Muslim Bosnian soldiers of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian) are called to prayer. The 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar was a mountain infantry division of the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the German Nazi Party, that served alongside but was never formally part of the Wehrmacht. From March to December 1944, it fought a counter-insurgency campaign against communist-led Yugoslavian Resistance forces in the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet state of Germany, that encompassed almost all of modern-day Croatia and all of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as parts of Serbia. It was the first non-Germanic Waffen-SS division, and its formation marked the expansion of the Waffen-SS into a multi-ethnic military force. Composed mostly of Bosnian Muslims with some Catholic Croatian soldiers and German and Yugoslav Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans living in Yugoslavia) officers, it took an oath of allegiance to both Adolf Hitler and the Fascist Croatian leader Ante Pavelić. Neuhammer, Province of Silesia, Germany (now, Świętoszów, Bolesławiec County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland). November 1943.
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Soldiers of the 13th SS Division with a brochure Islam and Judaism, 1943.
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Grand Mufti al-Husseini with his Muslim Waffen-SS soldiers.
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