Below is the second part of an essay about the Nazis and Islam by Joost Niemöller. It has been translated from the Dutch by GB. Part 1 is here.
Hitler and Islam (2)
by Joost Niemöller
What about Hitler himself and Islam? To answer this question, it has to be pointed out that Islam in Hitler’s time was quite unimportant. The Ottomans were practically chased from Europe with the first Balkan War[1], and with Atatürk (admired by Hitler[2]) and the Young Turks[3], a secular movement emerged. In the new Turkey, nationalism was more important than Islam. Hitler shared this nationalistic ideology, hence the admiration[4] among Nazis and Hitler for the dictator Atatürk and his modernization movement.
What Hitler (under Himmler’s influence) was seeking in the Islamic ideology was a uniting ally, as David Motadel describes with many examples in his Islam and Nazi Germany’s War[5]
So this uniting ally had to be Islam. But Hitler’s problem was not only the lack of enthusiasm among Turks for this “world-Islam”. Muslims could hardly be united, which turned out to be a big problem at the Dresden school for imams: there a pan-Islamic vision was being taught, but Persians, Pakistanis, Turks, Arabs and not the least Sunnis and Shias couldn’t be gathered in the same classroom!
Hitler and his gang got support from the Bosnians, who were fighting the Russian-allied Serbs, and from Muslim peoples in Russia, who were suppressed under Stalin, as there were the Crimean Tatars[6] and the Islamic peoples from the Caucasus. In those areas some SS units were established, however with more propagandistic than military importance.
Despite the initial victories of Field Marshal Rommel in Northern Africa[7], the Nazis did not succeed in creating a structural stronghold in the Arab world. Also the attempts to organize an Islamic uprising against the British in India failed. This was partly due to the fact that the British, French and Soviets did not fight an ideological battle against Islam. Just as the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies, they were very conscious of the danger of Islam (read Snouck Hurgronje[8]) and smart enough not to engage into an ideological confrontation that could only inflame the Islamic consciousness.
During the days of the Nazi ideology, Muslims were “locked” in their ethnic and nationalistic division. The present Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, with their predilection for Nazism[9], were not yet developed[10], not to mention Al Qaeda or ISIS.
In those days Islam had two faces: ethnic and nationalistic.
That was a problem for Hitler. Ironically, the Nazis, with their Pan-Germanism, also pursued an ethnic and nationalistic community.
Beside the chaotic combination of Fascism, National Socialism and Nazism, there was indeed another ideology that Hitler tried to realize for a higher purpose; hence his affinity with the Japanese, Italians and Spanish. Different races, same ideology. Also with Muslims, whom he considered less important. The ideological similarities between Nazism and Islam are obvious:
- Anti-democratic
- Anti-Semitic
- Bellicose
- Imperialistic
- Anti-Christian
These similarities were to be exploited by both Nazi and Islamic ideologists. This is described in much detail in Islam and Nazi Germany’s War. Here we must emphasize that Islamic ideologists were totally unimportant in the Nazi empire. They were Hitler’s puppets, and curiosities. Hitler was quite positive towards Islam, but did not find it worthwhile to embrace it as a real alternative. He also looked down upon Turks, Arabs etc. as a race.
For example, you won’t find Islam as a serious subject in Hitler’s excessively detailed biography by Ian Kershaw[11], nor in other biographies by John Toland[12] or Werner Maser[13]. This is not because Hitler wasn’t intellectually “hungry” :Timothy W. Ryback wrote a very interesting book, Hitler’s Private Library[14]. According to Ryback, Hitler was an obsessive reader of subjects such as military history, old myths, the occult, Christianity, art, architecture. Here Islam is not even mentioned.
It is true that Islam is mentioned a few times in Hitler’s Table Talk.[15] [PDF]
However in Mein Kampf,[16] [PDF] now so popular in the Muslim world[17], Islam is not even mentioned, and the term “Mohammedanism” only in an insertion that is talking about Christianity. Muslims were irrelevant friends. And Islam was interesting as a better variety of Christianity[18] .
In the same way the influential Nietzsche considered Islam an improved version of despised Christianity, so did Hitler. Hitler was not an atheist (neither was Nietzsche), but he had ethical objections to Christianity. Christianity was not ready to fight.
