Heinrich Himmler's Adoration of Islam

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Heinrich Himmler's Adoration of Islam
By: Emerson Vermaat Militant Islam Monitor Monday, June 08, 2009

Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), Hitler's notorious "Reichsführer SS" (Federal leader of the SS) and chief of the German police, is one of the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century. Not only was he directly responsible for the death of at least six million Jews but also for the death of countless others most of whom belonged to so-called "inferior races" or simply despised Nazism. Moreover, a lot of German enemies and political opponents of the "Third Reich" also died in concentration camps and prisons – as a result of the brutal practices of SS and State Security Police or "Gestapo." (Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller had once visited Russia where he had been impressed by the methods of Stalin's secret police.)

Less well known is the fact that the same Heinrich Himmler warmly embraced Islam or "Mohammedanism" as it was called then. He admired the religion of the Muslims because it promised that there will be "beautiful women in paradise for those who die in battle." (Many of today's suicide bombers – often sexually frustrated young males – have also deluded themselves into believing that 72 smiling "Huris" or virgin beauties are waiting for them in paradise.)

Felix Kersten (1898-1990) was Himmler's personal masseur and confidant. It was seven years after the war that Kersten published his sensational memoirs, "Totenkopf und Treue." The Kersten memoirs were also published in English but, unfortunately, the original chapter on Himmler's "Enthousiasm for Islam" ("Begeisterung für Islam") was conspicuously lacking in the English edition. Although some of Kersten's claims are exaggerated, other parts of his memoirs seem to be fairly reliable. Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, two leading Himmler biographers, believe that Kersten "became the most powerful influence in Himmler's life after the death of Heydrich." There is no doubt that Kersten met Himmler quite often and that they were very close friends. This is apparent, for example, from the numerous references to Kersten in Himmler's 1941/42 office diary/appointment book ("Dienstkalender"), published in Hamburg in 1999. On March 21, 1945, Himmler wrote a very friendly letter to Kersten, thanking him for a recent visit:

"This time I was again delighted when you came here and used your tremendous medical skills as a token of (our) long friendship. In the many years we know each other we discussed many problems."

Kersten kept notes of everything Himmler told him. He was the only man whose "miraculous hands" could relieve Himmler's pain. Himmler's health was rather poor as he was suffering from severe stomach cramps. "The moment he was relieved of pain, Himmler began to unburden his mind," Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel write.

The fact that Himmler did not hesitate to nearly exclusively confide in Kersten was not appreciated by other high ranking SS officers. It seems that Himmler was well aware of this. He personally warned SS Security Service chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, that should Kersten be murdered, he, Kaltenbrunner would not survive Kersten longer than 24 hours. Kaltenbrunner's predecessor Reinhold Heydrich did not like Felix Kersten either. He thought the Finish masseur was a spy. But Heydrich, too, could not have Kersten arrested or killed since he knew that the Finnish masseur enjoyed Himmler's personal protection. (As he was traveling in an open car Heydrich was attacked by two British supported partisans in Prague in May 1942 and later died in hospital.)

Kersten was not a spy, but he did have high level contacts both in Germany and Sweden. It was through his efforts and personal influence on Himmler that 3500 Jews could be transferred from Nazi concentration camps to Sweden. And this was not the only thing Kersten did to save those who suffered under Nazi persecution. On December 12, 1945, the World Jewish Congress sent a letter to Kersten thanking him for his successful efforts to save the 3500 Jews as well as for his generous willingness to help whenever he could.

Himmler: "Islam is a practical and sympathetic religion for soldiers"

British historian Peter Longerich recently published a 1035-page study on Himmler quoting, inter alia, from documents in the German Federal Archives in Berlin ("Bundesarchiv Berlin"). Longerich quotes Himmler as saying in November 1944 that Islam is "a practical and sympathetic religion for soldiers." "It promises that those who fall in battle will go to heaven."
We find similar quotes in Kersten's 1952 book. On December 1, 1942, Himmler told Kersten:

"Mohammed knew that most people are terribly cowardly and stupid. That is why he promised two beautiful women to every courageous warrior who dies in battle. This is the kind of language a soldier understands. When he believes that he will be welcomed in this manner in the afterlife, he will be willing to give his life, he will be enthusiastic about going to battle and not fear death. You may call this primitive and you may laugh about it, but it is based on deeper wisdom. A religion must speak a man's language."

