But there is a further layer, too. On the outskirts of the town, overlooked by empty, crumbling barracks with broken windows and leaky roofs, is a great cleared expanse of wasteland, slowly being colonized by saplings. Across these empty acres spans a network of old pathways and the vague outlines of buildings demolished long ago. In 1915 this space was the Halbmondlager (Half-Moon or Crescent Camp), housing prisoners of war, and named after the crescent moon of Islam. The facility was a show camp, brought into existence as much for propaganda reasons as to warehouse enemy PoWs. What took place behind its barbed-wire fences, between 1915 and 1917, is one of the most bizarre and least known stories of the First World War.
The inmates at the Halbmondlager were mostly from India and the French North African colonies. At any one time there were between 4,000 and 5,000 of them, living in rows of tidy wooden barracks. Another 12,000 men from the Muslim minorities of the Russian army were housed at the nearby Weinberger Camp. Most of the men in the Halbmondlager were Muslims, but there were also Sikhs, Hindus and a few Indian Christians. In the early months of the war, captured colonial troops had been housed by the Germans in makeshift interment camps, and later they were interned in general camps, alongside men of other British and French army units; but in early 1915 construction of the Halbmondlager and Weinberger Camp was begun, and in the summer of that year the Germans began to move prisoners to Wünsdorf. The Halbmondlager was built to demonstrate to both the prisoners and the wider Muslim world that Germany was a friend of Islam, a nation that was generous and respectful towards the Muslim soldiers who had fallen into its hands. The camp was yet another of the many schemes of Max von Oppenheim, the strategist of Jihad. In his October 1914 Memorandum Concerning the Fomenting of Revolutions in the Islamic Territories of Our Enemies, he outlined in detail how Indian prisoners were to be processed, from the moment they were captured:
Indian prisoners are to be presented as soon as possible to Mr Walter [a former missionary working as an army translator on the Western Front] or other people of trust so as to be thoroughly questioned by them about: their origins, the (military) formations they belong to, which Indians had at all come to Europe, their fellow countrymen in Egypt, who their officers are, the position of native officers, how the food supply for the Indians is organised in the enemy army etc.… Thereupon the Indian prisoners are to be transported speedily to a single prison camp in close proximity to Berlin, which, similar to that of the French Mohammedan soldiers, is to be completely cordoned off from other prisoners and any attempt made by our enemies to influence them. They should, if possible, be separately housed according to religious community, race, and caste. Already during transport, in prison camps and in hospitals, religious duties and practices of individual Indian races should, to the extent possible, be taken into account. Most of them are vegetarians; Hindus are forbidden to eat beef, Mohammedans to eat pork. Funerals are to be carried out in compliance with their customs, and places for prayer established. Furthermore, accommodation should of course be warm. Both German and Indian agents are to be kept in the camp at all times to act as interpreters, to observe the people, to assess who could be of use to us, who would be suitable as a leader etc.1
Max von Oppenheim’s Intelligence Bureau for the East later provided the camp authorities with more detailed reports, outlining the religious, dietary and cultural requirements of the prisoners. This document covered everything from prayer to burial rites and became the foundational text upon which the camp was run, influencing almost every aspect of its administration. The faith, military rank, caste and nationality of each of the inmates determined in which of the long wooden barracks they would be billeted. The main avenue of the Halbmondlager, named Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse (Kaiser Wilhelm Street), along which the barracks were built, led to communal areas shared by all. The food of the prisoners was a subject to which a great deal of attention was paid. Meals were prepared in separate facilities according to the requirements of each faith, and from the propaganda pictures and even archive film that was produced of camp life it is clear that the prisoners themselves were involved in the slaughter of animals and the cooking of their own rations. The inmates were actively encouraged to celebrate their religious festivals. Eid was marked and the strictures of Ramadan observed. Indian Hindus marked their spring festival of Holi, while Nepalese Hindus celebrated Fagu Purnima, their own variant of the event. Among the many communal facilities provided were workshops, in which men could learn or practise the arts and crafts of their homelands. With materials and tools provided by their captors, they produced ornate furniture, decorated pottery, embroidered wall hangings and even elaborate wooden signposts showing the distances between local landmarks. These were erected at the designated crossroads and intersections of wartime Wünsdorf, reminders to the bemused locals of the thousands of exotic strangers hidden away from view on the edge of their town.
