During his research on problematic mosque communities in Bavaria, journalist Irfan Peci came across the Bosnian “Islamische Kulturgemeinschaft Dozo e.V.” in Ingolstadt. He found out what apparently no one had noticed before: this community names itself in all seriousness after Husein Dozo, who was an SS-Sturmbannführer of the Handzar Division in World War II and also worked there as a military imam.
Dozo was an enthusiastic National Socialist and a deeply convinced Jew-hater. In December 1943, Dozo wrote a letter to Himmler in German that it was an “honour” for “us Muslims” to “dedicate our lives in battle for the great leader Adolf Hitler and the New Europe”.
The divisional imam Dozo was in complete agreement with the National Socialist agenda. In 1943, he wrote in an article for the “Handzar” magazine that Europe had to be liberated from its “enemies” with the help of the SS. He specifically named Jews, Freemasons, capitalists and communists as these “enemies”. Dozo expressed his conviction that the SS would “build a better future for Europe”.
Husein Dozo also headed the Imam Institute in Guben, Brandenburg, which had been founded by the SS to train clerical staff. At the opening on April 21, 1944, first the notorious Grand Mufti of Palestine, Amin al-Husseini, who was also an SS group leader, and then military Imam Husein Dozo spoke. He affirmed that the Institute would “further strengthen the friendly ties between the Islamic world and National Socialist Germany”. The imams were ready to “extend our utmost efforts to realise the New Order”.
After the Second World War, Dozo was sentenced to five years in prison for collaborating with the Nazis. His views, however, seemed to have changed little, at least as far as anti-Semitism was concerned. Dozo, for example, met with his old SS crony, the former Grand Mufti, at the Fourth Islamic Conference in Cairo in early October 1968. At this conference, attended by representatives from 34 Islamic countries, a call was adopted for Jerusalem to be “liberated” from the Jews in a “holy war”. Dozo promised “in the name of Yugoslav Muslims” to contribute to the “victory of jihad in the Middle East” by means of volunteers and donations.
These facts about Husein Dozo had also been known to the Penzberg imam Bajrambejamin Idriz since the end of 2010 at the latest, when Focus confronted him with them. Idriz had called Dozo a “pioneer of Islamic reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina” on the homepage of the Islamic Forum Penzberg. Dozo, he said, was “a pioneer of a distinctive and consistent reform scheme” in the Muslim world. Through the first Islamic Faculty of Science in Bosnia, founded by Dozo, “the reform ideas have been widely and effectively disseminated”. In the anthology “Islam with a European Face”, co-edited by Idriz, Idriz again referred to Dozo, whose work he considered “groundbreaking” for the “more progressive forces”. Idriz also praised Dozo in his book “Grüß Gott, Herr Imam!
https://www.pi-news.net/2022/05/ingolstadt-moschee-nach-ss-sturmbannfuehrer-benannt/
