I

Advancing into the kingdom of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941, German troops were surprised by the enthusiastic welcome they received from large parts of the Muslim population. Anton Bossi Fedrigotti, liaison officer of the Foreign Office to Maximilian von Weichs's invading 2nd Army, reported that the soldiers had been utterly astonished to be greeted jubilantly by the Muslims, though he quickly explained that this reaction was ‘only natural’ as the Muslims had always been the fiercest opponents of the Orthodox Serbs.Footnote ¹ In Sarajevo, Fedrigotti noted, Islamic leaders had called upon their followers to decorate the streets with flags to express their joy at the German invasion.Footnote ² The day after the occupation of the city, a Muslim crowd cheered on as the Germans tore down the plaque commemorating the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Afterwards, they participated in a German military parade that took place along the banks of the Miljacka. ‘The entire mood of the Muslim population on this day demonstrated that here, too, far away from Germany, exists a tremendous adoration for the Führer’, Fedrigotti rejoiced.Footnote ³ A few days later, on the occasion of Hitler's birthday, Muslim leaders organized mass rallies and celebratory prayers in the mosques, to which the German military authorities were invited. To be sure, German reports about the enthusiasm of the Muslim population need to be read with caution. The Germans could only record what they saw, and those Muslims who were opposed to Axis aggression stayed silent or expressed their concerns in private. But although attitudes of the Muslims towards the invasion can hardly be generalized, most felt little loyalty to the collapsing kingdom.

As, over the following months, the Balkans became more and more engulfed by civil war and partisan insurgency, German officials began to think about the Muslim population as potential allies to support their pacification efforts in the region. Considering the Muslims as both a religious and a political community, German authorities ultimately began to promote the Third Reich as the patron of Islam in the Balkans. Religion in fact became central to German policies towards Muslims in the region. In their attempts to seek Muslim support, the German army command and, more importantly, the SS, made significant efforts to employ religiously charged propaganda and to engage with religious dignitaries and leaders on the ground. Focusing on Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Sandžak, the following pages examine the German involvement with the Islamic community during the war years.

Scholarship has addressed Nazi Germany's military campaigns in the Balkans for decades.Footnote ⁴ The works of historians like Jozo Tomasevich, Enver Redžić, and Marko Attila Hoare have provided profound insights into German political and military involvement in the region, particularly in its major battlegrounds in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over the last years, scholars have, moreover, shown an increasing interest in the social and political history of the Muslim population and Islam in the region during the war years, reflected most notably in Zlatko Hasanbegović's account of the Muslims of Zagreb and Emily Greble's study of wartime Sarajevo.Footnote ⁵ The history of Germany's engagement with Muslims and Islam in south-eastern Europe, however, has been studied less. In the existing literature, discussions of Germany's policy towards the Muslim population are usually limited to the history of the employment of Muslims in the 13th SS Waffen Mountain Division, known as ‘Handžar’.Footnote ⁶ In what follows, the division is only considered tangentially. The article instead shows that Germany's engagement with the Muslims of the Balkans went much further and included a significant, religiously charged, campaign, targeted at the civil population. These policies may be seen as an episode in the wider story of Germany's attempts to instrumentalize Islam in other parts of the Muslim world during the Second World War. Indeed, as research has shown, German authorities tried to employ religious policies and propaganda to rally the faithful from North Africa to Central Asia.Footnote ⁷

On a wider scale, the following pages address the politics of religion in the Second World War, and may contribute more generally to our understanding of the intersection of power and religion in war and military conflict. Throughout the war, German authorities employed religious policies in the warzones. German troops encountered Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Jews, Muslims, and, in the Kalmyk steppes of the southern Soviet Union, even Buddhists.Footnote ⁸ As they destroyed synagogues and killed millions of Jews, the Germans ruled over thousands of Orthodox cathedrals, Protestant churches, Catholic domes, and Islamic mosques. And although it was race, not religion, that formed the basis of Nazi policy schemes, in most warzones German officials soon became aware of the significant influence of religion among the population and regularly engaged actively in confessional politics. Ranging from suppression to support, German policies towards religion were usually pragmatic and determined by local conditions, the military situation, and the political and tactical considerations of the involved branches of the regime. Religious structures were destroyed when suspected of generating resistance, or actively employed to rule and pacify the rear areas and to win local support, as in the case of the Muslims of the Balkans.

When studying the politics of religion under Nazi rule, historians have long concentrated on the question of collaboration and resistance, while showing less interest in the nature of German religious policies themselves. Drawing on archival materials in both German and Bosnian, this article examines the ways in which German authorities instrumentalized religious rhetoric, slogans, and imperatives in their propaganda, and employed religious dignitaries to pacify the Balkans. At the same time, it looks at the ideas and notions about Islam and the Muslim population that informed these policies. It first examines the gradual involvement of German officials in the ‘Muslim question’ of the Balkans between 1941 and 1943, subsequently explores various facets of this involvement, including the use of religious propaganda and the engagement with local religious authorities, and finally discusses the tense relation of these policies and propaganda efforts with the violent nature of German warfare.

II

Hitler had initially not intended to get involved in the Muslim territories when invading and dissolving the kingdom of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941. While German troops occupied Serbia, the Muslim areas fell under the administration of the Italians (Montenegro, including the Sandžak of Novi Pazar), the Bulgarians (Macedonia), and, most importantly, the newly created Croatian Ustaša state (Bosnia and Herzegovina), which governed the majority of the Muslims of the former Yugoslav kingdom. It was the escalation of the war in late 1942 that would eventually lead to German political involvement with the Muslims of the region.

The Muslims of Yugoslavia had, for most of their history, enjoyed special rights and a certain level of autonomy in their religious life and organizations, first under the Ottomans, then, from 1878, under the Habsburg monarchy, and, after 1918, in the Yugoslav kingdom, although Yugoslav rule had quickly proven to be less tolerant than that of its imperial predecessors.Footnote ⁹ Although Muslims, under the leadership of Mehmed Spaho, head of the powerful ‘Yugoslav Muslim Organization’ (Jugoslovenska Muslimanska Organizacija), had retained much of their religious autonomy in the interwar period, most felt repressed under Orthodox Serbian hegemony (as did many Catholic Croats) and welcomed the fall of Yugoslavia in 1941, not anticipating that it was the prelude to years of violence and bloodshed.

The Ustaša regime, with its fascist vision of a Catholic Croatia, had little respect for its Muslim subjects. And yet, while murdering Jews and persecuting Orthodox Serbs, Ante Pavelić, Poglavnik of the Independent State of Croatia, did at least formally try to accommodate the Muslim population. He made Islam the second state religion and Ustaša officials declared the Muslims to be ‘the flower of the Croatian people’.Footnote ¹⁰ The regime also employed a number of Islamic leaders, most prominently perhaps Ismet Muftić, the Mufti of Zagreb, who became a vigorous promoter of the Ustaša state, and, officially at least, sustained šeriat courts, medresas and vakuf (waqf in Arabic) properties. In the centre of Zagreb, the new government even opened the colossal Poglavnik Mosque (Poglavnikova Džamija). Soon, however, the Muslim population was caught in the crossfire of a bitter civil war.

