In his global bestseller, Inside the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler's former architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, cited the German dictator's view that if the Arabs had won the Battle of Tours in the eighth century, “the world would be Mohammedan today.” That was the case, he continued, because “theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to their faith. The Germanic people would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.” Yet, because of what Hitler called Arabs' “racial inferiority” and inability to handle the harsher climate, “they could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.” Hitler concluded, “It's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”Footnote ¹

In this important book, Islam and Nazi Germany's War, David Motadel had the good idea of drawing attention to Hitler's comments, which most scholars likely dismissed for decades as the lunacy and megalomania of an autodidact. When combined with the substantial recent scholarship on the Nazi regime's approach to Muslims and the religion of Islam, Motadel's study should encourage historians to engage in serious thinking about the relationship between Islam and the racial ideology of the Nazi regime. Motadel offers abundant evidence that Hitler's enthusiasm for Islam—or, rather, what he understood Islam to be—was both serious and consequential, and shared by other powerful figures in the Nazi regime. Motadel's signal accomplishment is to show that Nazi Germany's enthusiasm for Islam encompassed, but was not limited to, areas that other scholars have previously addressed most, namely, propaganda and policy in North Africa and the Middle East, or the Muslim Schutzstaffel (SS) Division in the Balkans. Through remarkable and pioneering research, especially in the files of the Berlin SS and the Wehrmacht files in the Federal Archives in Berlin and Freiburg, Motadel has documented the previously underexamined extent to which the National Socialists embraced Islam on Germany's Eastern Front in the Balkans, in the Caucuses, and in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945.

Islam and Nazi Germany's War offers abundant evidence that the enthusiasm of the Third Reich for what it understood Islam to be was, on the one hand, more extensive than the existing scholarship has suggested and, on the other, that the extent of Nazi-Islamic collaboration was greater in Eastern Europe during the years of Nazi occupation than in the more short-lived and tenuous period of Nazi presence in North Africa and the Middle East. At the same time that the Nazi regime was implementing the Holocaust and waging a race war against “Slavic subhumans” in Eastern Europe, it demonstrated remarkable solicitude and respect for Muslims in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Far from persecuting them, the regime encouraged their religious practices and found in Islam a mobilizing tool in the war against the Soviet Union. Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, receives considerable attention in these pages, but so do lesser-known Muslim collaborators, including Mufti Jakub Szynkiewicz in Vilnius, Imam Shakir Eriss in Riga, Mullah Alimseit Jamilov in Simferopol, Muhamed Pandza in Sarajevo, and the Berlin clerics Alimjan Idris and Taqi al-Din al-Hilali. Motadel demonstrates that Husseini was the most famous of a large number of Muslim collaborators with Nazi Germany who came not only from North Africa and the Middle East, but also from Eastern Europe and the Caucuses. When combined with existing scholarship, his work calls for recognition of the fact that, as far as Islam was concerned, religion trumped the conventions of Nazi racism—and did so, above all, among the hardcore ideological leaders of the Nazi regime.

Motadel's work complements a body of work that emerged in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as scholars and intellectuals turned to the issue of the relationship between National Socialism and Islam. The intellectual interventions began with Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism and Mathias Küntzel's Jihad und Judenhass. Über die neuen antijüdischen Krieg; both appeared in 2003, and the latter was published in English in 2007 as Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. Footnote ² Examining the published works of Sayyid Qutb, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and their Islamist successors, Berman and Küntzel made compelling cases that there were ideological affinities between Nazi ideology and the interpretation of Islam known as “Islamism.” To be sure, the history of the alliance between the Nazis and some Arab leaders had been examined in much earlier works from the mid-1960s: Joseph Schectman's The Mufti and the Führer: The Rise and Fall of Haj Amin el-Husseini, and the now classic work by Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East.Footnote ³ The latter drew on the then available German and British diplomatic records to situate this ideological affinity in the military and political history of World War II. Further evidence of the links came in Donald L. McKale's 1977 study, The Swastika Outside Germany, and in his 1987 work on the German diplomat Curt Prüfer; in Bernard Lewis's Semites and Anti-Semites, from 1986; and in Zvi Elpeleg's 1993 study, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Husseini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement.Footnote ⁴ Klaus Gensicke's 2007 study, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten, drew on recently released files from German archives that offered more information on the extent of Husseini's collaboration with the Nazi regime.Footnote ⁵

