Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2015

Vol. 15, No. 4, 683688

REVIEW ESSAY

The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: a history, by Marko Attila
Hoare, London, Hurst, 2013, 478 pp., 55 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-8490-4241-3
Sarajevo 19411945: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitlers Europe, Emily
Greble, Ithaca, NY/London, Cornell University Press, 2011, 276 pp., US$35
(hardcover), ISBN 978-0-8014-4921-5
Islam and Nazi Germanys War, David Motadel, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2014, 500 pp., US$35 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-
6747-2460-0

Since the war of the 1990s, there has been steady interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and its Muslim/Bosniac population, as shown by the many books written by histo-
rians, geographers, political scientists and anthropologists. In this review, we will
cover three recent books that deal with the Second World War from different
perspectives, all of which give an important place to Bosnian Muslims. We will
show how these books refresh our view of the Second World War in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, notwithstanding a few shortcomings and aws. We thus hope to
contribute to a debate that is still in its nascent stages.
The rst of these three books is Marko Attila Hoares The Bosnian Muslims
in the Second World War, published by Hurst in 2013. Marko Attila Hoare, a
reader at Kingston University in London and a recognized specialist of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, already published a book in 2005 entitled Genocide and Resistance
in Hitlers Bosnia. The Partisans and the Chetniks 19411943. The current book
builds on the previous one, focusing on the period 19431945. In short, Hoare
defends the following thesis: during the Second World War, two authentically
Bosnian resistance movements arose in Bosnia-Herzegovina: the Partisans and the
Muslim autonomy movement. These two movements began to converge in 1943,
enabling Bosnia-Herzegovina to assert itself as a sovereign political entity. More
precisely, chapter 1 describes how the Partisan movement took root in the rural
Serbian population beginning in 1941, while in parallel a Muslim opposition
arose that was hostile to the Croatian Ustasha state and in favour of autonomy
for Bosnia-Herzegovina. In chapter 2, Hoare focuses on how the Partisans gained
a foothold in urban areas with a Muslim and Croat majority, and successfully
inltrated enemy military formations, beginning with the Croatian Home Guard.
Then, in chapter 3, he shows how in 1943, a portion of the Muslim elite began
to support the Partisan movement, while various Croatian army units defected
and the 13th Waffen-SS Division Handschar was formed with support from
some Muslim autonomists. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the Provincial Antifascist
Council for the Peoples Liberation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ZAVNOBiH) that met
on 25 November 1943 in Mrkonji Grad and asserted Bosnia-Herzegovinas
sovereignty. Chapter 5 takes a deeper look at this issue, showing the dissensions
within the Partisan movement on the subject of Bosnia-Herzegovina, before
returning to the Partisans political and military successes of late 1943. In chapter
684 Review essay

6, Hoare describes the collapse of the Croatian Ustasha state and the SS Division
Handschar in the course of 1944, emphasizing the fact that the Partisans were able
to take control of Bosnian towns practically without a ght, thanks to their inltration
efforts. Lastly, chapters 7 and 8 focus on the immediate post-war debates on
Bosnia-Herzegovinas Constitution and the matter of Muslim national identity.
Marko Attila Hoare is indisputably one of the foremost experts on Bosnia-
Herzegovina in the Second World War period, and he has carried out research in
the most important archives on this topic, including the military archives in
Belgrade, the archives of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the archives of the Historical
Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, both located in Sarajevo. He also has rare
knowledge of collections of documents and rsthand accounts published during the
Communist period, and can therefore provide accurate and vivid descriptions of
certain local situations, such as the fall of the city of Tuzla to the Partisans in
autumn 1943, the rallying of Muslim militias of Cazinska Krajina to the Partisan
movement in February 1944 or the collapse of the SS Division Handschar in
autumn 1944. Likewise, Hoare describes in great detail the political disagreements
between Communist leaders or the trajectories of certain important Muslims,
including Muhamed Panda, Neat Topi and Ismet Bektaevi. Hoares attention
to local contexts and individuals is one of the most important contributions of this
book. He casts light on little-known aspects of the Second World War in Southeast
Europe. In particular, he shows how ideological differences were often less
important than family bonds, childhood friendships and momentary tactical choices,
demonstrating that we cannot understand the Second World War in Bosnia-
Herzegovina without taking account of the circumstances that caused thousands
and thousands of men to shift their political and military allegiance often several
times. As such, Hoare breaks with the classic representation of the Partisans
ghting in the mountains, alone against their opponents. He shows the importance
of urban Communist networks and their inltration of the Croatian Home Guard
and Muslim militias. Thus, the political efforts of Yugoslav Communists stand out
as being just as important if not more so than their military action.
Although Hoare is very convincing when he describes the importance of shift-
ing allegiances, local dynamics and urban resistance, his central argument that
the Partisan movement and the Muslim autonomy movement converged around an
independent Bosnia-Herzegovina is much weaker. Firstly, Hoare draws articial
parallels between two movements that had very different characteristics and aims.
He ignores the persistent anti-communist views of most members of the Muslim
autonomy movement (especially the Muslim clerics). He speaks of a dual Bosnian
movement of resistance (9), whereas the history of the Muslim autonomy move-
ment is chiey the story of their collaboration with the Third Reich. He even
makes the odd assertion that the SS Handschar Division was the agship project
of the Muslim autonomist resistance (103) whose ruling ideology shared some
common ground with the multinational Bosnian patriotism of the Partisans (195).
At the same time, his emphasis on the Bosnian patriotism of the Partisan
movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina leads him to ignore its Yugoslav dimension. Yet
this aspect was clearly visible not only in most ofcial resolutions and propaganda
tracts, but also on the ground. As Hoare himself notes, the region of Cazinska
Krajina was long dependent on the Communist Party of Croatia, the Partisans of
Vojvodina fought in Eastern Bosnia and the Bosnian units took part in the ultimate
liberation of Serbia and Croatia. Hoare ignores the fact that the Yugoslav idea was
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 685