From early 1942, the Balkans became increasingly engulfed in a severe conflict between the Croatian regime, communist partisans, and Orthodox Serbian Četniks.Footnote ¹¹ The partisans, led by the former Habsburg soldier and Bolshevik revolutionary Josip Broz, better known as Tito, clashed with both Ustaša troops and Četniks. At the same time, the Četnik movement, which under Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović fought for a restoration of the monarchy and a Greater Serbia, waged war against not only Ustaša troops and the Catholic population, but also against Tito's partisans. The Muslim population was repeatedly attacked by all three parties. Ustaša authorities had employed Muslim army units to fight Tito's partisans as well as Četnik militias, and had used them to control Serbian Orthodox areas. Soon, Muslim villages became targets of retaliatory attacks from both partisans and Četniks. Particularly violent were the Četnik reprisals against Muslims in East and South Bosnia and in parts of Herzegovina, where Ustaša authority had always been unstable. Mihailović burned down entire villages. His men became feared for killing Muslims by cutting their throats. Estimates of the number of Muslim victims grew into the tens of thousands. Despite Pavelić's warm words for Islam, Ustaša authorities did little overall to prevent these massacres. Even worse, in areas where Muslim leaders engaged in local ceasefire agreements with Četnik and partisan commanders, Catholic Ustaša units responded by repressing the Muslim civil population. German military reports pointed to the mounting discord between the Muslims and the Croatian Catholic state.Footnote ¹² More and more Muslim leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina pleaded for independence. Attempts to build Muslim militias for self-defence were, on the whole, a failure. As an ultima ratio, some leading Muslim representatives turned to the Germans. In a memorandum of 1 November 1942, addressed to Hitler, they asked for Muslim autonomy under a German protectorate in Bosnia and Herzegovina.Footnote ¹³ Remarkably, the Muslims tried to employ pan-Islamic references to strengthen their case, emphasizing that the Bosnian Muslims were an integral part of the ‘300 million Muslims’ in the world, and that they were willing to align themselves with the Axis against ‘Judaism, Freemasonry, Bolshevism and the English exploiters’.Footnote ¹⁴

The Germans were in a dilemma. Berlin accepted the Ustaša state and its rule over the Muslim territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hitler had only sent diplomatic and military representatives to Zagreb, most importantly the Austrian Nazi veteran General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, who was accredited as the Wehrmacht's representative in Croatia, and SA-Obergruppenführer Siegfried Kasche, Germany's envoy in Zagreb. Kasche had little sympathy for the Muslims and would, until the end, support the Ustaša regime.

In practice, however, the situation was changing.Footnote ¹⁵ From autumn 1942, as parts of the Croatian state, particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina, seemed to be spinning out of control, German troops became increasingly involved in the Muslim territories. All operational areas were subsumed under German military command, forcing Pavelić to give up de facto sovereignty of parts of Croatia. In late 1942, Glaise-Horstenau was forced to share power with General Rudolf Lüters, who became ‘Commander of the German troops in Croatia’. In early 1943, a major offensive was launched against all insurgents in Central Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. Soon, the SS would also become involved. In late March 1943, Himmler sent SS-Brigadeführer Konstantin Kammerhofer to Zagreb as the official SS commissioner on the spot. Kammerhofer had limited respect for the Ustaša authorities or for the German envoy, Kasche. Ignoring all complaints, he instantly put parts of North Croatia under the authority of the SS. Convinced that the SS would be more effective than the wavering Ustaša security forces, the Wehrmacht did not resist. Kasche was increasingly sidelined and isolated. By the end of 1943, the SS had further strengthened its influence. Between spring and autumn 1944, it practically ruled over the Muslim areas within Sava, Drina, Spreča, and Bosna.

Less concerned than Kasche and the Foreign Office about Ustaša authority, the Wehrmacht and, more importantly, the SS saw the Muslims as welcomed allies. Military reports and internal papers regularly referred to the alleged pro-German attitude of the Muslims from the Balkans and to their influence on the wider Muslim world. It was the pan-Islamic character of the Muslims, Rudolf Lüters assured in a report from spring 1943, that provoked the Četniks. ‘It is especially the apparently supranational, religiously determined behavior which angers the Serb with his overarching national pride.’Footnote ¹⁶ A commander, who would brief German troops fighting in Bosnia, emphasized not only the pro-German attitude of the Muslims, but also that the ‘950,000 Muslims’ of Bosnia and Herzegovina ‘know very well that they represent the some 500,000,000 Mohammedans to the Greater German Reich and the Axis’.Footnote ¹⁷ German support for the Muslim population would therefore have a propagandistic effect on ‘the other Mohammedan countries’. These views were shared by officers in the SS intelligence and by other German officials on the ground.Footnote ¹⁸ It was a set of reasons – the idea of a pro-German attitude of the Muslim population as well as considerations of their alleged significance within the wider Islamic world – which prompted the Wehrmacht and SS to seek co-operation with the Muslims when pacifying the region from early 1943 onwards.

Soon, as the German military stepped up their operations in the Balkans, the Wehrmacht and SS extended this policy towards Muslims of the Italian occupied regions. In early 1943, German troops got involved in the Sandžak area, the Muslim mountain belt between Montenegro and Serbia which was formally under the rule of the Italians, who had, as the civil war escalated, turned a blind eye to Četnik massacres of the Muslim population. The German army command immediately ordered the soldiers to treat only the Muslims as allies, while encouraging them to act ruthlessly towards the rest of the population.Footnote ¹⁹ In September 1943, when Italy changed fronts and withdrew from the Balkans, the Sandžak was formally taken over by German troops. Moreover, the Muslim majority of Albania, which included Kosovo and had been under Italian occupation since 1940, now too came under the control of the Germans, who installed a puppet regime in the country.Footnote ²⁰ In the Epirus area of north-western Greece, which bordered Albania and had also been under Italian rule, German military authorities sought co-operation with the Albanian Muslim Cham minority, which provided militias to pacify the region.Footnote ²¹ German involvement in these territories was overseen by Hermann Neubacher, as Hitler's Plenipotentiary for south-eastern Europe responsible for Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece and himself an ardent supporter of an alliance with the Muslims of the Balkans.

Hitler fully endorsed German courtship of the Muslims. Neubacher, who discussed the situation in south-eastern Europe regularly at the Führer Headquarters, recalled after the war that Hitler had firmly supported a ‘positive Muslim policy’ (positive Muselmanenpolitik) in the region.Footnote ²² According to Neubacher, Hitler's view of the Muslims in the Balkans was also influenced by considerations about pan-Islamic implications. Discussing ‘the political significance of Balkan Islam in regard to the Middle East’, Neubacher had tried to explain the connection to Hitler in terms easy to understand: ‘When you strike a Sandžak Muslim, a student in Cairo reacts!’ The phrase had apparently impressed Hitler so much that he soon used it himself.

Indeed, when strategically mapping the region, the Germans defined the Muslims primarily in terms of religion.Footnote ²³ This was to a certain extent a consequence of the situation on the ground. With ethnic and linguistic distinctions being marginal, religion had long been a principal marker of communal difference in the Balkans. Confessional bonds, be they Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, or Muslim, were strong. Although of course none of these communities was fully homogeneous and the lines between them were not impermeable, they shaped the social landscape across the region. Even in an age of shattering empires and rising nation-states, most Muslims continued to see themselves primarily as ‘Muslims’. While some had embraced national affiliations (like ‘Croatian’ or even ‘Serbian’), and many would also emphasize their regional (like ‘Bosnian’ or ‘Herzegovinian’) or urban identities (like ‘Sarajevan’ or ‘Zagrebian’), religious loyalties (as ‘Muslim’) remained crucial. Furthermore, religion had a political meaning, with religious leaders and institutions exerting significant political influence. In the conflicts of the Second World War, the political-confessional divisions came most radically to the fore, and the Germans keenly fuelled and instrumentalized them for their war effort.

