On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo. The event set off a diplomatic chain reaction two decades in the making. Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum demanding huge concessions from Serbia, which it held responsible for the murders. Serbia refused and turned to its ally, Russia; Russia looked to its allies Britain and France for support. Austria sought Germany’s backing. A month later the Austrians declared war on Serbia and all the powers joined battle.
In Berlin, the war lit the fuse for Germany’s secret weapon. On July 30, the kaiser explained: “Our consuls and agents in Turkey, India and Egypt are supposed to inflame the Muslim regions to wild revolts against the British.” If the plan worked, “England shall lose at least India.”1 Von Oppenheim, author of Germany’s Islamic strategy, returned to the Foreign Ministry on August 2, nominally as head of the news department but actually to run covert warfare in the Middle East, implementing the program he had advocated for twenty years.2 As von Oppenheim had put it in 1898, his mission was to unleash “Muslim fanaticism that borders on insanity.”3
Of the experts recruited for this purpose, the most important were Carl Heinrich Becker, Hugo Grothe, and Eugen Mittwoch, all brilliant scholars but not necessarily well-informed regarding how to organize a jihad.4
Becker was a thirty-eight-year-old professor of Oriental Philology at Bonn University and editor of the journal Der Islam. Despite earlier reservations about the jihad strategy, he was eager to implement it. Since he had been rejected for military service due to poor health, this was the way he would serve the Fatherland.
Grothe, forty-five years old, knew Turkey and India well and had traveled across Iran in 1907, but was mainly an economist and made basic factual errors in discussing Islam. A strong partisan of the Turks, he referred to Armenians’ “cheating and usury” and to them as the “main supporters of the terrorists in the Caucasus,”5 and blamed previous Turkish massacres on the Armenians’ “bloodsucking activities.”6
Mittwoch, thirty-eight years old, would have the strangest career. In 1916, he succeeded von Oppenheim in running the German jihad campaign, and after the war he became the University of Berlin’s professor of Semitic studies. An at least partly observant Jew, Mittwoch was praised by one of his students, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Lubavitcher rebbe and one of the greatest figures of modern Jewish history.7 His scholarship was so highly regarded that the Nazis rescinded his firing in 1933 and kept him on for two more years, and even then gave him emeritus status due to intervention by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who admired his research on Ethiopia. He headed the office of an American Jewish organization in Berlin until he could escape in 1939, dying three years later in London.
In August 1914, Becker, Grothe, and Mittwoch agreed that their duty was to use their knowledge for Germany’s benefit.8 They all believed that the longer, more deadlocked the war in Europe, the more vital it was to open a front in the Middle East.9
On one point the experts and the kaiser were quickly proven correct. In early 1914, the Turks secretly asked for an alliance with Germany, and on August 2, as the war was beginning, the two countries signed an agreement in which the Ottomans would enter the war if Russia did so and if the Germans provided support and equipment.10 This achievement was the culmination of a decades-long German dream.11 The head of the kaiser’s war cabinet, Moriz von Lyncker, expressed both hope and ambivalence about German strategy. “Eventually all of Islam might turn against England,” he agreed, but asked how much of a contribution that would really be to the German war effort.12
While von Oppenheim organized his team and wrote a master plan for launching jihad,13 the three experts assembled a program entitled “Germany and Islam.” Their mission was to inform the German elite and prepare the general public for an unprecedented—in Becker’s phrase—and frightening undertaking: a European Christian–manufactured jihad against other European Christians. Becker dealt with German policy toward Islam in general; Grothe, with Turkey; and Mittwoch, with the doctrine of jihad.14
While examining potential problems, the German experts were up-beat, claiming alliance with the Ottomans plus jihad would be unstoppable. “We have to win the war ourselves,” they explained, but the Ottomans would be an important force in that victory.15 They could stir huge Islamic revolts, Mittwoch wrote, because, “Culture and religion, state and church, nation and community of faith are for Muslims all the same.”16 He predicted that Ottoman troops accompanied by German officers could even advance into India and inspire a massive anti-British revolt there.17
Of course, the authors admitted, there were risks, especially that of unleashing an Islamic genie that would escape Berlin’s control, launching an all-out offensive against all Christians. Or, perhaps the Allies might discredit the Ottoman sultan as a pawn of German “infidels” and raise an Islamic-flavored Arab revolt against him. Becker revived his old idea that the jihad strategy wouldn’t work because the Ottoman sultan was not a real caliph.18
But Becker and his colleagues quickly brushed aside these objections. At this point, they believed, Germany had no choice but to try the scheme. At a minimum, a jihad would tie up Allied troops in the Middle East so they could not be sent to the European front. If, however, the jihad succeeded the prize would be enormous. A huge, modernized Muslim state dominated by the Ottoman Empire, the Islambund, with Istanbul as its capital, would become a close ally and valuable economic partner. Iran and Afghanistan would be linked to it in an Islamic Triple Alliance.19 And Germany would be predominant throughout the Middle East.20
On August 5, 1914, just three days after the German-Ottoman alliance was concluded, Chief of the German General Staff General Helmuth von Moltke asked the Ottomans to invade Egypt to trigger pan-Islamic revolts. Ottoman War Minister Enver Pasha agreed and gave the order to prepare the operation. He told a visitor from Berlin: “I am conducting this war according to orders from the German General Staff. I have asked for [German] advisers in all ministries. And this shows my real intention.”21
Figure 7. Enver Pasha, Ottoman war minister during World War I, who also unleashed the German-Ottoman jihadization of Islam with a 1914 call for Afro-Asian jihad in the colonies of Great Britain, Russia, and France. After the war he briefly joined the Soviet “leftist jihad” in the service of world revolution, but was eventually killed fighting for Central Asian Muslim opponents of the Bolsheviks.
Enver cooperated closely with the German naval attaché, Hans Humann, a boyhood friend.22 The Turkish-speaking Humann’s background exemplified Germany’s prewar role in the empire. His father, Carl Wilhelm, was an engineer who traveled widely building roads and railroads, as well as a great amateur archaeologist. His great accomplishment was the excavation of Pergamon, an almost intact ancient Greek city near Izmir. It was in that latter place where Hans was born in 1878.
Together, Hans Humann and Enver established the tashkilat-i mahsusa, an organization to spread revolt and jihad throughout the Russian-ruled Caucasus.23 Enver created another such group, the Bureau for Revolutionizing Middle Eastern Lands,24 to do the same for Arab-populated regions.25 Meanwhile, Enver received the promised German military advisers and equipment. On October 21, 1914, he became Ottoman commander in chief,26 and the next day he told Berlin his war plan.27 Within a week, the Ottoman navy, under the command of German Admiral Wilhelm A. Souchon, was ordered to attack Russian Black Sea ports.28 On November 2, Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire, followed by Britain and France three days later.
