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In Spring 1943, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, (aka Amin al-Husseini), was invited by the Nazis to assist in the organizing and recruiting Bosniaks into the Waffen SS and other units in Yugoslavia. He was escorted by SS Standartenführer Karl von Krempler, who also spoke fluent Turkish. the Mufti successfully convinced the Bosniaks to ignore the declarations of the Sarajevo, Mostar, and Banja Luka ulema (Islamic clerics), who in 1941 forbade Bosnian Muslims from collaborating with the Ustaše. Croatian Foreign Minister Dr. Mladen Lorkovic suggested that the Division be named “SS Ustasa Division”, not an SS Division but a Croatian unit raised with SS assistance, and that its regimental names be given regional names such as “Bosna”, “Krajina”, “Una” etc.
The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust states that “The Germans made a point of publicizing the fact that Husseini had flown from Berlin to Sarajevo for the sole purpose of giving his blessing to the Muslim army and inspecting its arms and training exercises”. According to Aleksa Djilas in The Nation That Wasn’t that al-Husayni : “accepted, visited Bosnia, and convinced some important Muslim leaders that a Muslim SS division would be in the interest of Islam.”
George Lepre in his excellent study of the division (“Himmler’s Bosnian Soldiers”) writes that the division has been unfairly criticized:
“…During the division’s initial months in combat, i.e. before the collapse of the southeastern front, it proved to be more than a match for its enemies, as was admitted by all parties concerned. The experiment only disintegrated in the autumn of 1944 with the rapidly deteriorating Axis military situation, the feared German evacuation of the Balkans, and Muslim Turkey’s severing of diplomatic relations with the Reich. The division’s combat record has been much maligned by many post-war historians who in reality have perpetrated little of any actual research on the subject, but the successes achieved during the nine major anti-Partisan operations it conducted in and around northeastern Bosnia – Wegweiser, Save, Osterei, Maibaum, Maiglöckchen, Vollmond, Fliegenfänger, Heiderose and Hackfleisch – are now a matter of record and speak for themselves.”
After the Handschar Division departed northeastern Bosnia for Hungary in November 1944, it spent most of its time in along the western bank of the Hungarian Danube in the Batina bridgehead. After the Russian breakthrough in late November, it retreated to the area around Somogyudvarhely. It crossed the German border into Austria (Germany then) in early April 1945 and remained there until the end of the war. Only small elements subordinated to other divisions may have fought in other areas, such as in Slovenia. (I should note that at this stage of the war, the practice of mixing units was quite common.) For example, I know that one unidentified division element was sent to Varasdin, Croatia to maintain a small bridgehead in 1945.