III

In late March and early April 1943, the SS sent Amin al-Husseini, the legendary Mufti of Jerusalem, on a propaganda tour across the Balkans.Footnote ²⁴ Al-Husseini had arrived in Germany in late 1941 and since then had become a prominent figure in Berlin's propaganda efforts towards the Muslim world. Carefully staged by the SS Head Office, the spectacle marked the beginning of Germany's Islam campaign in the region. Its aim was to win Muslim popular support and to mobilize the male population into the Muslim SS Division, portraying the Third Reich not only as the protector of Muslims in the Balkans, but also as the patron of Islam more generally. Al-Husseini's role as an Islamic figure was to impart religious legitimacy to the German war effort. Berlin thereby adhered to the conception (fostered by al-Husseini himself) that the Mufti was comparable to an Islamic pope, whose words would have authority among pious Muslims across the world. The employment of the Palestinian religious leader not only reflected the idea of global Islamic solidarity, it also underlined the religious character of German efforts to win Muslim support in the Balkans.

Greedy for influence, al-Husseini had boasted in a conversation with Gottlob Berger, chief of the SS Head Office and responsible for the organization of the tour, about the great influence he had across the entire Muslim world.Footnote ²⁵ The cause of Muslims in south-eastern Europe, he claimed, had been his special interest for a long time. Indeed, the Mufti had already received a delegation of Islamic dignitaries led by the Mufti of Mostar, Omer Džabić, a major proponent of an Islamic state in the Balkans, in Rome in 1942.Footnote ²⁶ A large deputation of Yugoslav Muslims had also participated at the Muslim Congress in Jerusalem in 1931, where some had established ties with al-Husseini.Footnote ²⁷ Among many Muslims of the Balkans the Arab Mufti enjoyed remarkable respect. As early as August 1942, Osvit, a major Muslim newspaper in Sarajevo, had published an interview with al-Husseini which had aroused interest both in Croatia and among German officials.Footnote ²⁸Osvit remarked that the Mufti had become the spearhead and protector of millions of suppressed Muslims. The Mufti affirmed Hitler's and Germany's amity for Islam and claimed that the Muslim world stood entirely on the side of Germany, Japan, and its allies. The British empire would be fought until its collapse, just like Russia, which had been an enemy of Islam for centuries. ‘Recently, the Führer confirmed to me that Germany follows with great interest the fight of the Islamic world against its oppressors, and does not intend to enslave or suppress any Islamic country.’Footnote ²⁹ The victory of the Axis would be the victory of the Islamic peoples.

Officers of the SS Head Office planned the tour down to the minutest detail and prepared the Mufti well in advance.Footnote ³⁰ His role was, of course, limited to representational purposes. Berger had assured the Mufti that his support was ‘not only for practical reasons’, but came ‘from a full heart’. Yet, he made no secret of his practical intentions, adding that the SS would ‘not believe in promises’, but wanted to have ‘proof’ on the spot. On 30 March 1943, the Junkers 25 Tubo of Kurt Max Franz Daluege, head of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei), crossed the Alps.Footnote ³¹ On board were the Mufti and a number of SS officers, most importantly SS-Sturmbannführer Schulte and SS-Untersturmführer Rempel of the SS Head Office, and SS-Hauptsturmführer Hermann, representing the SS Reich Security Head Office. Moreover, two Gestapo officers accompanied the Mufti, as well as a pistol sniper.Footnote ³² The tour took two weeks. After visiting Zagreb (1 to 2 April), the group flew to Banja Luka (3 to 4 April) and set off from there to Sarajevo (5 to 9 April), before returning to Zagreb (10 to 11 April).Footnote ³³

During his travels, the Mufti met with Ustaša representatives, including Pavelić, and German and Italian officials. More significant, however, were his consultations with the local ulema in Zagreb, Banja Luka, and Sarajevo, which underlined the religious character of the journey.Footnote ³⁴ In Sarajevo he would receive Muslim leaders and dignitaries from the entire area of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from Tuzla and Mostar, as well as delegations from the Sandžak and from Albania. Al-Husseini was particularly impressed by the Friday prayers in Sarajevo's grand Gazi Husrev Beg Mosque and his meeting with the religious establishment afterwards, years later recalling in his memoirs the warm welcome he had received.Footnote ³⁵ ‘For the Bosnian Mohammedans, the Mufti was first and foremost significant as a Mohammedan’, a German diplomat noted.Footnote ³⁶ ‘The pious accepted him as a just Muslim; he was honored as a descendant of the Prophet; friends from his theological studies in Cairo and from the pilgrimage to Mecca welcomed him.’ In the name of the Axis, al-Husseini affirmed solidarity with the destiny of Muslims in the Balkans, emphasizing, as the Germans observed, ‘his deep repulsion’ for atrocities committed against ‘religious facilities like mosques’ by partisans, whom, he claimed, were ‘paid by Moscow and London’.Footnote ³⁷

Throughout the tour, the Mufti made extensive use of religious rhetoric. His speeches, sermons, and appeals were delivered in Arabic, with local interpreters translating them. When visiting the Gazi Husrev Beg Mosque, he gave such an emotional speech about the torment Muslims had suffered that parts of the audience burst into tears.Footnote ³⁸ Bemoaning the situation of the Muslims in the Balkans, he assured the faithful that only the inner refuge of Islam made life bearable. His sermon included the call for war on the side of the Axis. Mustering all his religious authority, he warned throughout his visit that doubts about an Axis victory would be a sin. Finally, the Mufti not only employed religious language, he also used pan-Islamic rhetoric. German observers noted with satisfaction that al-Husseini emphasized the common nature of the battle fought by both the Muslims of Croatia and the Muslims from other parts of the Islamic world, in Palestine, Syria, or Egypt, who were troubled or oppressed by ‘anti-Muslim elements’, be they ‘Muscovite arsonists’, ‘English tyrants’, or ‘American exploiters’.Footnote ³⁹ To the press, the Mufti announced that the ‘Muslims in the Islamic world’ would follow the situation in the Balkans with ‘the greatest concern’. ‘The outrage in the Islamic world’ against the Serbian gangs and their allies was ‘significant and bitter’.Footnote ⁴⁰ According to US intelligence, al-Husseini condemned the Allies for massacres committed against Muslims in the Balkans.Footnote ⁴¹ His pan-Islamic rhetoric was exactly what the Germans wanted to hear. Not surprisingly, the Mufti later summed up in his report to the Germans: ‘Islam fights Bolshevism and the Muslims know without doubt that their destiny is linked with that of Germany and the Axis, and that they are only threatened by Serbs, communists, and the Allies.’Footnote ⁴²

The SS reacted enthusiastically to the tour. ‘The visit of the Great Mufti has been a success in every way; also politically it has been received exceptionally well and positively, and may contribute quite considerably to pacification in this area’, Berger reported effusively.Footnote ⁴³ Emphasizing the religious dimension of the tour, he declared: ‘It has proved anew that the Grand Mufti possesses a fully functioning intelligence apparatus and commands extraordinary prestige in the entire Mohammedan world.’ Sustaining misconceptions about the Mufti's universal authority among Muslims and the possibility of winning large-scale support through Islam, Berger even suggested similar tours on the Eastern front: ‘The Grand Mufti is also by all means prepared to travel to the Crimean Tatars, i.e. to the Mohammedans of the currently occupied Eastern territories and to activate them in every form for Germany.’