The author quotes Hitler (Table Talk, see 15):
Without Christianity, we should not have had Islam. The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of world-domination, and humanity would not have extinguished fifteen centuries of civilisation at a single stroke.
(And about Japan)
The fact that the Japanese have retained their political philosophy, which is one of the essential reasons for their successes, is due to their having been saved in time from the views of Christianity. Just as in Islam, there is no kind of terrorism in the Japanese State religion, but on the contrary, a promise of happiness.
Only by the end of the war did he regret having underestimated Islam’s importance. He admitted to having overplayed his hand with the useless Italians with their colonial ambitions in North Africa, thereby unnecessarily alienating the Muslim population.
But according Motadel, Hitler never had a serious ambition to liberate the Muslim countries controlled by the Russians. Volker Koop underscores this aspect in his Hitlers Muslime[19]: Hitler deceived the Muslims with promises of liberation. In the Table Talk he fantasizes about the Crimea as a future German colony, not as an independent Muslim country. In their counter-propaganda in the Muslim world, the British eagerly pointed out that Hitler considered Muslims as “Untermenschen” (A viewpoint that they actually shared…)
Hitler was not always positive in his comments about Muslims. In his Table Talk he viewed them historically as one of the groups that tried to overrule the European civilization:
First of all it was the Greeks attacked by the Persians, then the Carthaginians’ expedition against Rome, the Huns in the battle of the Catalaunian Fields, the wars against Islam beginning with the battle of Poitiers, and finally the onslaught of the Mongols, from which Europe was saved by a miracle — one asks what internal difficulty held them back. And now we’re facing the worst attack of all, the attack of Asia mobilized by Bolshevism.
But the diabolical dreamer was once more inconsequent. In the same Table Talk he at one point fantasizes about what would have happened if Charles Martel had NOT won the Battle of Poitiers. Then the whole of Europe would have converted to Islam, the ideology of “heroism” would have ruled, and the Europeans could have repressed Judeo-Christian morals, resulting in the Germanic Race obtaining the gift of world power.
Then, with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians. The chivalry of the Castilians has been inherited from the Arabs. Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers — already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity! — then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.
And here we hear a very clear echo of Nietzsche in The Antichrist:[20]
If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousand fold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men… Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (— I do not say by what sort of feet —) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin — because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life!… The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have groveled in the dust — a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very “senile.” — What they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich…. Let us put aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! The German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was to be won…. The German noble, always the “Swiss guard” of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church — but well paid…. Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious…. Christianity, alcohol — the two great means of corruption…. Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala [Sanskrit, an untouchable whose task is to dispose of corpses] or he is not…. “War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!”: this was the feeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel decently? I can’t make out how a German could ever feel Christian…
Notes:
Joost Niemöller is a Dutch investigative journalist, writer and blogger. His website is www.joostniemoller.nl.
Echoes of Nietzsche indeed!
Interesting, when you read actual quotes of Hitler’s, how similar they are to internet comments nowadays from “alt-right” / white nationalist folks.
I mention this not only to point out that today’s Nazis are like yesterday’s Nazis, in their belief systems if not in the extent of power that they hold. It is also worth keeping this in mind when looking around to assemble a coalition of anti-Islamization people. Unfortunately at the moment, many of those most opposed to Islamization are Nazis. At the drop of a hat, they might decide that hating the Jews is more important than hating Islam, and switch to making common cause with the Muslim Brotherhood as a junior partner.
In prison, you may think you are better off with the tattooed skinheads of the Aryan Brotherhood than when you are at the mercy of Black Muslim inmates. But it may not be an improvement at all. The AB are bad people, too.
What a strange article. The author rightly points out Hitler said very little about Islam, most of what he did say was dismissive, and his authoritative biographers concur with this view. So, again, what is the link between Hitler and Islam – negligible at best
The most obvious reason for Hitler’s interest in Mohammedanism is universally over looked precisely because it is so obvious and it has nothing to do with a mutual hatred of Jews. How did he do it? How did Mohammed create a Thousand-year Reich with perpetual Fuhrer worship (for that is exactly what the Ummah is)? The answer to that question was all that Hitler wanted from Islam. He saw through the quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo and understood it as endless mass obedience to a Party through purely coerced faith in mass validation of the Party, a political perfect circle or truly perpetual motion political machine; what he desired above all other things. As soon as he had the secret the Muslims could go into the slave labor/crematorium grist mill with the rest of the sub-humans. He and Germany were more than prepared to handle the “Jewish Question” without the help of semi-literate savages.
