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A MOSQUE IN MUNICH: NAZIS, THE CIA, AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN THE WEST

EVER SINCE THE mid-eighteenth century, Berlin's Tiergarten has been the city's green center, an elegant swath of lakes, fields, and woods connecting its western suburbs with its political and cultural heart in the east. Even the Nazi architect Albert Speer, whose megalomaniacal plan to turn Berlin into "Germania" -- the new capital for the thousand-year Reich -- planned only minor changes. He envisioned transforming its southern border into a lush diplomatic district.

The land near the Tiergarten was expensive, but Speer could rely on the Nazis' Aryanization policies for cheap real estate. In 1938, for example, one of Berlin's most famous Jewish families, the Mendelssohn-Bartholdys (the family of Felix Mendelssohn, counted among the great German composers) fled and sold their property for the fire-sale price of 170,000 reichsmarks. Speer had a new piece of land. The plot was small, so the government awarded it to a minor European power, the kingdom of Yugoslavia.

The city tore down the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy house and commissioned the architect Werner March to build the Yugoslavian embassy. March's most famous work is Berlin's Olympic Stadium complex in Berlin's western suburbs. The stadium's rough-hewn stone, severe lines, and imposing entrance make it a landmark of the Nazi era. March put similar touches on the new embassy. Its gray travertine walls invoked severe solidity, and its small windows and black grilles were reminiscent of an Italian palazzo. The new embassy opened in 1939, but two years later, Hitler invaded Yugoslavia and the Nazis confiscated the embassy. They handed it over to a new government agency: the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, or the Ostministerium.

The Ostministerium's mission was crucial to Hitler's vision. Everything in the war until then -- the conquest of western Europe, the pummeling of Britain, and the battles in North Africa -- had been means to an end. Hitler's dream was to create a giant land empire for Germany, one that would expand eastward into Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Hitler liked to call Russia "Germany's India" -- a vast continent of a country with seemingly inexhaustible resources. Everything up to the Urals would be under German control. Germany would reorganize political boundaries and the conquered territories' ethnic groups. The rest of Russia would be left for later. The Ostministerium was to oversee this massive transformation. It was conceived of in April 1941, when Germany was drawing up invasion plans. In theory, the German army was to have little to do with the conquered lands. As quickly as possible, it was to turn their administration over to the Ostministerium.

Control of the Ostministerium was given to an old friend of Hitler's, Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a Baltic German who went to Germany after World War I and quickly joined the fledgling National Socialists. He even led the movement when Hitler was briefly sent to prison after a failed coup in 1923. But Rosenberg was illsuited to bureaucratic infighting. He was slowly shunted aside, referred to derisively as "the philosopher." He edited the Nazi party newspaper and wrote an apology for racism, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Tellingly, when the Nazis took power in 1933, he was given no ministry to run. Instead, he continued to lead the Nazis' foreign policy office.

Rosenberg, however, had definite ideas about the new territories. As a Baltic German, he sympathized with the non-Russians in the Soviet Union. As early as 1927 he wrote that dealings with the Soviets must take "into account the strong separatist movement in the Ukraine and the Caucasus." He planned to use his ministry to create a buffer of countries around the remainder of the Soviet Union. That would mean at least nominal independence for Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and Turkestan.

He began to staff his new ministry. It included a political section to oversee various geographic areas, such as Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Baltic states. A panoply of other departments were to look after culture, the press, youth, women, health, law, finance, agriculture, lumber -- every aspect of the new empire.

Rosenberg scoured the Nazi party apparatus and other ministries for promising staff. He commanded a seemingly powerful organization and should have attracted top talent. But few were interested. Power rested in Nazi institutions like the SS and not in government ministries. In addition, Rosenberg's plans ran counter to many of Hitler's own ideas. Hitler wanted to enslave many of the peoples with whom Rosenberg wanted to create alliances. What talent he did attract would soon be sidelined, victims of political infighting and their master's impotence. Von Mende was an exception.

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Von Mende now lived in the well-to-do district near Charlottenburg Palace, the Prussian kings' old summer residence. The commute to the ministry took about half an hour by streetcar, much easier than crossing to eastern Berlin where the university was located. The von Mende family had grown to four, with the birth of a daughter and a son.

Von Mende was given control of the ministry's Caucasus division, reporting to his old contact in the Nazi party, Georg Leibbrandt. Von Mende recruited a group of men who had been in exile for years. Most were part of an anti-Soviet movement called Prometheus -- named for the mythological hero who championed humanity by defying the god Zeus. It was founded in 1925 by men who had hoped the destruction of the czarist empire would free their peoples from Russian rule. When that didn't happen, the Prometheans published and agitated against Moscow from Warsaw and then Paris. By the 1930S, the group was being backed by French, Polish, British, and German intelligence. The German conquest of France brought the group completely under German control.

