Aye, although when things started to go wrong I think the Italians were under no illusions about who was really in charge.
I meant before that, with his clashes with Britain over the influence of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and encouraging German trade; “To counterbalance British and Soviet influence, Reza Shah encouraged German commercial enterprise in Iran. On the eve of World War II, Germany was Iran’s largest trading partner.[57]” Nothing to do with religion, granted.
Errr… Godwin’s Law does not apply in this case, since the conversation began with Hitler and the Holocaust.
(There’s always a relevant XKCD).
What’s an “old-age ghetto”, and why would you want to be accepted in to one?
Theresienstadt.
"He [Heydrich]* stated that Jews residing in Germany and Austria who were 65 years old and above would not be “evacuated” to the east for “labor,” but would be “transferred to a ghetto for the elderly” at Theresienstadt. Also to be “transferred” were German and Austrian Jewish World War I veterans who met at least one of two criteria: severely disabled due to war wounds and/or veterans awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class and above."*
I think people looking for consistency and rationality in Nazi actions are going to be dissapointed.
Fact is that Hitler and the Nazis did not care less about Muslims much. They simply were not part of Hitler’s world view (except vaguely, as an “inferior” folk to be colonized by Germans some day - like everyone else).
He was perfectly willing to make use of useful idiots like the Grand Mufti, to cause embarassment to the British in their ME colonial efforts, but with typical Nazi myopia missed opportunity after opportunity to interfere seriously in the ME - despite positive invitations from several fronts (French Vichy in Syria, Iraq rebels).
The reason is pretty clear: he wished to concerntrate all his attention on defeating his real ideological enemy, the Soviets, and had little to spare for the ME. Sending Rommel to North Africa was really more of a gesture of support for his fellow-dictator Mussolini, aided by British strategic insanity (splitting their successful NA army to support the gallant-but-doomed Greeks).
In short, they could not really care less about Muslims, and more then they could about any other “racial inferiors” whom they were willing to use pragmatically - fortunately for the Muslims. Featuing in Nazi ideology never had a good outcome for anyone.
One of the great “what-ifs” of WW2 is what if instead of invading the Soviet Union, Hitler had concentrated on the ME -particularly to obtain the oil his war machine desperately needed. That would certainly have thrown his relationship with Muslims in high relief. However, this “what if” ignores the fact that Hitler was all about destroying the Soviets. Fighting the British, and interfering in the ME - he simply did not have his heart in that; he rather admired the Brits and their colonial empire.
I know what ‘H’ word Godwins law refers to. I was asking if there was a similar law for the other ‘H’ word.
Long past time to remind people, but just to be clear.
Islam is a religion, in exactly the same way as Christianity is.
Being Jewish is, unusually, but not uniquely, mostly about racial heritage.
Hitler was almost totally focussed on race.
In the west we have a curious notion that to be Muslim means being an Arab or maybe Middle Eastern. Countries that are almost entirely (or are officially) Muslim and are not Arab include Egypt, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. Only 20% of Muslims are Arab.
It would seem consistent with history to assume that the question of Muslim religion just wasn’t on Hitler’s radar, and if he did have some people of the Muslim faith murdered, it was only by coincidence, and not by design.
As a clarification, this isn’t about actual notions of ethnicity or religion, but about Hilter’s peculiar use of these terms. “Racially”, German Jews are indistinguishable from German non-Jews, while of course most Muslims visibly belong to ethnicities that are non-German.
This lead to all sorts of rational anxieties on the part of Germans in Hitler’s Germany, along the lines mentioned above - that is, “do I have some ancestors who may have been Jewish?!”. The point being that without access to detailed geneological research (often faked up), one certainly could not tell who was “Jewish” or not under Nazi rules.
In contrast, in reality, Jews know who they are - they are members of the tribe. It is a tribal, not ethnic or “racial”, identity (meaning that one can, and does, join it or leave it voluntarily, and people of vastly different “races” can be Jews - see Sammy Davis, Jr. ).
(post shortened)
*Foreigners in Waffen SS (Balkan and Centr. Europe)
Slovenians 6,000
Albanians 4,000
Serbs 4,000
Bosnians 20,000
Greeks 1,000
Czech 5,000
Hungarians 40,000
Bulgarians 3,000
Rumanians 5,000
Special armed formations of fascist Germany (Waffen-SS) until the end of war created all together 38 divisions, 18 of which were staffed by pure German and 20 by foreigners. Among them was a “Handzar” division staffed by Bosnians, claims the French magazine “Istoria” (Number 32, year 1973.).*
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/handzar/handzar.htm
I suppose the creation of three Muslim divisions could be considered a minor collaboration? The Handzar division, complete with uniform Fez, was one of several Muslim division of Nazi SS.
Cohen states that the division achieved a maximum strength of 17,000 in April 1944.[29] The division had a Muslim Imam for each battalion other than the all-German signal battalion.
