If history is dictated by the concerns of the historian’s day, then it’s surprising more of us haven’t heard the story of the Halbmondlager, or “Half Moon Camp”, a small First World War prisoner-of-war camp in Zossen, near Berlin.
It was like no other PoW camp in history. Reserved primarily for Muslim prisoners, detainees lived in relative luxury and were given everything they needed to practise their faith. Spiritual texts were provided, Ramadan observed, a mosque erected – the first on German soil – and there were sermons by visiting spiritual leaders and academics.
But Half Moon Camp was not some torchbearer for the more enlightened treatment of PoWs ushered in later by the Geneva Convention. It was, instead, the symbolic centre of a spectacularly unsuccessful pet project of Kaiser Wilhelm II: to turn Muslim soldiers fighting for Britain and France into jihadists loyal to Germany. Extensively written about in German history books but elsewhere a long-forgotten story of the Great War, the camp’s extraordinary role is finally being highlighted as part of the renewed scrutiny of the conflict in this centenary year.
The unlikely prophet of the jihad was German aristocrat, adventurer and diplomat Max von Oppenheim. The 54-year-old had returned to the Heimat after 20 years of travel and study in the Orient and, before Britain had even declared war on Germany, had convinced the Kaiser that Islam was Germany’s secret weapon. Oppenheim believed that a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign would stir up a mass Muslim uprising against Britain and France from within colonial territories such as India, Indo-China and north and west Africa.
GRAPHIC: First World War interactive map
“A lot of Germans thought he was a crank,” says Eugene Rogan, the author of forthcoming book The Fall of the Ottomans. “He had idiosyncratic views about the irrational extremist way that Muslims would behave.” The Kaiser, though, took him at his word. Wilhelm vowed to “inflame the whole Mohammedan world” against the British and on August 2 1914 a secret treaty between Germany and the Ottoman Empire marked the beginning of a bizarre political marriage between the Kaiser and Sultan Mehmed V.
That same day Oppenheim moved into his bureau in Berlin, the headquarters of his jihad propaganda machine.
The PoWs, who had fought valiantly for the Allied powers in the early battles of the First World War, were prime targets, confined as they were to a controlled environment a short distance from Oppenheim’s HQ. “I’m sure the Germans believed they would be fairly malleable to a message that turned them against the Entente and played on their Islam,” says Rogan.
Muslim prisoners of war were used as pawns in the project right from the start. In early November, when the Sultan – by arrangement with Germany – announced Britain, France and Russia the enemies of Islam from a mosque in Constantinople, the German ambassador in the city followed with a flamboyant announcement on the embassy balcony, flanked by 14 of Germany’s earliest Muslim prisoners, from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
Their duty was to deliver scripted lines in Arabic and Turkish promising the crowds that they would take the German jihad to North Africa. Afterwards, they are said to have carried Karl Emil Schabinger von Schowingen, an ally of Oppenheim’s, in a chaise longue through the streets, encouraging demonstrators to loot and burn any shops owned by the French and English. So the story goes, the affair was crowned with a symbolic flourish when Schabinger's entourage entered the lobby of his hotel and his police escort sent a single bullet into an English grandfather clock.
The German orientalist Max von Oppenheim arranged for a mosque to be built at the Half Moon PoW camp
The spectacle set the tone for the propaganda effort, as Oppenheim’s PoW camp depended on similar levels of carefully orchestrated hot air. Only 4,000-5,000 prisoners were detained in the camp (though Muslim soldiers were also housed in the neighbouring camp of Weinberg, where the propaganda effort was extended), but as the tokenism of the Half Moon Camp’s name suggests, the place was self-consciously styled as a theatre for the wider world. As German historian Heike Liebau explains in the BBC documentary The World’s War, to be broadcast this week, Half Moon was a “show camp”.
Postcards were printed showing prisoners taking part in sport and religious services, and engaged in the slaughter of animals for halal meat. The biggest showpiece of all was the Ottoman-style wooden mosque, with ornate arched doorways, a broad dome and a single minaret. It was built “to prove that Germany was the true friend of Islam”, says Liebau. “It was not built out of religious ideas, it was built on the expectation that it would serve the propaganda purposes that Germany had.” Oppenheim’s office spread the rumour that Kaiser Wilhelm himself had paid for its costly construction out of his own pocket.
