Nazi Middle East strategy would be rooted in debates begun a half-century earlier, in the 1880s, and on how that policy was implemented during World War I. That German strategy was to portray itself as champion of downtrodden Muslims and to promote jihads against Germany’s enemies.
The original debate setting German policy on this course was between the two men who dominated modern Germany’s origin, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II. Conservative and cautious, Bismarck urged that the new country focus on economic development rather than seek to be Europe’s leader or a global power. In an 1888 speech to Parliament, he explained why not following his advice would lead Germany to catastrophe.1
First, von Bismarck said, Germany must avoid war because of its poor geographical situation that left it open to attack on three fronts simultaneously since it was surrounded by Russia, France, and Great Britain. In comparison, Britain was an island fortress protected from invasion by its rule over the seas, while France and Russia were only vulnerable along their borders with Germany.
Second, Germany should avoid making enemies because the common interests of Britain, France, and Russia gave them good reason to ally against Germany rather than to support it.
Third, by the time Germany became a united country in 1871, Great Britain, France, and Russia already had large overseas empires. Germany couldn’t catch up. Von Bismarck’s lack of interest in Middle East colonies made him remark that gaining territory in the Ottoman Empire wasn’t worth the bones of a single German soldier.2
Instead of seeking empire, von Bismarck concluded, Germany should focus on commercial opportunities. Middle East peace was in German interests while any attempt to alter the regional situation would set off a losing war in Europe.3
Some powerful Germans, however, contemptuously dismissed von Bismarck’s arguments. They thought that not having an empire consigned Germany to be eternally a second-rate power. Reversing von Bismarck’s geopolitical analysis, General Hermann Count von Schlieffen replied that only overseas expansion would let Germany leap over its encirclement within Europe.4
Wilhelm II, who came to the throne in 1888, agreed with von Schlieffen. Within twelve months of being crowned, Wilhelm forced von Bismarck into retirement and reversed his policy. For the kaiser, in addition to finding raw materials and markets for Germany’s growing industry, empire or at least a sphere of influence in the Middle East was imperative.5 Alongside practical considerations was a considerable romantic element. Fascinated by the Middle East, Wilhelm dreamed of being an oriental potentate or reincarnation of Alexander the Great. Two trips to the Ottoman Empire, in 1889 and 1898, convinced him that this was his destiny.
In a January 1896 message to Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II, Wilhelm tactlessly complained that the British wrongly thought the Mediterranean an “English Sea” and that their hold on the Middle East was unbreakable.6 Wilhelm confidently explained that a friend of his had met a Muslim prophet so influential in India7 that a signal from him would spark revolution there. Losing India would reduce Britain to a third-rank power.8
This man’s name was Sayyid al-Kailani and the kaiser’s “friend” was Max von Oppenheim, who had met al-Kailani in 1893.9 Sayyid was descended from Abd al-Qadir, a twelfth-century preacher who founded a group that spread to China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, the Balkans, and Africa. Von Oppenheim also told the kaiser of eight similar brotherhoods, for example the as-Sanusiyya of North Africa, that Germany might use to organize a jihad against its enemies.
While Sayyid al-Kailani (from the Persian highland area Jilan, Kilan in Arabic and in Iraqi also al-Kailan) himself would never launch a pro-German revolt, one of his descendants would do so almost a half-century after von Oppenheim’s prediction and at a time when von Oppenheim was still a top German agent. That man, Rashid Ali al-Kailani, would lead a pro-German coup that took over Iraq in May 1941. So in a sense the kaiser’s prophecy would come to pass, albeit to fail.
The immediate effect of the kaiser’s bragging was to hurt himself. The Russians were so alarmed by the kaiser’s ambition that they shared this message with the British and later entered an anti-German alliance with London and Paris. After all, Berlin could also try to launch a jihad against them in their own Muslim-populated areas. And that concern would also prove accurate.