The Wehrmacht co-operated through the entire campaign. ‘The German generals’, Berger reported to Himmler, had done the SS ‘an extraordinary political and military service’ when making the trip of the Mufti possible.Footnote ⁴⁴ A month after the beginning of the campaign, in May 1943, Lüters already rejoiced that ‘the treatment of Muslims [Muselmanenbehandlung] has become a propaganda weapon of the first order for Germany’.Footnote ⁴⁵

SS and Wehrmacht attempts to employ Islam in the Balkans had many opponents. Well aware of the politics of the tour, the SS faced heavy resistance from Italian authorities and the Ustaša regime, both anxious to maintain their respective spheres of influence. As soon as the Mufti's plane had landed in Zagreb, the Italians tried to stage all kinds of plots to stop the tour. In his memoirs, al-Husseini remembered that after his arrival in the Croatian capital, a high-ranking Italian diplomat flew in from Rome to prevent his trip to Bosnia and that he had been warned that they could not guarantee his safety should he choose to travel to the war-torn area.Footnote ⁴⁶ After the Mufti had returned to Berlin, the Italians urged the Germans ‘with respect for Italy's special Croatian and Islamic interests’, as Ernst Woermann, head of the political department of the Foreign Office, reported, to ensure that any future contact between the Mufti and the Muslims of the Balkans be organized through Italian channels.Footnote ⁴⁷ The SS could not have cared less. Equally unsuccessful was the intervention of the Ustaša regime. The Croatian government had reacted ‘quite dismissively’ to the tour, Berger noted.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, Ustaša officials very quickly ‘reversed’ their attitude, the head of the SS Head Office boasted in a letter to Himmler, after he, Berger, had directly confronted the Croatian envoy in Berlin. Ultimately, the Ustaša regime tried to control the Mufti throughout the visit. On his tour from Zagreb to Sarajevo, the Mufti was escorted by two representatives of the Ustaša regime.Footnote ⁴⁹ Croatian government officials tried to isolate the Mufti from Muslim leaders who were not part of the regime. Nonetheless, the SS officer Karl von Krempler, a former Habsburg officer who was now responsible for Muslim affairs in the Balkans, sidelined the Ustaša agencies and organized confidential meetings with various Islamic dignitaries and separatist leaders.Footnote ⁵⁰ Officially, of course, the Germans tried to conceal these frictions with the Ustaša leadership.

The SS also faced internal resistance. Kasche and the Foreign Office were opposed to the trip. In their eyes, the courtship of Muslims in the Balkans would only further undermine the Ustaša regime. When the Mufti visited Kasche's office in Zagreb, the envoy did not receive him, and only sent his card.Footnote ⁵¹ Furious, Kasche internally complained that the tour had sparked rumours among the Muslim population that Berlin was prepared to support the creation of a Muslim state in the region.Footnote ⁵² In general, the new course of the SS and Wehrmacht towards Islam in the Balkans, reflected in the Mufti's tour and the deployment of the Muslim division, was interpreted in the Foreign Office as an attempt to ‘fortify’ Islam in south-eastern Europe, as the diplomat Hans Alexander Winkler in Berlin, put it.Footnote ⁵³ In the immediate aftermath of the Mufti's tour, Winkler had visited Zagreb and Sarajevo, and subsequently worked out an eight-page memorandum about Germany's policy towards Islam in the Balkans, giving a highly concerned assessment of the new direction.Footnote ⁵⁴ He showed an understanding of why the military found the Muslims, who in his eyes were entirely pro-German and still remembered the times of the Habsburg empire, as ideal allies on the ground. The SS must appreciate their ‘racial material, the soldierly tradition and the anti-papal spirit’, Winkler remarked. Yet, he sounded a note of caution with respect to German support for Muslims in the Balkans. First, he warned that German support for an ‘autonomist Islam’ (autonomistisches Mohammedanertum) in the region would undermine the Ustaša regime. The Mufti's tour had given a boost to ‘Mohammedan self-confidence’, and the deployment of the Muslim division would give rise to a ‘religious idea’ with the ‘utmost disruptive’ effect on the Ustaša state. Second, Winkler expressed his concerns about the ‘pan-Islamic, non-European orientation’ of Muslim collaborators in the Balkans. Unlike the SS, he perceived pan-Islamism as a risk, not an opportunity. The tour of al-Husseini had contributed to this risk. ‘The Mufti regards the world situation under a very widespread Muhammedan perspective, which for us is completely alien.’ This perspective, Winkler stated, was entirely ‘anti-European’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Winkler's memorandum reflected a rare perception of Islam, expressing a classical European notion of the religion and the Occident, a view which did not really fit into the pragmatic and rationalized conceptions of SS officers like Berger or military representatives such as Lüters, who were convinced of the usefulness of Islam for their war effort. Winkler's warnings had little impact. He, Kasche, and the Foreign Office had no significant influence anymore on the German political course in the Balkans, whilst the SS and the Wehrmacht pursued their policy towards Islam.

The Mufti's tour was framed by a wider campaign. It was followed not only by the employment of the Muslim SS division, but also by a major religiously charged propaganda campaign to win over the Muslim civil population for Hitler's New Order.

IV

Considering Ustaša sensibilities, the Germans avoided employing Islam in their propaganda in the Balkans before the spring of 1943. ‘A propagandistic influence of the Muslim population was withheld, as such is not wanted from the Croatian side’, a report of the Propaganda Squadron South-East remarked in August 1942. ‘Only’, the report added, 10,000 copies of a ‘small illustrated brochure in the Croatian language’ entitled ‘The Life of the Muslims in Germany’ had been printed for distribution in West Bosnia, where German units had begun fighting again.Footnote ⁵⁶ In fact, ‘The Life of the Muslims in Germany’ (‘Život Muslimana u Njemačkoj’) was twenty-seven pages long.Footnote ⁵⁷ It contained many photographs of Muslim life in the Reich, including pictures of the Berlin Mosque, founded in the interwar period, and short texts about individuals from all parts of the Muslim world who worked in Germany. Its aim was to identify the Third Reich as the friend of Islam, assuming a pan-Islamic sense of identification between Muslim peasants in West Bosnia and Muslim civilians in Germany. The brochure was the first significant piece of German religious propaganda launched in the Muslim areas of the Balkans.

With the beginning of further German military involvement, this kind of propaganda intensified. Brochures and pamphlets were distributed in Muslim towns and villages, propaganda posters were put up in streets and trains. The print propaganda which survived the war, today mostly stored in the German military archives in Freiburg, has, interestingly, never been examined in any study about the Balkans during the Second World War. It paints a clear picture of the ways in which German authorities employed religion as a political instrument against their enemies. German propaganda pamphlets would usually portray Jews, British, and Americans as the foes of Islam, who pulled the strings behind the scenes of the Balkan theatre and were responsible for the miserable situation of the Muslims there. Other pamphlets, which were distributed on the spot in more specific tactical situations, characterized Tito's partisans and Četniks as the enemies of Islam. In any case, the Germans repeatedly drew on religious sentiment.

First, German propaganda merged Islam with Jew-hatred. One of the most significant examples of this kind of religiously charged anti-Jewish propaganda dispersed among Muslims of the Balkans was the brochure ‘Islam and Judaism’ (‘Islam i Židovstvo’).Footnote ⁵⁸ It propagated the idea of an age-old history of hostility between Islam and Judaism, beginning with the conflict between the Prophet and the Jewish community of Khaybar. German propagandists distributed 10,000 copies of the publication on 21 February 1943. Half of the texts were circulated among Muslims by the local office of the Propaganda Squadron Croatia in Banja Luka; the remaining copies spread by its local representative in Sarajevo.