Himmler, whose parents were devout and conservative Bavarian Catholics, publicly left the Catholic Church in the summer of 1936. In his conversations with Kersten he later lashed out against the Catholic Church, the Vatican and Christianity in general. Christianity does not promise anything to the soldiers and warriors who die in battle, Himmler said. They either go to hell or heaven – there is just no reward for fighting bravely. "And now compare this, Herr Kersten, to the religion of the Mohammedans, a religion of people's soldiers."

In other words, Himmler admired the Muslim concept of martyrdom: if you die on the battlefield as a jihadist (Muslim holy warrior) and so become a martyr, you will be amply rewarded in the afterlife ("paradise"). This is precisely what Haj Amin Al-Husseini told the Muslim soldiers in the SS.

It was in the first half of 1942 that Himmler and an SS officer named Adolf Eichmann befriended this firebrand cleric – the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem whom the Nazis had welcomed to Berlin. Haj Amin Al-Husseini, whose hatred of the Jews equalled that of the Nazis, arrived in Nazi Germany in November 1941 and was received by Hitler that same month. The Grand Mufti wanted the Nazis to approve his plan for a pro-Nazi Muslim fighting force or "Arab legion." Hitler initially declined, but Himmler was enthousiastic about the idea. In November 1943, the SS Reichsführer sent a telegram to the Grand Mufti, saying there existed "a natural bond between National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom loving Mohammedans throughout the world."

Earlier that year, a special Muslim unit had been created inside Himmler's "Waffen-SS" (the combat arm of the SS). It was called the "SS-Handschar Division" and largely consisted of Bosnian Muslims. In 1944, the Handschar Division committed serious war crimes in Yugolavia killing Serb civilians. (After the war, Yugoslav leader Marshall Tito wanted Al-Husseini for war crimes but the French and the British had no intention of upsetting the Arab world.) Al-Husseini traveled to Sarajevo in October 1944 to address his men from the Handschar Division. He said that the National Socialist and the Islamic world view largely ran parallel. "The Germans are the real friends of the 400 million Muslims," he added. In April 1944, the SS founded its own "Imam training school" in Guben, near Cottbus. Himmler strongly supported this initiative and the Grand Mufti gave the opening ceremony speech.

Himmler told his masseur Felix Kersten on December 2, 1942, that he was reading serious books on the "Mohammedan religion." When the war was over, he said, he wanted to visit the Islamic countries himself with a view to continuing his studies. "Look, how wise ("vernünftig") this religion is."

Himmler: "Let us assume that the Turkish Muslim armies would have conquered Vienna and Europe in 1683...."

Five days later, Himmler told Kersten that he regretted the fact that the Turkish Muslim armies had not been able to conquer Europe in 1683:

"Let us assume that the Turks in whose ranks Europeans were fighting as well, even in high positions, would have conquered Vienna and Europe in 1683 instead of having been forced to withdraw. If the Mohammedans would have gained the victory at the time and Islam would have swept victoriously over Europe, then the Christian churches would have been depoliticized. (...) For the Turks were religiously tolerant, they allowed each religion to continue to exist, provided it was no longer involved in politics – otherwise it was finished."

This view comes close to the Muslim concept of the so-called "Caliphate" or Allah's kingdom on earth. The same concept is also embraced by many terrorists belonging to Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri repeatedly said they strongly regretted that the Muslims had been driven out of Spain ("Al-Andalus") in the late Middle Ages. They call on Muslims to reconquer "every stolen Islamic land, from Palestine to Al-Andalus and other Islamic lands that were once lost because of the betrayals of rulers and the feebleness of Muslims." Many militant Muslims believe that Europe can also be conquered though massive immigration flows from the Muslim world.

Polygamy

There is something else that Himmler and the militant Muslims have in common. Both believe in polygamy and having lots of the children. Indeed, the Muslim prophet Mohammed himself, "is usually said to have had fourteen wives in the strict sense, of whom nine survived him," W. Montgomery Watt, a British expert on Islam, writes. (Montgomery Watt then identifies the names and age of thirteen wives or concubines.) Himmler once told Kersten: "The multiple marriage ("Mehrehe") also exists in other countries, so why shouldn't this be the case here?" Katrin Himmler, Heinrich Himmler's great-niece, recently published an excellent book on the three Himmler brothers. Himmler was officially married to Marga Boden, but Hedwig Potthast was his mistress, she writes. Himmler and Miss Potthast who was his secretary once, lived as if they were married. They had two children. Himmler told his SS men to follow his example: the more "Aryan" children they would beget, the more women they would make pregnant, the better. "We must show courage and act decisively in this matter, even if it means arousing still greater opposition from the Church," Himmler told Kersten.