The British, hypersensitive to interference with their lifeline to India and protectorate over Egypt, saw the kaiser’s interest in the region as a serious threat. Some news of these German plots would eventually reach the British novelist and intelligence official John Buchan. While working for the War Propaganda Bureau during World War I, he wrote a successful spy novel, Greenmantle, about a villainous German conspiracy to seize the Middle East as a base for conquering Europe. Through a charismatic Muslim preacher (whose codename is “Green-mantle”), a high Foreign Ministry diplomat explains to the novel’s narrator, a German-backed jihad will “astonish the world . . . The war must be won or lost in Europe. Yes; but if the East blazes up, our effort will be distracted from Europe. . . . The stakes are no less than victory and defeat.”10
To implement this strategy, Germany turned not only to individual religious leaders or brotherhoods but also to the Ottoman Empire whose monarch, as caliph, nominally led all Muslims. As such, he could declare jihad for every Muslim in the world, setting off what the kaiser called a “furor Islamiticus,” an Islamic fury against British (but not German) infidels.11 Seeing the Ottoman Turks as a kindred people, Germans dubbed them “the Germans of the Middle East.”12
The father of this policy and the man who persuaded the kaiser to implement it was Max von Oppenheim. His historic role was as important, especially since he played it over a far longer period, than that of his better-known British counterpart, T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia.13
Figure 3. Kaiser Wilhelm II leaves his camp at Jerusalem to inaugurate the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer on October 31, 1898, after starting off his official policy toward Islam with a visit to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in Istanbul. The diplomat Max von Oppenheim, posted in Cairo, had sent the monarch his report 48 on the “Pan-Islamic Movement,” advising the use of “Islamism”—the Kaiser’s term—to inspire Muslim revolutions in enemy colonies in the event of a European war.
Born in 1860, von Oppenheim descended from a Jewish banking family in Cologne that had converted to Catholicism in his infancy.14 In 1868, Abraham, the brother of Max’s grandfather, had become the first Jew to be made a baron by Prussia’s monarchy, giving family members the right to add the aristocratic “von” to their names. Max received his law degree in 1883 but preferred to be an explorer, and his wealthy family was willing to pay for his travels. He set off, first through Syria and Iraq in 1883–84, then to Morocco in 1886, and afterward all the way to the Persian Gulf and India in 1893–94. He studied Arabic in Egypt and achieved a fair mastery of the language. On his return, von Oppenheim published his observations in two volumes. His reputation rose as the country’s leading expert on the contemporary Middle East.15 Von Oppenheim was a good observer of the region’s life and politics. His rival, Lawrence of Arabia, a great writer in his own right, would call von Oppenheim’s book the best on the area available before World War I.16
Germany’s Foreign Ministry, concerned about Islam’s spread into its African colonies, wanted an independent source of information on the topic. In 1896, through a family connection with a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official, von Oppenheim became an attaché to the German consulate in Cairo. During his service there, until 1909, he sent 467 reports to Berlin. Building a good network of contacts, von Oppenheim learned a great deal, though not all of it accurate. Ironically, despite being sent to Cairo to study Islam as a threat, von Oppenheim became convinced that, on the contrary, it offered Germany a tremendous opportunity. Soon his dispatches, including a long 1898 report on the Pan-Islamic movement, were being sent on to the kaiser.17
The Ottoman Empire was sponsoring Pan-Islamism to counter nationalism’s inroads into its subject peoples’ loyalty. The empire had already lost the Christians of southeastern Europe who had rebelled under the inspiration of Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Romanian nationalism. It hoped to hold Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and others by persuading them that their Muslim identity should come first and the sultan was their caliph, endowed with full Islamic legitimacy. For the Germans, however, it was not these defensive but Pan-Islamism’s offensive aspects that were of greatest interest. What if the peoples of French-ruled North Africa and those under British control in India or Egypt would also demand an Islamic government? What if Russia’s Muslim subjects sought the same? That would be the best way to subvert Germany’s rivals.
On the eve of Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1898 Middle East trip, von Oppenheim advised him to back Islamism as a political movement.18 He explained that Muslims wanted to end the reign of Christian powers (that is, Britain, France, and Russia) over Muslim-majority lands. In part, this was a response to spreading Western culture and political power; in part, a realization of Islam’s command to unite and make their societies follow its precepts. Muslims, von Oppenheim wrote, had established a unified state in the seventh century and sustained it for centuries. Starting in the 1860s the Ottomans had revived this effort by using Islam to retain the loyalty of its Muslim subjects. Von Oppenheim thought this campaign had succeeded, and that Muslims were increasingly viewing the Ottoman sultan-caliph as protector of Islam and its holy places. This was good for Germany which, he claimed, was the Muslims’ favorite European country since it had no colonies in the area and was friendly to the Ottoman Empire.
Von Oppenheim was more enthusiastic than accurate in many of his conclusions, misled by wishful thinking or informants’ eagerness to tell him what he wanted to hear in hope of gaining Berlin’s financial and political support. To answer criticisms, von Oppenheim responded that it was easy to underestimate the sultan’s massive religious influence. Just because his empire was militarily weak did not mean it was not potentially mighty. If as caliph the sultan were to proclaim jihad and Muslims had been prepared properly, von Oppenheim predicted, that decree would be an unconventional weapon of massive power.
