"Third Reich. 16 Stories About Life And Death "- Alternative View

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"Third Reich. 16 Stories About Life And Death "- Alternative View
"Third Reich. 16 Stories About Life And Death "- Alternative View

Video: "Third Reich. 16 Stories About Life And Death "- Alternative View

Video: "Third Reich. 16 Stories About Life And Death "- Alternative View
Video: ГАРДЭНІЯ 16+ / Эльжбета Хаванец (рэж. Пётр Непагода) 2024, March
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The book by anthropologist and journalist Artyom Kosmarsky “The Third Reich. 16 stories about life and death”(edited by“Avant”by the publishing house“AST”) examines life and death in Nazi Germany and the occupied territories through the prism of microhistory - bright local plots. Along the way, the author argues whether the system of power of the Reich was as strong and organized as is commonly thought, and how ordinary people were built into it. The Organizing Committee of the Enlightener Prize included this book in a “long list” of 24 books, among which the finalists and laureates of the Prize will be selected. We invite our readers to read an excerpt on the cult of Hitler in the countries of the East.

The Crescent and the Swastika: Islam in Hitler's Imagination and Strategic Plans

ISIS attacks on French synagogues, the entire history of "Muslim" terrorist attacks after September 11, 2001, the unrelenting cult of Hitler in the countries of the East, as well as the coincident rise of European neo-Nazism and Islamic radicalism in the 2000s, aroused great interest in Hitler's connections with the world of Islam … Serious historians have also responded to this interest, having released several strong works on the topic by the mid-2010s. The effectiveness of Hitler's propaganda, Muslim legions, Turks as true Aryans, the mufti of Jerusalem and Jewish pogroms, jihad as a proper SS war - Norman Goda (University of Florida, USA) spoke about the latest works on the topic "The Third Reich and Islam" on the pages of European History Quaterly …

Ataturk - Hitler's idol

Usually, the first thing that is remembered in the context of the Islamic policy of the Reich is the actions of the Mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of the Arab nationalists of Palestine, Amin al-Husseini. For his participation in the 1936 Arab uprising (which was partially funded by Germany), the mufti was expelled from the country, and as a result he found refuge in Berlin. Throughout the war, he broadcast on German radio frequencies, calling on Arabs around the world to rebel against the British, Communists and Jews. He personally met with Hitler and suggested that he create an Arab legion of many thousands, as well as "present" his state to the Arabs of the Middle East after the war. However, the Nazis ignored these wishes: the main thing in which the interests of Germany and al-Husseini converged was their readiness to slaughter all Jews.

However, the Middle East is not limited to Palestine or even the Arab world. It turns out that the main hero for the Nazis was none other than Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. According to the research of the historian Stefan Irig, Atatürk was a personal model for Hitler in the early 1920s - not as a Turk or the head of a Muslim state, but as a national leader who did not allow the Entente countries to dismember and divide his country among themselves. Even the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler copied not from the march to Rome of Mussolini, but from an even more heroic offensive - Ataturk from the Anatolian hinterland to the "rotten" Istanbul - and the overthrow of the last collaborationist sultan. At the trial, Hitler compared himself to Ataturk, who was saving his homeland by force from decay and external enemies.

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Even Turkey's frank unwillingness to become an ally of Germany against Britain and the USSR did not bother the Nazis: in the Nuremberg racial laws, the Turks were proclaimed true Aryans, after the death of Ataturk, mourning was declared throughout the country, and so on. Simply put, flies (the stubborn neutrality of Turkey, which did not want to repeat the experience of the First World War and give up Western Armenia and Istanbul) - separately, cutlets (Turkey as an exemplary national state that “cleaned out” its harmful national minorities - Greeks and Armenians) - separately.

"Bandera" dreams of the Arabs

But what about the Arabs of the Middle East, groaning under the yoke of Western powers and their own corrupt monarchs - from Morocco to Iraq? Paradoxically, the Nazis did not rush to ignite the fire of nationalist revolutions, concludes Francis Nicosia, author of the largest work on the geopolitical strategy of the Third Reich in the Middle East, "Nazi Germany and the Arab World." Hitler, like his predecessors at the head of the Weimar Republic, valued stability in the region above all else, and did not want to quarrel with Britain either. Talks about selling arms to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq did not lead to anything, and even the violent Arab uprising against Jews in British Palestine was ignored by the Third Reich. Moreover, the Nazis would be only too happy to "shake off" their Jews to Palestine!

After the defeat of France in 1940 and the success of the Afrika Korps in Libya, the situation changed. The Germans supported Rashid Ali al-Gailani's anti-British uprising in Iraq - and even tried to airlift planes there. True, they did not achieve much success: the British with their Indian units succeeded faster and "crushed" the conspirators. When in 1942 Rommel, having broken through the allied defenses, rushed to the Nile, the Germans turned on al-Husseini's propaganda to the maximum, calling on the Arabs to slaughter all Jews in Egypt and Palestine. Rommel's troops even managed to form an Einsatzgroup for these purposes.

However, the geopolitical interests of the Germans were above all. They did not support the struggle of the Arabs of Algeria, Tunisia, Syria and Palestine for independence in any way (then all these territories were under the control of the French and the British). Syria and Palestine after the victory were going to give Mussolini. Moreover, the Nazis needed the support of the puppet French government of Marshal Pétain, to which all the Middle Eastern colonies of defeated France had ceded. Finally, the Arabs (despite all the pretentious enthusiasm for Islam) were considered racially inferior - still Semites - and bad soldiers. After the failure of the North African campaign and the landing of the Allies in Sicily in 1943, Hitler lost all interest in the Arabs. He even planned to send Bulgarian and Romanian Jews to Palestine instead of concentration camps and in exchange for German prisoners of war in Great Britain. Al-Husseini was indignant, but he could not do anything.