Other more recent studies include Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers's Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das “Dritte Reich”, die Araber und Palästina, which appeared in 2006. Drawing on the files of the SS and the German military, it examined the translation of ideology into Nazi Germany's efforts to extend the so-called Final Solution to the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East.Footnote ⁶ In 2009, the present author's Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World used findings from the U.S. National Archives, the Political Archive of the German Foreign Office, and the German Federal Archives in Berlin and Freiburg, to offer new insights into Nazi Germany's Arabic-language propaganda in North Africa and the Middle East, and the active intellectual contribution to this effort by Arab exiles in Berlin.Footnote ⁷ In his important work of 2010, Islamism and Islam, Bassam Tibi, examined, among other things, the role that Nazism had played in the emergence of the Islamist tradition that developed from the 1920s to 1940s.Footnote ⁸ Two years ago, Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz published Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which drew on additional archival findings from Germany and the United States to explore the impact of the Nazi-Islamist alliance on events in the Middle East during and after World War II.Footnote ⁹

Motadel complements these earlier studies in important ways. His key findings are the following: In the first place, the Nazi regime began in 1941 and 1942 to promote an alliance with Muslims against alleged common enemies—the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Jews. It did so in what Motadel calls the “Muslim war zones” in North Africa, the Middle East, the Crimea, the Caucuses, and the Balkans. The largest number of Muslims, by far, who fought with the Wehrmacht and the SS came from the Soviet Union; many also came from the Balkans but fewer from the Middle East. Nazi Germany presented itself in Europe as a defender of Islam in the face of Soviet atheism. Rather than being the result of long-term planning, this decision owed to “strategic pragmatism” (2), especially as the war turned against the Germans after the failure of the Blitzkrieg and defeat at El Alamein in 1942 and Stalingrad in 1943. In the process, Motadel argues, “ideological factors became less decisive. Racial guidelines were suddenly relaxed. As the war losses mounted and massive shortages in manpower became apparent, both the Wehrmacht and the SS began to recruit volunteers from all parts of the occupied territories” in the service of an alliance against Bolshevism. Another facet of what Motadel calls “this pragmatic shift” was Berlin's “anti-imperial campaign,” i.e., its support for Indian, Iraqi, and Palestinian leaders: “All of these developments were dictated by the exigencies of the war rather than by ideological considerations. Berlin's efforts to rally the Islamic world can be seen as an important facet of this shift toward strategic pragmatism and total mobilization” (2–3). Motadel views his work as “an attempt to put Islam on the political and strategic map of the Second World War” (5).

According to another of Motadel's major findings, German authorities made extensive attempts to employ Islam in their efforts to control Muslims behind the military fronts; to stir up unrest behind enemy lines on the fringes of the Soviet Union, as well as in the British and French colonial domains in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; and to recruit Muslims into German armies and the SS. This meant, in what Motadel calls the “Muslim moment of the war” (6), that the Nazi regime drew on Islamic institutions and religious authorities, on “politicized religious imperatives and rhetoric, sacred texts and Islamic iconography” (3), to provide religious legitimacy for its war. Motadel thus examines how the Nazi regime, especially the Wehrmacht and the SS, but also the Foreign Office, the Eastern Ministry (Ostministerium), and the Propaganda Ministry, all “conceptualized and instrumentalized religion for political and strategic ends” (10). In the process, he examines “underlying political conceptions about Islam that informed decision makers and officers in the German capital and in the field” (4); in so doing, Motadel offers the first “comprehensive picture of Nazi Germany's policy toward Islam in its full breadth” (5), thus expanding on previous work that had focused on one particular region.Footnote ¹⁰