The most impressive example von Oppenheim could muster to make his case was the Sudan, where a charismatic leader, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah, the mahdi, had led a victorious jihad uprising against the British. Starting with nothing, he built a large army, defeating and wiping out regular British forces on several occasions. He captured Khartoum, established an Islamist state, and ruled it for thirteen years. Only after his death had the British, in the 1898 battle of Umm Durman, finally succeeded in defeating and destroying that state.
Von Oppenheim’s report on Islamism was submitted three months before that battle, when the mahdi’s state still existed. If the mahdi could achieve so much with so little and no foreign allies, the Ottoman sultan—with a half-millennium of legitimacy, a large state apparatus, and recognition throughout the Muslim world—could shake the world with Germany behind him! Von Oppenheim was not alone in advocating this strategy. Other government officials and experts like Ernst Jäckh, a specialist on the Ottoman Empire, were spreading similar ideas.19 Thus, Germany’s ruler accepted von Oppenheim’s proposal. In the event of war, the kaiser decided, Berlin would aid the Ottomans while the sultan would raise a jihad against Germany’s European foes in British-ruled India, French-ruled North Africa, and Russian Asia. Not everyone in the German government was entranced with this scheme and none less so than Friedrich Rosen, a Foreign Ministry expert on the region. Rosen, who spoke better Arabic than von Oppenheim and had been Germany’s envoy in Baghdad and Jerusalem, mocked von Oppenheim’s idea as ignorant of the region’s real conditions. He joked that the idea’s real father was Karl May, the popular German writer of Wild West stories and romantic tales about the Middle East.20 But what Rosen or others said didn’t matter because von Oppenheim had the kaiser’s ear.21
Figure 4. Max von Oppenheim, the German “Abu Jihad” (“father of jihad”) and mastermind of the jihadization of Islam from 1893 on, sits in his tent, carpeted and hung with texts from the Qu’ran in the style of an Arab chieftain. He was responsible for both the 1914 German-Ottoman plan for jihad in the British, French, and Russian empires, and the 1941 German-Arab “Union Jack” plan for jihad in the British mandatory areas of the Middle East after the fall of Paris in mid-1940.
The most prestigious expert, Carl Heinrich Becker, at first had mixed feelings about von Oppenheim’s thesis.22 He believed there was a real possibility of a massive jihad revolt—in fact, he made the case far better than von Oppenheim—but doubted the Ottoman sultan was the man to unleash it. True, Becker said, one of Islam’s basic requirements was for Muslims to fight for it through jihad until Islam ruled the world. It was also true, he added, that Europe’s advance had made Muslims realize their military and technological inferiority to Christian civilization. In turn, this gave Muslims greater solidarity among themselves and strengthened Islam’s political appeal. They yearned for a mahdi to restore Islam’s primacy through revolution.
But that wasn’t the whole story, Becker explained. Short of the true mahdi, a divinely inspired messiah who would come to bring the world’s end, nobody, including the Ottoman sultan, could claim to be the one rightful Islamic ruler. There was no “Muslim pope,” Becker pointed out, and while sultans had always found Muslim theologians to back their claims, they were really just worldly rulers with no true religious authority. Sultans merely pretended to possess that authority in order to gain support from their own subjects and European powers. Moreover, Becker explained, discontent with the Ottoman sultan could just as likely provoke a Muslim uprising against him as foment a jihad under his leadership. Further, the possibility of a big transnational jihad was weakened by splits among Muslims. Turks, Arabs, and Persians all had quarrels, as did Sunni and Shia Muslims. The solidarity of Islam was a phantom, said Becker.23
Becker’s conclusions were more accurate than those of von Oppenheim, yet they also did not offer the prospect of a victorious Germany. Moreover, since the kaiser’s mind was set, Becker would not openly contradict him. So Becker eventually turned around and endorsed the idea he had previously ridiculed.
There were seeds of truth in von Oppenheim’s analysis and yet much error, too, as later history showed. The strong feeling of solidarity among Muslims was countered by deep divisions based on religious views, ethnicity, region, differences of opinion, and self-interest. Numerous Muslim leaders and groups—the Egyptian Jamal Abd an-Nasir, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iraqi dictator Saddam Husain, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successors, Libyan ruler Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Usama bin Ladin—trying to set off such transnational revolts always failed and were defeated.
