did you know that the nazis, and hitler, actually liked islam? because they did, and because there's actually a longstanding pro-islamic thread in german history going back to a seminal history textbook called the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire by edward gibbon, as published in the late 18th century. gibbon's thesis was that christianity contributed to the fall of the empire by making it "decadent" and "weak", via it's embrace of pacifism. islam, on the other hand, was a militaristic religion that made the arab armies strong and dominant. for that reason, islam is superior to christianity, and a vigorous civilization (like the germans) should choose islam over christianity.
"Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers [...] then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world." - adolf hitler
now, of course, the nazi elite actually adhered to a kind of neo-paganism that was about trying to reconstruct an indigenous german faith to replace this jewish system of christianity with, but the nazis were classist and saw the value of the jewish value system to brainwash the masses with. don't try to make sense of nazism; nazism is like quantum physics, nobody really understands it. just shut up and compute. so, the nazi vision of the world was something like there being a german elite of neo-pagans at the top and a mass of muslims at the bottom.
for that reason, the nazis did not persecute muslims. there are some anecdotes of muslims being persecuted, mostly because they were mistaken for jews, and a handful of arabs ended up at auschwitz because they were homosexuals or communists, but there simply wasn't any kind of systemic extermination of arabs or muslims at all. to the contrary, the nazis sought out alliances with nationalistic muslim resistance armies in the middle east because they were fighting the british. the muslim nationalists saw a "natural ally" in hitler, as they had a common enemy, the jews.
the italians complicated this, and hitler was actually pissed off about it. hitler actually criticized mussolini directly for making it harder to win the support of muslim nationalists.
again, that doesn't mean that every muslim was a nazi. but, think about it. the ideologies are actually quite similar, if you do a rational comparison. these muslim leaders were correct - hitler was their natural ally.
there's even a wikipedia page about this:
every once in a while i hear somebody suggest that being critical of islam is in some way some kind of nazism, and i always just gasp. this is actually one of the most ignorant positions you could possibly take.