It is not very strange that some high ranking SS criminals later found refuge in the Muslim world. Alois Brunner, for example, lived in Syria for many years. (He is problably no longer alive.) Others went to Egypt. Militant Muslims, but also many Egyptians, Syrians and Saudis, embrace a virulent kind anti-Semitism. Osama bin Laden, whose father was from Yemen but later settled in Saudi Arabia, and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, call on their followers to kill Jews and Americans wherever they can be found. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who coordinated the 9/11 attacks and is currently in Guantanamo Bay, made no secret of his anti-Semitism when he proudly announced at a hearing that he "decapitated with his blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl."

If Himmler – like Eichmann and Brunner – would somehow have managed to escape from Nazi Germany, he would probably have tried to reach a safehaven in a Muslim or Latin American country. Instead, he committed suicide on May 23, 1945, now 64 years ago.

Emerson Vermaat is a Dutch investigative reporter. He is author of a major Dutch study on temporary alliances between extremists: "Nazi's, Communisten en Islamisten" ("Nazis, Communists and Islamists"), Aspekt Publishers, Soesterberg, Netherlands, November 2008).

Hitler And Muhammed

From Atlas Shrugs:

Verboten Discussion?—Hitler, Muhammad, and Islam

Andrew Bostom

Cliff May deserves credit for his National Review Online column of Thursday (1/24/08) which dares to associate—however indirectly, and in the end, I am afraid, inadequately—those he terms, using layers of prophylactic rhetorical separation from orthodox Islam, either “militant jihadists,” or “Islamists,” and their movement as “militant Islamism,”—with Hitler, and his “movement,” i.e., Nazism.

May’s inchoate effort, should be applauded for its attempted illustration of any possible ideological nexus between Hitler’s Nazism, and Islam. But ultimately, the associations he makes—the “ability to nurse grievances and stoke ambitions,” Germans/Aryans as a master race, and the concordant supremacism of “militant Islamism,” and generic “fanaticism”—ignore much more intimate, if uncomfortable to acknowledge, doctrinal and historical connections between ancient Islam, and modern Nazism, which I have elaborated, below.

Islam, Nazism, and Totalitarianism

During an interview conducted in the late 1930s (published in 1939), Karl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychiatry, was asked “…had he any views on what was likely to be the next step in religious development?” Jung replied, in reference to the Nazi fervor that had gripped Germany,

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.

Albert Speer, who was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, wrote a contrite memoir of his World War II experiences while serving a 20-year prison sentence imposed by the Nuremberg tribunal. Speer’s narrative includes this discussion which captures Hitler’s racist views of Arabs on the one hand, and his effusive praise for Islam on the other:

Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. [emphasis added] Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire. [emphasis added] Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking,

“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

A similar ambivalence characterized Nazi Germany’s support for Arab Muslim causes in the World War II era. Hitler for example, in December 1937, even proposed omitting his “racial ladder” theory—which denigrated the Arabs—from a forthcoming Arabic translation of Mein Kampf. And a Berlin Foreign Ministry spokesman, during a November, 1942 press conference reported in the New York Times, took “great pains” to assure Arabs that Nazi antisemitic policies were directed at Jews, exclusively. The spokesman elaborated:

The difference between Germany’s attitude toward Jews and Arabs has been clearly shown in the exchange of letters between the former Prime Minister of Iraq, Rashid Ali, and the German Institute for Racial Problems. We have never said the Arabs were inferior as a race. On the contrary, we have always pointed out the glorious historic past of the Arab people.

Although now, inexplicably, almost ignored in their entirety, writings produced for 100 years between the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, by important scholars and intellectuals, in addition to Carl Jung—for example, the historians Jacob Burckhardt and Waldemar Gurian, philosopher Bertrand Russell, Protestant theologian Karl Barth, sociologist Jules Monnerot, and most notably, the renowned 20th century scholar of Islamic Law, G.H. Bousquet—referred to Islam as a despotic, or in 20th century parlance, totalitarian ideology.