As Becker originally noted, there were other weaknesses as well to von Oppenheim’s thesis. On paper, the Ottoman caliph’s power looked legitimate and overwhelming but in reality it had withered. The Ottomans were not so popular in Arabic-speaking lands and of relatively little importance elsewhere. The British and French had their own Muslim assets, including an ideological import from Europe: ethnic nationalism. Finally, von Oppenheim was short on practical measures. How would Germany prepare and organize the masses to unleash, in his words, a “Muslim fanaticism that borders on insanity,” to set off the nuclear chain reaction of militancy he envisioned?24
All of these problems were ignored by the kaiser, and when he visited the sultan’s domain, in October–November 1898, the alliance with Islamism and the launching of jihad were officially adopted as German policy.25
The nominal purpose for the kaiser’s trip was to inaugurate the new Lutheran Church of the Redeemer on the Muristan hill in Jerusalem, and in his public speeches, the kaiser’s message of peace differed sharply from his aggressive plan. Speaking in Istanbul, the German monarch explained the mutual benefits of peaceful competition between peoples of different faith and background. As he schemed to fight fellow Christians through a Muslim revolt, the kaiser told an audience in Bethlehem that he regretted how quarrels among Christians set a bad example for the rest of the world.
The U.S. representative in Jerusalem, Consul Selah Merrill, was impressed: “The Emperor and Empress were constantly busy in sightseeing, visiting churches, schools, colonies, hospitals, and orphanages that belong to the Germans. Without being partisan, the Emperor showed that he was a stalwart supporter of the great principles and doctrines of Protestantism, and at the same time he conducted himself in such a manner as to make a most favorable impression upon all classes.”26 But the kaiser was not trying to win over the empire’s non-Muslim or dissident subjects. In 1898, the Ottoman Empire appeared a stronger horse than scattered Arab nationalist intellectuals, Jewish ideologues, and Armenian activists with no troops or money behind them. Thus, the Germans turned down Armenian requests for help against the Ottomans. Wilhelm associated the growing Zionist movement in Germany27 with his enemies in the Social Democratic Party.28 While the visiting kaiser praised the young Zionist settlements and met the movement’s leader, Theodor Herzl, at the entrance of the Mikveh Israel agricultural school, he insisted that Jewish immigration must be in the context of recognizing the sultan’s sovereignty over that land.29 Consequently, Armenians would turn toward Russia and both Zionists and Arab nationalists toward Great Britain for support.30
The kaiser’s endorsement of the Ottoman Empire’s continued authority and Islam’s power to inspire political action required some remarkably mixed symbolism, as seen in the trip’s most striking event, in Damascus on November 8, 1898, when the kaiser visited Salah ad-Din Yusuf al-Aiyyub’s tomb.
Born around 1140, Saladin, as he is generally known, became the greatest Muslim general fighting the Christian Crusaders, many of whom were Germans. At the battle of Hittin in 1187 he destroyed his foes and then wiped out their strongholds, culminating in his conquest of Jerusalem. He became the symbol of Muslim triumphs over Europe, Christianity, and the West. Now here was one of Europe’s leading monarchs, many of whose countrymen had been Saladin’s victims, praising that general as “a fearless knight who had taught even his enemies the proper way to chivalry.”31 The kaiser proclaimed himself friend to the world’s Muslims as he planned to harness the power of Islamic fervor to create some new Saladin to unleash against his enemies. The Germans printed his words on postcards mailed to influential Muslims in many countries.
That German strategy’s ultimate backfiring was perfectly symbolized by the fate of the bronze laurel wreath the kaiser left as a gift at Saladin’s tomb. Twenty years later, almost to the day, the Allies entered Damascus in triumph after defeating the Ottomans and their German allies in World War I. Lawrence of Arabia picked up the wreath and sent it as a war trophy to London, where it is still on display today at the Imperial War Museum.
As has so often happened in the modern Middle East, a mistaken Western strategy ended in catastrophe. But as also has so often happened, local rulers were manipulating the Western power that thought it was doing the stage-managing. On his trip, the kaiser seems to have succeeded in winning the admiration of Muslims and of the Ottoman government. Yet Ottoman agents were systematically exaggerating the sultan’s religious authority in order to make the kaiser think as he did.
Figure 5. A postcard in German and Turkish displays the kaiser’s words of 1898, pledging always to be the friend of the Ottoman sultan and the three hundred million Muslims who revere him as their caliph. The postcard was produced two years after the Ottoman sultan and caliph Abdülhamid II had been condemned throughout Europe for massacres against his Armenian subjects that shocked all “minorities of infidels.”
Thus Shaikh Abdallah, a cleric on the Ottoman payroll, told the kaiser that 300 million Muslims all over the world viewed the sultan as their spiritual ruler and now saw the German monarch as their friend, too. The kaiser was so impressed with this compliment that he thereafter used the “300 million” number himself as the measure of his influence among Muslims. The exaggerations, however, were not all on one side. The kaiser’s speech at Saladin’s tomb became a legend among some Muslims, part of the tale of “al-Hajj Wilhelm,” the Christian emperor so moved by his visit that he converted to Islam. Around evening camp fires and in marketplaces, colorful details were added to this story.
