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A MOSQUE IN MUNICH: NAZIS, THE CIA, AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN THE WEST |
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Chapter 7: "A POLITICALLY SMART
ACT": THE MOSQUE IS CONCEIVED IN 1956, GERHARD VON MENDE received a memo from Theodor Oberlander, head of the West German refugee ministry, outlining an important national goal, one that required help from an unlikely source: Munich's Muslims. West Germany was home to thousands of emigres, Oberlander wrote, but many had been recruited by foreign intelligence groups such as Amcomlib. This could not be allowed to continue, he said, because West Germany needed these same Muslims. One day soon communism would fall, and they would return home to be future leaders of their homelands. There, they would help achieve West Germany's supreme foreign policy goal: reunification with East Germany and the recovery of vast stretches of German land lost to Poland and the Soviet Union after the war. "The success of the exiles will positively influence carrying out German goals in their home states." Then Oberlander outlined those goals, writing in a vein that had an unusually strong revanchist tone: "The goals of the political exiles lie in a complex and mutual relationship to the German efforts for reunification and lifting the effects of the Potsdam Agreement in relation to the Oder-Neisse border." Behind the bureaucratese was a crystal-clear message: West Germany wanted to redraw its border and regain its lost eastern territories, which lay beyond the Oder and Neisse rivers. For decades, the Oder-Neisse border was the most sensitive topic in German foreign policy. The two rivers separated East Germany from Poland. It had become the border after the 1945 Potsdam agreement had carved up Germany. The four major powers -- Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR -- each got a zone of occupation. Later, the Soviet zone would become East Germany, and the three western powers' zones would unite to form West Germany. Less well known is that two other zones of occupation also existed, both of them east of the Oder and the Neisse. One was administered by Poland. It encompassed large parts of Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania, and included Germany's third-largest city, Breslau (now known by its Polish name, Wroclaw). In addition, the Soviets received a slice of Germany, the eastern half of East Prussia, including the German city of Konigsberg (renamed Kaliningrad). Unlike the other zones, these two were never returned to German control after the war. Instead, they were annexed permanently by the Poles and the Soviets. The Poles didn't benefit much; the Soviets had already annexed parts of eastern Poland, so the German lands just compensated Poland for what it had lost. German territories, which had sprawled into eastern Europe for centuries, now ended at the Oder and the Neisse, which ran straight from the Baltic down to the Czechoslovakian border. If it all looked neat on an armchair strategist's map, this redrawing of central Europe's borders added to the misery caused by the war. The lost German territories had been overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Germans. Within a matter of months, these people were murdered or brutally expelled, first by the Red Army and then by state-sanctioned pogroms. Together with ethnic Germans fleeing other countries, more than thirteen million German refugees, one of the largest refugee flows in modern times, were forcibly driven from their homes. Most ended up in what became West Germany, but hundreds of thousands died along the way. Oberlander was the chief spokesman for these Vertriebene, the "expellees" or the "driven off." In the 1950s and '60s, they fought a rearguard action against those West Germans who wanted to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union or recognize the Oder-Neisse border. Oberlander headed a key political party that kept attitudes firmly fixed on loss and grievance. This was the same Oberlander who had participated in Hitler's failed beer-hall putsch of 1923 and who had led one of the first Wehrmacht units made up of Soviet minorities. Born in the Baltic, he realized the value of the non-Russian minorities. He had participated in pogroms against Jews but opposed the Nazis' policy toward the occupied territories -- like von Mende, he thought Germany should be the non-Russians' ally. For that he had lost his position in the party and his military command. That setback became a blessing after the war, allowing him to position himself as a victim of the Nazis instead of a party insider who had fallen out because of infighting. That, along with his party's voting power, was enough to convince West