Generally, however, it was British and Soviet imperialism that played the central role in German propaganda towards the Muslim population. A pamphlet circulated in the summer of 1943 proclaimed to ‘Muslims’ that the culprits who brought ‘misery and death, blood and tears’ were none other than the ‘agitators in London and Moscow’. Only the victory of the Axis would ‘mean the end and the extermination of all enemies of Islam’. The Muslims of the SS division were portrayed as part of a broader pan-Islamic mission, as ‘the first who could fight under these victorious banners, not only for the freedom of your homeland, but also for the liberation of Islam from its enemies’. The pamphlet was adorned with a flag depicting crescent and star. On 5 June, 15,000 copies were distributed by General Walter Stettner's infamous 1st Mountain Division. The Luftwaffe dropped another 35,000 copies in the areas of Konjic, Blagaj, Goražde, Rogatica, Fojnica, Visoko, Travnik, and Maglaj on 7 June 1943. The pamphlet concluded with a simple message: ‘Islam has one enemy: England. Islam has one friend: Germany. Muslims: Your place in this battle is set.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Typically, the leaflets would address the Allied powers jointly, speaking of the ‘danger of English, American and Soviet imperialism’,Footnote ⁶⁰ or warning of plots against Islam made in ‘London and Moscow’.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet, if one of these powers was mentioned most frequently, it was the Soviet Union or, more generally, Bolshevism, portrayed as the atheist enemy of Islam. A pamphlet addressing the ‘Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ warned: ‘A red wave from the East threatens to swallow all peoples and religious communities in the Balkans!’Footnote ⁶² Their ‘brothers in faith’ in the Soviet Union had, the pamphlet declared, already been ‘trampled down’ by the Kremlin. Only if the Muslims went to arms on the German side could they prevent their ‘total extermination by the Soviet fury’, a fury which had already caused the deaths of ‘hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Soviet Union’. ‘To arms’, it called the Muslims, and praised the SS division ‘Handžar’. Even more colorful language was used in another pamphlet, which drew on the religious associations of the green flag of the Prophet. It asked rhetorically: ‘Must Stalin's plan become a reality? Must the green flag of the Prophet run red with the blood of the Muslims?’Footnote ⁶³ And it referred to massacres of Muslims by Tito's partisans in the area of Čapljina. ‘The bloodsucker Stalin will allow his entrusted Tito to spill the blood of Muslims elsewhere.’ The reason for the alleged Soviet hatred against Muslims was also given: ‘Because every Muslim protects his faith, his old customs and conventions against communist overthrow!’ The pamphlet contained an image of a mosque with a minaret and a (supposedly green) flag. In the front, it showed a depiction of Stalin and below him a fictional quote: ‘I will take care that this flag also turns red. As is necessary, with the blood of the Muslims alone.’

On a more tactical level, German propaganda towards Muslims campaigned against communist partisans and Četniks. In fact, Muslim combatants in their ranks were the first the Germans encouraged to change sides. A pamphlet addressing the ‘fighters of the Bosnian and Muslim brigades’ of the partisans, for instance, claimed that Tito had made empty promises to Muslims and was now on the retreat, facing hunger and cold.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Muslims were called upon to change sides before it was too late. Another pamphlet referred to atrocities committed by the partisans, remembering ‘353 murdered Muslims’ from the area of Vlasenica and giving a detailed two-page ‘report’ about the cruelty of the communist partisans and their determination to kill all Muslims. It concluded with a final call: ‘Muslims! Do you want to continue watching your extermination quietly?’Footnote ⁶⁵ These texts would often be religiously charged as well. A pamphlet which called for Muslims in Tito's ranks to change sides was prefaced by a quotation: ‘Fire at the mosque with the cannon!’Footnote ⁶⁶ These were the alleged words of Tito's commanders, when they had ordered the attack on the town of Velika Kladuša. The (remains of the) mosque of Velika Kladuša, the pamphlet explained, now evidenced the attack by the ‘communists’. Employing religious rhetoric, the pamphlet called those ‘who believe in god’ to ‘take aim with the weapons against the communists’. A pamphlet addressing ‘Muslim fighters’ asked why Tito ridiculed their faith and customs, and insulted Muslim women.Footnote ⁶⁷ The answer was immediate: ‘Because human and religious ideas, customs and conventions are incompatible with communist ideas’, and ‘because you and the people of the right faith will always be a plague upon godless Bolshevism!’. At the top of the pamphlet was a picture of a mosque with a crescent on its roof and a minaret. Similar propaganda was directed at the few Muslims who fought in Četnik ranks. A pamphlet addressing the ‘Muslim brothers!’, for instance, counteracted Četnik propaganda towards Muslims, reminding Muslims that Mihailović's troops had killed everything that was ‘Islamic or Croatian’.Footnote ⁶⁸ ‘Muslims know very well who their enemy is’, the pamphlet read.

Religious images and illustrations, especially those of mosques and minarets, played a remarkable role in many of these pamphlets. Visual propaganda had the advantage that it could also reach those who were illiterate. ‘To allow for the illiteracy of the population here, a series of suitable drawings has been prepared at the instigation of the department in Agram’, a report from the Propaganda Division South-East had stated as early as September 1942.Footnote ⁶⁹ Besides illustrated pamphlets, Germans also distributed propaganda posters depicting mosques.Footnote ⁷⁰ One of them showed Roosevelt dropping bombs on Mostar, represented by a skyline of roofs and minarets.

A high portion of the pamphlets addressed Muslims in religious terms, as ‘Muslims’ (Muslimani) or ‘Muslim brothers’ (Braćo muslimani), rather than as, for example, ‘Bosniaks’ (Bošnjaci) or ‘Bosnians’ (Bosanci). Yet, some leaflets attempted to accommodate Muslims within other religious groups, addressing for instance, ‘Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox of Bosnia’, or ‘Croatians and Serbians: Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox’, or the ‘honest Croatians, Muslims and Orthodox in the partisan ranks!’, exhorting them to change sides.Footnote ⁷¹ Another pamphlet asked ‘Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox’ to remember that the Bolsheviks would not only spread ‘murder and burning’, but that they also stood for the ‘extermination of faith and religion’.Footnote ⁷²

After the employment of the ‘Handžar’ division, reports and pamphlets about it became a strong instrument of German propaganda directed towards Muslim civilians. Moreover, from early 1944, when the division was deployed after several months of training abroad, its propaganda section also became concerned with the ideological education of the civil population.Footnote ⁷³ In spring 1944, for instance, it put up charcoal drawn propaganda posters for the Mavlud (birthday of the Prophet) celebrations across the occupied Muslim areas.Footnote ⁷⁴ Between 12 and 25 March 1944, it employed a loudspeaker van to address three local Mavlud celebrations.Footnote ⁷⁵ The division also produced pictorial reports of the religious celebrations of the soldiers. These were then used, for example, in window displays.Footnote ⁷⁶ In autumn 1943, the SS had already given a photographic report about the Ramadan Bajram (end of the Islamic fasting month) celebrations of the soldiers to the Croatian press for publication. Concerned about the SS campaign, Ustaša authorities turned to Kasche, complaining that the article had been foisted upon them under duress.Footnote ⁷⁷

Soon, the German command would also use the military imams of the division to conduct propaganda among Muslim civilians. Propagandistically trained, the SS sent them into the mosques to lead the Friday prayers (džuma-namaz) for the civil population in order to ‘carry’, as an SS report put it, the ‘ideas of the division’ to the civil population.Footnote ⁷⁸ The report further noted that the ‘imams continuously hold gatherings in the mosque for the civil population, which are framed by Islamic prayers’. These religious gatherings were used to spread political ideas and propaganda, especially to explain the work of the division and to agitate against Tito.