How much political capital all this gave Berlin was unclear. But now Germany had a long-term Middle East strategy, and one that was profitable in the short term, too, since Wilhelm’s trip led to an agreement for Germany to build the Ottoman Empire’s railroads.32 By the turn of the century, Berlin’s influence there was rising and offering serious competition to Britain and France. And when it came to producing new Saladins, Germany had been training the empire’s officers and selling weapons to the Ottomans since the 1880s. As a result, there was a strong pro-German faction in the Ottoman military. The British, worried about this link, referred to such officers as being “made in Germany.”33
Germany’s Middle East gambit was accompanied by production of an extensive literature on the region including novels, travelers’ reports, translations, and scholarly writings. Students and scholars flocked to Middle East studies. By 1900, Germany had fifty-seven professorships in the field at twenty-one universities.34 That same year, the kaiser received von Oppenheim royally and congratulated him for having proposed such a successful strategy, and von Oppenheim retired from the diplomatic service in 1909 with his policy set as Germany’s own.35
Yet Germany’s success in the Middle East had, as von Bismarck fore-saw, stirred up dangerous antagonism from the British, French, and Russians. The British satirical weekly Punch mocked the kaiser as following a strategy of “Germany Over Allah,” a play on the German national anthem, “Deutschland über Alles” (Germany Above All).
The British press published lurid articles about the kaiser converting to Islam, seeking naval bases to challenge British primacy in the Mediterranean, or taking over countries; in the words of one headline, “Teutons colonize Mesopotamia!” (the name used for Iraq at the time). The idea of a German-backed Berlin to Baghdad railroad—it had extended into Iraq by 1914 though it did not reach Baghdad until 1940—became the symbol for the British and French of their rival’s threatening influence in the area.
The Germans tried to soothe these fears and—except for one slip by the kaiser in referring to a German “foothold in Mesopotamia”—maintained that their strategy was not a colonialist one. Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow stressed that Germany had no political interests in the Middle East.36 “Germany does not seek any kind of economic monopoly in Turkey nor would this be in Turkey’s interest,” insisted one German article in 1898.37 Some European diplomats accepted the idea that German ambitions were limited to economic opportunities rather than seeking colonies.38 So did later scholars, who used such phrases as the “imperialism of free trade,”39 or spoke of “ethical imperialism” or “peaceful imperialists”40 whose goal was merely to build profitable railroads.41 Indeed, contemporary internal German government documents show that this was true.42
Figure 6. The map shows the eastern section of the Berlin to Baghdad railroad, built between 1903 to 1940 and running for a thousand miles through modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq—a long-term German project for gaining influence in the region that aroused the suspicions of all its imperialist rivals.
The German economic push went far beyond railroad-building. In 1906, the German Orient Bank was established in Berlin, led by two Jewish bankers, Eugen and Herbert M. Gutmann, to develop business connections with the Middle East. It was a big success and became the leading regional-oriented bank in the world, with projects in Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire.43 Three years later, Germany’s gigantic Deutsche Bank opened a branch in Istanbul, linking directly with Ottoman financial institutions. A deal with British interests the following year brought the Deutsche Bank into financing oil production in Iran. In the period leading up to World War I, Germany was, after Britain and France, the Ottoman Empire’s third largest trading partner.
This emphasis on commercial ties, then, seemed to be in the tradition of von Bismarck, who had declared his distaste for “French-style colonial conquerors” and preferred economic relations instead.44 Yet the strategy also contradicted von Bismarck’s warning to avoid even the appearance of aggressive intensions or else risk fomenting war. Bringing von Bismarck’s worst fears to fruition, London and Paris formed an alliance, joined by Russia in 1907, directed against Germany.
The Germans could well argue that this was unfair. The French and British had carved up Africa; the Russians and British had split Persia’s oil wealth between them while begrudging Germany colonies or even control of overseas resources. But, unfair or not, Germany was seen and portrayed by others as the aggressive newcomer in the Middle East.45 The kaiser’s visit to Morocco in March 1905, for example, was met with British and French screams about “German imperialism.” Frustrated by France’s growing power over Morocco—contradicting Paris’s promise to maintain an open door there for all European states equally—the Germans sent their gunboat Panther to visit in July 1911. This “leap of the Panther,” as it was dubbed in the British press, again set off alarm bells in London and Paris.46
An even greater shock for Germany’s rivals, albeit one based on mistaken assessments, was the idea that Germany had gained complete control of the Ottoman Empire. In July 1908 there was a revolution by the Young Turks, mostly German-trained young officers. Many of them revered Germany as a role model of how a single ethnic group (in those days the term usually used was “race”) could unite in a single nation-state. The new regime’s leaders adored the head of the German army’s training mission, General Colmar von der Goltz, as their father figure and viewed his writings on war as sacred texts.