Germany's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to make Oberlander the cabinet minister in charge of refugees. Oberlander was probably the farthest-right member of the West German government, and in later years he came to be considered the personification of the young democracy's Nazi roots. The memo he sent to von Mende illustrated this far-right bent: he wanted Germany's borders redrawn and von Mende's cooperation in keeping a firm grip on the assets he thought could help achieve that -- the foreigners living on West German soil who had fought for Germany during the war. Von Mende had most of the emigre groups firmly in hand. He financed Bulgarians and Rumanians, Ukrainians and Czechs. But the previous year's events showed that he was losing control of the Muslims. Compared to Amcomlib, his bureau was puny, and most of the Muslims were working for the Americans. Kuniholm's trip to Turkey and Europe emphasized Washington's more ambitious goal: using Muslims in its global propaganda wars. *** West Germany and the United States were firm allies during the forty-year-long Cold War. America had supported West Germany's creation and its integration into the world community. West Germany became a steadfast military ally, providing the bulk of troops in the West's military alliance. But the relationship wasn't always smooth, and this was a particularly trying time. West Germany had just regained full sovereignty. The country was making overtures to the Soviet Union, causing the United States to worry that it might accept a deal like the one offered to Austria: reunification of its eastern and western sections in exchange for neutrality. US officials even thought West Germany might expel Amcomlib and Radio Free Europe from Munich and discussed how to evacuate staff. Oberlander's plan began to worry Washington. The US. intelligence community needed the Soviet minorities in Munich to staff Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe -- and to undertake covert activities. But this arrangement would fall apart if Bonn gained control of the minorities. As US. officials saw it, the driving force behind this policy was Oberlander and the diplomats in the Foreign Office, such as Otto Brautigam, who, like Oberlander, had been heavily involved in the Nazi movement. "They are not Nazis in the sense of seeking to put Mein Kampf back on every table in Germany." the State Department stated in a report on the group, "but they set the German national cause, in nationalist-imperialist fashion, higher than all other causes." "Their chief agent is Professor Dr. Gerhard von Mende and their chief governmental tool is von Mende's Office for Homeless Aliens." a classified State Department cable said. "The von Mende mission is not concerned with the fate of 'satellite' peoples but with the fate of the Germans. He and his principals have no intention of allowing 'inexperienced' Americans to arbitrate in this area." The cable also stated that von Mende had been dealing with undemocratic emigre groups -- "some of them rather shabby collaborators with the Nazis." The CIA noted that von Mende had helped set up a group to help the emigres -- the Aid Society of Former Volunteer Units. It was made up of the German officers who had led the Soviet minority troops during the war and now were concerned about their fate in West Germany. Von Mende ran the group out of his offices in Dusseldorf, according to the CIA. While that might be an exaggeration, the group certainly did exist and its records show that it was made up primarily of ex-Wehrmacht and ex-SS officers who had led the minorities. And von Mende did have close ties to it. By late 1955, the CIA had decided to take action against the man they'd once tried to recruit. "I have built up quite a small connection file on this gentleman and his associates." a CIA agent wrote in von Mende's file. "Perhaps we could launch an operation to subvert one of his people with the aim of getting microphotographs of his information files ..." But a few months later, the agent had another idea. Lodged in U.S. government files was a note from Amcomlib's Ike Patch, who a couple of months earlier had talked to von Mende. Patch reported that von Mende had been upset that West Germany was about to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The unnamed CIA agent saw an opening: "I was 'stalking' von Mende with the idea of having his place and his files in Dusseldorf ransacked and possibly photographed but the latest information from you seems to me to indicate that we would do better to try to recruit him." The agent noted that this would be the third time in eleven years that U.S. intelligence would make overtures to von Mende, ruefully noting that they had a deal all but sealed in 1949. "The case was suddenly dropped at Munich because von Mende