On the covert operations front, von Oppenheim sent his 136-page plan, “The Revolutionizing of the Islamic Territories of our Enemies,” to the kaiser in November.29 It was quickly approved and funded.30 The prime goals were to take Egypt away from Britain and raise serious revolts in India and Afghanistan. Toward this end, Germany would bribe tribes to revolt and distribute propaganda to persuade Muslim troops in enemy armies to desert and join the German side. The Suez Canal, water supplies, and oil pipelines would be sabotaged. War would be waged against the British in Iran, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and India, against the French in North Africa, and against the Russians in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Since the plan identified the enemy as not only the British, French, and Russians but also non-Muslim minorities, Christians and Jews who supported the Allies, this meant Germany’s endorsement of a war against civilians and spreading religious hatred. Thus, German strategy would be intimately involved in the Ottomans’ mass murder of Armenians.
Would the sultan’s religious prestige suffice for Muslims to follow him in fighting their Christian rulers?31 It is easy to see these schemes as fantasies, but there was a real basis for believing Islam could be Germany’s secret weapon. Aside from the millions in enemy territory, almost 500,000 Muslim soldiers served in Allied armies: in the French forces, they came from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; and in the British forces, from India.32 And belief that the sultan was the proper ruler and guardian of Islam’s holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, did keep almost all of the Ottoman army, including Arab officers, and the empire’s Muslim population loyal throughout the war.
Von Oppenheim quickly established propaganda bases throughout the empire, the main ones being in Medina, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Cairo, Baghdad, and the Shia Muslim centers of Karbala and Najaf. To assemble his team required the services of a variety of characters. One of them was the Young Turk activist Munis Tekin Alp who wrote pro-German propaganda and extolled Pan-Turkish ideas.33 Although a convinced Turkish nationalist, he had been born Marcel Cohen in Salonika.34
Alp’s writing stressed Pan-Turkish nationalism and enmity toward Russia; Arab and Arabic-speaking German agents wrote similar materials that put the emphasis on Pan-Islamist religious ideology and Britain as the enemy. Alp’s 1915 pamphlet, The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal, spoke of uniting all Turkic peoples—including those ruled by Russia—into a great nationalist-Islamist empire that would be allied to a Germany that dominated Europe.35 In comparison, the Russians were portrayed as enemies of all Turkic and Muslim people; the English as degenerate friends of the tsar; and the French as foes of Turkish nationalism and Islam. Germany, claimed Alp, “is the only country” that would help create and sustain the new Turkey, respecting its national independence and territorial integrity.36
But one German operation in the Ottoman Empire, involving an agent as flamboyant as Alp, would not only dwarf the impact of all the others but decisively change world history. Israel Lazarevich Gelfhand, better known as Alexander Parvus, was simultaneously a revolutionary thinker and a counterrevolutionary spy. Born in 1867 in a Russian shtetl, he was raised in cosmopolitan Odessa where he joined the Jewish Socialist Bund. Moving to Switzerland and Germany, Parvus became a Marxist and became friends with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, joining his Bolshevik group Parvus was considered one of the early movement’s most brilliant minds. His writings, especially his thoughts about how revolutionaries could ally with the tsar’s enemies in an international war to bring down the regime, drew German intelligence’s attention as early as 1905.
Continuing his remarkable permutations, Parvus moved to Istanbul where he became a millionaire arms merchant and adviser to the Young Turks.37 German ambassador Hans von Wangenheim, another admirer, sent Parvus to Berlin in March 1915 with a proposal to use German money to back the Bolsheviks in overthrowing the tsar and taking Russia out of the war. Soon, through Parvus’s networks in Denmark and Istanbul, money started flowing to Lenin. Success came in March 1917 when the Germans arranged Lenin’s return to Russia in a sealed train to foment a revolution. Before the year ended, Lenin seized power and did take Russia out of the war, a large, though not ultimately fatal, blow to the Allies. Germany could then transfer hundreds of thousands of troops from the Eastern to the Western Front for its final offensive in 1918.
Ironically, the operation intended to create a Muslim jihad to destroy Germany’s Russian enemy unexpectedly succeeded in that goal by helping set off a Communist revolution instead! It was ironic that Hitler and al-Husaini38 would both claim that the hated Jews were behind the Bolshevik revolution when actually the real culprit was arguably the kaiser.
As Buchan’s novel Greenmantle showed at the time, British intelligence knew a great deal regarding the German jihad plan. But the man who most publicly spilled the beans was a soft-spoken, respected Dutch scholar, C. Snouck Hurgronje, who read what his counterparts in Berlin wrote and was horrified at what he called this “jihad made in Germany.” Unleashing a plague of religious hatred, he warned, would provoke mob violence and massacres beyond anyone’s control. Hurgronje correctly pointed out in an article that while the caliph was formally endowed with the right to call a jihad and that Islam’s most sacred texts held jihad to be every Muslim’s duty, this did not correspond to what happened in the real world: “The jihad program assumes that the Mohammedans, just as at their first appearance in the world, continuously form a compact unity under one man’s leadership. But this situation has in reality endured so short a time, the realm of Islam has so quickly disintegrated into an increasingly large number of principalities, the supreme power of the so-called caliph, after flourishing for a short period, has become a mere word. . . .”39
This was especially embarrassing for Becker, who viewed Hurgronje as one of his mentors. The German scholar retorted that when the Allies used Muslim troops against the Central Powers, Berlin had every right to incite jihad in the colonial territories of its enemies to undermine that recruitment.40
Another leak came through German ambassador Wangenheim in Istanbul who blabbed too much to his neutral American counterpart, Henry I. Morgenthau. Puffing away on a big black cigar in his office, Wangenheim claimed that the Ottoman army was far less important than the sultan’s ability to proclaim a jihad. The ambassador explained, Morgenthau later recalled, “Quietly and nonchalantly, as though it had been the most ordinary” matter, Germany’s plot “to arouse the whole fanatical Muslim regions against the Christians.”41
But as it had been since von Oppenheim first raised the idea many years earlier, this was still all big talk. What could the Germans actually do to raise and direct such a jihad?
Von Oppenheim’s team worked closely with Rudolf Nadolny, a former diplomat who had been posted in the Middle East and now served in the German General Staff’s political section, and the Foreign Ministry’s Middle East expert Otto von Wesendonk. Insisting he wanted real experts, not adventurers, von Oppenheim quickly hired a dozen German experts and two dozen, mostly Muslim, non-Germans. By the war’s end, about sixty such people worked for him. Among them were the Tunisian Salikh ash-Sharif at-Tunisi; the Algerian Rabah Bukabuya; Mamun Abu al-Fadl, from western Arabia; and the Egyptians Ahmad Wali, Mustafa Mansur Rifat, and Abd al-Aziz Jawish. After the war, Jawish would be a key adviser of Hasan al-Banna in the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Von Oppenheim also hired Caucasian Muslims like the Tatars Said Effendiev, Shamil Safarov, and Muhammad Kazakov. There were also Indian and Persian sections. One of the more capable collaborators was Rabah Bukabuya, a French Muslim officer from Algeria who deserted to the German side in 1915. Also in Berlin, the Lebanese Druze Pan-Islamist Shakib Arslan and the Egyptian nationalist Muhammad Farid become advisers.