Being imbued with fanaticism was the ultimate source of Muhammad’s great strength, and lead to his triumph as a despot, according to the 19th century Swiss historian Burckhardt:
Muhammad is personally very fanatical; that is his basic strength. His fanaticism is that of a radical simplifier and to that extent is quite genuine. It is of the toughest variety, namely doctrinaire passion, and his victory is one of the greatest victories of fanaticism and triviality. All idolatry, everything mythical, everything free in religion, all the multifarious ramifications of the hitherto existing faith, transport him into a real rage, and he hits upon a moment when large strata of his nation were highly receptive to an extreme simplification of the religious.

The Arabs, Burckhardt emphasizes, Muhammad’s henchmen, were not barbarians and had their own ingenuities, and spiritual traditions. Muhammad’s successful preaching among them capitalized upon an apparent longing for supra-tribal unification, “an extreme simplification.” Muhammad’s genius, “lies in divining this.” Utilizing portions of the most varied existing traditions, and taking advantage of the fact that “the peoples who were now attacked may also have been somewhat tired of their existing theology and mythology,” Muhammad

…with the aid of at least ten people, looks over the faiths of the Jews, Christians, and Parsis [Zoroastrians], and steals from them any scraps that he can use, shaping these elements according to his imagination. Thus everyone found in Muhammad’s sermons some echo of his accustomed faith. The very extraordinary thing is that with all this Muhammad achieved not merely lifetime success, the homage of Arabia, but founded a world religion that is viable to this day and has a tremendously high opinion of itself.

Burckhardt concludes that despite this achievement, Muhammad was not a great man, although he accepts the understandable inclination,

…to deduce great causes from great effects, thus, from Muhammad’s achievement, greatness of the originator. At the very least, one wants to concede in Muhammad’s case that he was no fraud, was serious about things, etc. However, it is possible to be in error sometime with this deduction regarding greatness and to mistake mere might for greatness. In this instance it is rather the low qualities of human nature that have received a powerful presentation. Islam is a triumph of triviality, and the great majority of mankind is trivial…But triviality likes to be tyrannical and is fond of imposing its yoke upon nobler spirits. Islam wanted to deprive distinguished old nations of their myths, the Persians of their Book of Kings, and for 1200 years it has actually prohibited sculpture and painting to tremendously large populations.

University of Notre Dame historian Waldemar Gurian, a refugee, who witnessed first hand the Communist and Fascist totalitarian movements in Europe, concluded (circa 1945) that Hitler, in a manner analogous to the 7th century precedent of Muhammad, had been the simplifier of German nationalism.

A fanatical simplifier who appeared as the unifier of various German traditions in the service of simple national aims and who was seen by many differing German groups—even by some people outside Germany—as the fulfiller of their wishes and sharer of their beliefs, with some distortions and exaggerations—such, as long as he had success, was Adolf Hitler.

Based upon the same clear understandings, and devoid of our era’s dulling, politically correct constraints, Karl Barth, like Carl Jung (cited earlier), offered this warning, also published in 1939:

[Karl Barth] Participation in this life, according to it the only worthy and blessed life, is what National Socialism, as a political experiment, promises to those who will of their own accord share in this experiment. And now it becomes understandable why, at the point where it meets with resistance, it can only crush and kill—with the might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam [emphasis in original], its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet.

And after interviewing Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna himself, who “preached the doctrine of the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other,” Carlson observed:

It became clear to me why the average Egyptian worshipped the use of force. Terror was synonymous with power! This was one reason why most Egyptians, regardless of class or calling had admired Nazi Germany. It helped explain the sensational growth of the Ikhwan el Muslimin [Muslim Brotherhood]

In a brilliant, dispassionate contemporary analysis, Ibn Warraq describes 14 characteristics of “Ur Fascism” as enumerated by Umberto Eco, analyzing their potential relationship to the major determinants of Islamic governance and aspirations, through the present. He adduces salient examples which reflect the key attributes discussed by Eco: the unique institution of jihad war; the establishment of a Caliphate under “Allah’s vicegerent on earth,” the Caliph—ruled by Islamic Law, i.e., Shari’a, a rigid system of subservience and sacralized discrimination against non-Muslims and Muslim women, devoid of basic freedoms of conscience, and expression. Warraq’s assessment confirms what G.H. Bousquet concluded (in 1950) from his career studying the historical development and implementation of Islamic Law:

Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of fiqh [jurisprudence], to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer… the study of Muhammadan Law (dry and forbidding though it may appear)… is of great importance to the world of today.
Islam Über Alles?—The Convergence of Jihad, Islamic Jew-Hatred, and Nazism

Dr. Bostom has much more here.