The Young Turks were not Islamists but modernizing ethnic nationalists who wanted their country to be like Germany. Still, the kaiser wrongly saw them as Islamist in politics and took the upheaval as proof that he was right about the emergence of Islamic political power. He even used the term “Islamism.” If the great powers continued to interfere in the Middle East, the kaiser speculated, the Ottoman sultan could merely raise the green flag of Islam, Muslims in all corners of Asia and Africa would shout, “Allahu Akbar,” and Christians—at least non-German ones—would be driven out of the region.47 If this were true, the kaiser thought, Christians, at least non-German ones, were finished in Ottoman lands.48 But the idea that Christians and other minorities might be massacred—as had happened with the Armenians and Greeks on a number of occasions in the late nineteenth century—did not discourage the German strategy of promoting Islamism and allying with the Ottomans.
One of the most powerful Young Turks was Ismail Enver Pasha, military attaché in Berlin from 1908 to 1911 and a strong Germanophile. He became war minister in 1913 and one of the ruling Young Turk triumvirate at the age of thirty-one. As a result, relations between Germany and the Ottoman Empire became tighter than ever. In December 1913, General Otto Liman von Sanders arrived with forty officers to become inspector general of the Ottoman army. He reorganized it and put German advisers into key positions.49
Thus, the stage was set for World War I: Germany would cast its lot with the Ottoman Muslims and hope the sultan’s call for jihad would destabilize French and British colonies from Algeria through Egypt and all the way to India. The Allies would respond by backing the nationalism of Arabs, Jews, and Armenians. Most Arab officers did remain loyal to the Ottomans but overall the Allied strategy was far more successful.
Yet in history there is always a longer run. Already, even before the first act—a first world war—of the drama had begun, the scene was being prepared for the second round. Two young men affected by the kaiser’s policy would play a central role in those future developments.
The first of these was a young Austrian named Adolf Hitler. Born in 1889, the same year the kaiser first visited the Ottomans, he arrived in Vienna to study painting. A high school drop-out, he failed the entry exam to the Academy of Fine Arts. Angry, bitter, and with no profession, he turned his attention to architecture, theater, and politics. Having grown up in a village, he was fascinated by Vienna’s imperial buildings like the Court Museum, the Opera, and the Parliament. For hours he gazed at the skyline, feeling an “enchantment out of The Thousand and One Nights.”50 Hitler drew on Middle Eastern imagery surprisingly often, and the Middle East is the most neglected influence on the thinking of this most-studied person in modern history. He was eager to devote his life to some higher mission. But what should that be? With his unimpressive physique, unsteady eyes, pale face, and tendency toward ranting monologues, he seemed a most unlikely person ever to play a great role in public events.
Hitler lived in a house for impoverished men built by donations from two Jewish families, the Gutmanns, who had established the German Orient Bank, and the Rothschilds.51 The struggling painter, used to a thoroughly ethnic German environment, went into culture shock in the cosmopolitan city where German, Czech, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Russian were spoken in the streets and even the Parliament.52 To him, Vienna appeared “a Babel of languages and races” with no coherence.53 He saw the city that had in effect rejected him as filled with “filth, prostitution, and scum.”54 Why was he impoverished, his genius unrecognized, while all those others went around like lords, dividing wealth and honors among them?
The answer he found was that the cities had become “mixed-language danger zones” where the “de-Germanization” of life led to “Judaization, Slavization, bastardization, and Niggerization.” With an eye to the nearby German Empire, he thought about an “Aryan and pan-German” alternative in “racial self-awareness,” influenced by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species.
