Here the desire to rally all the non-Slav ethnic groups from the occupied Soviet territories and, later, the Balkans intersected happily with the pan-Islamic enthusiasms of the SS and the German Foreign Office, whose expertise dated back to stirring up the Middle East during the First World War. Over 500,000 men were raised in this way.13 When Army Group South entered the Crimea in autumn 1941, the Germans found themselves warmly welcomed by the population of 225,000 Tatars. As Sunni Muslims they had seen their mosques and madrasas desecrated, decommissioned and destroyed by the Soviets.
