COLLABORATIONISM OF CENTRAL ASIAN MUSLIMS WITH NAZI GERMANY DURING WWII

Abstract

The Central Asian population was one of the most mobilized groups in the Red Army. Around 3,4 million Turkestanis (Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Kirghiz, and Tajiks) were drafted into the Red Army during the war, thousands of whom died, and many were captured. 1 Taking advantage of the failures of the Soviet soldiers, the German Nazi’s Ostministerium or Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) tried to recruit Muslim Central Asian prisoners of war. The Germans’ attempts at drawing support from the Soviet Union’s Central Asian citizens reflected the heavy losses they suffered after 1942-43 due to the lack of support of people in the occupied areas and inability to fulfil the Blitzkrieg plan as well as their intention to disrupt the stability of the Soviet regime in the Central Asian region. De Cordier estimates that the number of Soviet Muslims ranged from 280,000 to 297,000 soldiers in the Wehrmacht and 8,000 soldiers in the Waffen-SS, where the Turkestani battalions had the biggest number (between 110,000 to 178,000 soldiers in the Wehrmacht and 3,000 soldiers in the Waffen-SS). 2 While the number of people recruited to these battalions was much lower than the number of Muslims fighting in the Red Army, the topic of war-time collaboration among Central Asian soldiers remains underexplored. The paper will examine soldiers’ motivations for collaboration and ask whether these were exclusively survival-driven. I will argue that Nazi Germany changed its racial policies and created a possibility of collaboration due to the war-time practical necessities, such as advancing on the front and promoting propaganda against the Soviet Union