The World's War

by David Olusoga

  The men who took part in the Afghan expedition emerged from the war better off than most. Oskar von Niedermayer returned safely to Germany. He travelled back the way he had come, through Persia and back into Ottoman territory. Arriving home in 1918 he was knighted and awarded the Military Order of Max Joseph. In 1919, in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat on the Western Front, he joined the infamous Freikorps unit of Franz Ritter von Epp, a veteran of the Germany genocides in South West Africa, whose forces led the brutal suppression of communists in postwar Munich.

  After being rebuffed by the Emir of Afghanistan, the diplomat Werner Otto von Hentig crossed the Pamir Mountains and made his way to China. From there he took a ship to Hawaii and handed himself over to the authorities of the still-neutral America. Once repatriated, he was personally awarded the House Order of Hohenzollern by Kaiser Wilhelm.

  Perhaps the most unlikely home-coming of all was that of the Indian deserter and former PoW Jemadar Mir Mast. Held in the British Library is a report marked ‘Secret’ and entitled Nominal Roll of Indian Prisoners of War Suspected of having deserted to the enemy or of having given information to or otherwise assisted the enemy, revised on 24 October 1918. Mir Mast appears as Number 19 on the list of Indian deserters. In a column giving the latest information on him and two others, the report states: ‘These three accompanied the Turco-German mission to Afghanistan and are reported to their homes in Tirah in June 1916.’

  The home to which Mir Mast returned was in Tirah’s Maidan Valley, today on the Afghan–Pakistan border, and which is nominally part of Pakistan. Some time after the failure of the Afghan mission, Mir Mast seems to have slipped away from Kabul and made his way back there. And at some unknown date after that Mir Mast, reputedly a winner of Germany’s Iron Cross, must have been reunited with his brother and hero of the Allied war effort, Mir Dast VC, whom he had last seen in March 1915. It must have been an interesting encounter. Together they had sailed with the Indian Corps for France in August 1914, and they had fought in the trenches of France and Belgium during the terrible winter of 1914–15. On 26 April 1915, seven weeks after his brother had defected, Mir Dast and the 57th Wilde’s Rifles fought the vicious engagement against German forces in which he won his medal for (as his citation read) leading ‘his platoon with great bravery during an attack’ and then collecting ‘various parties of his regiment when no British officers were left, until the retirement was ordered. He then helped carry eight British and Indian officers to safety under heavy gun fire.’35 As with other recipients of the Victoria Cross, Mir Dast had his portrait depicted on British wartime cigarette cards. He was mentioned in dispatches and photographed meeting Lord Kitchener and General Jan Smuts, and his name is today etched into the Memorial Gates at Hyde Park Corner in London.

  As the historian Santanu Das has pointed out, it is difficult to find a category or definition for Mir Mast – brave soldier of the British India Corps, then deserter, prisoner and Jihadist.36 Certainly he was nothing like the stereotypical image of the passive, unworldly sepoy, incapable of independent action without the paternal hand of a white British officer. He was a dogged survivor, a man who somehow navigated a path between the competing demands of global empires. Surviving the Western Front as well as capture and internment, he demonstrated to the Germans his value as a native of the Khyber region of Afghanistan with local knowledge and contacts. This is what almost certainly led to his recruitment into the Niedermayer expedition, which took him back to his homeland, via the Orient Express, Istanbul, Baghdad, Tehran and Persia’s Great Salt Desert. Although a pawn in someone else’s ‘Great Game’, he found his own strategies and used the ambitions of those who sought to exploit him to find his way home. That home is today part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In truth, it remains as disconnected from twenty-first-century Pakistan as it was from the British Raj a century before. But still it is a region contested by empires and drawn into global conflicts, as the American drones that patrol the skies above testify.*11

  ISTANBUL, 2014. Towards the northern end of the ancient Hippodrome stands a large, neo-Byzantine fountain, which shelters under the shade of a stone gazebo that is held aloft by eight stone columns. Dismissed by one commentator as ‘a lumbering commemorative fountain, which according to experts is an insult to good taste’, the Alman Çes¸mesi, or German Fountain, was a gift to the Ottoman Empire from Germany.37 It was even said to have been designed by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, and in 1900 it was erected on a site of huge symbolic importance. Deep in the soil beneath its marble base are the ossified roots of the Bloody Plane tree – the Janissary Tree – the ancient gathering point for the Janissary Corps, the elite military sect of soldier-slaves who made the Ottoman Empire feared across three continents. Recruited mainly from the Christian provinces of the empire, the Janissaries became a rival locus of power within the empire, and they ultimately turned upon their masters. On three occasions the Janissaries came close to bringing down the House of Osman: in the seventeenth century they rebelled, imprisoning and finally executing Sultan Osman II; in the early nineteenth century they rose again, deposing Sultan Selim III before he too was murdered. In the 1820s, though, the wily Sultan Mahmud II lured the Janissaries into another revolt, which he used as the pretext for their disbandment and annihilation, in a bloody struggle in the heart of Istanbul itself. The Janissaries were then outlawed and all reminders of their presence eradicated. Seventy years later, on the now vacant site of the Janissary Tree, the German fountain was constructed to celebrate the Kaiser’s second visit to Istanbul, its inscription on the base reading: ‘The German Kaiser Wilhelm II presented this fountain in 1898 autumn, in thankful remembrance of his visit to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II’.