Von Mende had known and cultivated some of these men even before he worked for the Ostministerium. After the war, Prometheans such as Mikhail Kedia of Georgia and Ali Kantemir of Turkestan would play major roles in von Mende's entanglement with the United States. Kantemir would also become a key player in the Munich mosque.

One man would top them all in importance during and after the war: Veli Kayum, the political activist who had addressed the Muslim soldiers, including Sultan, in the camp. Kayum was initially unimportant in the Promethean movement but soon emerged as the most prominent Central Asian exile following the death of Mustafa Chokay, who had headed a short-lived rebel government in Tashkent. To further consolidate his position, Kayum added the honorific suffix Khan to his name. The Germans were delighted with Kayum's rise in influence because he had been helping the Nazis since the 1930s. They considered him loyal and trustworthy. They embraced the same vision: to build Turkic-Muslim armies that would fight the Soviets.

Von Mende was a civilian, but as the war progressed he was seen as essential to the Nazis' military success. In 1943, the SSchiefHeinrich Himmler engineered the ouster of Leibbrandt, von Mende's boss in the Ostministerium. Himmler installed one of his loyalists, hoping to gain control of the rival ministry. But von Mende emerged from the shakeup unscathed. Indeed, he got a promotion -- advancing from head of the Ostministerium's Caucasus division to head of the "Foreign Peoples" division -- essentially overseeing the Ostministerium's entire policy toward Soviet minorities. The reason? Von Mende had hit upon an ingenious way of motivating the Soviet minorities, one that would echo into the postwar years.

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Sultan arrived in Berlin just as von Mende's plans were taking shape. In 1942, von Mende set up "liaison offices" to give the soldiers some representation in the Nazi hierarchy. The liaison offices were soon heavily engaged in political work. In early 1942, the Ostministerium and the Wehrmacht launched an ad campaign in the Crimea, asking for Tatar recruits. The results were sensational. About 200,000 Tatars lived in the Crimea, and about 10,000 of them had been drafted into the Red Army. But a stunning 20,000 volunteered -- basically the entire male population of ages eighteen through thirty-five who weren't already fighting for the Soviets. The Germans could not have enlisted more if they had used conscription.

Such success depended on convincing soldiers in the field that these liaison offices were indeed quasi governments in exile. The offices held out the hope of independence to the various non- Russian ethnic groups, even if the Nazis had little intent of actually ceding it to them. The West Germans and the CIA would duplicate the structure and staffing of the liaison offices after the war in their attempts to organize Muslims.

Sultan joined the Tatar liaison office as a propagandist. The office ran a radio station, a dance troupe, and a theater, as well as newspapers crucial to the effort. Except for one aimed at Georgians and another at Armenians, the rest of the papers, including New Word, The Volunteer, and The Holy War, were published with Muslim soldiers in mind. Many, such as National Turkestan, New Turkestan, and Sultan's newspaper, Idel'-Ural (or Volga-Ural), were aimed specifically at the Turkic soldiers. Sultan later ran the German-Tatar Newspaper.

Sultan's newspaper was overseen by the Wehrmacht's propaganda office, which supplied most of the information. Many of the articles were taken directly from Nazi newspapers, such as the People's Observer and The Attack. Often, they included anti-Semitic statements. Idel'-Ural, for example, claimed in one issue that Jewish labor bosses had exploited honest, hardworking union members in Western societies -- a standard anti-Semitic stereotype.

A few years later, when the war was over, Sultan set down his thoughts in a lengthy memoir. The high percentage of "German" topics in the papers, Sultan wrote, was a mistake. Not because repeating Nazi propaganda was morally dubious, but on practical grounds: the Tatar legionnaires saw little difference between Nazi and Soviet propaganda. The publications would have been more effective, he wrote, if they had been more objective.

Not all the Soviet minorities were worried about such tactical issues. Some saw a deeper ethical problem in fighting for the Nazis. The most famous was Musa Galil, a prominent poet. He served in a performance troupe but used the freedom of movement it allowed to build anti-Nazi cells among the Tatars. He was betrayed and hanged at the notorious Moabit prison in Berlin.