decisive in mobilizing Bosnian Serbs, who were the majority of Bosnian Partisans
until the war ended. In his attempt to demonstrate the emergence of a Bosnian
state, Hoare interprets the Second World War with strong ideological bias. On the
one hand, he attributes to the Bosnian Muslims and their elite a national conscious-
ness that did not exist at the time. On the other, he describes the new Socialist
Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a nation state, a description that results in
some semantic confusion: on page 287, he writes that in 1945, Bosnia and
Herzegovina became a nation-state without a nation (a contradiction in terms),
then he concedes that the new Constitution implied a nationally heterogeneous citi-
zenry (336) and concludes by speaking of a Bosnian multinational patriotic
model (380; my emphasis). In short, Marko Hoares central thesis is not very
credible, but his book is an impressive source of information, and is a must-read
for anyone interested in the Second World War in Yugoslavia.
The second book covered in this review is Emily Grebles Sarajevo 19411945.
Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitlers Europe. Greble is an associate professor
at the City College of New York. In this book, she rejects the analyses of the
Second World War in terms of ethnic conict or a black-and-white opposition
between Partisans and collaborators. Instead, she favours a two-pronged local
approach focused on religious communities on the one hand, and on the civic con-
sciousness shared by all Sarajevos inhabitants, on the other. In particular, she
shows how the local elites multiple strategies of adaptation and resistance enabled
this Sarajevan exception to be preserved despite the nationalist and racist ideologies
put forward by the Croatian Ustasha state. Emily Greble opens her book with a
brief history of Sarajevan multiculturalism, then in chapter 1, she describes the rela-
tions between religious communities and their internal diversity on the eve of the
war. Chapter 2 describes the rst few weeks of the war and occupation, showing
notably how the rise of the new Ustasha power went hand in hand with a challenge
to the relations between the state and religious institutions, on the one hand, and
the autonomy of municipal institutions on the other. Chapter 3 focuses on the anti-
Jewish and anti-Serbian policies implemented in 1941, with emphasis on local com-
plicity and opposition, and then investigates the diverging trajectories of these two
policies beginning in 1942 (extermination of the Jews vs. reintegration of Orthodox
Christians). In chapter 4, Greble begins by showing the internal divisions of
Croatian identity in Sarajevo (Catholics vs. Muslims, religious vs. secular, etc.),
then describes the deterioration in material conditions in Sarajevo (the inow of
refugees, food shortages, etc.) and the reaction of municipal authorities and
community associations. Chapter 5 emphasizes the weak inuence of the Partisan
movement in Sarajevo, then shows how the opposition of some members of the
Muslim elite to the Ustasha state led them to demand autonomy for Bosnia-
Herzegovina and to support the creation of the SS Division Handschar. In chapter
6, Greble turns her attention to the numerous forms of local resistance beginning in
1943, and to internal tensions within each community in a context of political
uncertainty and substantial material hardship. Lastly, chapter 7 is dedicated to the
wars nal months, which were marked by a nal wave of terror by the Ustasha,
great apprehension as the Partisans drew nearer, and continued efforts by municipal
authorities and community associations to preserve the civic consciousness of the
city. Greble concludes by emphasizing the importance of a local approach to under-
standing the Second World War, and asserts that despite the difculties and
686 Review essay