In Part I, Motadel examines continuities between Germany's efforts to mobilize Muslims during World War I and then more extensively during World War II. Part II looks at German policies toward Muslims in the war zones, and documents the Nazi policy of respecting Muslim religious customs and conventions. In 1941 and 1942, they reestablished mosques, built madrasas, and honored Islamic religious rituals, holidays, and celebrations in those parts of the Soviet Union occupied by German forces—all of which stood in stark contrast to the atheist policies of the Soviets. In so doing, they supported the “ulama,” i.e., the network of Islamic religious scholars, as well as community and educational institutions. Part III examines policies toward Muslims in the German army and in SS divisions. Taken together, Motadel offers the most extensive English-language history of German policy toward Muslims in the Wehrmacht Muslim Eastern Legions, the Arab contingents of the Wehrmacht, the Eastern Muslim SS Division, and the Islamic SS units in the Balkans. He found extensive and previously unexamined evidence in the German Federal Archive in Freiburg about a wide range of religious concessions to Muslim soldiers, including attention to the Islamic religious calendar. He also performed new research by examining a vast number of pamphlets, booklets, and journals published by the Wehrmacht and the SS and then distributed to Muslim soldiers, often by military imams trained in German schools set up specifically for imams.Footnote ¹¹

In a work otherwise notable for careful examination of the evidence, Motadel offers a peculiar reading of the transcript of the famous meeting between Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini on November 28, 1941. At that meeting, Hitler told Husseini that when the German armies reached “the southern exit from the Caucuses,” the hour of the Arab world's “liberation” would arrive. At that point, “Germany's objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.”Footnote ¹² In other words, Hitler told Husseini that he would extend the Final Solution to Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, who numbered between seven hundred thousand and a million. Despite the historic importance of Hitler's revelation, Motadel writes that “their conversation was limited to an exchange of empty courtesies and the affirmation that they were fighting against common enemies—the British, Jews, and Bolshevism” (42). Motadel adds only that Hitler asserted that he would carry out an “uncompromising fight against the Jews,” which also included the Jews of the Arab lands (42). The author's choice of words here understates both the radicalism of Hitler's threat and, in Husseini's view, Hitler's promise to destroy the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa.

Motadel writes about the use and employment of Muslims, yet offers abundant evidence that this is also a history of collaboration with enthusiasm. In other words, he presents the Muslim personalities who collaborated as actors with their own intentions, interests, and beliefs: they were not merely objects used and employed by the Nazis to their own ends. He strikes a nuanced balance between Nazi efforts to use Islam, on the one hand, and the efforts of Muslim personalities, on the other, to make themselves of service. Motadel rightly criticizes a tendency in some past and present commentary to overestimate the influence of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in Berlin. Previous historians, in particular historians working on decisions regarding the Holocaust, have understood Husseini as simply an Arab exile who did not have any role in the decisions for the Final Solution. He was clearly not a major policymaking figure in the Nazi regime.Footnote ¹³ That said, he played a significant role in Nazi Germany's Arabic propaganda efforts, and also in the mobilization of Muslims in Europe. He was significant enough for the Nazis that they not only paid him a monthly salary of 90,000 Reichmarks (RM), but also placed several residences at his disposal for himself and his entourage. As previous historians have documented, Husseini “enjoyed the special trust” (44) of German leaders such as Heinrich Himmler precisely because he offered an interpretation of Islam they found compatible with Nazism. For example, Motadel examines Husseini's speech of December 18, 1942, at the opening of the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, noting that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop approved the text for an event overseen by the Foreign Office. The Nazi regime clearly employed Husseini and Alimjan Idris for its own ends, as Motadel argues, but he underestimates the intellectual contribution that both men made. While offering abundant evidence of the subjectivity and enthusiasm of Muslim actors for Nazism, he suggests, at the same time, that they were primarily the instruments and tools of the Nazis. The Germans were certainly dependent on Arab and Muslim exiles from the Middle East, as well as on Muslim leaders in Eastern Europe, for lending authenticity to their version of Islam as a warrior religion compatible with Nazi ideology.