Arslan would ultimately be the most famous and influential of them all. In 1893, von Oppenheim had met members of his clan.42 Forty-five years old in 1914, Shakib Arslan was a Druze prince who had been a member of the Ottoman Parliament. Influenced by the ideas of the influential pioneer Islamist Muhammad Abduh, who had also influenced al-Husaini, Arslan viewed the Ottoman Empire as Islam’s defender against European colonialism.
The other staffer of note, and the only one with a real political base in his home country, was the forty-six-year-old Egyptian Mustafa Farid, former president of the National Party, Egypt’s main nationalist group. An advocate of expelling Britain from Egypt, he was exiled by Egypt’s king in 1912, after which he sought Ottoman and then German help.
During World War I, von Oppenheim’s office produced over one thousand publications in nine European and twelve Middle Eastern and Asian languages—four hundred of them in 1914 and 1915 alone—and distributed three million copies of books, newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and leaflets. These materials included such Pan-Islamic, anti-Allied materials as “They Cheat God and the Infidels,” “England and the Caliphate,” “Russian Massacres,” and “Jihad and French Troops.”43 Von Oppenheim placed propaganda with sympathetic news agencies like Agence Ottomane.44 In November 1914, the Germans opened a reading room in nearby Medina to attract those making the pilgrimage to Mecca until the area’s ruler, Sharif Husain—already involved in secret talks that would lead to his joining the British the next year—closed it.45
The most important readers for von Oppenheim’s publications were, literally, a captive audience: Muslim prisoners of war—mainly Indians from the British forces and North Africans from the French armies—held by Germany. There were about nine hundred of them at first. To indoctrinate and recruit them, these potential turncoats were moved into two special camps near Berlin, each with a mosque. They were given classes in Islam along with intensive German propagandizing by lectures and literature, including a multilingual weekly appropriately named al-Jihad.46
The means for actually carrying out the grand plan were limited. Nevertheless, the long-awaited moment arrived. On November 14, 1914, the sultan-caliph’s call for all faithful Muslims to wage jihad against the British, French, and Russians was proclaimed. Non-Ottoman Muslims also had to participate, said the fatwa—published in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish—to rescue the Ottoman Empire as the heart and soul of the umma, the international community of all Muslims. In a special ceremony, Sultan-Caliph Mehmed V was given an ancient Ottoman sword. Grand Mufti Ürgüplü Khairi Bey, the empire’s highest Muslim cleric and the fatwa’s main author, unrolled what was said to be Muhammad’s original battle flag. The sultan himself addressed the troops while War Minister Enver Pasha thundered, “Three hundred million Muslims sigh under chains,” and must be liberated.47
A large crowd, some on horseback, marched from the mosque to the German embassy. They included a woman acting the part of Aisha, one of Muhammad’s wives. On the balcony stood the German ambassador and some special surprise guests: fourteen Muslim ex–prisoners of war who had decided to join the German-Ottoman side. One of them, a huge Moroccan from the French army, made a speech in Arabic praising Germany and saying that Muslim soldiers were badly treated in the French military. The kaiser himself had approved the plan to take these men from Berlin to Istanbul on the luxurious Orient Express. To keep the operation secret, they had been disguised as acrobats.48 After cheering the kaiser, the crowd moved on to the embassy of Germany’s ally, Austria-Hungary, where they repeated the ceremony.
The declaration of jihad was calculated to make Muslims’ blood boil with indignation and eagerness to fight. Enemies, the declaration began, have attacked the Islamic world, seized and pillaged Islamic countries, and taken Muslims as prisoners. The “warships and armies” of Russia, England, France, and their allies: “Attack the Seat of the Islamic Caliphate and the Imperial Dominions and strive (God forbid) for extinguishing and annihilating the exalted light of Islam. . . . [Consequently] it is also incumbent upon all Muslims that are being ruled by these governments to proclaim jihad against them and to attack them.”49 Any Muslim who did not wage jihad, the declaration continued, was committing “a great sin and deserve[s] Divine wrath and punishment.” Even if the Allies threatened him with death or the extermination of his whole family, to fight against the Ottomans violated Islamic law and made them deserving of “hell-fire.” All Muslims “be they young or old, on foot or mounted, [must] hasten to partake in the jihad.”
Figure 8. The rulers of the Central Powers in World War I meet in Vienna, 1916. Left to right: Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Kaiser Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, and Sultan Mehmed V Reshad of the Ottoman Empire.
This imperial decree was followed by many other fatwas, some engineered by the Germans, others translated and distributed by them. Typical was a 1915 fatwa by Hibat ad-Din Muhammad ash-Shahrastani, translated by Helmut Ritter of the Sixth Ottoman Army in Baghdad and Carl Brockelmann of Halle University. Becker checked the text and von Oppenheim’s organization distributed it widely. An Iranian, Muhammad Farisi of Karbala, added notes.50
The fatwa began with a question: “Germans are Christians and now helpers of Muslims. But they are also infidels like the Russians, English, Italians, and French. Why is it allowed for us as Muslims to be friends with the Germans while the killing of other infidels is an obligation, and since all the infidels are of one nation?” Ash-Shahrastani answered, “There are two kinds of infidels. The friendly ones do not seek to plunder the houses of Muslims and to rape their religion. The other kind of infidels—the French, British, and Russians—are our religious foes. They want to loot our houses and destroy our national independence and state. The Sharia [Islamic law] does not allow us to treat them nicely but orders us to be hostile and wage war against them.”
As examples of Germany’s pro-Muslim policies, ash-Shahrastani recalled how the kaiser had honored Saladin and called himself a friend and protector of Muslims. Germany’s ruler had sent Muslim prisoners of war taken from the French and Russian armies to Istanbul, city of the caliphate, to fight for the Ottomans. Finally, Farisi noted the military training and weapons Germany gave the Ottomans. In contrast, ash-Shahrastani listed the Allies’ sins, some of them fabricated: British “Foreign Minister” William Ewart Gladstone (he was prime minister but never foreign minister) supposedly had told Parliament that England could not succeed unless the Muslim holy book, al-Qur’an, was defiled. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury had allegedly stressed that only if the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site in Mecca, was eliminated could London control Muslim countries. An unidentified French ruler was quoted as advocating that Mecca and Medina be captured so that Muhammad’s body could be put in the Louvre and Muslims lured to come live in France. To this list, Farisi added the Crusades (deleting the large German role in them), Russian expansionism, French and British colonialism, and the 1907 Anglo-Russian treaty dividing Persia into spheres of influence.
