Hitler's Foreign Executioners (54 page)

In their final paragraphs, the committee made a direct appeal to German racial obsessions:

Hitler was completely indifferent to Bosnian Muslims and despised their history. He did not trouble to reply to this obsequious epistle. A few of the German consular staff in Zagreb, like General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, had some sympathy for the Bosnian Muslim plight – but he believed that they were much too closely attached to the Pavelić regime, which Glaise von Horstenau abhorred. Himmler took a different view. Soon after the memorandum had been circulated in Berlin, SS officer Rudolf Treu had meetings with Muslim leaders and sent an urgent report to Himmler, warning that although the Muslims were, for now, warmly disposed to Germany, it could not be discounted that many would shift their allegiance to the Yugoslavian partisans or even the Allies. This was alarming. Himmler acted quickly, and according to SS records, made a decision to form a Bosnian Muslim SS just a few weeks after reading Treu’s report. He assigned Artur Phleps, the commander of the SS ‘Prinz Eugen’, to establish a recruitment staff in Zagreb.

Himmler’s swift response to the Bosnian Muslim entreaty sheds a great deal of light on his long-term thinking about a future SS state. According to historian George H. Stein, the ‘Handschar’ was the ‘first Waffen-SS formation to be recruited without regard for racial and ethnic factors’.
²⁶
A closer look at the evidence reveals that this is nonsense. Himmler did not view Bosniaks as a Slavic people. Just as he believed that Estonians, for example, ‘could not be distinguished from Germans’, he accepted the claim, first made by Croatian ethnologists as well as the authors of the memorandum, that Bosnian Muslims were a ‘Gothic’ people descended
from ancient Persians. In other words, they were Aryans. In Himmler’s mind, the racial origins of many Muslim peoples explained their traditions of martial bellicosity that he contrasted with Judeo-Christian ‘softness’. He informed Goebbels that ‘Islam … promises heaven if they [Muslims] fight in action and are killed: a very practical and attractive faith for soldiers’.
²⁷
The very same sentiment informs modern Islamic fundamentalism.

Armed with these handy fantasies, on 6 December 1942 Himmler approached Hitler to discuss the idea of a Bosnian Muslim division. The military rationale he offered was that the new division would assist the SS ‘Prinz Eugen’ Division to fight Tito’s Soviet-backed partisan army that now threatened ethnic German communities in the all important Srem region, the ‘Granary of Croatia’. Germany desperately needed to import grain and so the rich farms of Srem had to be defended. For Hitler, getting bread on to German tables was a pragmatic reason to rethink the strategy in the Balkans – rather different from Himmler’s fantasies about recruiting ‘Islamic warriors’.

At the end of the meeting, however, Hitler refused to make an immediate decision; he knew that the Croatian government would fight tooth and nail to resist any suggestion of Bosniak autonomy. Hitler had no interest in upsetting the hitherto pliant Poglavnik Ante Pavelić. But Himmler did not regard Hitler’s prevarication as a serious setback – and by January 1943 active discussions were taking place between the SS and Siegfried Kasche, the pro-Pavelić German envoy in Zagreb. Himmler had little respect for Pavelić, who was after all supposed to be a client ruler. On 13 January, a second conference took place at Rustenburg – and this time Hitler agreed to permit the formation of the new Bosnian Muslim SS division. ‘I hope to reach out to a people,’ Himmler wrote to the German Plenipotentiary Glaise von Horstenau, ‘who stand apart from the Croatian state and have a long tradition of attachment to the Reich, which we can utilize militarily.’ By ‘the Reich’, Himmler meant in this case the defunct Hapsburg Empire. He believed erroneously that the Bosniaks had served in the Austro-Hungarian army. He would use the very same argument later that year when he began recruiting Ukrainians in the old Austrian province of Galicia.