With respect to the Middle East and North Africa, Motadel writes that “overall, German propaganda failed. Uprisings against the Allies in North Africa and the Middle East did not take place” (108). It is not clear, however, that an absence of uprisings indicated a failure of propaganda. Rather, it reflected the strength of British forces in North Africa, which held them in check—a presence that was in stark contrast to the massive preponderance of German military force in Eastern Europe from 1941 to 1944. More important, as Motadel acknowledges, there was a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in the spring of 1941. He carefully notes that, “overall, it is hard to reach definitive conclusions about the reception of German religious propaganda in the region” (114). There were many who supported the Allies, especially in the Wafd party in Egypt, and there was also a large majority not actively involved in the war on either side. Those who did support the Axis, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, were kept under surveillance and their leaders sometimes arrested by the British. As American and British diplomats reported at the time, local attitudes toward the Axis and the Allies depended greatly on who appeared to be winning the war.

The key point, however, is one that Rubin and Schwanitz, Mallmann and Cuppers, as well as the present author have made, namely, that Germans, British, and American officials all agreed that the success or failure of Nazi propaganda toward Muslims was inseparable from the course of the war. This was evident in the reports from Cairo by American Ambassador Alexander Kirk and British Ambassador Miles Lampson. From 1940 to the German defeat at El Alamein in October 1942, there were activist minorities (associated with Husseini, the coup makers around Rashid al-Kilani in Bagdad, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) that were prepared to take up arms in support of the Germans if the latter had been militarily successful. As Rubin and Schwanitz put it, “history could have turned out differently” if the Kilani regime in Iraq had not been overthrown by British armed intervention in the spring of 1941.Footnote ¹⁴ By the summer of 1942, a victory by the Germans in North Africa at El Alamein—or victory at Stalingrad and in the Caucuses—would have likely elicited much greater Muslim support for the Nazis. The point is that the “failure” of Nazi propaganda was inseparable from this much larger military failure. Judged by the political culture of the region following World War II, when British wartime controls were relaxed, there is powerful evidence that Nazi propaganda found a warm response among minorities such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Just as important, Husseini's infamous collaboration with the National Socialists did not prevent Palestinians from choosing him as their leader before and during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

In occupied Soviet areas, the Germans presented themselves as liberators of Islam from Soviet atheism. Officials in Alfred Rosenberg's East Ministry (such as Theodor Oberlander, who later pursued a career in West German politics) stressed the importance of treating devout Muslims well. German soldiers were advised to respect Muslim religious customs in the Caucasus, for example. In addition to reopening and even rebuilding mosques there that the Soviets had closed or destroyed, the Wehrmacht reintroduced Islamic education into elementary schools. Motadel describes in fascinating detail “the return of Islam” (141) staged by Wehrmacht officers, who reintroduced previously banned religious holidays and celebrations. For instance, during the “liberation” of the Caucasian town of Kislovodsk on October 11, 1942, the “entrance of the main road to the town was decorated with a swastika flag and the green flag of the Prophet with the Muslim crescent. At the town hall, an enormous garland adorned an image of Hitler.” A paper mache Koran was installed at a ceremony honoring Muslim leaders, which suggested that there was a religious imperative for the Karachais, the local Muslims, to “fight alongside the German army against the Soviet enemy. Nailed above the Qur'an was an enormous wooden Reich eagle with a swastika” (142–143).

Motadel's reluctance to acknowledge the connection between the success or failure of propaganda, on the one hand, and the ebb and flow of war, on the other, is all the more surprising given that his careful and extensive examination of German policy and Muslim collaboration in Europe clearly illustrates the interaction between the course of the war and the extent of Muslim collaboration. On the Eastern Front in Europe, Nazi Germany had several years, as an occupying power, to build on its military victories to mobilize and recruit Muslims in these areas. It was in the Balkans, Caucuses, Crimea, and occupied regions of the Soviet Union—not in North Africa and the Middle East—that tens of thousands of Muslims were successfully recruited into the Wehrmacht and SS divisions. The German army successfully recruited Azerbaijanis, Turkestanis, Kalmyks, Ukrainians, Georgians, and Armenians: by 1943, of the seventy-nine infantry battalions in Germany's Eastern Legions, fifty-four were Muslim—or dominated by Muslim soldiers. Fighting with Nazi Germany were some thirty-five to forty thousand Muslim Volga Tatars and one hundred ten to one hundred eighty thousand Muslim Turkestanis, as well as twenty-eight thousand from the Caucasus and twenty-five to thirty-eight thousand from Azerbaijan. Many of them fought in the Battle of Stalingrad, where tens of thousands died.

