13th Waffen Division of the SS Handschar

In WW2, Thousands of Slavish Muslims served in one of the most unique and notorious Waffen-SS divisions – the 13th Waffen Division of the SS Handschar.

Though, in fact, in the scope of enormously Holocaust unique event in history, these units, or even the Mufti's part as a whole, played a very marginal role, the will and readiness was there, especially on the side of the "spiritual" recruiter and motivator, the eager Mufti's.

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In 1943, when Italy collapsed, the NDH reached its apogee and the Dalmatian coast, including Kotor and Zadar, was given to an enlarged Croatian state. For many Croat nationalists, the ephemeral 1943 borders were the culmination of their boldest aspirations because they included Bosnia as well as Dalmatia. As far as the Ustaše ere concerned, the primary obstacle in the way of Bosnia becoming part of Croatia remained the Orthodox population, many of whom were not generally considered to be 'redeemable', although there were some forced conversions. Hundreds of thousands were murdered on the grounds of race or religion by the Ustaše especially between the summer of 1941 and 1942. The fascist regime launched a campaign of extermination of the Orthodox peoples of the region and, as allies of the Nazis, allowed the deportation of Sarajevo's Ladino-speaking Jewish population to the death camps. Muslim leaders were initially quite sceptical about the Ustasa until the intervention of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, who persuaded many of them to support the Third Reich.  Adolf Hitler was enthusiastic about keeping alive links between the Nazis and Islam and was persuaded by Heinrich Himmler that the Bosnian Muslims would make a suitable division of the Schutzstaffel or SS. Some of the older Bosnians had fought for the Habsburgs just over 20 years earlier, including Husejin Biscević. Muhamed Hadziefendić who had served in both the Habsburg and Yugoslavian armies, organized a Muslim militia in the Tuzla region before joining the 13th SS Handschar Division in 1943, which 12,000 men volunteered to join. He and his men were surrounded by the Communist Partisans in Tuzla in the autumn of 1943 and died in the struggle. The name that the SS battalion adopted referred to the dagger that was their collective symbol. Some attempts were made to mark their Muslim heritage and their rations excluded alcohol and pork. As in the First World War, their dead were honoured as šehidi (Muslim martyrs). As part of their uniform, the Handschar wore a fez with two further symbols: the SS skull and an eagle astride a swastika. Bosnian Handschar soldiers were among the defenders of Berlin in 1945 when it fell to the Soviets. Ustaše troops carried out the genocide so rapidly in the early summer of 1941, that some confused Serbs reported their actions to the authorities, largely because they could not believe that these actions could be sanctioned by a legitimate government and must be the work of terrorists. Tomislav Dulić has calculated that approximately 75 per cent of Jewish and Roma communities of the NDH and up to 17 per cent of Serbs died as 'victims of fascism'. Six per cent of Croats died, many killed in 1945 by Communists ...

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