employed a methodical approach to the problem and [the CIA office in] Munich was immersed in a program of helter-skelter, planless recruitment of 'agents.'" This time the CIA would do it von Mende's way. Attached to the formal recruitment plan was a list of von Mende's agents, including, of course, Veli Kayum. The agent wrote that Kayum had outed Rusi Nasar as having received CIA money for distributing U.S. propaganda during the Hajj. The CIA kept close tabs on von Mende and in March 1956 noted that the East German secret police and intelligence service, the Stasi (known by its German abbreviation, MfS), was seeking a map of his office. "This could be an indication that the MfS has some plans for Gerhard," the agent wrote. Then, in early 1957, the CIA offices in Germany were asked to comment on Soviet plans to recruit Muslims. The request seems to have come after two U.S.-backed agents working with Muslims were exposed as spies; the CIA was trying to trace any further leaks in its operations. The Munich office responded by again proposing von Mende. "If von Mende is recruited, he can readily produce a 'Who's Who' of Moslems." But von Mende didn't seem to be interested in working for the Americans. Perhaps reflecting West Germany's growing self-confidence, von Mende was angry. He saw the minorities, including the Muslims, as his assets. And he had a plan to win them back. *** In late March 1956, Nurredin Namangani landed in Munich. Survivor of the Soviet gulag, imam of an SS division, holder of high military awards, he was an ideal choice to bring Munich's Muslims into line. At least that seems to have been von Mende's reasoning. In keeping with Oberlander's desire to gain control of the emigres, von Mende had invited Namangani to Germany to head a new office aimed at unifying Germany's Muslims. Until then, the only organization in Germany that could claim to do so was Gacaoglu's Islam group, but it was now under strong U.S. influence. Namangani was one of von Mende's men, with a proven wartime record of loyalty to Germany. Indeed, as Namangani's appointment was pushed through the bureaucracy, his long service to Germany appeared to be his main qualification. This was not a man who would hand out CARE packages for the Americans or front their press conferences. He was indeed a political creature, but one who would loyally serve West Germany, a salaried employee of the state. Von Mende had been planning Namangani's arrival for a while. Earlier in 1956, Oberlander's ministry had contacted von Mende about funding Gacaoglu's group. Of all the exile groups in Germany, the Muslims seemed the most disorganized, and the ministry wondered if Gacaoglu wouldn't be the logical choice to unite them. When Gacaoglu wrote the Bavarian social-affairs ministry a year earlier asking for money, the officials noted that "the majority of the Mohammedans collected in the above-mentioned group served in the German Wehrmacht ... therefore a favorable handling of the request is requested." But von Mende pushed back. He wrote to the federal ministry that a one-time payment to Gacaoglu might "create a favorable echo in the Muslim countries of the Orient" but said that Germany needed more -- a chief imam for its Muslims. One didn't exist in Germany, he wrote, but he knew someone who would be happy to return to Germany and "look after" the Muslims: Namangani. Von Mende and Namangani were old friends. Namangani had been arrested by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in Turkestan and taken to a prison in western Russia. A month after the German invasion, the Wehrmacht overran his camp and he was liberated. Four months later he was the imam in the 450th Battalion during the pioneering Tiger B operation. During the war he rose to head imam of the SS division Ostturkischer Waffenverband, or Eastern Turkic Armed Formation. That unit helped suppress the Warsaw city uprising in 1944. For his service Namangani won the Iron Cross, first and second class, two of Germany's highest military awards. At the war's end, Namangani spent two years in a U.S. prisoner-of- war camp in Italy and then lived in Germany. He was a regular at the von Mende home, coming over to cook Uzbek food and share stories with his patron. Later he went to Turkey, either to work among emigre groups or, according to his own account, to get theological training -- these details of his biography are unclear, and no record exists of such study. Friends remember him as strict and humorless. He criticized one mixed Christian-Muslim family when the woman put up a Christmas tree, arguing that the woman should convert and the family become Muslim. A young Uzbek officer who met him in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941 said that Namangani "commanded only a little appreciation from the men since his