I pity the poor psychological profilers of World War II who had to draw a usable profile of Hitler. Hitler was all over the place,awash in his own fantasies and castles-in-the-air, apparently never subject to a rational debate or conversation concerning his fantasies.
Hitler complained incessantly about how Christianity held up the expansion of the Germanic race: of course, this was because in the conflicts between the Germanic tribes and the Christian empires, the Christians won. So, Hitler was upset that the Christians, who he considered to be a philosophy of weakness, won over those he considered the philosophy of warriors. Oops.
So, Hitler waxed eloquently praising the civilization of Islam, which never produced anything remotely of interest to a cultured person, other than calligraphy exhibitions on the walls of mosques, as a counter to the Bolsheviks, who by coincidence, also never produced anything remotely close to culture in their 75 years of rule over Russia and Eastern Europe.
As it turns out, the Nazi outlook had one HUGE similarity with Islam: the overriding purpose was to spread itself. Islam has literally no other purpose than to spread Islam. Hitler appears to have judged everything in its relationship to allowing the Germanic peoples to expand.
One of Islam’s tricks is to dumb down the population through aggressive interbreeding, literally removing the genetic ability of Muslims to think critically. I would speculate that if Hitler had ever achieved his goal of a large empire of “Germanic” peoples, he would not be hostile to the idea of somehow lowering the critical cognitive ability of his subjects.
Does Islam’s natural affinity to National Socialism make Islam any more dangerous than it would be otherwise? No. Islam is as dangerous as it could be. Is Islam more dangerous than National Socialism was? I expect the people who lived under Nazi occupation might respond in the negative.
RonaldB –
Grinding poverty for the masses is another of Islam’s tricks to limit the average intellect. Poverty generally leads to malnutrition, which generally leads to underdeveloped frontal lobes.
Then, Islam is pounded into the sclerotic frontal lobes that do develop, thus indoctrinating the masses with programming they will be unable to escape because they lack the brain capacity to consider anything but Islam.
Excellent information to know.
A minor side-note…
“But the diabolical dreamer [Hitler] was once more inconsequent.”
The word “inconsequent” is not proper English (at least, the software that watches over the composition of these readers’ comments disapproves of “inconsequent”, by underlining it with a wavy red line). The German (and Dutch?) word “inkonsequent” means “inconsistent”, not “inconsequential”.
Mark, correct.
A “slip of the pen”.
My bad.
GB
Mohammedan civilization — this is an oxymoron.
I have read that there was a Mohammedan civilization, somewhere at some place at some time. However, I do not believe it just as I don’t believe in the tooth fairy.
What a strange article!
Victory is not dressing up the enemy in the uniform of a vanquished foe, that is deception and delusional misidentification.
Suspect a 21st century Nietzsche would be a fully paid-up member of the counter-jihad.
You need to look at Himmler not Hitler.
Dave Emory interviews John Loftus about the Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood:
http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/ftr/500_599/f-514.mp3
More audio files available here:
http://spitfirelist.com/audio/audio-500-599/
Hitler seems to be a typical leftist in his attitude to Islam, it is a better religion than Christianity. I noticed that tendency even when I was a student back in the early sixties, and met plenty of leftists. Hitler himself was a Marxist who realized that the Germans were too enamored of Nationalism to accept International Communism, so he dressed his lies up in National Socialism. He was supported by the Soviets in various ways, from advice on how to organize mass murder of civilians (the Soviets already had had about ten years of practical experience in such matters) to propaganda support for Hitler by local Communist parties (such as in the U.S. and Britain) and his ambitions against his neighbors. All that went up in smoke when Hitler showed the bad taste to attack Soviet Russia and the American and British Communist parties, switched sides in the debate on the virtues of intervention overnight.
The Communist International did secure an important propaganda victory in the long term by using Hitler and Nazism as some sort of equivalent to Nationalism, when it is actually a from of Marxism and belongs firmly on the left. When I was a kid in Czechoslovakia, in the 50’s, the Czechs, who were unfortunately in a position to know, assured me that Communism and Nazism were the same thing. Anyone who takes the time to look honestly into how they both operated would have to come to the same conclusion.
