Ian Johnson abhors pack journalism. Instead, he prefers to investigate the margins of major news stories. In A Mosque in Munich, this predilection serves him well. Based in Berlin and Beijing, he speaks fluent German and Mandarin, and holds an advanced degree in Chinese Studies. With equal tenacity and lack of bluster, however, he also pursues the development of radical Islam in Europe. Mostly by accident, the veteran journalist stumbled upon one of the largest untold stories of the last fifty years: how, with help from Nazis and the CIA, radical Islam first established its foothold in the West, and planted its roots firmly in Germany.
Johnson begins decades before the now-familiar Cold War narrative of the 1980s. In that decade the United States began to back the Muslim holy warriors, mujahideen, in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. But as Johnson’s investigative work definitively shows, America’s efforts to use the religious and political fervor of Islam to its own ends followed a Nazi program intended to do much the same thing during World War II. This was a program, Johnson writes, which Hitler “explicitly blessed,” saying, “I consider only the Mohammedans to be safe. All the others, I consider unsafe.”
In the eastern regions of the Soviet empire, where the Nazis were more interested in oil than ethnic cleansing, the Third Reich mobilized Muslims and other ethnic minorities to fight for the liberation of their homelands. The Nazis plucked Muslims from German prisoner-of-war camps: some Muslims became German soldiers; some, members of the SS; some, professional propagandists. Although rumors and half-truths about this historic collusion have long existed, Johnson does the painstaking archival work of retracing the lives of these largely unknown Muslim Nazis, and pieces together their lives compellingly.