The problem IMHO is that pointing to the Jews in the German army (that were not as it was implied, serving openly) was a reply to a humorous comment that there were no SS Jewish divisions, pointing to the few that had Jewish ancestry in the German army did not contradict that. And then to a point about what the Nazis did to establish who was a Jew the reply was to peculiarly point at how Israel is doing this nowadays, evading the fact that what the poster pointed out was not as good a point as he thought.
And then it has to be mentioned that comparing what is happening with the Jews today with what the Nazis were doing and not mentioning a lot of context regarding how the Jews were treated in the army and elsewhere, is also a common thing coming from very unsavory sites of the internet.
The word Muslim is an Arabic word: “Muslim” is an Arabic word meaning “one who submits (to God)”.
Where do you get that only 20% Muslims are Arabs.
One last question why was Hitler, or those he commanded, so angry at the gypsies to round them up and send them to be exterminated?
Christian is a Greek word. Most Christians are not Greek, don’t speak Greek, have never been to Greece.
Also, cite.
Like in the case of Jewish persecution, there was a long history of the persecution of the Romani prior to Hitler’s rise in Europe, they were (and in some places still are) stigmatised as at best workshy freeloaders and at worst locust-like wandering criminals. Scientific racism also played its part, as although the Roma were technically an Aryan peoples from India the Nazis reclassified them as racially inferior, "A more contemporary Nazi theorist believed that "the Gypsy cannot, by reason of his inner and outer makeup (Konstruktion), be a useful member of the human community.“1”
Like the Jews they also attracted the ire of Hitler’s National Socialists as it was thought that due to their nature they were internationalists, or stateless. In other words, their loyalty could never be to Germany or German interests but to themselves. Himmler in a 1938 circular on*“Combating The Gypsy Nuisance”* states “…it has been shown that efforts to make the Gypsies settle have been unsuccessful, especially in -the case of pure Gypsies, on account of their strong compulsion to wander.” Their targeted extermination was in line with Nazi policy of a racially pure Germany free from supposed foreign influence; “…the aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies.”
Well, Gypisies were from Rajestan (supposedly) so, they were vert much not Aryan (which means Iranian)
Indo-Aryan, one should say. Though it was a problem for Nazi racial classification, they eventually justified racial persecution based on the idea that over their wanderings gypsies had mixed with undesirables;
“The Gypsies have indeed retained some elements from their Nordic home, but they are descended from the lowest classes of the population in that region. In the course of their migrations, they have absorbed the blood of the surrounding peoples, and have thus become an Oriental, western-Asiatic racial mixture, with an addition of Indian, mid-Asiatic, and European strains. Their nomadic mode of living is a result of this mixture. The Gypsies will generally affect Europe as aliens.2” From Professor Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde Europas.
Thank you for adding to my knowledge … all of ya’ll are really nice to respond
No, there wasn’t. You’re taking the existence of a single SS division (and the partial existence of two more) and trying to balloon it into collaboration between the Nazis and the Muslims as a whole, which is simply entirely untrue. One could as easily and as incorrectly point to the 23rd SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier Division Nederland as proof that there was active collaboration between the Nazis and the Dutch during WW2 in Europe (while also ignoring the inconvenient fact that it never reached divisional strength) or the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) as proof that there was active collaboration between the Nazis and the French. Never mind, of course, that both of these countries fought and were defeated by the Germans. As for “the Muslims”, I don’t imagine that it’s occurred to you that India provided the Allies with a 2.5 million strong volunteer army in WW2, a sizable percentage of which were Muslims.
36.Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS
Is that a serious statement and a serious question? And yes, these are infantry divisions that we’re talking about. What do you think a mountain division is? For your edification: Gebirgsjäger.
Apparently some people can not make (or do not want to) a difference between religion and ethnicity.
So we have list inaccurate and from a source that is sprska… that is it is tied to the genocidaires of the Srpska republic and that even now has on its website claims that the intervention to stop the genocide of the 1990s against the bosniaks and the kosovars is a “war crime” … I am glad to see that the sources of this persons position have such quality and it tells us much about this and the posting.
Yes, you can when you see that none of the Balkan muslim divisions are full divisions at all - and and have with them the Catholic Croats and other non muslims… this ignores even that only the bosniaks had no “national” partner engagement, unlike the croat etc. So it is a false comparision
Oh my god, they have fezes! it is obviously a sign of the muslims, as no non muslims wear fezes…
this is of course a distortion and a falsehood, with the citation to the fez apparently to try to hand wave around the weak engagement of the bosniaks…
Or in fact the compliants and protests of the bosniak ulema that the croat (catholic) milities, the Ustaches were exploiting bosniak symboles in massacres and also killing the bosniaks…
It is quite clear that some parties are more interested in making distortions and propaganda than honest GQ responses.
Please do not forget as well the hundreds of thousands of muslims who made up the majority of the free french forces to late 1944 (75%), most who were are volunteers - the west africa, the Moroccans, etc.