Nicosia rightly notes that Arab nationalists in their relations with the Third Reich fell into the same trap as the Banderaites or the Romanian "Iron Guard": the Nazis either encouraged and supported them, then smashed or "fed" political opponents - as, for example, during suppression of the Iron Guard coup by Marshal Antonescu. Only on the Jewish question did the Nazis stand in solidarity with these ultranationalists, and ignored their dreams of new states (Ukraine or Great Arabia). By the way, it is likely that if Rommel broke through to Egypt, al-Husseini's associates would have unleashed pogroms of the same type as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Ukraine: Jewish agents infiltrating the Islamist underground in Egypt and Palestine reported numerous caches of weapons.

SS Jihad

But Arabs are one thing, and Islam is quite another, stresses historian David Motadel, author of the most fundamental monograph on the topic (Islam and the War of Nazi Germany). Motadel worked in the archives of the USA, Germany, Russia, Israel and Iran. According to the historian, the Nazis really believed in the great power of Islam: that this religion can mobilize the energy of the entire macro-region - from Morocco to Central Asia. This was unusual for the Nazis: as a rule, they were very skeptical of religion, and the racial factor was considered the driving force of history.

Over time, it was Islam, not race, that came to the fore in Eastern affairs. According to the historian, the “father” of German Islamophilia was the amateur archaeologist Max von Oppenheim: even during the First World War, he wanted to become the second Lawrence of Arabia (with whom he was personally acquainted), incited the authorities to raise the Arabs against the British and continued to promote his ideas until 1944 of the year. For SS Reichsfuehrer Himmler, Nazism and Islam were united by hatred of world Jewry. Islam, moreover, favorably distinguished itself from Christianity with its militant, courageous, fanatical character.

By 1944, the SS leadership took over all the contacts of the Third Reich with the Islamic world, using not only al-Husseini (whom the Germans groundlessly considered the Muslim "pope", the spiritual head of 400 million believers), but also other clergy. The Tatar Alimjan Idrisi, for example, who back in 1916 was the imam for Muslim prisoners of war in Germany, in the interwar years languished in a minor position in the Foreign Ministry, but then became almost the main adviser of the Nazis on the future arrangement of the Turkic peoples of the USSR. Idrisi and his SS patrons successfully fought other projects of the Nazis (for example, von Mende) to create national republics of Tatars, Azerbaijanis, etc. Only Islam, only Turkic unity!

Nazi propaganda in the Islamic world worked very unevenly. Yes, there were millions of leaflets and hundreds of hours of al-Husseini's enticing radio broadcasts about jihad, the Jewish enemies of the true faith and Hitler, its defender. Yes, it was German propaganda that first "glued" Islam with anti-Semitic propaganda on an unprecedented scale - and this then backfired on Israel and the Jews of the Middle East. But during the war, this did not particularly help Germany itself: only a handful of wealthy people had radios in Arab countries, the propaganda was very primitive, and the British presented convincing counterarguments, pointing to Nazi atheism.

And most importantly, the Arabs were not at all eager to change the Anglo-French yoke for the German-Italian, and the idea of "Islam oppressed by the West" then did not kindle hearts as it did in the 2000s. The propaganda among the Shiite Iranians worked especially badly, despite the fact that the Germans respected them as true Aryans. Thus, the young Mullah Ruhollah Mousavi (future Ayatollah Khomeini) defeated the Nazi manipulations of Islam: he was outraged by hints that Hitler was the hidden twelfth imam, Mahdi (the messiah).

Why did Soviet Muslims believe Hitler?

For the domestic reader, Motadel's research on the Turkic SS troops will not be a sensation: several works devoted to these collaborationists have already been published in Russia. However, one cannot fail to note the historian's carefully described respect for religion in the Muslim units of the Wehrmacht and the SS. Field imams, halal food, daily prayers, observance of all the funeral rituals of Islam - despite the fact that Himmler expelled Christianity from the SS with all his might. Motadel writes that Himmler was skeptical about the Slavic units of the SS, but he unconditionally trusted the Muslim (Crimean Tatars, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks and others), considering them the natural allies of the Reich.

And here's another plot: a completely similar scheme - a set of Muslim "legionnaires" from captured French soldiers - did not work. He was told about in a new book, "Colonial Soldiers in German Captivity," by the historian Raffael Scheck. It is known that conscripts from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal and Mauritania constituted an important part of the army of the French Republic even in the First World War. Black people in Africa were considered racially inferior by the Nazis and used them for hard work, but 82,000 Algerian prisoners over time became a valuable propaganda resource. With the help of the imams, the same al-Husseini, and their orientalists, the Germans conducted explanatory work among them, inciting them against the French and Jews.

However, even the weak Vichy government easily resisted this propaganda, relying on the respect of the Algerians for Marshal Pétain and pointing out that the Germans never promised independence to Algeria (and they, the French, would give autonomy). That is, there was not even a trace of the devotional service of Soviet Muslims! Apparently, the fear of Soviet prisoners of war of the inevitable repressions was so great that they had nothing to lose, and they readily signed up to the SS.

What's in the bottom line? The global anti-British and anti-Soviet jihad did not work out. The Third Reich collapsed in 1945. But the seeds of Nazi anti-Semitism have sprouted richly. Thus, Johann von Leers, a professor and a prominent SS propagandist, fled to Argentina in 1945, and then moved to Egypt. He converted to Islam and became a big boss under the leftist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, becoming a key figure in organizing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda throughout the Middle East. In some ways, Hitler reached out to the Jews - with the help of Muslims - even after his death.

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