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their personal possessions. After Rauff was evacuated from Tunisia, the war
soon ended.
The Middle East was not the only place Muslims were working for
Hitler. The Mufti was crucial to raising Muslim Nazi troops in Croatia and
elsewhere. These troops, who were SS war criminals, wore uniforms honoring
both Nazi and Islamic symbols. Certainly, all European Muslims were
not Waffen SS soldiers. But this book is not about those who were not
Nazis, it is about those who were. In Among the Righteous, Satloff 15 told
about the righteous Muslims of WW II who saved Jews. Unfortunately,
there were tens of thousands more who carried guns, burned homes with
civilians inside, and generally perpetrated mayhem under the Crescent and
the Swastika. Bolshevism, Jews, Catholic Serbs, and gypsies were the
enemy. The troops were inspired by Imams trained in Islam and Nazi propaganda
who traveled with them as they inflicted havoc. The cover of Nazi
Palestine shows a photograph of two young and innocent-looking Muslim
Waffen SS soldiers studying an antisemitic text. In Western Europe, there
were training camps provided by the Germans for Arab informers who were
trained in sabotage, insurrection, and radio operations. They were guided
intellectually and politically to believe that Nazi and Islamic interests were
parallel. Nowhere, though, do Mallmann and Cüppers claim that these Muslim
troops were crucial to the Holocaust; in fact, they write when discussing
the Muslim troops, “The practical value of the SS formations proved to be
modest.” 16 Those troops did, however, commit numerous war crimes and
“had taken wide ranging measures against the Jews.” 17
Husseini exaggerated to the Reich what he could deliver to them in
terms of real military might. He was a failure not only to his troops and the
Nazis, but to his people as well. Or was he? In the short term, he failed, but
his view was wider and longer than WW II. One could say that his anti-
Western plan is continuing and that WW II was just the beginning.
Mallmann and Cüppers end the book with a follow-up on some of the
villains. The Mufti lived a long and celebrated life. Walter Rauff retired to
South America and spoke freely of his death machine; he was protected by
Chile’s lack of deportation laws. Others were killed by the end of the war,
and very few were tracked down and punished after the war.
Of course, all Arabs were not Nazis. The Mufti and his thugs did
allow, intentionally or not, some moderate, communist, and other Palestinians
to live. Mallmann and Cüppers did not write a survey of all of Arab
hearts and minds. They wrote instead a shocking and dangerously revealing
15. Satloff, Among the Righteous.
16. Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine, 17.
17. Mallmann and Cüppers, Nazi Palestine, 146.