Ash-Shahrastani’s arguments, down to the accusation that Gladstone was behind a war on Islam, would be recycled by al-Husaini before and during World War II. Echoes of this World War I propaganda can also be found in the documents of Hamas, al-Qaida, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the twenty-first century.
The fatwas promulgated were precisely as von Oppenheim prescribed to the kaiser back in 1896: jihad was the duty of all Muslims, the caliph could order them to jihad, the Ottoman ruler was the caliph, so all Muslims should obey him.
Could this chain of logic win the war for Germany and the Ottoman Empire? The problem was that German experts erroneously assumed that Islam’s doctrines would be implemented by its adherents. Yet in practice things were quite different. Outside the Ottoman Empire the sultan’s fatwa was largely ignored. Shia Muslims, who formed the majority in Iraq and Iran, did not accept this claim that they must obey a Sunni Muslim Ottoman ruler.
Even among Sunni Muslims, there were many who never heard of the fatwa or were indifferent, who put ethnic considerations as Arab nationalists above loyalty to the Ottomans, did as local political or religious leaders ordered, thought a non-Arab Turk could not be the proper caliph, benefited from working with the colonial rulers, or simply didn’t want to risk their lives or property. This distinction between the theory of Islam and the actual daily lives of Muslims would be one that many would miss in future, both in the West and among Muslims themselves, such as in the foiled expectations of Usama bin Ladin decades later.
In Istanbul, the immediate aftermath of the fatwa’s issue confirmed the idea that inflaming passions might end with killing Christians. U.S. Ambassador Morgenthau described how after the ceremony, Enver visited Morgenthau and promised, “There will be no massacres,” a statement that did more to heighten than assuage the American ambassador’s concern. At the very moment Enver was speaking, Morgenthau’s secretary entered the office and whispered in his ear that a mob was demonstrating against foreigners and assaulting an Austrian-owned shop that had a sign saying, “English clothes for sale”—ironic since Austria was Germany’s leading ally—and a French clothing store. This was just a mistake, Enver said, and left.
Later in the day, Morgenthau called Enver to find out what had happened. Enver tried to calm him by saying that the U.S. embassy had nothing to fear. Meanwhile, though, the mob—with Ottoman policemen in the lead—marched through the area where most foreigners lived.51 One target was the famous Armenian-owned Tokatlian hotel and café on the Grande Rue de Péra. Men used poles with hooks on the end to break its mirrors and windows. Others smashed marble-topped tables. Within minutes, the place was gutted. Suddenly, one of the policemen drew his gun and shot straight into a fine English grandfather clock. Even von Oppenheim’s deputy, Karl E. Schabinger, who later succeeded him as head of the News Department, was shaken by the violent passions aroused. “This is the way the Holy Jihad war is starting.”52
Quickly, Enver, who was simultaneously planning the deportation and massacre of Armenians, realized that the violence had to be focused against his and Germany’s enemies. He asked Salih ash-Sharif at-Tunisi of von Oppenheim’s staff to write a supplementary analysis of the fatwa to show that only war against the Christians of France, Britain, and Russia was good, but that attacking German Christians was bad. Al-Tunisi produced a pamphlet entitled “Truth of Jihad.”53 He explained that peace between Muslims and European Christians could only be achieved if there was no longer any foreign occupation of Islamic lands. Since Germany had no colonies, it would be sufficient to expel Britain, France, and Russia from Muslim lands, and German willingness to help in this effort proved they were good infidels.54 Von Oppenheim’s organization published the booklet in several Middle Eastern languages, with the German Society for the Study of Islam bringing out a German edition.
In March 1915, von Oppenheim left Istanbul to oversee field operations. During the next few months, he toured Ottoman Syria, giving talks in Beirut and Damascus calling for jihad and a close Ottoman-German alliance.55 More prosaically, a British intelligence report following his activities, perhaps drawn from local rumors and eager-to-please informants, also accused him of “consorting with Muslim prostitutes while intriguing with Muslim married women.” Von Oppenheim later seemed to admit this was at least partly true.56
As a result of all these activities, von Oppenheim claimed, his organization had established seventy-five reading rooms, mostly managed by locals, all over the empire to make literature available, gather intelligence, and recruit agents. Within two days, he boasted, he could spread a piece of propaganda all over the sprawling, technologically backward country.57 In early 1916, the German liberal politician Gustav Stresemann inspected two of von Oppenheim’s reading halls in Istanbul and was impressed. Thousands of people were using them, he noted, even if only—because they were illiterate—to look at the pictures. “This is great for us since it is not obvious . . . that they are German-controlled operations.”58 Morgenthau was less favorable. In trying to make public opinion hostile to the Allies, he reported, the halls use “streams of slander.” Huge maps posted on the walls showed Muslim-inhabited territories snapped up by the British, French, and Russians; cartoons portrayed the Allies as greedy animals harrying poor Turkey.
Figure 9. Map of Max von Oppenheim’s news operation in the Ottoman Empire, with seventy-five centers for jihad propaganda open or planned. The agitation for war was often coordinated with local Young Turk leaders. In 1916 the German politician Gustav Stresemann visited two centers in Istanbul and commented that “it is not obvious . . . that they are German-controlled operations.”
The local hero in this propaganda was Enver Pasha. The other idol was the kaiser: “Hajji Wilhelm,” he was called as if he were a Muslim who had made the Mecca pilgrimage. Another theme was the claim that Muslims of India and Egypt were about to revolt and throw out the British tyrants. People were taught the German motto, which took on an even more intense meaning for Muslims: “Gott strafe England!”— “God Punish England!”59
Outside the Ottoman Empire, von Oppenheim organized news halls wherever possible in neutral countries, like Tabriz, Iran, and Misrata in Italian-ruled Tripolitania, as well as distributing materials in the neutral Netherlands and Switzerland. In 1916, he founded a newsreel company to make propaganda films for use in the Balkans and Middle East.