changes, the citys elite managed to preserve the multiculturalism of Sarajevo

multiculturalism that, according to Greble, endures in Sarajevo today (256).
In writing this book, Emily Greble used various little-known local archives,
beginning with the archives of Sarajevos municipality, as well as the archives of
various public administrations and cultural or charitable associations. Thus, she
enables us to discover how the Sarajevan municipal authorities faced the inherent
difculties of war, how the Muslim charity Merhamet aided Muslim refugees arriv-
ing in Sarajevo and how the staff of the provincial museum and national theatre
reacted to demands by the Ustasha authorities. More generally, Grebles local
approach offers a resolutely new perspective on the Second World War in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, allowing for a nuanced and vivid presentation of the main political,
religious and civic leaders, and putting forth some very persuasive arguments. Thus,
Grebles central argument that the Sarajevan elite still largely identied in religious
and civic terms, defending these forms of identication from the nationalist ideolo-
gies of the Ustashas and Chetniks is much more plausible than the idea of a
Bosnian revolution asserted by Marko Hoare. Greble also shows the importance of
non-violent forms of urban resistance and ambiguous political allegiances that are
generally ignored in research on the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Unlike
Hoare, Greble has the merit of emphasizing the importance of anti-communism in
the political choices of the Sarajevan elite, and of showing how old debates over the
secularisation of the state, the organization of religious institutions or the religious
dimensions of national identity continued in the wartime context.
While Emily Grebles book stands out for the strength of its reasoning and the
precision of its descriptions, it nevertheless falls prey to a few simplications. First
of all, the simple fact that Sarajevo saw substantial demographic growth during the
interwar period means that we must take with a grain of salt the image of an island
of urban multiculturalism under threat from the countryside in the sway of national-
ist (and communist) ideologies. Moreover, the essentializing view of Sarajevos
urbanity causes Greble to make a few errors of interpretation. For example, she
deems that the memorandum addressed by Muslims to Hitler in November 1942
adopts a more sophisticated, Sarajevo-centric focus (165), whereas this memoran-
dum was in fact a break with the traditional reasoning of the Muslim urban elite,
and its likely author was actually living in Banja Luka. Likewise, Greble
emphasizes that less than 1% of the Bosnian population of Sarajevo was involved
in the Communist resistance in 19411942, but such a percentage was not unique
to Sarajevo and was probably similar in many other occupied cities in Croatia and
elsewhere in Europe. Moreover, the authors desire to deconstruct the traditional
binary view of resistance vs. collaboration is welcome, but can also lead to debat-
able interpretations. Greble probably underestimates the importance of the Commu-
nist resistance in Sarajevo (a debate with Marko Hoare on this point would be
interesting), and sometimes struggles to distinguish between various types and
degrees of resistance. For example, she writes that there were thousands of towns-
men involved in resistance activities after 1943, but only a handful working for the
Partisans and the Tchetniks (207), but can we consider these forms of resistance to
be equivalent? Likewise, Greble writes of the waves of arrests and executions that
swept the city, but pays virtually no attention to the German occupation apparatus
or its links with the local political elite: German police commanders Franz
Abromeit and Werner Fromm are relegated to a mere footnote (167), whereas their
records in the State Commission for the Establishment of War Crimes suggest
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 687