religious fanaticism was so extreme." Namangani seemed to have little authority other than the fact that von Mende appointed him. In a letter to von Mende shortly after Namangani arrived, Veli Kayum wrote that even before Namangani had left Istanbul, "denunciations" in Munich had started. Exactly why is not clear, but over the next few years Namangani would be plagued by criticism for having been a hard-core Nazi and a bad leader -- his poor German, for example, made him unable to communicate with the ex-soldiers' children. Namangani's Nazi past might seem perfectly normal among men who had almost all fought for the Germans. After all, this was the 1950S,a period of relative amnesia about the Nazi era, when people wanted to forget and move on -- dealing directly with the trauma would get underway only in the 1960s. But Namangani had been a highly politicized figure. As divisional imam, he had worked directly with the Nazi military leadership. That made him more than a battlefield cleric; he was part of the political apparatus that had led the men into a hopeless battle with an unsavory ally. Moreover, Nazi ties weren't as unproblematic as we might assume. In 1960, for example, Oberlander himself was brought down after his Nazi past was brought to light. He was attacked in East German and Soviet propaganda for participating in an anti-Jewish pogrom. The charges stuck and he stepped down, spending the next forty years trying to clear his name. Just two months after Namangani arrived back in West Germany, the Stasi was taking aim at von Mende too. It launched an investigation, probably on behalf of the Soviet Union -- which likely had asked for help in discovering why this small "research office" was behind so much anti-Soviet propaganda. The Soviets were already attacking von Mende's most valuable employee, Baymirza Hayit. In July 1956, Radio Tashkent launched a well-informed attack against Hayit, recounting his wartime service and how he allegedly had planned for his own escape at the end of the war, leaving his men to their fate. In the end, the Stasi never launched a full assault on von Mende's operation, perhaps saving its powder for later or focusing on Oberlander. What is clear is that people like Namangani were vulnerable. *** How could the West Germans, none of whom were Muslim, anoint a Muslim leader? That question never seemed to bother von Mende and his colleagues in the government. To them, the only issue was how to knock out Gacaoglu and the Americans. They treated it as a tactical issue and began casting around for ideas that would increase Namangani's appeal. At first, von Mende stumbled because he was ill. Always a heavy smoker, he had a heart attack in 1956. Unable to work for a couple of months, he recuperated only slowly. During that time, Gacaoglu wrote letters to Oberlander, appealing for support. But by the end of the year, von Mende was back at work full-time and fought back forcefully. He blasted Gacaoglu for being an American stooge. "Because no German office could be found to finance [Gacaoglu], it seems that the American Committee is interested in the Society to use it as a launching pad for its political-propaganda activities among the emigrants of Muslim faith in the Federal Republic and further afield, in the Orient;' he wrote in a letter to Oberlander's refugee ministry. Proof, von Mende said, was the August press conference Gacaoglu and Sultan put together after their Hajj. Von Mende saw it as a turning point in Amcomlib's propaganda offensive in the third world. "Since their return, the American Committee is trying to start its own political-propagandistic campaign in the Muslim world." Now, he wrote sarcastically, Sultan had begun referring to himself as "Hajj Sultan bin Garif." an honorific that cited his participation in the pilgrimage -- inappropriate, von Mende implied, for someone who went on the Hajj for nonreligious reasons. Sultan, von Mende wrote, was also trying to take a leading position in Gacaoglu's group, which needed to be stopped. Only Namangani could do it. The refugee ministry concurred and outlined Namangani's role. "Mr. Namangani has the assignment, first to gather together into a religious community the Muslim stateless foreigners and non-German refugees, in order to eliminate the unwanted American influence, which can be harmful to the Federal Republic." Another official wrote that the key problem was that the Muslims were not conforming to West Germany's political goals: "I find it unbearable that currently the stateless Islamic foreigners are being misused for various intelligence and political intrigues, and that all this is taking place on the soil of the Federal Republic, whose prestige is being harmed;' a Bonn official wrote. "If we succeed in building a real religious community, we will also