Back in 2009, I posted an article on this site about the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spent World War 2 largely in Berlin as Hitler's guest. While there, the Mufti sent out radio broadcasts to his brethren in the Middle East urging them to expel the Jews. In addition, he also assisted in the formation of a Bosnian Muslim Waffen-SS division.
Today in the German daily, Welt, I came across an article on some 100 of the volunteers who joined the Bosnian unit and who later deserted. After their arrests, they were transported to Buchenwald.
The below reference to Ettersberg refers to the hilly area above the city of Weimar, which is only a few miles from Buchenwald. It is here that the former concentration camp sits. The area was first noted as where Goethe used to wander and write many of his works while living in Weimar.
The below article in Welt is translated by Fousesquawk.
History
Handschar Division
How Muslims of the Waffen SS came to Buchenwald
Posted 21:03
Caption: Volunteers of the Waffen-SS from Bosnia-Herzogovina during drill exercises, here a staff infantry company. Source: Picture Alliance.
At the end of 1944, at least two transports of Muslim prisoners reached the Buchenwald concentration camp. The more than one hundred Bosnians were members of the Waffen-SS and deserted in their homeland. To date, little is known about their fate.
The weather was unusually mild for a March 23rd. The Buchenwald concentration camp said goodbye to Latif Kostura on this spring day in 1945 with a mix of sunshine and clouds, according to the weather reports. The farmer from Visoko, Bosnia had spent the entire winter on the Ettersberg over Weimar. His fight for survival lasted exactly 123 days. Now he and a handful of men who had been brought to Buchenwald with him were free-on parole.
All of them belonged to one of the most unusual prisoner groups in Buchenwald. According to the available files online from the Arolsen Archives in Buchenwald, 56 men arrived at the concentration camp in Thuringia on 21 November 1944 from Mostar. All of them were Muslims. All were members of the Waffen-SS in the 13th Mountain Infantry "Handschar" Division before their arrests. A second transport with some 50 Muslim deserters of this unit arrived in Weimar on 23 December via the Dachau concentration camp.
The Handschar Division was established on March 1, 1943 by Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945). Himmler was enthusiastic about the philosophical connections between National Socialism and Islam. The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was derived from the Koran, seemed to overlap with National Socialism. Many Germans and parts of the Arab world were especially united as to the so-called Jewish question.
Caption: The image from NS propaganda shows members of the 13th Volunteer Bosnian-Herzogovina Mountain Division during a prayer exercise, taken in December 1943. Source: Picture Alliance, photo archive for contemporary history/Archive.
The SS quickly began recruiting the so-called "Musel-Germans". The support of the Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (ca 1896-1974), who as an opponent of the then-British Mandate in Palestine, often collaborated with Hitlerian Germany, was helpful here. Altogether, 21,000 mostly Bosnian Muslims responded to the recruitment to defend their Islamic homeland against the Serbian-dominated bands under partisan leader Tito (1892-1980).
Soon, however, the alliance between the Germans and their Bosnian auxiliary troops began to crack. Many of the volunteers had joined the Waffen-SS in the hope of defending against the attacks by Orthodox Serbs and the Croats, who were also allied with the Germans. The Muslims first fought in northern Bosnia and soon became notorious for their extraordinary brutality. In mid-1944, however, the defeat of the Germans against the troops of the partisan leader Tito became increasingly clear. Many Handschar soldiers changed sides or saw little sense in fighting further.
Presumably, Latif Kustora also had enough of the war. According to interrogation records of the US Army, all his comrades, who had remained in Buchenwald until its liberation, gave desertion as the reason for their arrest. Kustora was arrested in Sarajevo in mid-October 1944.
He did not escape the field of battle. Because Kustora and some other deserters left Buchenwald on 23 March 1945 at the behest of the SS and police court in Kassel and with the order to prove themselves in the 13th SS Training and Replacement Battalion in the Austrian mining town of Leoben. Other prisoners were released on 4 April for the same purpose. Some Muslims actually arrived in Leoben. Afterward, however, their tracks were lost in the darkness of history.
The Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation only knows of the case from written records in its archives. To date, historical research into these transports and what happened to the men after the war has not been investigated. SS court and administrative files in the German Reich, as well as Mostar (Croatia) are no longer available.
Only the fate of a few men is clarified beyond any doubt, like, for example, that of Mohamed Kahrmanovic. The nurse died on 1 February 1945 in Buchenwald, according to his death certificate, as a result of acute heart failure.
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