Less publicly, von Oppenheim’s group produced “how-to” manuals for jihad. One of the most widely circulated was by the Egyptian Jawish who worked both for the Germans and for Enver’s intelligence operation in Berlin.60 Morgenthau obtained a copy and was horrified. The booklet called for assassinations and the systematic “inciting of hatred to the foreign infidel.” Jawish gave three methods for jihad: individual killings of Europeans or any non-Muslims, bands to slay infidels, and operations supporting Ottoman army campaigns.61 Referring to the many Christians serving as officials on Ottoman railroads, von Oppenheim advised they should be threatened and “members of their families taken hostage to ensure they would not engage in sabotage.”62
Von Oppenheim’s top objective was Egypt. Forcing the Suez Canal’s closure would be a tremendous blow to Britain’s war effort. There were, he estimated, 11 million Egyptians, mostly Muslims, but only 37,000 British troops in the area. If an Ottoman army crossed into Egypt, he claimed, the vast majority of Egyptians would support it and overwhelm the British.63 To achieve this result, von Oppenheim recommended, agents should be sent to spread revolt and Egyptians recruited into death squads “under Egyptian and Turkish officers to kill the English all over, beginning with the countryside.”64
Von Oppenheim continued:
Let us incite the Egyptians in the name of the sultan-caliph. Foment revolts there. Target especially the al-Azhar Mosque, the religious brotherhoods, and so on. Arrange as many strikes and assassinations as possible, regardless of whether they succeed or not. This helps us by confusing the British. . . . [British] reprisals are to be expected: the more cruel . . . the more they will hit the innocent civilians, the more it will deepen the people’s fury and fanaticism. This gets them ready . . . to fight until the bitter end and to throw the British out.65
While World War I was a brutal, bloody conflict in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers died and poison gas was used, Germany’s decision to launch a campaign of state-sponsored terrorism against civilians was nonetheless shocking at the time. Both Morgenthau and the Austro-Hungarian military adviser to the Ottomans, Joseph Pomiankowski, whose country was allied with Germany, thought so and questioned whether this strategy would lead to mass murder.66
Except for small-scale sabotage successes however, the covert German war in Egypt achieved little. In January 1915 the Austro-Hungarian engineer Georg Gondos and the linguist Paul M. Simon led a band of twenty men, including Ottoman soldiers, that tried but failed to destroy oil installations in the southern Sinai near the Red Sea. A few mines were placed near the Suez Canal.67 German operations from Sudan and Italian-ruled Libya sought to strike into Egypt.68
Von Oppenheim’s efforts were a bit more successful in North Africa than in Egypt but didn’t lead anywhere either. Italy’s loose hold on Libya let the Germans operate there with impunity. Twice, the German Arabic-speaking agent Edgar Pröbster infiltrated into Libya by submarine and distributed money to the rebellious Sanusiyya brotherhood.69 Another German agent, Otto Mannesmann, lived with that group as an adviser until killed by bandits in 1916.70
Subversive efforts against Egypt and Libya were ultimately more counterproductive than useful. Italy’s alarm about von Oppenheim’s efforts in Libya was one factor driving Italy to enter the war on the Allied side in 1915. Aware of the threat in Egypt, the British tightened their control and replaced pro-German ruler Abbas Hilmi with his pro-British uncle Husain Kamil. Hilmi’s German patrons helped the exiled monarch found the International Muslim Office in Lausanne, another of von Oppenheim’s many front groups.71
But the main difficulty was the German-advised Ottoman army’s inability to break through against the British on the Egyptian front. Its offensives failed in February 1915 and the summer of 1916. In contrast, the 1917 British offensive from Egypt succeeded, capturing Jerusalem and then Damascus. On the Iraq front they took Baghdad. Similarly, the British came out on top in Arabia. Von Oppenheim, knowing this was an extremely religious area, hoped to persuade Sharif Husain of Mecca, ruler of the west Arabian Hijaz kingdom, and his prestigious Hashemite family to join the jihad. His first agent was the journalist Max Roloff who volunteered to go disguised as a Muslim pilgrim. In late 1914 he returned to report on his perilous journey. But Roloff had merely made up the story.72 Next, the German ethnologist Leo V. Frobenius was sent to Medina in 1915 to buy up Islamist preachers for the jihad cause while Othmar von Stotzingen tried to build a support base in southern Arabia.
Figure 10. The German-Ottoman alliance at work, October 1917. Kaiser Wilhelm II visits Gallipoli, site of Ottoman victory over Australian, British, and New Zealand forces with Ottoman General Esad Pasha, Enver Pasha, and German Vice Admiral Johannes Merten while non-Muslims like Armenians and Jews became the first victims of Islamism, an ideology that was used by the German-Ottoman jihad of the kaiser and the “Three Pashas,” Enver, Talat, and Cemal.
The most able German agent in that region was Alois Musil, a Czech-born theology professor and Catholic priest. His mission was to win over the two key figures in Arabia, Sharif Husain and Ibn Saud, leader of the east Arabian kingdom in Nejd. For the first time, Enver balked at a German operation, concerned that the discovery that Musil was a priest could bring massive violence as local Muslims would suspect him of preaching Christianity. At last, though, Enver’s concerns were assuaged. Musil spoke fluent Arabic and had a deep understanding of local customs and Islam. The Arabs dubbed him mumathil al-muluk ath-thulatha, envoy of the three kings—Germany, Austria, and the sultan. But even Musil backed by a monarchical trio could not mobilize a pro-Ottoman movement.73
Instead, Britain successfully raised rebellion in Arabia by winning over Sharif Husain with bribes of gold and promises of territory. As for Ibn Saud, he mistrusted the Ottomans, from whom he had long struggled to maintain independence.74 The Germans had ignored the fact that backing the Ottomans was costly in a place where many saw the sultan as an enemy. While the British persuasively promised Sharif Husain a vast Arab kingdom carved from Ottoman territories if he joined them, Germany could only offer continued submission to Ottoman rule. For the tribesmen, loyalty to their leaders was more compelling than fighting for a distant supposed caliph who wasn’t even an Arab and whom they know only through resented tax collections. Then, too, even if they had no sophisticated sense of nationalism, the Arabs of the peninsula proved easier to rouse against Turkish governors they knew than against European Christians they had never glimpsed.
Aside from Egypt and Arabia, the main German target was India. Von Oppenheim’s twenty-five-member Indian section trained exiled nationalists to use explosives, preparing them for assassinations and even suicide attacks, then tried to infiltrate them back into India.75 He toyed with such daring operations as a naval attack to free five hundred anti-British Indian nationalists held prisoner on the remote Andaman Islands. German navy officers were ready to try but the plan was put aside due to more pressing demands on the Reich’s ships and men.76 In Berlin and Switzerland, von Oppenheim’s network established an eighteen-member Indian Committee whose men, as a German document put it, “were willing to die and kill any traitors.”77 But Germany vastly overestimated both the ease of stirring revolt there and the subcontinent’s Muslims’ interest in what the sultan said.
One operation was even conducted in the then-neutral United States. The key figure was Franz von Papen, German military attaché in Washington. He had already established an arms business, the Bridgeport Company, to make explosives and buy up weapons for the German war effort. Some were destined for anti-British revolutionaries in India.
In 1914, the Indian Committee in Berlin obtained an official German promise of arms and money to fight for the country’s independence. The committee sent that message to Indian troops in the British army to subvert their loyalty: “Revolution is round the corner, independence in reach.” The plan was to ship German weapons via the neutral Dutch East Indies, today Indonesia. Von Papen sent $250,000 worth of war materiel on two ships, the Annie Larsen and the Maverick. An Indian revolutionary, Manabendra Nath Roy, traveled to Java to take delivery,78 but the British discovered and blocked the plot. A year later, a trial in San Francisco of eight of von Papen’s Indian agents would reveal his involvement in a wide range of espionage and sabotage activities in America, including an effort to set up a military training base for pro-German Indians in upstate New York.79 As a result of these plots, the United States declared him persona non grata in early 1916.
