How Nazis courted the Islamic world during WWII

"On the Muslim side one cannot generalize. Some of the Muslim allies of the Nazi regime — most importantly the famous Mufti of Jerusalem — shared the Nazis' Jew-hatred. In the war zones, in the Balkans, in North Africa, and in the Eastern territories, the picture is more complicated. In many of these regions, Muslims and Jews had lived together for centuries. And in some cases, Muslims would now help their Jewish neighbors, for example hiding them from the Germans."  But not this week.

Wasn't Nazi racism a major obstacle to collaborating with Muslims?  . . . "In the war zones, Germany engaged with a wide range of religious policies and propaganda to promote the Nazi regime as the patron of Islam. As early as 1941, the Wehrmacht distributed the military handbook "Islam" to train its soldiers to behave correctly towards Muslim populations. On the eastern Front, the Nazi occupiers ordered the rebuilding of mosques, prayer halls, and madrasas — previously destroyed by Moscow — and the re-establishment of religious rituals and celebrations in order to undermine Soviet rule.

"German military authorities also made extensive efforts to co-opt Islamic dignitaries. German propagandists in the eastern territories, the Balkans, and North Africa tried to use religious rhetoric, vocabulary and iconography to mobilize Muslims. They politicized sacred texts like the Quran as well as religious imperatives, most notably the concept of jihad, in order to foment religious violence for political ends.

"From 1941 onwards, the Nazi Wehrmacht army and the paramilitary SS recruited tens of thousands of Muslims, mainly to save German blood. Muslim soldiers fought on all fronts. German army officials granted these recruits a wide range of religious concessions, even lifting the ban on ritual slaughter, a practice that had been prohibited for anti-Semitic reasons by Hitler's Law for the Protection of Animals of 1933." . . .