The German officers who oversaw the camp became attuned to the taboos and observances of each of the nationalities under their charge. They learnt the complexities of caste, faith and clan, and displayed towards the prisoners a degree of what we would today call ‘cultural sensitivity’. The many propaganda photographs taken in the Halbmondlager create the impression of a strange flourish of frenetic activity and culture in the midst of the most terrible war the world had ever known, all taking place in what was little more than a large clearing in the Brandenburg Forest near a small backwater town.
On the advice of Oppenheim, the more favoured of the Indian prisoners were taken on excursions into the surrounding countryside; in September 1915 some were even taken to nearby Berlin. These field trips were intended to win the confidence of the more cooperative prisoners and to impress upon them the power and order of German society and industry.*1 However, the most dramatic, well-publicized and expensive outward expression of Germany’s concern for the wellbeing of its Muslim prisoners was the erection in the Halbmondlager of a mosque, the very first on German soil. It was built, on Oppenheim’s recommendation, in an Ottoman style with a broad round dome and a single minaret. Of wooden construction, it was erected by a local Berlin contractor and decorated in stripes of a dark, earthy red and a muted grey.
We know the mosque’s colour scheme from the photographs of it that were reproduced as postcards and distributed across the world. German propaganda even spread the rumour that the cost of the mosque had been borne personally by Kaiser Wilhelm himself. Other postcards of the Halbmondlager show Muslim prisoners praying outside the mosque in summer, in orderly rows with their German guards cheerily looking on. There are images of the prisoners milling around in front of the ornate arched doorways or being led in prayer by Muslim mullahs specially brought in to tend to their religious needs. Other images depicted religious festivals, prisoners playing sports and games, or engaged in the slaughter of animals. Few of the photographs show the barbed-wire fences that ran the circumference of the camp or the menacing machine-gun towers, the high vantage points from which many of the propaganda photographs were taken. Indeed, some of the Halbmondlager images are almost comically contrived. In one, of the Halal slaughter of livestock, the mosque is perfectly framed in the background and two German soldiers stand by the butchers, their faces plastered with unctuous, approving smiles.
As a show camp, the Halbmondlager was in effect the propaganda counter-ploy to Britain’s Royal Pavilion Hospital for Indian troops, at Brighton. The wide diffusion of the Halbmondlager images allowed German propagandists to constantly trumpet Germany’s respect for Islam and the rights of Muslim peoples. Indeed, with each side engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of the world’s Muslim population, these two facilities became trump cards. Formed for identical propaganda purposes, they came to mirror each other. Both the Brighton hospital and the Halbmondlager went to enormous efforts to respect the strictures of faith and the traditional cultures of their patients and inmates. But the men of both facilities had their letters monitored and were provided with officially sanctioned n
ewspapers – effectively propaganda. The pictures of both institutions were distributed across the world, as two Christian powers competed to demonstrate who was most attentive and sensitive to the needs of the Muslims in their midst. From both facilities, Indians were taken on tours of the nearby national capitals, as Britain and Germany both hoped to awe these men from Asia with the might, order and wealth of their great metropolis. But just as the Pavilion Hospital became sealed off from the public, its patients prohibited from wider contact, the Halbmondlager concealed a darker truth – and another function.