Soldiers of the division were also used as propagandists. Pamphlets designed for the civil population, which were created by the division's propaganda section, were not just airdropped from planes, but were also given to the soldiers to be sent, along with their field post, to their families, neighbours and friends.Footnote ⁷⁹ Soldiers were instructed to tell their relatives to forward the pamphlets in order to achieve a maximum readership. Moreover, the SS created pamphlets signed by Muslim soldiers calling for war against Tito. One such pamphlet, signed by the SS man Halid Komić, not only turned against the partisans, but also carried anti-Jewish stereotypes: ‘It is the Jews and the Jews’ menials. Who has had the whole capital in their hands? The Jews. Who has lived at ease? Only the Jew.’ Now, he claimed, the SS division would bring back ‘freedom, order and justice’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Another pamphlet, anonymously signed by a group of SS men, railed against the ‘godless hordes of Tito’ which had turned Bosnia into a ‘vale of tears’. ‘Our unshaken belief in the great man [Hitler], who leads the freedom loving peoples of Europe against the adversaries of god and mankind, gives us the strength to carry out the fight and the tasks successfully’, the pamphlet proclaimed. In the usual manner, religious imperatives were connected with political appeals: ‘Who is not for us and with us, is against us … herefore it is your holy duty to follow completely this, our call! … Heil Hitler!’Footnote ⁸¹

Finally, the imams were to instruct the German soldiers of the division about religious customs and rules in Muslim areas.Footnote ⁸² They were also to act as intermediaries during billets with the local populace. Islamic dignitaries were considered politically important by German officials on the ground.

V

Before 1943, German interactions with the religious leaders, the ulema, and their institutions were rare. German Foreign Office officials dealt almost exclusively with the Muslim representatives of the Ustaša state and faced the problem that a powerful Muslim leader did not exist. The two most important Muslim factions within the Ustaša regime were led by the Muslim vice-premier, Džafer Kulenović, and by Hakija Hadžić, Pavelić's lackey in Bosnia and Herzegovina.Footnote ⁸³ A veteran politician, Kulenović had already been a minister in the kingdom of Yugoslavia and, following the death of Mehmed Spaho in 1939, had become president of the ‘Yugoslav Muslim Organization’. According to a German diplomat, he drew first and foremost on religious slogans and only second on Croatian nationalism, but was still accused by many Muslims of being an Ustaša puppet. Hakija Hadžić, who promoted Croatian nationalist slogans rather than religious ones, had only a small following, mostly among the intelligentsia.Footnote ⁸⁴ Another German official observed in March 1943 that there was ‘no personality’ who could be considered a generally accepted leader.Footnote ⁸⁵ ‘The solution to the Muslim question is mainly a leadership question’, he stated. Muslims of the Ustaša regime had little authority within the Muslim population. The situation seemed clearer in the case of the religious establishment which was believed to wield more genuine power and influence over the people.

As religious structures were fully institutionalized, they could be understood, and, possibly, utilized. Organized within the ‘Islamic Religious Community’, the faithful were under the authority of the Reis-ul-Ulema (Head of the Ulema), the highest religious leader.Footnote ⁸⁶ The Reis-ul-Ulema was assisted by the Ulema-Medžlis (Council of the Ulema), the supreme council of the Islamic community, which consisted of himself and four other eminent dignitaries and oversaw the vakuf endowment, medresas and šeriat courts as well as the work of the local imams, the ulema and hodžas. This administration had been introduced in 1882 by Habsburg bureaucrats anxious to loosen the religious bonds with the Ottoman empire and keen to monitor and control Islam in the Balkans, and had survived in the Yugoslav kingdom and under the Ustaša regime. Eager to present themselves as a protector of Islam, the Germans made no direct attempts to interfere with the Islamic administration. As they became more involved in the Muslim areas of the Balkans in early 1943, however, German officials increasingly engaged with religious leaders. In the end, the SS even employed an important member of the Ulema-Medžlis for their political aims.

At the time of the German invasion of Yugoslavia, the office of Reis-ul-Ulema was held by Fehim Spaho, former president of the High Šeriat Court in Sarajevo and brother of Mehmed Spaho. Although Spaho initially enthusiastically supported the Ustaša regime, hoping that it would allow him to realize his own aims, he soon lost hope in Pavelić.Footnote ⁸⁷ Salih Safet Bašić, who informally replaced Spaho after his death in early 1942, had a rocky relationship with the Ustaša.Footnote ⁸⁸ Concerned with the protection of their community, both leaders sought good relations with the Germans. Spaho had in fact cultivated his contacts with German officials already in the months leading up to the invasion of the Balkans and kept them informed about atrocities against Muslims during the war.Footnote ⁸⁹ Other members of the Ulema-Medžlis went further. As the situation of the Muslims deteriorated in 1942 and 1943, many of them embraced the idea of Muslim autonomy under Berlin's protection. Their hopes were fuelled by the tour of the Mufti, the establishment of the Muslim SS division, and Germany's massive religious propaganda campaign.

Both Fehim Spaho and Salih Bašić were opposed as being too progressive by more fundamentalist members of the Ulema-Medžlis, most notably Mehmed Handžić. Al-Azhar educated, Handžić was a leading Islamic revivalist with pan-Islamic leanings who taught at a medresa in Sarajevo and served as the head librarian of the grand Gazi Husrevbegova Biblioteka.Footnote ⁹⁰ He was president of El-Hidaje (‘The Right Path’), a society of Salafi ulema.Footnote ⁹¹ Its youth organization, the Mladi Muslimani (‘Young Muslims’), attracted a considerable following. Handžić and his supporters had quickly become disillusioned with Ustaša rule and were now advocating an autonomist agenda and seeking German help. During al-Husseini's tour, Handžić had met with the Mufti in Sarajevo, gave him a warm welcome address at a banquet in the city hall, and afterwards published an article about the visit in El-Hidaje, the official organ of his society.Footnote ⁹² In consultations with German diplomats in Sarajevo in mid-April 1943, Handžić urged for a more extensive German intervention.Footnote ⁹³ Bemoaning the suffering and murder of Muslims, he blamed the Ustaša for the situation. The Croatian regime had adopted the same policy towards Muslims as pursued by the Serbs in the Yugoslav kingdom, he claimed – a policy of annihilation. The Muslims in Pavelić's government were not true representatives of the people, but had been bought, he told the Germans. Although he enthusiastically welcomed the foundation of the Muslim SS division, he made clear that this was not enough. The only solution was an independent Muslim state under the protection of Germany. Handžić even suggested a religious resettlement plan to create purified Muslim areas. The Muslim population had been deeply impressed that German soldiers had fallen in battle against the enemies of Islam. And the visit of the Mufti had also sent the right signals. There was no doubt, Handžić assured the Germans, that the Muslims were the natural allies of the Third Reich. Handžić was well aware of what the Germans wanted to hear. Giving them the impression that their religiously charged propaganda had fallen on fertile soil, he pushed his own agenda, most notably the strengthening of self-defence and the establishment, de facto and, if possible, de jure, autonomy from the Ustaša.

Handžić was not the only member of the ulema to seek a tighter alliance with the Germans. Ali Aganović, a widely respected member of Ulema-Medžlis who repeatedly consulted with German officials, also followed this line.Footnote ⁹⁴ Although he paid public lip service to the Ustaša regime until the end, he too had soon lost faith in Pavelić and had begun to urge the Germans for a stronger involvement in the Muslim Balkans.Footnote ⁹⁵ At a meeting in the spring of 1943, Aganović assured the officials from the German legation in Zagreb that Muslim religious autonomy could only be achieved through political independence.Footnote ⁹⁶ Emphasizing the importance of the Muslims of the Balkans within the wider Islamic world, he also discussed pan-Islamic policies and the re-establishment of the Caliphate, an office he believed should be given to the Mufti of Jerusalem. While Handžić and Aganović made their appeals for an alliance with the Third Reich behind closed doors, other members of the ulema stood openly in the service of the German authorities.