“We know [the prisoners] had visiting speakers so they must have had classes or lectures,” says Rogan. “The mosque was certainly there as a place of worship, but Friday sermons are an opportunity to politicise, so they would have used the pulpit to continue their message. In that sense building a mosque was about more than giving people freedom of worship. It was about creating a place where the message could be reinforced by a religious authority.”
The extraordinary care that went into the creation of Half Moon’s unique environment was largely owing to the efforts of one highly driven individual reporting to Oppenheim’s bureau.
Shaykh Sâlih al-Sharîf, a Tunisian nationalist, had come to Berlin from the Ottoman intelligence service. Distinguishing himself early with a written document for Oppenheim called Jihad is an Obligation, which was used by the German press to illustrate that the holy war was not “made in Germany”, Sâlih cut a striking figure in the office, always going around in distinctive traditional burnous (hooded cloak) and turban.
A strong supporter of Maghreb independence, Sâlih took his job as propagandist rather beyond the call of duty by making treacherous visits to the trenches in person. Witnesses report seeing his turbaned head appearing above the parapet of a German trench appealing in classical Arabic, across no-man’s-land, to the Muslims in the French lines. His confidence bolstered, Sâlih even wrote a personal letter to the Kaiser recommending that Germany’s prestige in the Arab world would be greatly increased were he to liberate his own colonial territories in east and west Africa – advice that was politely refused.
According to German historical accounts Sâlih dedicated a lot of his energies to the PoW camp, where he was able to realise the role of spiritual leader. He gave talks and sermons, instigated the camp’s propaganda newspaper, Al-Djihad, first produced in March 1915 in Arabic, and wrote articles for it. He also made sure his congregation’s physical welfare was taken care of.
In front of the mosque at Half Moon Camp
Former Half Moon Camp PoW Ahmed bin Hussein, a farmer from Marrakesh, gave an enthusiastic account of camp life in First World War interrogation records recently published in Turkey. “They even made a favour of us, and gave us a kitchen. Pork was not to be given to us. They gave us good meat, pilaf, chickpeas etc. They gave three blankets, underwear, and a new pair of shoes, etc. To each of us. They took us to the baths once in every three days and cut our hair.”
He goes on to describe how recruiters visited the camp, and how he was among a dozen men who volunteered to fight for the Ottoman side that day. “Others were afraid,” he says.
The Germans hoped that by affording the Half Moon detainees luxuries, they would win their trust enough so that the men would switch allegiances, and sign up to fight the Sultan’s holy war in the colonies. A cunning plan, but one that seems to have backfired. Bin Hussein’s interrogation, it’s worth noting, took place after he’d been taken prisoner for a second time – by the same side.
Rogan speculates he was involved in a revolt against his new Ottoman commanders, possibly showing the ineffectiveness of the recruitment scheme. “American records suggest morale among these troops was quite low – after having been relatively well treated by the Germans, they were sent off to hot, dry, very difficult fighting conditions,” he says.
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The numbers of volunteers from the propaganda camps Half Moon and Weinberg were not insignificant. As many as 3,000 recruits from the camps arrived in Baghdad to serve on the Mesopotamian and Persian fronts. “Nothing to sneeze at,” Rogan says. “But they didn’t really know what they were fighting for. It wasn’t as though they were motivated by jihad. They were probably promised good treatment and glory.”
Why weren’t the men motivated by jihad? It’s perhaps more pertinent to ask, “Why would they have been?” As Rogan points out, the concept was daft to begin with. “It was not a natural thing: a targeted jihad focusing on three Western countries but excluding three other European countries. You hate Britain and France but not Germany, Bulgaria and Austria – what is that about?”
Rogan also thinks Oppenheim and his enthusiastic band of orientalists were deluded. “There was this misconception that Muslims behave in a uniformly fanatical way: they pray together in massive numbers, they obviously all surrender their thoughts in a uniform way, and if you turn that to your advantage you’ve got a powerful force to motivate and mobilise. It just doesn’t work that way.
“Muslims are like people anywhere else. Their willingness to get into something as risky as war is going to be determined by their interests, or their fears, or the threats that they face. It’s not because somebody waves a sword or a Koran and tells them to go to war.”