One of the propaganda films made at the Halbmondlager shows a marching band, in full procession with drums and brass instruments, heading through the camp and out of the main gates. It passes the huge wooden watchtower that guarded the entrance. Above the gates and the barbed-wire fences fly two flags, the eagle tricolour of Germany and the red crescent flag of Ottoman Turkey. In another part of the film Ottoman officials, wearing fezzes and carrying umbrellas, can be seen milling around among the prisoners or chatting with the guards and with German officers in their heavy greatcoats and pointed Pickelhaube helmets. The Halbmondlager was much more than a PoW camp; it was at the same time a recruiting station, a place of indoctrination and part of Germany’s strategy of Jihad and global revolution. The Muslim prisoners were not expected simply to sit out the war in the shade of the Brandenburg Forest. It was hoped that many of them – perhaps most of them – through a process of persuasion and education, could be converted into Jihadists. Re-directed and re-armed they would re-enter the conflict and fight their erstwhile colonial masters. Their Hindu and Sikh comrades were to be similarly encouraged to take up arms against Britain and fight for Indian self-determination.
The indoctrination and recruitment of the prisoners was overseen and directed by Oppenheim’s Intelligence Bureau for the East, which appointed propaganda officers to work with each of the nationalities represented within the camp population. Some of these officers were Muslims who had been living in Germany before the war; others had been drawn into Oppenheim’s orbit when the net was cast for anti-British agitators in the summer of 1914. These intermediaries were able to translate propaganda material, hold classes and transmit the required message. There were also Ottoman propaganda agents at work in the camp, and physical reminders of Germany’s alliance with the Muslim empire – the crescent flag flying over the gate post, a portrait of the sultan-caliph. In the hope of winning their trust, prisoners were given books in their own languages and encouraged to take part in educational activities, including the learning of German. As many were understandably interested in learning more about the country they now found themselves in, and in whose hands their fate rested, education and indoctrination to some extent fused, as prisoners submitted willingly to lectures on Germany and German culture.
The other means of disseminating the Jihadi message was through the camp newspapers. The driving force was again Oppenheim, whose officials oversaw their production too. For the Hindu prisoners a nationalist newspaper, the Hindostan, was produced, appearing in both Urdu and Hindi editions. The Muslim newspaper – Oppenheim’s principal interest in this sphere – was unsurprisingly named El-Dschihad (‘The Jihad’). As a rule, PoW newspapers were amateurish and often light-hearted efforts, the work of the prisoners themselves; El-Dschihad was, by contrast, a professionally produced propaganda tract. Printed in Arabic as well as in the languages of the Russian Muslim minorities, it contained incessant appeals to reject Britain, France and Russia and to embrace the German and Ottoman strategy.
In 1916 the camps at Wünsdorf were able to dispatch to Ottoman Turkey the first contingent of converted Jihadists willing to fight for the sultan and the Kaiser against their former masters. Ultimately 1,084 Arabs and 49 Indian prisoners travelled across Europe and into Ottoman Turkey to do so.2 Among them was Mir Mast, who had spent time at the Halbmondlager. What became of the other men he had led over to the German lines at Neuve Chapelle in 1915 is less clear. But if, up to that stage, the recruitment policy at the Halbmondlager had been a moderate success, it seemed to collapse on contact with the waters of the Bosphorus. Would-be Jihadists, who had grown used to being treated with a degree of tolerance and sympathy, found themselves in an Ottoman Army that did not know how to deploy them and was unwilling to fully trust them. Jihadists deserted back to the British, and their evidence suggests that some of them had been subjected to severe mistreatment while in the ranks of the Ottoman Army, while many more had suffered what might best be described as neglect. Indeed, by the time that Germany’s great ambition was realized, to field Indian and French North Africans on the battlefields of Mesopotamia, the men from the Wünsdorf camps had been so starved and abused that the majority crossed over to the British lines at the first opportunity.
By 1917 the Halbmondlager experiment was deemed a failure, and along with much of the rest of the Jihad strategy it was quietly wound down. But the question remained as to how to treat colonial prisoners among the hundreds of thousands of Entente PoWs now held by the Central Powers.