Von Papen became chief of staff of the German army’s Asia Corps under General Erich von Falkenhayn on the Iraqi front.80 During his service, von Papen developed contacts with many Ottoman officers and political figures, including Mustafa Kemal who, as Kemal Atatürk, would lead the postwar Turkish republic. During this time, von Papen also befriended a young staff officer in Istanbul named Joachim von Ribbentrop. When von Ribbentrop became Nazi foreign minister, he remembered the favor. Von Papen would return to the area to play a leading role as Germany’s ambassador to Turkey during World War II.81
The other part of Germany’s India campaign was two adventurous but ultimately unfruitful overland treks by agents through Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan to raise rebellion in those countries and establish bases for operations into India. One group, which set off in January 1915, was headed by former German military attaché to Iran Fritz Klein. Its immediate task was to destroy British facilities near the Iran-Ottoman border, but the more ambitious goal was to raise jihad among the Shia Muslims of Iraq. A German officer, Edgar Stern-Rubarth, persuaded Shia leaders in Karbala to issue a fatwa calling for jihad in February 1915 and to praise Germany as the Muslims’ friend.82 Von Oppenheim’s group ensured that this declaration was relayed to India. But there was no uprising:83 tribal leaders simply took money from both sides and did nothing.
In an even more dramatic effort a German-Ottoman group of about forty men traveled by horse and camel from Istanbul through Iran all the way to Kabul. They included Werner Otto von Hentig, who would be the Foreign Ministry’s top Middle East expert during World War II, and the Indian nationalist R. Mahendra Pratap. Two men who traveled with them part of the way, Wilhelm Wasmuss and Max von Scheubner-Richter, both former German consuls in Iran, were dropped off to raise the tribes in, respectively, the southern and northern parts of that country.
Scheubner-Richter took as his assistant Paul Leverkuehn, who would later head German military intelligence in the region during World War II.84 Later, Scheubner-Richter was one of the first to join the Nazi Party. Close to Hitler, he undoubtedly discussed his experiences and views on the region with the future dictator, for whom he served as a fundraiser. During Hitler’s abortive 1923 coup in Munich, Scheubner-Richter was killed while standing beside him.
Wasmuss and Scheubner-Richter tried in November 1915 to make a deal with Persian Prime Minister Mustosi al-Mamalik to gain his support for Germany in the war. They did win over the German-educated governor of Shiraz, who helped them destroy some British telegraph lines and oil pipelines.85 They also built good networks of contacts, one of whom was a military officer named Reza Khan who after the war would overthrow the Qajar dynasty and make himself shah.86 That development, too, would have an important impact on German fortunes in the region during World War II.
The rest of the expedition moved on to Afghanistan. In August 1915 it showed the governor of Herat—a spy reported the details to British intelligence—the sultan’s and the Shia clerics’ jihad proclamations. Berlin, they said, would supply Afghanistan with new rifles and military advisers, and if it joined them in attacking India they promised a lot of Russian and Indian territory after Germany won the war.87 Arriving in Kabul late in 1915, they made the same offer to the monarch, Amir Habib Allah.88 He toyed with them, signing a German-Afghan Pact of Friendship after a month of talks, but took no action.89 The pact specified that the Germans would supply 100,000 rifles and 300 artillery pieces along with all necessary supplies. But the Afghan monarch was not so naïve as to take on Russia and England simultaneously on the word of a few weather-beaten travelers. He would act, the amir said, when 100,000 German or Ottoman troops arrived to cover his rear against Russia.90
The Afghanistan expedition nonetheless did benefit German interests. Aware of these contacts, the British kept more soldiers in the area than they would have done otherwise. As in Iran’s case, furthermore, the German contacts in Kabul had a delayed effect. In May 1919, after the war ended, a coup brought to power a new ruler, Aman Allah, who did declare a jihad against the British, and in the subsequent fighting the Afghans temporarily invaded Indian soil. But that was too late to help the Germans.
Another achievement was the establishment of an anti-British Indian nationalist base in Kabul. On December 1, 1915, Pratap, who had accompanied the expedition, announced himself president of Free Hindustan’s government in exile. The British put a price on his head but for the next thirty years he continued to cooperate with the Germans and later the Japanese. After India became independent in 1947 he was allowed to return home.
In general, though, the jihad strategy, so long in development and high in hope, had fizzled. Many Arabs within the Ottoman Empire and most Muslims outside of it either no longer cared about the sultan, didn’t accept his credentials, had other priorities, or just didn’t believe the Young Turks, the empire’s real rulers, were sincere in their religious pretensions.91
But the most momentous immediate event arising from the German jihad strategy was the mass murder of Ottoman Armenians. Von Oppenheim either urged or supported Ottoman repression of the Armenians and Jews, as well as the execution of Arab nationalists, groups he saw as favoring the Allies. When German officials warned about massacres of Armenians, von Oppenheim told them to shut up.92
On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government began rounding up and deporting Armenians after some groups began a revolt to coordinate with the Russian advance against the Ottomans, hoping the tsar would give them control over areas where they lived in eastern Turkey. Pomiankowski, the Austro-Hungarian military attaché who sympathized with the Armenians’ plight, wrote that Ottoman leaders were enraged at how the insurrection damaged their military situation. Muslim Turks were killed by Armenians. Enver and other Ottoman rulers had warned the Armenians at the war’s start of severe punishment if they sided with the Russians.93
Von Oppenheim’s aide, Scheubner-Richter, sent three vivid reports to German Ambassador von Wangenheim on the cruelties against Armenians in the Lake Van region. Scheubner-Richter reported rumors that deportations were being conducted according to German advice. Personally, he explained, he didn’t believe the story and tried to help ease the pressure on the Armenians, but von Wangenheim ignored his request for intervention.94 If the Germans had wanted to stop, or at least mitigate, Ottoman policy and behavior toward the Armenians they could easily have done so. For example, on October 8, 1915, von Oppenheim received a report that the Ottoman government’s goal was the extermination of the Armenians.95 Only one week later, however, he was telling Berlin that the deportations were justified war measures because the Armenians were betraying the Ottomans by supporting their Russian enemy.96
One of the few Ottoman leaders who openly criticized the massacres was the grand mufti who wrote the jihad decree, Ürgüplü Khairi Bey. He was an opponent of the Young Turks’ secularism and of executing Arab clerics for disloyalty to the regime. Precisely because he was a very traditional Muslim he complained about the alliance with the infidel Germans, too, and as a result was forced from his post in mid-1915.97
Meanwhile, German consuls, bankers, and clerics in the empire were telling a different story from what von Oppenheim reported to Berlin.98 During the second half of 1915, they warned of how jihad rhetoric was inflaming Muslim hatred of Christians and determination to annihilate them; how the jihad was just a cover for systematic looting, killing, and terror toward Armenians; and they provided detailed accounts of mass deportations, killings, and concentration camps.
