The Third Reich and Islam

• Islamic National Socialists

Relations between National Socialist Germany (1933–1945) and the Arab world ranged from indifference, resistance, collaboration and emulation. National Socialist Germany used collaborators throughout the Arab world to support their political goals. The cooperative political and military relationships were based on shared hostilities towards common enemies, such as the United Kingdom, the French Third Republic, along with communism, and Zionism.

National Socialist perceptions of the Arab world

In speeches, Hitler purportedly made apparently warm references towards Islam, such as: "The peoples of Islam will always be closer to us than, for example, France". Hitler was transcribed as saying: "Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers [...] then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world."

This exchange occurred when Hitler received Saudi Arabian ruler Ibn Saud's special envoy, Khalid al-Hud. Earlier in this meeting, Hitler claimed that one of the three reasons why National Socialist Germany had some interest in the Arabs was:

[...] because we were jointly fighting the Jews. This led him to discuss Palestine and the conditions there, and he then stated that he himself would not rest until the last Jew had left Germany. Khalid Al Hud observed that the Prophet Mohammed [...] had acted the same way. He had driven the Jews out of Arabia [...]

Propaganda Ministry

Throughout the war years, the Propaganda Ministry repeatedly instructed the press to promote a positive image of Islam. Urging journalists to give credit to the “Islamic world as a cultural factor,” Joseph Goebbels in autumn 1942 instructed magazines to discard negative images of Islam, which had been spread by church polemicists for centuries, and instead to promote an alliance with the Islamic world, which was described as both anti-Bolshevik and anti-Jewish. References to similarities between Jews and Muslims, as manifested in the ban of pork and the ritual circumcision, were to be avoided. In the coming months, the Propaganda Ministry decreed that magazines should depict the U.S. as “the enemies of Islam” and stress American and British hostility toward the Muslim religion.

In September 1943, the NSDAP explicitly stated that it accepted members who were “followers of Islam,” emphasizing that as the party accepted Christians as members, there was no reason to exclude Muslims.

National Socialists who view Islam positive:

• Adolf Hitler
• Joseph Goebbels
• Heinrich Himmler
• Fritz Grobba
• Karl von Krempler

National Socialists who converted to Islam

• Karl Wolff
• Johann von Leers
• Wilhelm Hintersatz (Harun el-Raschid Bey)