Jonathan Trigg: Hitler's Jihadis

by Trigg, Jonathan

ISBN: 9780752465869

Published: 2012

By the end of the Second World War there were soldiers of more than thirty different nationalities in the Waffen-SS, and Reich Germans themselves were in the minority. How did a regime that believed so completely in the racial superiority of its population come to welcome hundreds of thousands of foreigners into its military elite? Who were these foreign SS men, and why did they fight so long and so hard for such a murderous regime? Hitler's Jihadis provides an analysis of some of the most intriguing and controversial of these foreign volunteers - the thousands of Muslims, from as far away as India who wore the SS double lightning flashes alongside their erstwhile conquerors. Jonathan Trigg gives an insight into the pre-war politics that inspired these Islamic volunteers, who for the most part would not survive. Those who did survive the war and the bloody retribution that followed saw the reputation of the units in which they had served berated as militarily inept and castigated...