The atmosphere in Vienna fed these attitudes. He attended debates on the “gypsy plague” and heard proposals to send them to forced labor camps and tattoo numbers on their arms.55 At first, he was more favorably inclined toward Jews, seeing them as the first civilized nation that went from polytheism to monotheism, as an intelligent people who stuck together and succeeded in politics and culture. As Jewish refugees arrived in flight from Russian pogroms, Hitler met for the first time an Orthodox Jew in a black caftan and asked himself: “Is this a Jew or a German?”56 He missed a chance to further his ambition to become an artist when he recoiled from being interviewed by a Jewish professor, Alfred Roller.57 Hitler concluded that “neither assimilation nor conversion can turn a Jew into a non-Jew”; associated Jews with socialism, Marxism, and antinationalist thinking; and believed in a social Darwinism requiring survival of the “fittest race and elimination of the weak.”58 Hitler described himself as a “fanatical German nationalist.”59
All of this has been much discussed, but less appreciated is one other element in his evolution: a romantic fascination with the Middle East and with Islam. A key role here was played by Karl May, the same man to whose adventure stories about the Wild West and the exotic East Friedrich Rosen had sarcastically compared von Oppenheim’s ideas about fomenting jihad. In May’s books, which Hitler lovingly absorbed, he discovered the world of Muslims, Turks, and Arabs “exerting the magic spell” of Mecca as he later recalled. He was devoted to such books as A Desert Ride, even reading at night by candlelight or with a magnifying glass, using the moon as his lantern.60
May was born in 1842 into a poor working-class family with fourteen children, nine of whom died before adulthood. His career as a teacher was wrecked by an accusation that he stole a colleague’s watch. Twice imprisoned and having suffered a nervous breakdown, he began writing in jail in the 1870s. His imagination soared beyond the bars as he made up stories about distant people and dramatic adventures encountering his German heroes. For his Middle Eastern novels, May created the first-person German narrator, Kara Bin Nimsi and his Muslim servant al-Hajj Khalif Umar.61 On and on they traveled, through The Oil Prince (1877), Travel Adventures in Kurdistan (1882), the three-volume In the Land of the Mahdi (1891–1896), From Baghdad to Istanbul (1892), The Black Persian (1892), and In the Desert (1892). In 1899, May actually traveled himself through the Middle East.
Hitler’s fascination with May intensified when he attended a lecture by the author in March 1912. In an argument back at his hostel that evening, Hitler defended the literary quality of May’s work. Ten days later, May suddenly died. Hitler seemed to have felt himself the recipient of May’s final message, even the heir of his vision.
May promulgated no political doctrine. Among his fans were the humanitarian missionary doctor Albert Schweitzer, the antifascist writer Hermann Hesse, and the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein. May admired Native Americans, had no apparent anti-Semitic prejudice, and wrote sympathetically—albeit with excessive imagination—about a wide variety of non-European peoples. The only Jewish character in May’s book A Desert Ride, though, is Sir David, an Anglicized Jew who is a British agent. Hitler would later view Britain and the Jews as his united enemy.
May himself was something of a pacifist who at his career’s end revealed a mystical, utopian turn of mind. While he wrote about violence, he stressed that his heroes would only kill someone when absolutely necessary. Indeed, the only time Hitler saw May speak reflected those tendencies, the title of May’s lecture being, “Upward into the Noble Man’s Realm,” based on his mystical idea of how everyone could raise himself from materialistic Ardistan (pidgin Arabic for the country of the earth) to noble Jinnistan (May’s pseudo-Arabic for the high land of the spirit).62
While one can see how this thinking played into the mystical idealism of later Nazism, May’s moralistic thought had to be twisted greatly to fill that function. May’s importance for Hitler, then, had nothing to do with the ideology of Nazism as such but with several other aspects of his work, relating more to its tactics, style, and what might be called its idealization of the tribe. The basic plot of both May’s Middle Eastern and Western novels was always the same. A group of noble, brave natives are fighting local, tribal enemies. The German explorer makes an alliance with them to destroy their enemies. This was the model Hitler would use in befriending Arabs and Muslims by helping them against the Jews.
Another effect of May on Hitler and many of his later followers was to fill their Walter Mitty–like heads with a thirst for adventure, breaking out of the stolid bourgeois conformism so powerful in German society. In this context, Hitler would make even May’s lack of experience with the places and peoples about which he wrote into a plus. Years later he told senior aides that May’s writing proved that “It was not necessary to know the desert in order to direct troops in the [North] African theater of war. . . . It wasn’t necessary to travel in order to know the world.”63
Finally, May’s writings functioned for Hitler as von Oppenheim’s books and dispatches had for the kaiser, making him feel that he knew everything necessary about the Arabs and Islam. May even met von Oppenheim in Cairo in 1899. At von Oppenheim’s home, Bab al-Luq, they spoke at length about Middle East rulers, Muslim brotherhoods, and tribes. May was fascinated by “the consul,” as he called the diplomat, and von Oppenheim was equally impressed, describing May as handsome, tall, and with a full blond beard.64 For his part, May was familiar with von Oppenheim’s books and seems to have drawn on them for his own novels.65
Just as May’s hero Kara Bin Nimsi led his Arab Muslim servant al-Hajj Khalif Umar Bin Khalif, Hitler would dream of doing the same for the Muslims and Arabs in general. From Hitler’s perspective, Arabs seemed proud desert warriors in whom could be glimpsed an echo of the ancient Germanic tribes, that ideal group Hitler wanted his Aryans to emulate. In 1939, Hitler would tell a Saudi envoy that his sympathy and support for the Arabs had begun with his reading of May’s novels in his early youth.66
How did May characterize Arabs? In his works, they talk a lot but don’t necessarily follow through on what they say. Some are heroes, some are cowards, but they are all very religious—Islam is the main force driving them—and they want to convert everyone to their religion. The strategic import of this portrait for Hitler was, as with von Oppenheim and the kaiser, the idea that allying oneself with Islam was the political key to success in the region.67
The other young man of the time who would play a leading role in the second round of Germany’s efforts to raise the Islamic world in rebellion against rival powers was al-Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husaini. To Hitler’s Kara Bin Nimsi, al-Husaini would play the part of al-Hajj Khalif Umar Bin Khalif. Born in 1897 to one of the most important families in the Ottoman province of Syria, al-Husaini’s uniqueness was in his bringing together all the factors that would make a powerful Arab and Muslim leader.