Motadel's deep and path-breaking research in the military archives in Freiburg also draws attention to an overlooked aspect of the Nazi military policy toward Muslims in Eastern Europe. On November 20, 1941, General Erich von Manstein issued an order to his soldiers demanding that the “Jewish-Bolshevist system” be “exterminated once and for all” (151). Manstein's order became one of the key documents used by the prosecution at the postwar Nuremberg Trial as evidence of the racist nature of the Nazi war on the Eastern Front. As Motadel points out, Manstein wrote in this order that “respect for religious customs, particularly those of the Mohammedan Tartars, must be demanded” (151). In other words, the order that fostered racism toward Jews demanded respect for Muslims. When it came to Islam on the Eastern Front, religion clearly trumped conventional understandings of race. Motadel reports that Generals Franz Halder and Wilhelm Keitel shared Manstein's views on this matter. The Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Foreign Ministry cooperated to establish schools for mullahs (who were offered positions with Muslim military units), distributed Korans to the troops, exempted Muslims from service on Fridays, made concessions for prayer times, took into account Muslim dietary customs, and oriented the graves of the fallen towards Mecca. Rosenberg's East Ministry even distributed miniature versions of the Koran with a special magnifying glass for Muslim soldiers.

Mallmann and Cuppers, as well as the present author, have examined the efforts of the SS to extend the Final Solution to the Middle East, as well as Heinrich Himmler's enthusiasm for Islam. We have also written about the effort by SS “think tanks” to present Hitler as a messenger sent by Allah to wreak vengeance on the Jews. Motadel nevertheless adds a great deal to our knowledge about the remarkable extent to which the SS was also deeply involved with Islam in Europe, writing that, “in the end, it was the SS, more than any other institution of the regime that tried to exploit Islam for the war effort” (52). Himmler and other high-ranking officials of the SS Main Office (Hauptamt) and the Reich Security Main Office (Reichsicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA), including Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Walter Schellenberg, and Gottlob Berger, were “convinced of advantages to be gained from the exploitation of the Muslim faith” (52). Muslims were, in fact, the first “non-Germanic” peoples allowed to enter the ranks of the Waffen-SS.

Though scholars have previously referred to Haj Amin al-Husseini's tour of the Balkans in April 1943, Motadel offers a far more detailed account, which reveals that the RSHA had “planned the tour down to the minutest detail and prepared the mufti well in advance” (189). Officers from the Hauptamt and the RSHA accompanied Husseini for two weeks when he met in the Balkans with troops of the Handschar Division in Banja Luka, Sarajevo, and Zagreb, and concluded that the trip was a “success in every way” (191). Motadel emphasizes the pragmatic purposes of such a trip, yet his own evidence shows that it was also an expression of the deep ideological affinity between Nazi Germany's ideological vanguard and the military imams trained by the Germans with Husseini's guidance. The ideologues repeated Husseini's tirade against the Jews in his widely distributed pamphlet, Islam and the Jews, which was published following his Balfour Day speech in Berlin in 1943. Summarizing the print propaganda of the Wehrmacht he found in the Freiburg military archive, Motadel writes that it repeated a number of key themes evident in the radio propaganda aimed at the Arab countries: hatred of the Jews, of the British, Americans, and “Jewish Bolshevism,” as well as the supposed age-old hostility of Jews toward Muslims. The propaganda aimed at Muslims on the Eastern Front similarly repeated many of the key themes elaborated by Husseini and shared by his German allies by 1941.