These Germans said they often heard the slogan from Muslims that jihad should begin by killing local Christians. They also noted that Ottoman officers and officials frequently said that Germany wanted the Armenians killed. German bankers told how Armenian employees and customers were disappearing. The Ottoman government then informed them that it was seizing the Armenians’ assets. The official explanation for German inaction was that Germany needed Turkey’s help as an ally and so could say nothing.99
By early 1916 German officials in the Ottoman Empire had no doubt about what was happening. Even the kaiser heard the news. The head of his military cabinet, Moriz von Lyncker, wrote in his diary on August 8, 1916: “Most terrible how the Turks rage against Christian Armenians, their subjects. Thousands—men, women and children—are slaughtered, others are driven purposely to death by starvation. Our diplomats appear at this point powerless.”100 But in fact the German government never made the slightest attempt to discourage the mass murders.
Soon, the Armenians disappeared entirely from eastern Anatolia.101 Enver told a visiting German that there was “No Armenian question any more.”102 He said that Armenians had killed between 125,000 and 150,000 Muslim Turks, and that the Turks had killed—the figures are hotly debated to this day—up to one and a half million Armenians.103
The mass murder of Ottoman Armenians was the largest organized massacre against a civilian minority since medieval and probably since ancient times. While it was carried out by the Ottomans, the Germans broadly inspired it, were well aware of it, and didn’t interfere with it. There is no definitive evidence for the story that Hitler later said Germany could get away with the Jewish Holocaust because nobody remembered the Armenian massacres, but this certainly seems to be what he thought.
Meanwhile, on the war’s Western front, Corporal Hitler received the Iron Cross at the end of 1914.104 Heavily wounded at the Somme two years later and sent to the Beelitz hospital near Berlin, he heard there about developments in the Middle East. Later, Scheubner-Richter gave him an eyewitness account of how the Ottomans gained popularity and strengthened their strategic situation by making a minority community scapegoat for the country’s problems and murdering them.
The kaiser himself was not particularly anti-Semitic or even anti-Zionist, though his alliance with the Ottomans was a higher priority for him.105 Moreover, the Jews, who would be the target of Germany’s own jihad in the next war, fared better in the Ottoman Empire. Many of the Zionists who had immigrated were Russian citizens and thus subjects of the Ottomans’ foe, though they had no love for the tsar’s regime. Some hoped the British would support their project for a Jewish state, and a small group led by botanist Aaron Aaronson founded the Nili spy ring to help the Allies.106
Since the Ottomans assumed Jews would be disloyal, they arrested and deported some and planned to expel them all. Cemal Pasha, Ottoman governor of Greater Syria and Fourth Army commander, wanted to, as a contemporary Zionist report put it, eliminate “alien subjects and to resettle those areas with Turks.”107 Cemal ruled with such an iron hand that the Arab inhabitants called him “as-Saffah,” the blood-shedder or killer, according to al-Husaini, one of his officers.108
On December 17, 1914, eight hundred Jews with Russian citizenship were deported by ship to Egypt.109 But later deportation decrees were reversed due to intervention by several foreign envoys, especially Morgenthau, himself a German-born Jew, and Richard Lichtheim, a leader of the German Zionist movement. Berlin urged a stop to Ottoman attacks on the Zionist settlements, and the Ottomans canceled the projected mass deportation partly because Germany warned that the Allies would make propaganda out of any anti-Jewish actions.110
On March 31, 1917, however, Cemal again ordered the deportation of all Jews from the area, an operation Jews feared would be a cover for massacres similar to those against the Armenians.111 Von Oppenheim’s deputy, Schabinger, who had tried to stop the killings of Armenians, was at the time German consul in Jaffa. Schabinger estimated that there were sixty thousand Jews in Jerusalem alone. Ahmad Munir, Cemal’s deputy in Jerusalem, told Schabinger that the deportations could not be carried out “without starvation and death.” A Jewish delegation from the town of Petah Tikva asked Schabinger for help, and he, in turn, asked Munir, “How am I supposed to explain this to my fellow Germans?” He and the German consul in Jerusalem threatened to protest publicly, and pointed out that the Germans had carried out effective propaganda against Russia precisely because it mistreated Jews. Cemal’s German chief of staff, Kreß von Kressenstein, agreed with the diplomats. Cemal relented and the order was again withdrawn. Ironically, Schabinger, who may have saved tens of thousands of Jews, joined the Nazi Party fourteen years later.
As an Ottoman officer stationed in Syria with the Fourth Army, al-Husaini closely watched these events as he built strong personal ties to the Germans. Al-Husaini later wrote how pleased he was with the kaiser’s honoring of Saladin during the monarch’s 1898 visit.112 Al-Husaini supported the jihad, did not participate in Arab nationalist underground movements, and viewed the Jews as traitors to the empire. He later claimed that the Nili ring was uncovered by his friends, military intelligence officer Juwad Rifat Aitelkhan and an army doctor named Hasan al-Fuad Ibrahim. According to al-Husaini—though this story is almost certainly untrue—Ibrahim found a pigeon in his room, where Jews had formerly lived, carrying a coded message intended for the British. Ottoman troops captured Sara Aaronson, Aaron’s sister, who was tortured and three days later committed suicide.113
Yet before the war ended, the Germans decided, and persuaded the Ottomans, to change their policy toward Zionism. They realized the value of courting Jewish support. The British wanted to gain Jewish political backing to keep Russia in the war after its March 1917 revolution and to ensure strong U.S. support for the Allied side; the Germans hoped to do the exact opposite.
The British government, however, moved faster and more decisively. Negotiating with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour believed a pro-Zionist declaration would keep Russia in the war, encourage the Americans to fight, and beat German efforts to win over the Zionist movement. On October 31, 1917, the Cabinet approved the proposed text favoring a Jewish national homeland, which was published November 2, immediately after the British captured Gaza.114
The Germans and Ottomans had a mixed response to the Balfour Declaration. On the one hand, they tried to use it to hold the Arabs’ loyalty, spreading the word that Britain had sold their land to the Jews. Many Arabs who heard this at first, however, assumed the claim to be German propaganda.115 Yet, at the same time, the Germans and Ottomans rushed to make their own offer to the Jews. In August 1917, Cemal Pasha met German Zionist leader Lichtheim while on a visit to Berlin. Cemal was coy at first, simply repeating the Ottoman stance that Jews could settle anywhere in the empire except in the territory they hoped to make into a state some day, but then he hinted that this policy could change in future.116
Meanwhile, the new German ambassador to the Ottomans arrived in Istanbul. Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff had spent ten years as a diplomat in Washington and held a high opinion of Jewish influence on the U.S. government. He lobbied with Ottoman leaders to support the policy shift and in October, before the British issued the Balfour Declaration, persuaded him to make a deal with the Zionists. The Ottomans would offer a Jewish national home under their rule after the war. Talat thought he had nothing to lose by doing so since, he predicted, the Arabs would eventually kill all the Jews who went there.117
As the British gained ground in the fighting, both the Germans and the Ottomans became desperate, especially after the British captured Jerusalem in December 1917. The Ottomans were reluctant to change policy, though, saying that the Zionist dream of autonomy conflicted with the empire’s sovereignty.118 Von Bernstorff continued his efforts, however, joined in July 1918 by German and Austrian Jewish leaders.119 They were now negotiating, however, over an area largely controlled by the British, not the Ottomans. Von Bernstorff urged the Jews to drop political demands for the time being because if the land was reconquered, they could get open immigration after the war and eventually reach their goal. While the Germans didn’t want to go too far and get into conflict with the Arabs, he continued, the kaiser would like to see Germany’s Jewish problem solved by emigration.120
The Ottomans, too, were finally ready to act. On August 12, 1918, Talat issued a statement that was the Ottoman equivalent of the Balfour Declaration:
The Council of Ministers had just decided . . . to lift all restrictions on Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine.