active collaboration with the Muslim elite, in general, and the Sarajevo municipal-
ity, in particular. Despite these caveats, Emily Greble has written a book of great
quality, full of innovative thinking and fascinating detail. We can hope that it will
prompt other researchers to focus on the local contexts of the Second World War,
whether urban or rural.
The third book in this review does not focus on Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Islam
and Nazi Germanys War, David Motadel, research fellow at Gonville and Caius
College, University of Cambridge, aims to reconstitute the Third Reichs Islampoli-
tik from a global perspective, and thus to put Islam on the political and strategic
map of the Second World War (5). In the books rst part, Motadel lays down the
overall framework of this Islampolitik. In chapter 1, he reminds us that the German
Islampolitik stretches back to the colonial policies of the German Empire under
Bismarck and the beginnings of German Orientalism. It underwent an unexpected
expansion during the First World War with a failed effort to rally the Muslim colo-
nial subjects of the British, French and Russian Empires. In chapter 2, Motadel
shows how the Third Reichs interest in the Muslim world was not really sparked
until 1941, and involved various players, chiey the Auswrtiges Amt, the
Ostministerium, the Wehrmacht and the SS. The author also investigates to what
extent the Nazi leaders attitude was attributable to a fascination for Islam, to Nazi
ideology and to political pragmatism. In the second part of the book, Motadel
focuses on war zones with Muslim populations, beginning with North Africa and
the Middle East (chapter 3), Crimea, the Caucasus and the Reichskommissariat
Ostland (chapter 4) and Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Balkans (chapter 5). In each
case, Motadel carefully describes the propaganda efforts aimed at local populations
and prisoners of war, and in areas under lasting German occupation, the attempts
either to restore Islamic religious institutions (e.g. in Crimea) or to rely on existing
ones (e.g. in Bosnia-Herzegovina). He shows the limitations of these attempts to
instrumentalize Islam: no uprisings occurred in territories under British or Soviet
control, and Great Britain and the USSR quickly launched their own propaganda
campaigns aimed at Muslim populations. The third and nal part of the book
focuses in particular on the Muslim units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS,
mainly recruited from Muslims in the USSR and the Balkans. In chapter 6,
Motadel shows how German military commanders attempted to use Islam and
Islamic religious institutions to recruit volunteers. Then, in chapter 7, he focuses on
Islams place in maintaining order among the troops, notably through the appoint-
ment of army imams and the organization of religious life. Lastly, in chapter 8, he
returns to the propaganda materials produced for Muslim combatants and the limits
to these soldiers obedience, in a context of continued strong discrimination against
them. In conclusion, Motadel says that the Third Reichs Islampolitik largely failed.
In his view, this policy was too inauthentic to be successful and was based upon
too many misconceptions about Muslims and Islam (315), but nevertheless repre-
sents one of the most vigorous attempts to politicize and instrumentalise Islam in
modern history (322).
In his conclusion, David Motadel writes that this book, for the rst time, com-
prehensively examined Germanys engagement with Islam during the Second World
War (313). Although it is hard to say whether this is actually the rst comprehen-
sive look at the issue, it is denitely the best one to date. Motadels book provides
a vast panorama of the Third Reichs Islampolitik and clearly presents various
aspects of this policy and various questions that it raises. Motadel loves details,
688 Review essay

and the book sometimes reads like historical anthropology. This is particularly true
when he presents the contents of various propaganda materials, explains the
workings of Crimean religious institutions or describes the role of imams in the SS
Handschar Division, the celebration of Uraza Bayram in Kislovodsk or ritual live-
stock slaughter on the front line. Likewise, he provides biographical information
about many individuals involved in this Islampolitik, on both the German and
Muslim sides (or both sides at once, in the case of Harun Al-Rashid).
More generally, this book is virtually exhaustive in its approach, and would
therefore be hard to surpass. However, Motadel says almost nothing about Austro-
Hungarian Orientalism or the Bosnian Regiments in the First World War. Nor does
he describe Karl von Kremplers Albanian Muslim SS Legion in the Sanjak region
or the Croatian legionary divisions (under German command) that included many
Bosnian Muslims and had their own military imams. Motadel uses an impressive
number of sources, including diverse secondary sources and archives. Apart from a
few discoveries, such as propaganda materials from the Freiburg military archives,
the author is especially skilled at using well-known sources in a unique and judi-
cious way (e.g. the reference NS19/2601 at Berlin-Lichterfelde). Yet Motadels
book is mainly based on German sources, and therefore favours a German perspec-
tive over local ones. As Motadel himself says, the reception of German policies
by Muslims has not been the focus of this study (317). As a result, the Muslims
sometimes appear to be mere receptors or objects for German policy, and when
they do act, their motives are much less clear than those of their German counter-
parts. With regard to Muslim soldiers, Motadel writes that it remains open to ques-
tion whether religious policies and propaganda were the major reasons for [their
collaboration]; in many cases other motivations were stronger (315). Naming these
other motivations would probably require another book, so Motadel can hardly be
criticized for not answering this question. However, in his book as in those by
Hoare and Greble the motivations of ordinary people, somewhere between sur-
vival strategies, political allegiances and ideological passions, could still be better
elucidated.

Xavier Bougarel
Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin
bougarel@cmb.hu-berlin.de
2015, Xavier Bougarel
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1037573
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