Trigg Hitler's Jihadis

Muslim Volunteers of the Waffen-SS
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7758-9
Verlag: Spellmount
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Reihe: Hitler's Legions

As the West finds itself embroiled in conflict with radical Islam at home and abroad it is fascinating to hear the echoes of militant Islam from the Second World War, and the Nazis attempt to preach 'Jihad' against the British Empire and Stalin.Hitler's Jihadis tells the story of the tens of thousands of Muslims, from as far away as India who volunteered to wear the SS double lightning flashes and serve alongside their erstwhile conquerors. Jonathan Trigg gives insight into the pre-war politics that inspired these Islamic volunteers, who for the most part did not survive. Those who did survive the war and the bloody retribution that followed saw the reputation of the units in which they served in berated as militarily inept and castigated for atrocities against unarmed civilians. Using first hand accounts and official records Hitler's Jihadis peels away the propaganda to reveal the complexity that lies at the heart of the story of Hitler's most unlikely 'Aryans'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Trigg, Jonathan

Leseproben

II

The War begins

Nazi war strategy

If Hitler had a grand strategy prior to the outbreak of general war, and this is still debatable, then the West’s reaction in declaring war on account of his invasion of Poland threw it into complete chaos. The counter-reaction from the Reich Chancellory was nothing if not quick and decisive. The Wehrmacht’s Fall Gelb operation (Case Yellow) set in motion a blitzkrieg assault on the Low Countries and France that effectively knocked all of Nazi Germany’s opponents, except Great Britain, out of the War. Hitler could now focus on what he considered to be his true enemy, the behemoth of Soviet Russia. With the British unable to respond following the disaster of the battle for France and Dunkirk, Hitler was confident his rear was secure. Scandinavia was in his pocket and Finland was still smarting from its defeat by Stalin in the previous year’s Winter War and willing to side with Germany to secure its northern flank. The only piece of the jigsaw left was to ensure south-eastern Europe and the Balkans were on side and then Hitler could focus all of Germany’s might on kicking in the Soviet door.

Using a combination of carrot and stick Hitler and his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop managed to win over the majority of states in that traditionally chaotic part of Europe. Despite being the bitterest of enemies, both Rumania and Hungary signed the Nazis’ Tripartite Pact (previously an agreement between Germany, Italy and Japan), and even King Boris’s Bulgaria agreed to cooperate, though interestingly not to turn its troops against its Soviet neighbour. Albania had been invaded by Mussolini’s Italy and effectively annexed several years previously. As for Greece, its diminutive dictator, General Ioannis Metaxas, was pro-Axis but he was also a fierce patriot and the failed Italian invasion of the previous winter necessitated German intervention. But as long as Yugoslavia could be brought into the fold then Greece would remain isolated until overwhelmed. This seemed entirely probable with Yugoslavia having been led from 1935 by the pro-Axis Serb Milan Stojadinovic and his Radical Union Party. Stojadinovic even referred to himself as the Vodja (Serbo-Croat for Führer) and set up his own uniformed paramilitary stormtroopers, similar to the Nazi’s brownshirted SA, to bully opponents. However he had been replaced earlier in the year by Dragisa Cvetkovic who was not seen in such a favourable light by the Germans. Consequently, what passed for diplomacy in Nazi Germany swung into action and the usual mix of bluff and promises overwhelmed the Belgrade government, which duly signed up to the Pact on 25 March 1941.

All was now set to allow Hitler to begin his momentous invasion of Russia at the very start of the 1941 campaigning season and give his troops the best possible chance of defeating the Soviet Union before the onset of the horrendous Russian winter. With everything in place the entire apple cart was knocked over by the trademark unpredictability of the Balkans. Popular revulsion in Yugoslavia at the signing of the Tripartite Pact led to an uprising against the Regent led by the military High Command, and covertly supported by Great Britain, that saw the government overthrown and an anti-Germany administration swept into power just two days after the Pact was signed in Vienna. At the Chancellory Hitler flew into a towering rage and demanded retribution. Yugoslavia’s fate was sealed.

