A long time ago, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote: Maybe the Nazis would have been a better deal for the religionists (except Jews, of course). After all, they had "Gott mit uns" imprinted on their belt buckles and their State ministry had signed a mutual tolerance agreement with the Vatican.
--- This is an old thread, but as it happens I'm reading a histoty of the Tatars which discusses it, and I really like primary sources, so... The following are excerpts from articles published in the newspaper Azat Krym (Liberated Ukraine), published by the Muslim Committee in Crimea during the war. Quick and dirty translation by me.
10 March 1942. "Muslims have expressed their gratitude to the Great Fuhrer Adolf Hitler -- an effendi due to his gift of free life to the Muslim people. Therefore we have carried out divine service to ensire the life and health of the effendi Adolf Hitler for many years."
The same issue: "To the Great Hitler, the liberator of all peoples and religions!..." 2000 Tatar villages in Kokkozy "have gathered to be mobilized... in the honor of the German soldiers. We have said a prayer for the German martyrs of the war... The whole of the Tatar people every minute prays and asks Allah to give to the Germans victory over all the world. O, great leader, we speak to you with all our hearts, with all of our existence, believe us! We, Tatars, give our word that we will fight with the herd of Jews and Bolsheviks together with the German soldiers in the same line!... God thanks you, our great Lord Hitler!"
20 March 1942. "Together with our glorious German brothers who arrived in time to liberate the world of the East, we, Crimean Tatars, announce to all the world that we have not forgotten the solemn promises of Churchill at Washington, his efforts to create a Kike government in Palestine, his wish to destroy Turkey, occupy Istanbul and the Dardanells, raise an insurrection in Turkey and Afghanistan etc. etc. The East awaits its liberator not from the lying democrats and tricksters, but from the National Socialist Party and its liberator, Adolf Hitler. We gave sworn to fight to the death for such a holy and shining task."
10 April 1942. To the liberator of oppressed peoples, the son of the German people, Adolf Hitler! We, Muslims, since the arrival into Crimea of the valiant sons of Great Germany, with your blessing and in the memory of many years of friendship, have stood shoulder to shoulder with the German people, have taken into our hands weapons, and begun to the last drop of blood to battle for the advancement of your great, universally human idea -- the annihilation of the Kike-Bolshevik plague to the end and without a trace.
"Our ancestors came from the East, and we awaited liberation from there, but today we are witnesses that liberation has come to us from the West. Perhaps, for the first and only time in histoty, it has occured that the sun of freedom has arisen from the West. This sun is you, our great friend and leader, with his mighty German people. Presidium of the Muslim Committee."
And the inevitable response:
The State Committee of Defense to Comrade Stalin I.V. 10 May 1944 The organs of the NKVD and NKGB are carrying out in Crimea work on uncovering and removing agents of the enemy, traitors to the Fatherland, collaborators with the German-Fascist occupiers and other elements... Up to 1944 more than 20 000 Tatars had deserted from sections of the Red Army, betraying the Fatherland and going over to the Germans with weapons in their hands to fight against the Red Army... Learning of the treacherous activity of the Crimean Tatars against the Soviet people and proceeding from the undesirability of further residence of Crimean Tatars on a border region of the Soviet Union, the NKVD of the USSR submits for your consideration the project of a decision of the State Committee of Defense on the resettlement of all Tatars on the territory of Crimea. We consider it expedient to resettle the Crimean Tatars as special settlers in regions of the Uzbek SSR for use in work in agriculture -- collective farns, sov farms, and in industry and construction. The question of the resettlement of the Tatars in the Uzbek SSR has been agreed with the Secretary of the CC KP(b) of Uzbekistan com. Yusupov. According to preliminary data, at the present time in Crimea there are 140-160,000 Tatars. The resttlement operation will begin 20-21 May and finish on June 1. With this I present for your decision this project of the State Committee of Defense. People;s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Union of SSR L. Beria.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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