The German SS representatives based in Zagreb now had to placate Pavelić, who was violently opposed to any ‘autonomist’ concession to Bosnian Muslims. Himmler should have understood the Croatian dilemma: if you arm any group of separatists, you risk turning them into a nationalist militia – and the Poglavnik desperately needed Bosnia–Herzegovina to remain part of the NDH. Glaise von Horstenau warned Himmler: ‘[the Croatians] saw this as a dangerous blow against their false principle of a national unified Croatian state.’ To soothe Pavelić, Hitler
dispatched von Ribbentrop, who it will be recalled had supported Croatian independence in 1941. The Foreign Minister ordered Kasche to go back to Pavelić and insist that ‘the enemy has to be dealt with as forcefully as possible. It would be in the best interest of the common war effort that this German-led division be formed. I hope that that the Poglavnik will agree.’ To Ribbentrop’s great irritation, the Poglavnik certainly did not agree – and he may well have been encouraged to resist Ribbentrop’s appeal by Kasche himself, who was an ardent admirer of the murderous Ustasha regime. Vjekoslav Vrančić, one of Pavelić’s closest advisors, told a Muslim friend: ‘We cannot give a No answer to the German request, but we can make it impossible for them to succeed. Allowing the Germans to establish a Bosnian division in Bosnia … would be the same as losing Bosnia.’
²⁸
Pavelić now made a counter proposal: a Croatian SS division that would recruit both Muslims and Catholic Croatians, but have Croatian officers and use Serbo-Croat as the language of command. The Germans refused; discussions again bogged down. Ribbentrop, sensing another humiliating impasse, beat a hasty retreat.

Only Hitler could break the deadlock. Croatia was in principle a sovereign nation state and an ally of the Reich. But Hitler had been unimpressed by Croatian soldiers both on the Eastern Front and as partisan fighters in their own backyard. So he now insisted that the SS proceed immediately to form a Muslim division that had no connection with the discredited ‘Croatian’ militias. In February, Phleps flew to Zagreb to hammer out details with the Croatian government, represented by Dr Mladen Lorković, the Foreign Minister. Phleps was astonished to discover that Lorković had evidently made a decision to fight Himmler every inch of the way. Now he would agree only to a ‘Ustasha SS division’ – the only concession Lorković was prepared to make was to adopt regional names for regiments, one of which would be called ‘Bosna’. Phleps turned Lorković down flat and retreated to seek advice from Himmler, who refused to contemplate any compromise with the Ustasha government. So Phleps returned to Zagreb to meet Pavelić himself, who turned up accompanied by his tame deputy Dr Džafer-beg Kulenović, who declared himself a ‘Croat of Muslim Faith’. Pavelić again refused to budge, and Phleps, who did not hide his astonishment that the Poglavnik still dared to resist the Reichsführer-SS, stormed out of the meeting, slamming the door behind him. In March, Himmler seemed to blink. After more discussions (this time without Phleps) Himmler agreed to permit a Croatian SS Volunteer Division, to be recruited by the Croatian government jointly with Waffen-SS, but with German as ‘the language of command’. It appeared that Pavelić had won.

How then did Himmler finally end up with the Bosnian Muslim division that he had wanted all along? The answer is simple: he brushed aside the agreement with
the Croatian government and ordered Phleps to begin a recruitment campaign in Bosnia that would exclusively entice Muslims. And it was at this juncture, in the spring of 1943, that Berger and Himmler turned for help to the Grand Mufti. They had chosen their moment well. The Grand Mufti was still locked in a battle with his rival in Berlin, Rashid Ali el-Gaylani, and had been bitterly disappointed by the German withdrawal from North Africa and the recall of the Rauff Kommando. He yearned to take action against the Jews and their purported allies, the British. He was well aware that the hated British had backed Tito’s communist partisans in the Balkans – so the new SS division offered a means to strike at two mortal enemies on the same battleground. On 24 March, Berger and Phleps met the Mufti at his villa in Berlin. A week later, on 30 March, he was driven to Tempelh of Airport to board a special flight to Sarajevo. The Mufti’s Bosnian crusade had begun. In a sermon delivered on the eve of his departure, he preached: ‘The hearts of all Muslims must today go out to our Islamic brothers in Bosnia who are forced to endure a tragic fate. They are being persecuted by the Serbian and communist bandits, who receive support from England and the Soviet Union.’
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In Bosnia, the Grand Mufti was treated like a Sultan. When he swept into Sarajevo, his hosts installed him in the sumptuous palace of the former Austrian governor. It was inside the palace that on 28 June 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand had expired from wounds inflicted by Bosnian assassin Gavrilo Princip. ‘The Mufti was an extremely impressive personality, ’SS officer Balthasar Kirchner recalled. ‘His reddish blond beard, steady motions [sic], expressive eyes and charismatic facial features gave him more the look of a philosopher than a revolutionary.’
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The Mufti’s bodyguard, a Bedouin, appeared never to sleep, eat or rest. According to the German Consul Dr Winkler: ‘The faithful recognized [the Mufti] as a true Muslim; he was honoured as a descendant of the prophets. Friends from his theological studies in Cairo and pilgrimage to Mecca [the Haj] welcomed him.’ Kirchner recalled that the Mufti was ‘quite reserved’ with respect to ‘fighting Bolshevism’ – ‘His main enemies were the Jewish settlers in Palestine and the English’. He had not perhaps completely grasped that the Germans regarded the Bolshevik and the Jew as virtually coterminous. In Sarajevo’s main mosque, the Mufti delivered a sermon and urged Muslims to support Germany and ‘take weapons from them’. His grand tour was managed by the SS, but el-Husseini was determined to further his own cause. He was committed, Glaise von Horstenau later explained to Himmler, to the establishment of ‘a United States of Islam extending all the way from Morocco to Bosnia’ and the destruction of Zionism. His counsel to ‘take their weapons’ shows that he hoped that SS recruitment of Muslims would further his own Jihad just as much as Hitler’s crusade.