The Germans had a hard time finding qualified men to run the liaison offices. The head of the Tatar group was widely seen as an incompetent drunk. Sultan was considered for the top post, but he was still legally a minor (at the time, that meant under twenty-one years of age) and therefore rejected. The committees lurched along, without real power yet demonstrating how religion and even the faint hope of realizing a national identity could motivate people -- a valuable lesson that others would apply years later.

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At a 1942 conference held at a villa on Lake Wannsee in a Berlin suburb, plans for the Holocaust took shape. Although the murder of Jews began earlier, the meeting brought the full might of the bureaucratic, totalitarian state into alignment against them. Key ministers and Nazi officials attended. The meeting lasted just ninety minutes, but its message was clear: the state would now coordinate efforts in a single, awful focus.

The Ostministerium was represented at the conference; von Mende's boss and pre-war contact in the Nazi party, Leibbrandt, at tended on behalf of the ministry. Its officials had called for a definition of who counted as a Jew, so the Germans could properly prepare the eastern territory for German settlers by eliminating Jews and other undesirables.

Nine days later, the Ostministerium held the first of a series of meetings to iron out legal details stemming from the Wannsee conference. Although the Nuremberg race laws precisely specified who was to be considered a Jew, the situation in the east presented complications: poor record keeping made tracing a person's origins more difficult, but the Nazis desired to kill quickly without careful deliberation. Many wanted a flexible guideline that would allow officials on the ground to kill as they saw fit. Von Mende was one of a dozen midlevel bureaucrats who participated in the meeting. The minutes do not set down any of his comments. Surviving Ostministerium records show no effort on von Mende's part to use his power to slow down the process or raise objections. And he certainly knew of the genocide against the Jews by January 1942.

This behavior doesn't fit von Mende's postwar image. He liked to portray himself then as having been the Soviet minorities' best friend. He was one of the key sources of information for the Harvard historian Alexander Dallin, whose work German Rule in Russia (1956) is one of the classic accounts of the Nazis' occupation. Dallin variously dubs von Mende the "lord protector" and "master protector" of the minorities -- a sort of benevolent figure looking out for these groups' best interests. He never mentions von Mende's pre-war anti-Semitic writings or his participation in the Holocaustrelated meetings -- perhaps Dallin wasn't aware of the documents or was protecting a source.

One of the stories von Mende and the Muslims around him liked to tell after the war concerned the Karainen. Known as the "Tats" or "Mountain Jews" ("Bergjuden"), they were a tribe that had converted to Judaism. Recent scholarship backs von Mende's claims that the Karainen were protected, but his private papers show the extent of his involvement in the Holocaust. After the war, he wrote, "I still think back with some horror at an Orientalist conference in Berlin during the war. I had back then the unpleasant task to send a request to our Orientalists to help out with current questions. I brought a long list of requests that stemmed from practical policy, for example, the history of the Crimea and what were the Karainen (they were supposed to be handled as Jews)." In other words, von Mende had treated the Nazis' request seriously, helping define who would live and die.

That after the war von Mende thought back with "horror" might be seen as a sign of remorse. Or it could have been a recognition that his public participation in the Holocaust helped ruin his academic career, making permanent his turn from academics toward politics and espionage.

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As the German army pressed forward in 1942, it reached more densely populated Muslim areas. The Wehrmacht took the North Caucasus in August 1942. When a German general announced that the mosques there would be reopened, the elated citizens hoisted him on their shoulders, tossing him in the air and shouting hurrahs. The German advance was in fact running out of steam -- the Stalingrad debacle was looming -- but for now everything seemed to be working smoothly.

The military victories increased Berlin's interest in the minorities. The Foreign Office tried to take control of the minorities' emigre leaders -- especially those in the Promethean movement. But the Ostministerium ended up victorious. Yon Mende was the main winner, officially gaining responsibility for all Turkic peoples, including those in Central Asia. That meant he was in charge of all the emigres from this region as well as responsible for solving important problems, such as how to use Islam to motivate them to do the Germans' bidding.

Von Mende moved to strengthen the liaison offices. They were mostly staffed with emigres -- in contrast to the new recruits in the Wehrmacht and SS fighting units, who were former Red Army sol diers. He put the emigres on the Ostministerium's payroll and renamed the liaison offices "guiding offices" and then "national committees" -- a semantic move that implied that the emigres would guide the soldiers in the field and the people back home, as if they were nascent governments in exile.

Von Mende then allowed the guiding offices to place staff nominally in charge of the military units, further strengthening the impression that the minorities were running their own show. By 1943 he allowed Azerbaijanis, Volga Tatars, and Turkestanis to stage congresses in order to establish "representative" committees, small parliaments that would give voice to these peoples. The most important among them was the National Turkestani Unity Committee, headed by Kayum.