The most important collaborator of the Ulema-Medžlis was Muhamed Pandža, a leading religious dignitary and a member of El-Hidaje.Footnote ⁹⁷ From a prominent Sarajevo family of religious leaders and educated at the most prestigious Islamic institutions in the country, Pandža had always kept a certain distance from the Ustaša regime and was now publicly pleading for Muslim autonomy under German protection. His strong pro-German attitude made him an ideal collaborator for the Wehrmacht and the SS. At once, the SS employed him for the recruitment of Muslim volunteers, a mission which he would carry out with all his religious authority. Pandža was described by a field imam of the Muslim SS unit, Hasan Bajrakitarović, as the ‘true initiator, greatest propagandist, recruiter and fighter for the foundation and replenishment of this division’.Footnote ⁹⁸ According to the imam, it was Pandža who had convinced the ‘Muslim clerical leadership’ to support the deployment of the division. ‘Everybody knew’, Bajrakitarović explained, that what Pandža recommended must be ‘genuinely Islamic and patriotic’. In some towns, before recruits were allowed to enter the enlisting office of the division, they were required first to see Pandža, who prepared them mentally for their mission.Footnote ⁹⁹ Aside from military mobilization, the Germans would also use Pandža as an intermediary to support their efforts to pacify the Muslim areas.

A significant role in this respect was played by the socio-religious organization Merhamet – also known as the ‘Muslim Charitable Society Merhamet’ (Muslimansko Dobrotvorno Društvo Merhamet) – in Sarajevo, which was led by Pandža.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Merhamet became a major body providing humanitarian aid during the war years, running soup kitchens, orphanages, and refugee camps, and it also got politically more and more involved. For the Germans, Merhamet became a valued partner, and they were cautious to retain good relations with the organization. When, for instance, Merhamet requested the return of a Muslim orphan who had been adopted by a German Catholic family, brought to Germany and converted to Catholicism, German authorities swiftly intervened, returned the child and entrusted it to a Muslim family in Sarajevo.Footnote ¹⁰¹ On the ground, military officials soon regarded Merhamet as the most important representative body of the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Merhamet repeatedly negotiated the food situation with the German Police Area Commander, Sarajevo, SS-Oberführer Werner Fromm.Footnote ¹⁰² And when Berlin started a relief fund in early 1944, Berger suggested that clothes for Muslim refugees be distributed through Merhamet.Footnote ¹⁰³ Himmler was only too happy to employ the local Muslim structures, and authorized Merhamet to make the distribution.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The SS perceived Merhamet as a strong partner. Yet, it was not fully controlled by the Germans and would follow its own interests. In September 1943, the second secretary of the organization, Mehmed Tokić, who had actually been hired by the SS as a covert informer, would threaten German officers with an open rebellion against the Croatian state.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Muslims, Tokić made clear, despised the Ustaša regime and sought to live in a German protectorate instead, as in Austrian-Hungarian times. Berger tried to ameliorate the situation, rejecting any threats levied by the ‘Muslim leadership’, and warning that violent uprisings such as these would make things even worse for the Muslims.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The leaders of Merhamet soon became disillusioned with the Germans. In the end, also, Muhamed Pandža lost his hope in the Third Reich. He went into the woods, founded the ‘Muslim Liberation Movement’ (Muslimanski Oslobodilački Pokret), and called for armed self-defence and Muslim autonomy.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Addressing his ‘Muslim Brothers!’ in a propaganda pamphlet, Pandža now declared war against Ustaša and Četniks.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He announced: ‘Everything we serve is the wellbeing of the Islamic community and our nation.’ ‘Muslims’, he proclaimed, in his usual religious rhetoric, now had to fight ‘with faith in god and his help, bravely and dauntlessly’ for survival. Although some SS circles in Berlin were concerned about these developments, Krempler, who had repeatedly dealt with Pandža in the field, emphasized that he was still pro-German.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Hitler, whose trust in the Muslims remained unbroken, excused Pandža's defection with the remark that the Muslims needed to protect themselves.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Pandža, who later made contact with Tito's partisans, was finally captured by German troops in eastern Bosnia and handed over to the Ustaša authorities. He was not the only Islamic leader who had become disillusioned.

VI

Promises made to Muslims by the Germans, eager to present themselves as the protector of Islam, contrasted sharply with the realities of war. In practice, the Germans were not able to pacify the Muslim areas. The collaboration between Muslim leaders and the Germans nurtured the hatred directed against them by partisans and Četniks. Although the Germans had promised that the sole purpose of the Muslim division was the protection and pacification of the Muslim areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Himmler had sent it for training to France and, later, Germany. Unprotected, the Muslim population became the object of retaliatory attacks. In the autumn of 1943, Tito's partisans initiated a major offensive in Bosnia. Thousands were killed. Tens of thousands were soon on the run. The relatives of Muslim volunteers in particular were targeted by partisans. Muslim refugees gathered in the hundreds in depots, barns, stables, and basements, an SS field report noted.Footnote ¹¹¹ Many of them had no proper clothes and suffered malnutrition. Across the Islamic world, these events were followed closely. On 11 January 1944, the SS representative for Croatia, Konstantin Kammerhofer, wrote to Himmler, apparently concerned not only about the local situation, but also the effects this had on the wider Muslim world:

Himmler was convinced. On the occasion of the Bajram celebration in autumn 1943, the SS had already organized a collection of money for the Muslim population in Bosnia and, shortly after, Himmler had ordered a second relief fund.Footnote ¹¹³ During the second collection alone, more than 120,000 Reichsmarks were raised.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Himmler would add another 100,000 from his own funds.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In January 1944, Berger reported that 225,000 Reichsmarks had been amassed.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The money was mainly used for clothing, which was then distributed.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Still, these projects were only a drop in the ocean. SS policies towards Muslims had compromised the Muslim population, while providing it with no military protection.

Finally, in late February 1944, the SS sent the ‘Handžar’ division back to the Balkans, launching another major propaganda campaign. For a short period, the situation for Muslims eased. The Muslims responded with hope and thanks. On 20 April 1944, for instance, Krempler reported that prayers for Hitler took place in all the towns of the Sandžak.Footnote ¹¹⁸ A Muslim delegation from the area sent Hitler a telegram of obeisance:

Hitler thanked the Muslims, in return letting them know that he had been ‘very delighted’ by the letter.Footnote ¹²⁰ Similar demonstrations of loyalty followed. In July 1944, Muslims from the Sandžak area sent a gramophone record containing a prayer of thanks and praise in Arabic for Hitler.Footnote ¹²¹ In Berlin, Brandt, head of Himmler's personal staff, sent the record to the SS propaganda section to be exploited by the SS or by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry.Footnote ¹²²

In spring 1944, northern and eastern Bosnia effectively came under the control of the SS and Himmler's Muslim division. The infamous SS ‘Guidelines for the Securing of Public Peace in Bosnia’ (‘Richtlinien für die Sicherung des Landfriedens in Bosnien’) give a good idea of the intended occupational regime in the area and of the utilization of religion to support it.Footnote ¹²³ In the towns and villages, SS officers were to install reliable local leaders who functioned as intermediaries between the population and the Germans. Every Friday, the day of the džuma-namaz, these representatives had to read out the weekly propaganda slogans of the SS. Schools were to be put under the command of trustworthy locals – ‘teachers, imams, particularly suited women’, but ‘no intelligentsia’, as the SS specified. More importantly, the SS scheme envisaged a massive religious resettlement with the aim of creating homogeneous Islamic towns and villages. ‘It is the aim, under any circumstances, to create in the country communities a population of the same confession’, it was stated. Moreover, the SS guidelines endorsed a war of extermination against partisans, Četniks, and other hostile groups as well as an aggressive domination of the civilian population. ‘The point is to annihilate the enemy’, the guidelines made clear, encouraging field commanders to be particularly ‘ruthless’. In the end, the reign of the SS in the area was too short-lived and the German war bureaucracy too chaotic for schemes to be fully implemented. And yet, the soldiers of the Muslim division became notorious for acting particularly brutally, spreading fear and terror.