On the face of it, Stalin and Hitler were most unlikely allies . What could they possibly have in common? In fact, there were a number of similarities . One admired Peter the Great while the other saw himself as the heir of Frederick the Great. Both were advocates of ruthless force and operated under ideologies that were not essentially different. Communists and Nazis alike were self-righteous and dogmatic ; both were totalitarian and both believed that the end justified the means , sanctifying injustice, as it were , in the name of the state and progress.
Hitler had long admired Stalin, regarding him as “one of the extraordinary figures in world history,” and once shocked a group of intimates by asserting that he and the Soviet leader had much in common since both had risen from the lower classes , and when one listener protested comparison with a former bank robber, he replied, “ If Stalin did commit a bank robbery, it was not to fill his own pockets but to help his party and movement. You cannot consider that bank robbery.”
(Toland, Adolf Hitler, kindle loc. 11708)
Here is John Toland’s page:
http://smile.amazon.com/John-Toland/e/B000AQ44XS/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_3?qid=1440451774&sr=1-3
Hitler and Stalin recognised a certain ruthlessness in each other – Apparently Stalin’s comment on the 1934 purge was “Splendid chap that Hitler! He knows how to deal with political enemies!” Hitler also had something of a view that Stalin was “de-Judifyng” communism by getting rid of prominent Jews – Trotsky, Zinoview, Kamenev etc. Jews, however, remain over-represented in the CCCP, although less than they had before.
However, Hitler and Stalin’s occasional mutual admiration did not override Hitler’s hatred of “Judeo-Boshevism” – fighting this doctrine was always a central preoccupation of Hitler (and the Wehrmacht), even though there was a tactical reapproachment in 1939. As Mein Kampf makes clear, Nazis and Communists were always going to have it out in an epic confrontation, and so it proved.
Just a note about WHO the Serbs were fighting for. It was NOT for that commie Tito or the USSR
The Serbian people were butchered along side the Jews and the Roma of Yugoslavia at Jasenovac in Croatia. The majority of the Serbs were Serbian Orthodox Christian people. Hitler had called the Orthodox Christians, CHRISTIAN JEWS.
Croatia was allied with the Nazis and had formed the Utaschi government and the Prince Ogen SS division of the NAZI SS. Bosnia also allied with Hitler and formed the Handschar division of the SS. Albanian muslims already in Kosovo, though a minority at that time, formed the Skenderberg division of the SS . These muslims persecuted the Christians and sent them and the Jews of Kosovo to Dachau… including the Serbian Orthodox Patriarch and other Orthodox clergy, like Monks and Priests.
The leader of Croatia, Ante Pavlic ( later Juan Peron’s minister of internal security in Argentina after being sent there via the ratlines) had a plan to kill 1/3 of the Serbs, enslave 1/3 of them and convert 1/3 of them to the Roman Catholic Church from their Serbian Orthodox Church.
Serbian General Draga Mihailovic was a Yugoslav ROYALIST. He and his SERBIAN troops fought against both the Nazis and TITO and his Croatian and Slovenian troops.
Gen. Draga Mihailovic and his men saved over 500 allied flyers who had been shot down over Yugoslavia after bombing the Nazi controlled air fields of Romania. Made a secret airfield were the allies were able to land planes to get the flyers back to allied bases.
The General was betrayed by Tito and the Soviet spys in Churchill’s cabinet and sent to his death after Tito and the USSR took over Yugoslavia. A spy for the USSR in the UK lied and told Churchill that the General was really a Nazi. NOT true of course, but Churchill believed his “aides”. Besides Churchill wanted to TRY to keep Yugoslavia out of the sphere of influence of the USSR. EPIC FAIL there UK!!
Must not make Tito angry.
General Mahailovic was awarded a medal after his death by President Truman but it was not given to his family until well after Tito died so as to not make Tito angry with the USA.
Tito was actually a red headed Croat-Sloven and a commie most of his adult life. He hated Serbs so much that he even brought in thousands of Albanians muslims after WWII, to take over the Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarchy in Kosovo. It was like giving Jersusalem to nothing but ISIS like muslims.
“Secret airfield”? WW2 aviation is a particular interest of mine, and I’ve not come across this. Evidence, please?
http://intellectualconservative.com/islamic-alliances-past-and-future-part-1/
http://intellectualconservative.com/islamic-alliances-past-and-future-pt-2/
http://intellectualconservative.com/islamic-alliances-past-and-future-part-3/