Unternehmen Strafe (Operation Punishment)

The planned German invasion of Greece, codenamed Operation Marita, was hurriedly amended by Hitler’s Führer Directive No. 25 that called for an immediate invasion of Yugoslavia which aimed ‘to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a national unit’. In an incredibly short period of time the existing plans were adapted and on 6 April the invasion of Yugoslavia was heralded by a savage bombing raid on Belgrade carried out by Generaloberst (General) Alexander Löhr’s Luftflotte (Airfleet) IV. In two days of bombardment, reminiscent of the terror bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam, over 17,000 Yugoslav civilians died. Simultaneously, elements of both the Second and Twelfth Armies and Panzergruppe Kleist (Panzer Group Kleist, named after its commanding general) comprising ten corps with 32 divisons, attacked Yugoslavia from Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania and Austria (the Ostmark, as it had been called since the Nazi Anschluss of 1938). Even though the Royal Yugoslav Army was over 900,000 men strong it was no match for Nazi Germany’s modern forces and blitzkrieg tactics and it took the Wehrmacht just twelve days to force the country’s surrender, on 17 April. The end of the campaign saw 6,028 Yugoslav officers and 337,684 NCOs and men become POWs, but more than 500,000 soldiers of all ranks refused to lay down their arms and disappeared either back home or into the mountains. Many of them would later become the enemy against which Muslim Waffen-SS men would fight. For the Germans it was a victory bought incredibly cheaply with a casualty count of just 151 men killed, 15 missing and 392 wounded.

In accordance with Hitler’s wishes the great dismemberment of Yugoslavia was then carried out. In effect a sovereign nation was carved up between the victors, nothing had been seen like this since the great Partitions of Poland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Yugoslavia disappears from the map

The victory belonged to Germany and it was she who divided up the former Triune Kingdom and handed it out to her allies. Montenegro was given to Italy along with most of the Dalmation coast and islands as well as half of Slovenia that lay just across the Italian border. The largely ethnic Albanian Kosovo region was joined with Albania and so in effect also became Italian territory. Bulgaria, who had not sent any troops into Yugoslavia but had allowed the German Twelfth Army to launch its attacks from there, was rewarded with the whole of Yugoslavian Macedonia, while Hungary received the Barania and Backa regions of Yugoslav Vojvodina. As for Rumania, it only acquired some very minor border districts and the ethnic German Banat region which by virtue of its Germanic population in effect became a province of the Reich. Germany herself annexed the remaining half of Slovenia bordering the Ostmark to further extend her borders. As for the rest of the country, Serbia was effectively reduced to its pre-1912–13 Balkan War borders and placed under German control but with its own administration and limited self-defence forces under the collaborationist General Milan Nedic. A new country was also created in Croatia with the amalgamation of the Catholic Croats with the ethnically mixed population of Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of coastal Dalmatia. Although nominally independent the new nation had permanent German and Italian garrisons and was a puppet state. Outside of Muslim Albania it was in this country that lay Europe’s largest indigenous Muslim community.

Bosnia’s Muslims

Since it had burst out from the Arabian Peninsula centuries before, Islam’s contact with Europe had been little but a litany of blood and violence. Charles Martel’s last stand at Tours, Roland at Roncevalles, the Reconquista in Spain and of course the centuries of conflict of the Crusades had seen a tradition of conflict between the two religions wherever they met. Nowhere was this tradition of warfare more ferocious than in the Balkans where the Turkish thrust into south-western Europe over the Hellespont had receded over time as the Ottoman Empire gradually atrophied and decayed. There was little large-scale Muslim migration to their conquered lands in Europe, and widespread opposition to Muslim rule led to very few conversions, with one notable exception. Among the independent-minded peoples in the rugged mountain province of Bosnia were a sect of Christians called the Bogomils. An introverted group, they were universally despised by their Catholic and Orthodox Christian neighbours and seen as nothing better than heretics. Prejudice was rife and persecution open but all this changed with the conquest of Bosnia by the rampaging Ottomans. Turkish policy was one of religious tolerance and the Bogomils were afforded a level of state protection hitherto unknown. In an unprecedented act of gratitude towards their Turkish overlords the Bogomils willingly converted en masse to Islam, and in doing so became the only racially European Muslim community on the continent. This act, viewed with delight by the Ottomans but with fury by their Serbian and Croat neighbors, has fuelled a bitter internecine ethnic conflict that has lain near the surface of Bosnian life ever since.

The civil war – Ustasha atrocities

By the time of the German invasion there were over one million Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina out of a total population of some two-and-a-half million. Their incorporation into the new Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska (the Independent State of Croatia) under the leadership of Dr Anté Pavelic, an ex-Vice President of the Croatian Bar Association and member of parliament, and his extremist Croatian nationalist Ustasha (‘Uprising’) movement was greeted with a sense of cautious optimism after Pavelic spoke of equality between the state’s Catholics and Muslims. However, it soon became clear that any reassurance felt by the Muslim community was totally illusory. From almost day one of its creation the new country was in a state of near civil war.

Many Croats had felt little if any loyalty to the old Serb-dominated Triune Kingdom of Yugoslavia and most wanted at least a measure of autonomy and self-determination. Support for Croat culture...