The rules for the treatment of prisoners of war had been codified in 1907 at the famous Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land.3 Despite being created and approved by the great imperial powers, whose armed forces included African and Asian soldiers, the Hague agreements established no rules on how captured soldiers of different races were to be interned. Within weeks of the outbreak of war, the issue was confronted by a bewildered Germany. After just six months of fighting, Germany and its allies, fighting across two fronts, had captured 625,000 enemy troops; and a year into the war, more than 1 million Allied troops were in German and Austrian custody, among them soldiers from Africa and Asia, Aboriginal men from Australasia, and troops from South-East Asia, Mongolia, Japan and the Russian minorities.4
Among the initial German responses was a policy designed to punish British and French soldiers, directly and collectively, for the deployment of non-white troops by their governments. In October 1914 the Prussian War Ministry, despite some internal opposition, set forth its intention to create a series of camps in which there was to be ‘a thorough mixing of the different races (Volksrassen) among our opponents in the field’.5 The ministry calculated that imprisoning white French, British and Belgian troops alongside dark-skinned men from the colonial empires would be understood as a form of humiliation. The pro-German Swede Sven Hedin picked up on this sentiment. He reported that French wounded at a German hospital behind the lines were attempting to prolong their stay on the wards, ‘For it is pleasanter to lie in one’s comfortable bed and be coddled in every way, than to live in a barracks or a concentration camp with crowds of other prisoners, including Senegalese negroes, Moroccans and Indians.’6 Whether this desire to avoid contact with colonial troops was expressed by the French prisoners themselves, or whether it came from the two German army doctors who showed Hedin around the wards, is not clear.
If the intention of the Prussian War Ministry had been to provoke anger and resentment in London and Paris, though, it succeeded admirably and rapidly. The British Army and government lodged formal protests – as did the Americans, who were the neutral power responsible for protecting British prisoners held in Germany. When these failed, the British retaliated in kind, informing the German authorities in early November 1915 that Britain was to begin holding German prisoners alongside captives of other races. The British even invited the Germans to ‘consider what would be the position…[of] a few German soldiers interned amongst large numbers of prisoners of alien race, say, for instance, with Ottoman troops’. The effect of this blatant threat was almost immediate. On 12 November – just nine days later – the Prussian War Ministry ended the practice of racial mixing in the PoW camps.7 From then on, colonial soldiers were housed in separate facilities in Germany, including the camps at Wünsdorf.
The camps constructed to house the non-European prisoners were a wholly new phenomenon, because never before had so many men from so many nat
ions, and of so many different races, been gathered together. In 1915 Dr Rudolf Martin, a physical anthropologist from the University of Munich, who was to become one of the most powerful figures in the German tradition of Anthropologie between the wars, sensed an opportunity in the fact that ‘The practice of our enemies, to pull in auxiliaries from everywhere, has resulted in representatives of the most varied people coming to Germany, who under natural circumstances would never have set foot on German soil in such numbers.’8 The only comparable phenomena in popular German memory were the Völkerschauen – ‘people shows’, a series of colonial exhibitions that had been held in the late nineteenth century. The Völkerschau had brought together men and women from the various peoples and races of the German colonies and beyond, and placed them on display in German cities, in what were in effect human zoos. The most spectacular had been the Berlin Colonial Show of 1896, a public–private partnership between the German Colonial Department and the Colonial Society. It formed part of the city’s Great Industrial Exhibition. The organizers had transported to Berlin’s Treptow Park more than a hundred people of different races from across the German Empire. The official brochure boasted that the show had ‘transplanted a piece of natural savagery and raw culture to the centre of a proud and glamorous metropolis, with its refined morals and fashion-conscious people’.9 On the Western Front, suddenly black and brown men were out of this ‘zoo’ and on the battlefield, armed and wearing the uniforms of enemy nations; they were no longer human exhibits, safely fenced off from white Germans by rope barricades. But in the PoW camps, ‘normal service’ could be resumed, as men from the colonies of Germany’s enemies were once again disarmed, pacified and controlled.
The World's War Page 29