If you missed Shmuel Klatzkin’s July 18 American Spectator essay, “The Nazis and the Mullahs,” please follow the link and take a moment to read it. It’s well worth your time. In our present historical moment, when leftists minimize the evil of the Iranian regime, he reminds us, in chapter and verse, of the mullahs’ historical alignment with the definitive evil of modern history. This is particularly important when our new generation of democratic socialists align themselves with radical Islam, while tossing the “nazi” label at everyone they disagree with — even, absurdly, at Israel. It’s likely not incidental that the unlamented Maine senate candidate Graham Platner got his Nazi tattoo while on leave in Croatia in 2007. As a one-time student of the Nazi period — I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the antecedents of the Gestapo — I was particularly struck by the essay’s accompanying illustration, a period photograph showing the notorious Grand Mufti of Jerusalem inspecting soldiers of the 13th SS division. The story behind this captured moment deserves telling, as it underscores just how deeply Nazism and Islamism were intertwined and — particularly — how much they hated Jews. Muslims were not simply aligned with Nazis. Some of them were active participants in the Holocaust itself. Which brings us to the curious history of the 13th SS Mountain Infantry Division “Handschar.” The picture used with Klatzkin’s article shows these soldiers in battle dress and wearing steel helmets. Had they been depicted in ordinary parade dress, they would have crowned their SS uniforms with a Fez, the cap associated with the Ottoman Turks, and, specifically, worn by the Ottoman gendarmes who’d once policed Bosnia and other Balkan regions during the time of Turkish rule. Nor was the division’s honorific title, “Handschar,” incidental. The term referred to a ceremonial sword carried by the Ottoman gendarmes. Casual students of Nazi history often assume that their notions of racial supremacy were rigid and built entirely based on the so-called “Aryan” race. This concept, confected of all manner of weird anthropological mumbo-jumbo, somehow conflated “Aryan,” a term with a basis in ancient India and Persia, with a race of blond, blue-eyed, Nordic supermen. The term never quite worked even in the realms of Nazi fantasy. Hitler was short and dark-haired while Goebbels was so diminutive that his enemies referred to him as the “Giftzwerg,” or “poison dwarf.” None of these figures, not even Himmler, the head of the SS, much resembled the Nazi racial fantasy. Over time, this scarcely mattered, since the concept itself proved almost infinitely malleable. At its most absurd outer boundary, Germany’s Japanese allies were redefined as “yellow Aryans.” When mounting casualties called for more widespread recruiting, all manner of compromises emerged in the name of drawing soldiers from the various subjugated populations. The SS itself ended the war as a veritable foreign legion; for example, some of the final defenders of Berlin in 1945 were French SS members. But the 13th SS belonged to something other than desperation, a fantasy concocted of a different kind of racialist absurdity. Himmler, ever given to weird obsessions, decided that the SS needed a Muslim division. Untangling his racialist justification for all this is too tedious and complicated for a short essay, but he soon fixed upon the Bosnian community as the perfect source, Muslims who’d demonstrated good fighting qualities in the First World War and who could be used to suppress the Serbs of Tito’s communist partisan army. Not all Bosnians bought into this, and recruiting didn’t proceed smoothly, but, eventually, enough Muslims volunteered to allow a division of mountain infantry to be formed. Importantly, the impetus to create a Muslim SS unit preceded the later desperate attempts to compensate for Germany’s massive losses in Russia, North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe. The placement of the 13th SS in the list of SS divisions is instructive. Only two of the first 12 SS divisions were foreign, the 5th SS Panzer Division, “Wiking,” and the 6th SS Mountain Infantry Division, “Nord.” As the honorifics underscore, both were based upon “Nordic” volunteers from the Scandinavian countries, which located them firmly within the Nazis “Aryan” ideology. A military division composed largely of Bosnian Muslims was something else entirely, and only Himmler’s capacity for tedious supplication wore down Hitler’s skepticism about the idea. In the end, Himmler prevailed, only to encounter a second problem, a shortage of Bosnian volunteers. This was eventually addressed through the direct intervention of Hitler’s friend the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, living in comfortable exile in Berlin, directing anti-British, pro-Nazi propaganda at the Arab peoples of the Middle East. In the final analysis, what bound the Grand Mufti and Hitler together and what would ultimately animate many of the operations of the 13th SS was hatred for Jews. While the 13th SS did perform the expected anti-partisan operations across occupied Yugoslavia, it also perpetrated repeated atrocities aimed at the region’s Jewish population, although it also committed atrocities against non-Jews. Pushed back into Germany by the Red Army, the division eventually disintegrated, and many of its member tried to hide their misdeeds in the usual manner; by effacing their SS blood group tattoos. Only a relative handful of its members were brought to justice in war crimes trials after the war, all too painfully typical for the postwar reckoning with such criminals. One who was executed was an SS Obersturmbannfuhrer (lieutenant colonel) by the name of Imam Halim Malkoc — make what one will of the combination of “Imam” with senior SS rank. Significantly, and undoubtedly with the connivance of the Grand Mufti, large numbers of 13th SS veterans relocated to Syria and Iraq, where they joined the Arab armies attacking Israel in 1948. Killing Jews, by this time, had become part of their ideological DNA, although one suspects they were shocked to encounter Jews who fought back effectively. After 1948, the Grand Mufti went on to spread his anti-Jewish poison throughout the Middle East, his influence waning only with age and the emergence of a younger generation of his disciples in hatred. The survivors of the 13th SS, never many in number, simply blended into their various new and old homelands, ultimately disappearing except again as the “seed corn” of new hatreds. It’s likely not incidental that the unlamented Maine senate candidate Graham Platner got his Nazi tattoo while on leave in Croatia in 2007. It’s almost certainly the case that the tattoo artist knew exactly what the tattoo represented. The skull and crossbones in question wasn’t some Jolly Roger pirate symbol, but precisely the one used by the SS on cap badges and collar insignia, and this is something that no one in the former Yugoslavia would fail to understand. And it beggars belief that even a drunken Platner would have missed the message in all its assertive transgressiveness. The salient point, however, is the ongoing unwillingness of the emergent Democratic Socialists —  indeed of large swathes of the Democrat party — to acknowledge the links between present day radical Islam and its Nazi-adjacent antecedents. This is not a matter of the facile Nazi name-calling that has become a commonplace of our current political discourse. No, it’s a matter of historical fact, a documented lineage that extends from the shadow of Nazi Germany to Iran’s IRGC and every other repository of Islamist fanaticism. So, the picture of the Grand Mufti inspecting a unit of Nazi soldiers tells an important story, but the most important part of that story is that the soldiers were Muslims serving in the SS. It’s a history that deserves to be remembered in all its fullness. READ MORE from James H. McGee: Peace Process, Meet Reality The Christian Slaughter the World Ignores ‘We Have Only To Be Lucky Once’ James H. McGee is a retired nuclear security and counter-terrorism professional. His most recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, was featured among National Review’s favorite books in 2025. His next novel, The Cathedral of Sorrows, will directly focus on the plight of Africa’s Christians. You can find The Zebras from Minsk and his previous thriller, Letter of Reprisal in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon. The Cathedral of Sorrow will appear this fall.