, Amin al-Husayni, an Arab nationalist whom the British had appointed as the grand mufti of Jerusalem, and whom Motadel describes as “peacock-like” and “an ardent Jew-hater,” accepted refuge in Berlin in late 1941. He met with Hitler and collaborated with Nazi propagandists during the remainder of the war. Nazi messages emphasized that Germany would liberate Muslims from British colonialism and Bolshevik atheism by rooting out the supposed controlling influence of Jews.
These claims certainly found receptive audiences in Palestine and in the wider Arab world. But the extent of Nazi influence on Arab attitudes toward Zionism is impossible to measure, not least because Nazi power in the Arab world proved to be short-lived. “Overall,” Motadel judges, “German propaganda failed.” Muslims ultimately fought in large numbers for Britain in North Africa and across the Middle East.
There were a few places where Muslims in territories occupied by Germany had to consider how to act amid the gathering Holocaust. In Nazi-occupied areas of the Balkans, some individual Muslims participated in the violence. Some stole copper from the rooftops of abandoned synagogues. Others courageously sought to protect potential pogrom targets. Overall, the role of Muslims in the killing of Jews and Roma, Motadel writes, “cannot be generalized, ranging, as elsewhere, from collaboration and profiteering to empathy and, in some cases, solidarity with the victims.”
At the outbreak of World War I, German intelligence studied how best to stir Islamic revolts against Britain from India to Egypt. At German urging, in Constantinople, the Ottoman sultan, Mehmed V, issued fatwas calling on all of the world’s Muslims to rise up against the Entente powers. The sultan assured those who might fall to British rifles that they would be glorious martyrs. In Berlin, the Intelligence Office for the Orient sought to foment jihad in as much enemy imperial territory as possible.
Max von Oppenheim, the office leader, outlined the campaign in a 136-page paper entitled “Memorandum on the Revolutionizing of the Islamic Territories of Our Enemies.” His staff included a “vast” number of “academic experts, diplomats, military officials, and Muslim collaborators,” Motadel writes. Their incitements “caused no end of trouble,” a French army report noted during the war, and yet, Motadel concludes, the entire German effort was founded on “a misconception.” It assumed that there was fertile ground for a pan-Islamic revolt when there was none, and it failed to disguise Germany’s self-interested manipulations. “The Muslim world was far too heterogeneous” to respond to a single blueprint for revolt, and in any event, “it was all too clear that Muslims were being employed for the strategic purposes of the Central Powers, not for a truly religious cause.”
None of this stopped von Oppenheim and other Foreign Office officials who oversaw the campaign from advocating for its revival as Hitler launched another great war.
The essential instrumentality of Nazi attitudes toward Islam can be seen in the bizarre lengths to which Nazi propagandists went to amend Nazi racial policies in order to avoid offending potential wartime allies among Turks, Arabs, and Iranians. Privately, Hitler viewed these peoples as racially inferior. Publicly, he interpreted Nazism’s race theories to rationalize his military alliances.
During Germany’s invasion of the Caucasus and Crimea, the Wehrmacht’s initial efforts to revive Islamic culture, in order to undermine the Soviet Union, did have some success. Bolshevism’s repression of Islamic rituals and institutions was less than a generation old. When they arrived in the North Caucasus, Wehrmacht officers carefully staged the reopening of mosques and religious foundations and the reestablishment of religious holidays and celebrations. They allowed displays of Arabic and Koranic script in public, both of which the Soviets had banned. Some Muslim and community leaders in the East embraced German occupation as a way to restore their culture. Up to 20,000 Crimean Tatars fought Soviet forces in purely Muslim formations incorporated into the German 11th Army.
Nazi strategy left another legacy: it suggested a model for the United States during the cold war. In partnership with Saudi Arabia after the war, American strategists considered how a mobilized Islam might counter Soviet expansion in the Middle East. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, President Jimmy Carter authorized the CIA to provide covert aid to Afghan rebels—a revival, in effect, of the OSS’s “Jihad of Freedom.”
William Casey, President Reagan’s first CIA director, embraced the covert action program and took it further. He authorized printing Korans in the Uzbek language, so they could be smuggled by rebels across the Afghan border and distributed to Soviet citizens. Casey also authorized or at least turned a blind eye to guerrilla raids on Soviet territory carried out by rebels loyal to the Afghan Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. (Hekmatyar, who received arms from the CIA, is still fighting in Afghanistan against the Afghan government and the United States.)
The anti-Soviet rebellion offers one of the few cases in history where the external rousing of Muslim fighters against a non-Muslim occupying power succeeded, at least militarily. Of course, that was primarily because the Afghan resistance was indigenous and well underway before the United States and Saudi Arabia arrived to stoke it with dollars and sophisticated arms. The outcomes of American intervention in Afghanistan against the Soviets included a devastating civil war and the birth of al-Qaeda.
Still, as in Berlin between the wars, failure has proven no deterrent to persistence in Washington, where Pentagon planners continue to act as if they can win wars in the Middle East by deftly manipulating and arming tribes, sects, and Islamic leaders in scattered territories they barely know.
Motadel’s sophisticated narrative suggests at least two reasons why such Western strategies typically fail. One is the planners’ ignorance of Islam’s diversity and of the subtle part that faith plays in the daily lives of so many self-identified Muslims. That is, Westerners often overestimate Islam’s coherence and thus its pliability.
The second reason is written across the vast history of colonial and postcolonial European and American interventions in Muslim territories, from the two world wars to the three Gulf wars and now to the campaign against the Islamic State. Muslim populations called to arms by Washington, London, or Berlin on the grounds of common enemies and common interests have heard it all before. They have seen countless promises betrayed and one traumatic outcome of Western intervention after another. It is little wonder that so many find the summons to alliance unconvincing.
Steve Coll
by David Motadel
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 500 pp., $35.00
by Stefan Ihrig
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 311 pp., $29.95
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/hitler-and-muslims/