succeed in gaining political influence. More about this verbally." The main obstacle was Amcomlib, according to the ministry. "Mr. Kelley from the local office of the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism supposedly said recently that the affair of the Muslim emigrants must not fall into German hands." The West Germans decided to put an end to the discussion about Namangani, which had been going on for a year, by simply appointing him as the Muslims' chief imam. To do this, they needed the main ethnic groups to back Namangani. The numbers didn't matter -- simply the backing of several groups who appeared to represent Munich's Muslims would suffice. So in March 1958, a cadre of Muslims close to von Mende -- all had worked in the Ostministerium's national committees -- held a meeting in Munich's Lowenbraukeller, a popular beer hall and restaurant. The participants defined their group as an amalgam of ethnic groups representing five areas of origin: North Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Turkestan, Volga-Ural, and the Crimea. Led by the veteran Turkestani activist Ali Kantemir, the members stated that they were equal in number to those Muslims who followed Gacaoglu, even though this claim was questionable. At the meeting they concluded that they needed an imam and that Namangani was their choice. To do this they needed a legal instrument. So the group then created the Ecclesiastical Administration of Moslem Refugees in the German Federal Republic, with Namangani elected as its head. The Ecclesiastical Administration became a West German government office, financed directly by Oberlander's refugee ministry. Namangani got 650 marks per month, his assistant 150 marks, and his men another 400 marks, designated for travel and for direct aid to be doled out to impoverished Muslims. (The annual budget of 14,400 marks is equal to about $30,000 a year in today's money.) Gacaoglu's response to the new government office was immediate and sarcastic. He called the March meeting of pro-Namangani forces "a group of professional politicians and a small band of likeminded people, who were specially drummed up for this meeting, elected to a so-called ecclesiastical leadership and claiming to represent the wishes of the Federal Republic." He had a point. The group was purely political, with no popular mandate. But bureaucrats in Bonn had anticipated this. A few months earlier the refugee ministry came up with an idea to give Namangani popular appeal: a central place of worship for Munich's Muslims. *** Helping to build a mosque is one of the greatest acts of piety a Muslim can perform. When the prophet Muhammad left Mecca for exile in the city of Medina, his first act upon arriving there was to build one. He also constructed mosques in other cities he visited in order to better pray to God. Mosques do not have to be fancy, but they function as the center of the Muslim community; gathering Friday for weekly prayers symbolizes the unity of all people of faith. If Namangani could be identified with this good deed, he had an excellent chance of uniting Munich's Muslims behind him -- and behind West Germany. But the idea was not his, and it was not conceived of as an act of piety. Instead, the bureaucrats in Bonn had very concrete, political goals, as one official stated explicitly in a 1957 memo: "The existence of a centrally located prayer room for the Muslims should, in consideration of the fact that many foreigners of Muslim faith also pass through Munich, provide them in addition to those permanently in Bavaria, with the opportunity to attend Muslim services. [Thus 1 an impact on Muslim countries shouldn't miss its mark, which will benefit the Muslims living in Germany and be favorable to the relations between Germany and Islamic countries." By late 1958, Namangani was no longer talking about just a prayer room. An entire mosque was needed. He received backing from a mercurial German officer from the war, Harun el-Raschid Bey. Born Wilhelm Hintersatz, Raschid was a convert who headed the SS's Ostturkischer Waffenverband, the unit in which Namangani had served as chief imam. The two knew each other well from the war and together were taken prisoner by the United States. Raschid wrote a letter to the federal president, Theodor Heuss, explaining that Namangani was a "true loyal friend of Germany" whose "love for Germany" caused him to return after studying Islam in Turkey. Writing occasionally in capital letters for effect, Raschid summed up West Germany's motivations and intentions.
By the end of 1958, the preparations were complete. On December 22, Namangani called a meeting of the Dini Idare, the Turkish name for the Ecclesiastical Administration. The goal of the meeting: building a mosque.
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