The central role of the SS in the effort to mobilize Muslims continued to the end of the war. “While the Wehrmacht was the first to begin recruiting Muslims and mobilized far more overall than Himmler,” Motadel concludes, “the SS became the strongest force in the military mobilization of Muslims near the end of the war. Leading German officials, most notably Hitler, Himmler, and [Gottlob] Berger repeatedly used religion rather than national or ethnic categories when speaking and writing about these formations” (244). Himmler shared Hitler's disdain for what he regarded as the meekness of Christianity, as well as his admiration for Islam as a “warrior religion.” Berger, Himmler's aide in the Waffen-SS and an official deeply involved in formulating policy toward Islam, also saw a “strong affinity between Germanic and Islamic culture” (63). In 1944 Himmler said that he did not have anything against Islam because it promised men in the SS a “paradise when they have fought and been killed in battle.” It was, in short, “a practical and attractive religion for soldiers!” (245). Motadel interprets this statement as an expression of Himmler's pragmatism and of his efforts to use Islam for his own purposes. Yet, his juxtaposition of pragmatism and ideology is unnecessary. They appear to have reinforced one another.

The fact that it was Himmler and the RSHA—acting in the spirit of Hitler himself, the leading radical of the Nazi regime—that were most enthusiastic about collaboration with Islam demonstrates the importance, not the erosion, of the ideological and cultural fusion of Nazism and Islamism that took shape in Berlin in 1940 and 1941 with the creation of radio and print material aimed at the Arabs. The same ideas were repeated in the even more massive flood of Nazi propaganda aimed at the Muslims of eastern Europe in canonic texts such as Husseini's Islam and the Jews, which was translated and distributed by the thousands in North Africa, in the Middle East, and on the Eastern Front in Europe.

Islam and Nazi Germany's War reinforces the point that, in the case of Muslims, religion trumped race for the Nazi regime. The latter exempted both non-Jewish “semites,” i.e., Arabs and Persians, as well as all Muslims, from the sort of racism that defined the regime. To be sure, common soldiers and lower-level officials—for whom Muslims were part of the vast “otherness” outside the Aryan master race—did not always clearly receive the message. Yet, at the highest levels of the ideological vanguard around Hitler and the SS, Muslims—in North Africa and the Middle East, and, as Motadel demonstrates, on the Eastern Front in Europe as well—were exempt from the kind of persecution that their perceived racial features would have evoked if they had been non-Muslims. There is thus a paradox in Motadel's work: he documents in great detail the enthusiasm for Islam by Nazism's fiercest ideologues, yet argues that strategic factors linked to the course of the war were decisive for the formation of an alliance with Muslims. In Nazi Germany's war in Europe, Islam was “a political force that could be employed against the Allies. Ideological considerations played only a marginal role” (315). In fact, his own research suggests another hypothesis, namely, that strategic pragmatism and ideological conviction were mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive, phenomena.

Motadel concludes that, in North Africa and the Middle East, in the Balkans and the Eastern territories, German attempts to use Islam to win the war failed overall. Though “many thousands of Muslims from these areas fought in the German armies,” it was also the case that “German propaganda failed to incite significant uprisings behind enemy lines.” The efforts were “launched too late and clashed too often with the violent realities of war. Most importantly they were founded upon too many misconceptions about Muslims and Islam.” Motadel concludes that “it was all too obvious that the Germans wanted to instrumentalize Muslims” and that their appeals thus “lacked authenticity” for some (315). Motadel sets a high standard for success—too high in my view. As long as Nazi Germany was winning the war, and even in the last years of military setback, thousands of Muslim soldiers fought bravely and loyally for Nazi Germany in eastern Europe. The Nazi attack on “Jewish Bolshevism” resonated with Muslims in the Caucuses and the Balkans who fought against a Soviet regime they viewed as an enemy of Islam. Debate about the meaning of success and failure should not detract attention from Motadel's accomplishment, however. He has demonstrated that the SS and the Wehrmacht were successful on the Eastern Front in recruiting and inspiring many thousands of Muslims to fight with German forces, and that they did so for reasons of strategic calculation and ideological common ground between Nazism and Islamism. Islam and Nazi Germany's War merits close attention by historians who seek a deeper understanding of the complex interaction between race and religion during the Holocaust. David Motadel has written a pioneering work that should foster rethinking about not only that relationship but also the one between Nazi Germany and Islam—especially in the war on the Eastern Front.