To some extent, the population relocations envisaged by the guidelines of the SS mirrored the demands of some Islamic autonomists. But although Himmler internally toyed with the idea of the creation of a future military protectorate, or ‘military frontier’ (Wehrgrenze), as it had existed in the Habsburg era, for the time being, the SS was in no position to realize the hopes of the Muslim autonomists in Bosnia and Herzegovina.Footnote ¹²⁴ Similarly, when, in the final months of the war, Bedri Pejani, a prominent Albanian Muslim politician, sought help from the Mufti of Jerusalem for the foundation of a Muslim state in the Balkans, uniting Kosovo, cleansed of Orthodox Serbs, and the Sandžak with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania, the Germans quickly thwarted these ambitions.Footnote ¹²⁵

As the German military situation deteriorated, many Muslims lost hope in an Axis victory. In July 1944, a Wehrmacht report described the attitude of the Muslim population towards the Germans as inconsistent, a fact which now made them ‘in every respect unreliable’.Footnote ¹²⁶ In the final months of the war, many did not count on German help any more and looked for alternatives. Muslim self-defence groups, like Pandža's ‘Muslim Liberation Movement’, spread.Footnote ¹²⁷ Many young Muslims, a German army report noted in June 1944, organized themselves into local self-defence units, so-called ‘green cadres’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Indeed, the militias, most importantly the ‘Green Cadre’ (Zeleni Kader) of the pro-German warlord Nešad Topčić, attracted more and more Muslim men. Supported by religious leaders like Mehmed Handžić, they not only protected Muslim villages but also committed ferocious atrocities among the Orthodox population. Attempts by the Četniks to recruit Muslims into their ranks had, unsurprisingly, only little success.Footnote ¹²⁹ Tito's partisans, on the other hand, seemed to be a viable alternative to both the Germans and the Muslim militias. As the war situation worsened in the winter of 1943–4, increasing numbers of Muslims joined their ranks, though the proportion of Muslims in Tito's ranks should not be overestimated. In spring 1944, according to Tito's own assessment, only 2·5 per cent of his men were Muslims.Footnote ¹³⁰ A first Muslim partisan unit had already been formed in the summer of 1941, and Marshal Tito willingly repeated Moscow's religious wartime propaganda that portrayed communism as the only hope for Islam. In the brochure ‘Muslims in the Soviet Union: Religion in the Soviet Union’ (‘Muslimani u Sovjetskom Savezu: Religija u Sovjetskom Savezu’), distributed by the partisan propagandists in the autumn of 1944, Stalin's state was depicted as a paradise for the pious.Footnote ¹³¹

The Germans dealt with those Muslims whom they suspected of betrayal with great brutality.Footnote ¹³² In a number of punitive missions against Muslim villages and settlements whose inhabitants were accused of sheltering partisans, German troops executed Muslim women and children. Even mosques were attacked. In late 1944, German forces broke into the building of El-Hidaje in Sarajevo to search for evidence against a number of members of the Young Muslims who were suspected of working with the enemy. And despite all official efforts to promote Germany as the protector of Balkan Islam, ordinary soldiers in the field often had little respect for Muslims and their religion.

After the war, Muslims across the Balkans were widely stigmatized as collaborators. Nevertheless, the communist regime in Yugoslavia did initially refrain from direct attacks on Islam.Footnote ¹³³ Only the most notorious Islamic collaborators, like Ismet Muftič, Pavelic's Mufti of Zagreb, were executed, while other religious leaders, like Salih Bašić, remained in office. Muhamed Pandža and Ali Aganović received long prison sentences (Mehmed Handžić had already died in 1944). The Poglavnik Mosque was shut down and its minarets blown up. After the consolidation of power, the new rulers engaged in a more rigorous crackdown on Islam, which culminated in the legendary anti-veiling campaign of Tito's Antifascist Women's Front. In the newly created People's Republic of Albania, Enver Hoxha launched an even fiercer attack on religious institutions, rivalling the Stalinist terror against religions of the interwar years.Footnote ¹³⁴ Accused of treachery, the Muslim Cham Albanians of the Epirus area were targeted by the nationalist militias of Napoleon Zervas's ‘National Republican Greek League’, which massacred many, plundered and burned down villages, and expelled the survivors to Albania.Footnote ¹³⁵

To conclude, Berlin's attempts to promote Germany as the patron of Islam in the Balkans was not the result of a long-term strategy but grew out of the escalation of the war which led to increased German military involvement in the Muslim areas in early 1943. The civil war had brought to the fore religious frictions, which the German authorities eagerly tried to exploit. The Muslims seemed to be an ideal ally not only because they were considered pro-German and hostile to the Western allies and communism, but also because of specific notions of Islam and geopolitical considerations, most importantly the belief that regional policies in the south-east of Europe would have global, pan-Islamic, resonances. The previous pages have shown the ways in which German officials tried to use Islam in their policies and propaganda on the ground, further politicizing the religious in the region. Religious language, terminology, and imperatives were employed in military propaganda to give religious legitimacy to an alliance with the Third Reich and the war against its enemies. German officials also got involved with religious dignitaries who tried to pursue their own agenda, most notably the aim of Muslim autonomy. Indeed, from the beginning Muslim leaders played an important role in German policies towards Islam in the region, which was, after all, also prompted by Muslim appeals and memoranda. In the end, German courtship of the Muslims was less successful than officials in the Wehrmacht and SS had hoped. Although German advances had initially raised the hopes of many Muslims who were suffering from the civil war, it soon became apparent that they conflicted with the violent realities of German warfare. Moreover, Berlin's propaganda campaign lacked credibility and authenticity. It was all too obvious that the Germans wanted to instrumentalize Islam for their political and military interests. Attempts to solve the problem of authenticity by employing trusted Muslim intermediaries had only limited effect.

The story of Germany's engagement with the ‘Muslim question’ in the Balkans, overall, fits into the larger history of Berlin's more general attempts to promote the Third Reich as a patron of Islam. Indeed, constant references to the wider Muslim world and the global dimension of German policies towards Islam in the Balkans were apparent not only in the internal writings of German officials, but also in their communications with local Muslim leaders and in their field propaganda. And yet, with their involvement in the ‘Muslim question’ in the Balkans, the Germans encountered a very particular situation, a highly complex, religiously charged conflict that can hardly be compared with the situation in any other Muslim war zone.

Finally, the previous pages have also shed some light on the intersection of religion, politics, and propaganda in the Second World War. The studied episode has shown that religion could be crucial – and at times even more important than ethnic and racial categories – for German political and military officials when mapping the populations in the warzones and drafting policies towards them. Assuming that religious communities, no matter how pious their members or how fluid their communal lines, were governed by a distinctive set of values and doctrines, religious policies were designed to manipulate and instrumentalize the sacred for political and military purposes. Indeed, the story of Germany's involvement with the ‘Muslim question’ in the Balkans constitutes one of the most striking examples of the significance of the politics of religion in the Second World War.