Race Theory versus a Religious World-View: SS–Ustaša Relations and Islam in the Independent State of Croatia

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses SS policy toward the Bosnian Muslims of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) within the context of the ideological and political relationship between the German Reich and the Ustaša regime. As part of its broader aim of mobilising Muslim support for Germany during the Second World War, the SS adopted and pursued a pan-Islamic policy in its effort to recruit Muslim soldiers for the Croatian-Bosnian Waffen-SS Handschar Division. Although the SS officially regarded the Bosnian Muslims as ‘Croats of the Islamic faith’ and Aryans, SS propaganda focused on the appeal to religious sentiments and treated them primarily as members of a global Islamic community. This unique pan-Islamic policy was the product not only of broader geopolitical aims that arose in reaction to wartime exigencies but also a widespread Nazi Islamophilic attitude that was combined with the anti-Catholic ideology characteristic of the SS leadership. The SS’s pro-Islamic policy actually undermined one of the main political-ideological aims of the Ustaša government, namely, the integration of the Bosnian Muslims into the Aryan-Croatian ‘national community’. Contrary to the widespread historiographical view that the Ustaše were a politically Catholic movement, this article highlights the fact that they adhered to a clearly secular racial-nationalist ideology, while the SS exaggerated the influence of clericalism in the NDH. Historiographical accounts of SS policy toward Islam in the Balkans have tended to play down the role of the Ustaše and Nazi anti-Catholicism, even though a more thorough analysis of SS-Ustaša relations can shed more light, as this article shows, on the precise nature of the relationship between race and religion in National Socialist ideology.