Strict orders have been given . . . to secure a benevolent treatment of the Jewish nation in Palestine based on complete equality with the other elements of the population. . . . I declare . . . my sympathies for the establishment of a Jewish religious and national center in Palestine by well-organized immigration and colonization. I am convinced of the importance and benefits of the Jewish settlement in Palestine for the Ottoman Empire.
I am willing to put this project under the high protection of the Ottoman Empire. I am willing to promote it by all means according to the sovereign rights of the Ottoman Empire which do not affect the rights of the non-Jewish population.
A commission was set up to write a detailed proposal for the Ottoman Parliament.121 Before this could happen, though, the Ottoman Empire surrendered to the Allies on October 30. Talat fled three days later in a German submarine on a voyage that would end in Berlin. But it is still significant that the last Muslim government ruling the area accepted the idea of a Jewish national home, as did both sides in the war.
Equally, though, the war also laid the basis for Nazi Middle East policy. The German strategy and many of the same individuals would be involved in World War II. Hitler would later say that all in his leading circle were from the generation of World War I soldiers, and that many of those men had served in the Middle East.122
The parallels between the kaiser’s and Hitler’s regional policies included the following.
First, Germany’s policy in both conflicts was based on stirring Muslim revolt against its enemies. Germany cast itself in the role of being the Muslims’ and Arabs’ true friend and patron, champion of the downtrodden, and sworn enemy to colonialism. Those who fought on Germany’s side were said to be acting faithfully in the interests of Islam and Iranian, Indian, or—in French-ruled areas—Arab nationalism; anyone who supported the Allies was a traitor to Islam.
Second, racism was a key element in German policy, laying a basis for its use by the Nazis in setting their Middle East (and other) policies. The Armenians were vilified on racist grounds while the Turks were praised as fellow warriors and rulers. As one German newspaper article put it in 1898: “The sick man [of Europe, a term used for the declining Ottoman Empire] will be cured, so thoroughly that when he wakes up from his sleep of recovery he will be difficult to recognize. One would think he has got blond hair, blue eyes, and looks quite Germanic. In our loving embrace we have injected so much German essence into him that he will be hard to distinguish from a German.”123 On the other hand, German policy looked down on Middle Eastern Christians, especially Armenians. Von Oppenheim said they deserved their reputation “as being cowards, and great at plotting and scheming.”124 This racial theme would continue under the Nazis, with some non-Europeans such as the Japanese and Arabs, granted “honorary Aryan” status, like the Turks in World War I. And of course by then the main target was the Jews.
Third, in deliberately stirring passionate hatred, Germany anticipated and accepted the idea that this would produce mass murders of minorities, Christians and Jews, as well as other civilians not on Germany’s side.
Fourth, German policymakers believed that powerful forces could be set in motion by charismatic individuals possessed with semimystical legitimacy. In both wars the Germans erred in expecting Muslims to react as a bloc rather than being divided by local, dynastic, ethnic, and other loyalties. At the same time, the Germans believed themselves able to control wildly fanatical forces. Such stories as those of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice or Frankenstein are based on ample historical experience that genies unleashed from bottles do not willingly return to their prisons.
Fifth, Germany accumulated during World War I a large cadre of experts and soldiers who knew the Middle East well and had extensive contacts there. About one hundred of them remained active in key positions during the Nazi era and continued their work in the region before and during World War II. Likewise, many Middle Easterners who had cooperated with Germany during the first war did so again in the sequel.
Sixth, Hitler would draw a lesson on the uses of genocide. The Armenians’ fate furnished a model for what he would do to the Jews since he believed that the Ottoman regime had benefited from the mass killings. The deep German complicity in the mass murders of the Armenians set a precedent. German officials were aware of these killings and other war crimes, hid them from the public eye, often justified them, and never acted to stop or reduce their scope though they could easily have done so. German officials who advocated the murders paid no price for their actions, while those who objected were silenced or ignored.125
Finally, the German concept of Islam and nationalism in the Middle East would reinforce Hitler in his romantic idea of a “racial”-based community prepared to wipe out entire peoples seen as rivals. While Germany had its own long history of anti-Semitism, Hitler developed the Middle East–influenced idea of staging a systematic jihad-style struggle against the Jews.
But there were also two lessons not fully absorbed by the Germans that would cost them dearly. One was that battlefield success would play the main role in determining whether political agitation could trigger revolts in the Middle East. The factor that sank von Oppenheim’s theories was military defeat, despite thirty thousand German troops fighting with the Ottoman army, two attempts to capture the Suez Canal, and hard-fought wars against the British in Iraq and against the Russians in the Caucasus. Even the fact that German advisers literally ran the Ottoman army—General Hans von Seeckt was the last Ottoman chief of staff—wasn’t enough to turn the tide.
The other thing the Germans didn’t learn, despite the failure of the sultan’s jihad, was skepticism about Arab and Muslim politicians’ promises to raise revolts and bring huge forces onto Germany’s side.
Hence the World War I experience of failure had not settled the issue as far as the Germans involved were concerned. Schabinger, von Oppenheim’s lieutenant, had said that the seeds of a mass uprising had been planted, positing that one day Middle Eastern peoples would turn against the British, French, and Russians.126 The idea that “the Muslims” or “the Arabs” could be united and mobilized in order to seize control of the entire region would be a central theme in Middle East history throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. The kaiser, Hitler, the USSR, Jamal Abd an-Nasir, Saddam Husain, Usama bin Ladin, and a variety of other Arab and Muslim leaders would try and fail to bring it to fruition.
Yet one thing was certain: Germany’s first effort to foment a jihad that would bring it victory would not be the last. The Germans would try the same strategy in a second round, seeking to use the Middle East in its attempt to conquer Europe and even the entire world.