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The interests that motivated the heroics of one particularly singular-minded individual from the camp, Mir Mast, are telling. In The World’s War, writer and presenter David Olusoga narrates the compelling story of this Muslim PoW, with “the face of a born survivor”, from a mountain village on the India-Afghanistan border. Mast was captured and taken to the Half Moon Camp after deserting the Allies at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in 1915. Olusoga follows his extraordinary story after he agrees to volunteer on a dangerous mission for the Germans to Kabul to convince the Emir of Afghanistan to stop backing the British. As it turns out, Mast had his own motivations for the trip: it was a way back home.
Another example of a spirited act of defiance emerges in one of the recordings from the ethnographic project carried out at the camp in 1915 by a German academic (2,600 recordings of prisoners were taken in 250 languages). One Chote Singh recites into the gramophone his scripted line – “the German Kaiser looks after me very well” – then laughs.
A wonderfully comic novel written in 1917 by the English writer Talbot Mundy, Hira Singh, suggests that even then people around the world were laughing at the camps and the simplistic beliefs of the German orientalists and their jihad effort. Serialised in an American pulp magazine in 1917, then published as a book in London in 1918, Hira Singh tells the story of a Sikh soldier captured by the Germans in Marseille in the early stages of the war.
About 80 Sikhs were housed in the Half Moon Camp, and in the story Hira and his squadron are taken there. Jihad propaganda obviously did not apply to the Sikhs – in the book Hira is constantly bemused that Germans keep feeding him Mohammedan ideas – though non-Muslim prisoners were plied with material designed to ignite a nationalist sense of injustice instead.
Mundy, well travelled in India, Africa and the Middle East, must have had a source of information about what life was like in the camp. Many of his descriptions of the good living conditions and the propaganda newspapers tally with what is now known about it. He also describes how local women and children would come and stare at them, as if they were exotic exhibits, through the fence – entirely possible since the camp’s existence was well publicised and documentation shows that as early as 1915 PoWs from the Half Moon Camp were transported into Berlin to play extras in films.
Mundy’s story lampoons the German camp wonderfully. Hira’s wry, intelligent stream of consciousness provides an amusing counterpoint to the simplicity of the fawning tactics employed at the prison. “Our sense of justice was not courted once. They made appeal to our bellies, to our purses, to our lust, to our fear – but to our righteousness not at all.”
An exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, in London, Empire, Faith and War: The Sikhs and World War One, shines new light on the plight of the Sikhs during the war. The exhibition presents a translated version of the Half Moon Camp’s propaganda newspaper, the Hindostan, which contained stories, appeals, reports, and poems all intended to fuel anti-British sentiment:
“Oh martyrs, you have to help the people of India by creating a string unity among the people of different religions, because the enemy is getting very fit by creating hatred amongst the people through incitement of one religion against the other,” as a front page in the exhibition reads. But according to the exhibition’s curator, Parmjit Singh, the Germans’ best efforts didn’t work on the Sikhs. They remained largely loyal to the British.
The same goes for the 50 or so Irishmen who, German records indicate, found themselves at the Half Moon Camp in summer 1915 – much to their disgust. One, Pte Cornelius Rahilly, noted: “All [over] the camp the ugly sweaty smell of the East prevailed and some of the other inmates danced themselves often into a frenzy. The white protruding eyeballs of these semi-savages and their fantastic perambulations and knife gyrations hypnotised one into imagining he witnessed some diabolical display of the nether regions.”
The Irishmen were also fed propaganda, suggesting that there was a larger imperial politics behind the Germans’ efforts. But, by all accounts, the men showed themselves unmoved by propaganda – and within four months they had left Half Moon “where their presence [was] disturbing”, according to a prison authority’s memo.
It didn’t take long for the prison commanders to learn from their misconceptions about the Irish. And although the political aspirations of the camp were abandoned in 1917 when the majority of its inhabitants were quietly sent to Romania to work on agricultural land (and Shaykh Sâlih left Germany to live in Switzerland) there are, perhaps, lessons that can still be learnt from the camp’s failure.
“I think [the story is] relevant to readers today because people still have that view,” says Rogan. “People still believe that there’s this capacity for Muslims to behave in this collectively fanatical way.”
'Empire, Faith and War’ is at The Brunei Gallery, London, until September 28; ‘The Fall of the Ottomans’ by Eugene Rogan will be published by Basic Civitas in September