First he had a strong education in Islam. Al-Husaini was taught to memorize the entire al-Qur’an and made the pilgrimage to Mecca as a teenager, accompanying his mother to the holy city in 1913.68 He was well connected for becoming a high-level Muslim cleric, being heir to one of the area’s most powerful clans whose members often held such posts. The al-Husaini family claimed a noble ancestry, in both Arab and Islamic terms, from Muhammad himself. They were said to have left western Arabia for Jaffa and in 1380 to have settled in Jerusalem. From that time, the family’s members often served as mayors or, like al-Husaini’s father and his brother Kamil, as muftis of Jerusalem.69
Then, too, he was taught other skills. In a land still governed in the Ottoman Turkish tongue, he was given private lessons in Arabic and Arab history, thus preparing him for the Arab nationalist movement. He learned French from Catholic priests, enabling him to communicate with Europeans both linguistically and socially. Later he would write to Hitler in French with a fine handwriting. Another advantage in this regard was that Amin himself was European-looking, with light skin, a reddish beard, and blue eyes.
After his early education, al-Husaini was sent to study at al-Azhar in Cairo, the most influential Islamic university in the Muslim world. He also sat in on courses at Cairo University. Al-Husaini also embarked on political activism, and in 1914 he organized a meeting of twenty Arabs to form an anti-Zionist group.70 As Hitler inherited old anti-Semitic concepts and transmuted them, so did al-Husaini. He was told in his religious education how Jews had corrupted the holy book given to them by God and had later refused to become Muslims, and how Muhammad—whose acts are always defined as righteous—had massacred Jewish tribes, killing the men, selling the women and children into slavery, and expelling all the Jews from Arabia.71 Al-Qur’an told him not to befriend or trust them.
One of al-Husaini’s teachers was the leading Arab intellectual of the day who blended Islamism, nationalism, and modernization. The Syria-born Rashid Rida argued that by adopting certain elements of the modern world and uniting, Muslims could best resist Western incursions and return to early Islam’s golden age. Amin quarreled with his father, who was more of a traditionalist and didn’t like the politicization of Islam that was producing this new Islamist movement.72
Back in Germany, after von Oppenheim’s retirement from the Foreign Ministry his place as the kaiser’s chief adviser on Islam and the Middle East was taken by Ernst Jäckh. This young man, born in 1875, had spent much of his career in journalism, wasn’t really an academic expert, and spoke little if any Turkish, but he was a strong enthusiast for the Ottoman regime and the Young Turks in particular. Since 1902, Jäckh had been an organizer for Germany’s liberal movement. He saw the Young Turks as kindred spirits, reformers dedicated to constitutionalism and modernization. There was truth in this concept, but they were also militaristic and chauvinistic nationalists, aspects he failed to understand.
Since Germany ruled few Muslims, Jäckh suggested, it had little to fear from a jihad against European Christian rule. In August 1914, as the war began, he wrote that once the Ottoman sultan-caliph ordered a jihad,
Then Islam rises up against Great Britain, France and Russia. In Iran are ten million Muslims ready to march against Russia and England. Russia rules over 20 million Muslims who could turn against her. London has to take into account 100 million Afro-Asian Muslims, among them 60 million in India.
It will be a global war from Morocco through India and Iran to the Caucasus. The stage is set “for the mighty sword of Islam.”73
It seemed that the kaiser’s dream of a second front in the colonial hinterland that would sweep Germany to victory was about to be realized. Or was it?
