Muslim Encounters with Nazism and the Holocaust: The Ahmadi of Berlin and Jewish Convert to Islam Hugo Marcus
- Marc David Baer
Marc David Baer is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He formerly taught at the University of California, Irvine, and Tulane University. He is the author of Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford University Press, 2008), which received the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani Book Award. He is also the author of The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford University Press, 2010). The recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, Baer is currently researching the interconnected histories of Jews and Muslims in Weimar and Nazi Germany. The first outcome of this research is “Turk and Jew in Berlin: The First Turkish Migration to Berlin and the Shoah,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (April 2013): 330–355.
- m.d.baer{at}lse.ac.uk
From 1923 to 1935, Dr. Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was among the leading German Muslims in Berlin. The son of a Jewish industrialist, and a homosexual, Marcus studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin in the first decade of the twentieth century. To support his family after financial reverses caused by World War I, he tutored foreign Muslim doctoral students in German. This led to his conversion to Islam, and for a dozen years, under the adopted name Hamid, he was the most important German in Berlin's mosque community. Nevertheless, he did not terminate his membership in the Jewish community, nor his ties to friends in the homosexual rights movement.
The Nazis incarcerated Marcus in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a Jew in 1938, and he claimed to have remained there until a delegation led by his imam, Dr. Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah (1889–1956), gained his release. Abdullah obtained a visa for Marcus to travel to British India, where a …