Kayum was von Mende's personal protege -- and the Muslim leader who most neatly parroted Nazi slogans. He repeatedly expressed his "faith in Germany." criticizing enemies of Germany as enemies of Turkestan. His committee had its own Turkic-language newspaper, Milli Turkistan, in which he blasted "imperialist, democratic, and liberal states" as enemies of Turkestan.

But Kayum's political style alienated people, and it would haunt him in the postwar era. In 1944, a group of Kyrgyz and Kazakhs in the Turkestani Unity Committee clashed with Kayum, appealing to the Ostministerium for its own representation and legions. Kayum retaliated brutally, denouncing the dissidents to the Gestapo. That could have meant the gallows for his opponents, but the Gestapo dropped the case, viewing it as a spat among emigres. As he would so often in the future, von Mende came to the rescue of his protege, organizing a Turkestani congress in Vienna that chose Kayum as its head.

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These events took on an aura of unreality: as German armies were pushed back, they lost control of the very territory the Ostministerium was supposed to oversee. Even von Mende's own home was under siege; in 1944 he evacuated his family to the countryside just before their apartment was destroyed in an air raid.

And yet it was exactly at this point that von Mende's work reached a fever pitch. Perhaps it was desperation, or simply the iron logic of von Mende's case: these Muslim men want to fight for us and all we have to do is make some promises. Never mind that the Nazis likely had no intention of fulfilling them; they were happy to let von Mende organize congresses and draw up fanciful plans if it meant that the soldiers would fight just a bit harder to keep the Soviets at bay.

After the war, von Mende would claim that the Soviet Muslims were not particularly religious --perhaps to allay fears that they were religious fanatics. But during the war, von Mende and others did their best to foster an Islamic identity among the soldiers. They did this by getting an endorsement from a top Muslim leader and by setting up Islamic seminaries.

The endorsement came from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Hussaini. Son of a prominent family of clerics, Hussaini inherited the position of Grand Mufti and set about building his power. He saw in the Nazis an ally against the British, who controlled his homeland, Palestine. During the war he escaped from Palestine and made his way to Europe, where he met Hitler, created bitterly anti-Semitic propaganda for the Nazis, and reviewed Muslim troops. After the war he was a staunch opponent of Israel and would come into contact with almost all the groups striving to control Islam in Munich. In 1943, von Mende decided he wanted a religious head for the Crimean Tatars -- to cloak German rule in religious garb. Von Mende sought Hussaini.

"The Islamic world is a whole." von Mende later wrote, explaining his actions. "German action toward the Moslems in the East must be such as not to prejudice Germany's standing among all Islamic peoples."

In other words, Germany could score points in the Muslim world by appointing a mufti for the Crimea. Von Mende and the Grand Mufti met again in July 1944. By then, the Red Army had regained control of the Crimea. Hussaini said that given the situation on the ground, appointing a mufti was pointless. But von Mende pushed forward on other fronts. In June 1944, he and the Islamic scholar Benno Spuler set up mullah schools in Gottingen and Dresden. Spuler was especially ambitious -- he intended to heal the thirteen-hundred- year split between Shia and Sunni Muslims and therefore trained only bi-denominational mullahs for the German army.

***

None of this saved the Germans. By early 1945, the Ostministerium had been bombed out of its building, and most of its files had been destroyed. Von Mende had one last card to play. Over the previous months, he may have arranged for the Muslim units to be transferred to the western front so that U.S. and British troops would capture them -- falling into Soviet hands would have meant certain death.

Many of the units simply fell apart. Most of the SS division defected to partisans in Czechoslovakia. A Georgian battalion rebelled against the Germans. In February 1945, Turkey declared war on Germany, dealing the Muslims' morale an even more devastating blow. Rosenberg said he would "recognize" the national committees as governments -- even though his ministry was now officially abolished. Even Sultan got his promotion. In early 1945, the Tatars set up a provisional government with Sultan as head of the military department.

But von Mende's efforts did serve an important function, especially for the political use of Islam after the war. Muslim minorities could claim they had been fighting for a quasi government in exile, not for the Nazis. Instead of a messy mixture of motives -- from wanting to escape dreadful prisoner-of-war camps to sheer opportunism -- they could claim the purest of reasons for their actions: national liberation. Forget that the Muslim organizations were essentially German creations meant to keep the troops in the field. The rationale of freeing a people from the Soviet oppressors to govern themselves and freely practice their faith would legitimize the entire effort and provide a blueprint for the Muslims' new friends, the Americans.

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