On 12 May, following his triumphant grand tour, the Mufti met Himmler at SS headquarters in Berlin and made a number of astonishingly naïve proposals. He wanted agreement that the mission of the new SS division must be to protect the Muslim families ‘of the volunteers’. The division must therefore never be deployed outside Bosnia–Herzegovina. The officers must be Muslims and the SS should not poach men from Hadziefendic’s Muslim Legion, which should be left intact.
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Himmler listened politely but refused to make a decision. However, on 19 May, he signed a formal agreement with the Mufti that guaranteed that Imams would be appointed and charged with the ideological training of recruits. This implied that the Bosniak recruits would not receive ‘political’ instruction from SS officers, but from the Mufti’s own clergy.
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As we will see, Himmler would exploit el-Husseini’s Imams for his own purposes. As to the Mufti’s specific proposals, he left it to Berger to officially reject all of them. The Mufti was no longer essential. His job had been to play the role of figurehead: he was the barker, not the ringmaster.

Although the Mufti had impressed the Bosnian Muslim community, the campaign to recruit Bosniaks got off to a poor start. By mid-April, just 8,000 men had come forward. Berger had been hoping for numbers well above 30,000. Appraised of this mortifying result, Himmler was at last forced to eat humble pie. He immediately flew to Zagreb to announce that Catholic Croatians could be accepted as recruits, provided that the numbers of Muslims exceeded that of Catholics by a proportion of ten to one. Even this proved hard to achieve: nearly 3,000 Catholics were eventually inducted, which made nonsense of the ratio Himmler had demanded. Although the SS chief had on balance won the battle, the frequent renaming of the SS division made clear that the recruitment had been a strategic fudge: the Kroatische SS-Freiwilligen-Division (Croatian SS-Volunteer Division) was amended to Kroatische SS-Freiwilligen-Gebirgs-Division (Croatian SS-Volunteer Mountain Division), then the SS-Freiwilligen-Bosnien-Herzegowina-Gebirgs-Division (Kroatien) or 13. SS-Freiwilligen-Bosnien-Herzegowina-Gebirgs-Division (Kroatien). It was only in May 1944 that the Germans settled on 13. WaffenGebirgs-Division der SS ‘Handschar’ (kroatische Nr. 1) – the 13th SS Mountain Division ‘Handschar’. Recruits took an oath of loyalty to both Hitler and Ante Pavelić as head of the Croatian state. The Muslim SS division would never shed its titular link to Hitler’s puppet state.

Smarting from his battle with Pavelić, Himmler was all the more determined to puff the Bosniak credentials of this new division.
Handschar
derives from
Handzar
(Turkish
hancar
) – a Bosnian fighting knife. The basic uniform would be field grey with special collar patch showing a scimitar (the
Handschar
) twinned with a swastika. The national arm shield, on the other hand, used the Croatian red and blue
checkerboard. But as if to distract attention Himmler ordered recruits to wear, instead of the usual field caps, a most picturesque kind of headgear: a fez, made of crushed felt which bore both the
Hoheitszeichen
(German eagle and swastika) and the SS skull and crossbones, complete with a tassel. (In fact two kinds of fez were issued: one field grey, the other a dark red.)
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These highly visible, mandatory fezzes loudly proclaimed the division’s Muslim ethos and identity and at the same time its allegiance to the Reich. To please the Mufti, Himmler also guaranteed that Muslim recruits would enjoy a diet that conformed to Muslim dietary laws and, crucially, that they would have their own divisional Imams.