  It was this relationship between a young Kaiser and an old sultan on which the fatal alliance was constructed. The ambitions of the German–Ottoman Jihad begun in 1914 were global and total. At their most grandiose they envisaged the toppling of the British Empire, or a British retreat from the war in Europe to cling onto the great colonial jewel of India. Even as the crowds in Istanbul had joined in the orchestrated celebrations of Jihad in November 1914 it had been made clear, on the battlefields of Europe as well as in the forests of West Africa, that empire was one of the great strengths possessed by Germany’s enemies. Imperial manpower had assisted the British in defending Ypres in the battles of October and November 1914. Empire gave the British and French great reservoirs of men, who could be brought to Europe as soldiers or sent to other far-flung battlefields of the ever-expanding war. Empire was a source of money and raw materials. It was copper from the Congo that was smelted to make the brass casings of the hundreds of millions of shells that British and French guns fired at the German lines over four years.

  Long before 1914, German strategists, including critically the Kaiser himself, understood also that empire might be turned into an Achilles heel – that the religious loyalties and the embryonic stirrings of nationalism among subject peoples might be exploited and harnessed to disrupt, even destroy, imperial might, forcing a diversion of men and resources away from the war against Germany in Europe and undermining the will to fight. And in 1915 and 1916 the Ottoman summons to Jihad travelled among the Muslims of British Nigeria and the Belgian Congo; it swept across Sudan, through German East Africa and reached as far south as Nyasaland – modern-day Malawi.38 It was known of in British India and among the various leaders of the peoples of Arabia.

  Although, for the most part, the Jihad and the missions it spawned failed to spark the great revolutions their authors dreamed of, they did succeed in dragooning into the conflict peoples and communities that might otherwise have been spared the agony of the First World War. At times, events descended into farce, undone by conflicting egos and the realities of geography. From the start, the Jihad was undermined by the dubious religious authority of the sultan-caliph and by Germany’s poor grip on the complex web of competing loyalties, schisms and inter­necine conflicts among the 300 m
illion Muslims whom they sought to marshal to their cause. When the call to Jihad fell – mostly – on deaf ears, it was more often than not because local leaders were perfectly capable of acting in their own best interests and were not the malleable unworldly beings of the German orientalist imagination. In the end, the German–Ottoman embrace succeeded in doing what the Janissaries had never been able to achieve – bring down the House of Osman and topple a 600-year-old empire.

  The Jihad’s ultimate failure has led some to dismiss it as a non-event. Yet across Africa, Asia and the Middle-East are the graves of British, German and Turkish men who died in the expeditions, revolts and small wars ignited by the Jihad schemes; alongside them, beneath the sand, lie the remains of Senussi fighters from Libya, Sudanese who fought in the army of Ali Dinar, the Sultan of Darfur, Egyptians and Indians who defended the Suez Canal, and men from Australia, South Africa and elsewhere. These men were just as much combatants in the First World War as the French poilu in the forts of Verdun or the British Tommy lumbering across the deadly fields of the Somme. Where the spark of Jihad took hold, the fire was real, and its potential was rarely underestimated by the British and French. The files of the British intelligence services contain innumerable references and reports on the impact of the call for Jihad on their subject peoples and the Muslims in the army. Indian soldiers on the British front lines, and North and West Africans fighting for the French, were monitored carefully for signs of disloyalty or expressions of sympathy to the Ottomans or to the sultan-caliph. When units were believed to have fallen under the influence of Jihadi propaganda, they were distrusted by the military authorities, as was the case with the 129th Baluchis, who would not fight fellow Muslims of the Ottoman Army.

  The Jihad of 1914 not only made the First World War more costly and more global, it left in its wake the political, geographic, religious and ethnic instabilities that became the foundations on which some of the most intractable disputes of the modern age stand. The names of the nations and regions to which Germany and its Ottoman allies dispatched their Jihad missions, targeted their propaganda and attempted to foment rebellion seem uncannily like a roll-call of twenty-first-century trouble spots and places of international worry: Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Darfur and even Pakistan’s tribal areas, to which Mir Mast and Mir Dast returned.

  *1 In this secret treaty, negotiated by Bismarck, Germany and Russia both agreed to remain neutral if involved in a war with a third power, with two exceptions: should Germany invade France, or should Russia invade Austria-Hungary. Germany also implicitly acknowledged Russian spheres of influence, in Bulgaria and the Black Sea.

  *2 It is too easy to imagine that Wilhelm, a man known for emphatic pronouncements and telling gaffes, was the captain of the German ship of state, always directing policy. Yet, as many historians have warned, most recently and compellingly Christopher Clark, this is a dangerous presumption. Wilhelm’s was a butterfly mind. He made statements that were mutually contradictory and often later reversed by changes of policy. He was one key player in a ruling elite, which contained rival factions vying for influence, money and patronage. He was not the author of all German policy and at times hardly involved in key decisions. There is much evidence that his role in the decision to allow the Reinsurance Treaty to lapse may have been a marginal one. See Christopher Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power (London, 2009).

  *3 For an overview of the complex debate over the dates of both the Jihad and the Fatwas, see M. Aksakal, ‘ÒHoly War Made in GermanyÓ? Ottoman Origins of the 1914 Jihad’, in War in History (online serial), Vol. 18, No. 2 (April 2011), pp. 84–199.

  *4 Despite claiming to have adopted his mother’s Catholicism, Oppenheim remained half-Jewish according to the definition established in the Nuremberg Laws, and in the 1930s and 1940s was to be the target of Nazi persecution. Yet he was a committed patriot and worked on schemes to enhance German influence in the Middle East right up until 1940.

  *5 This same title was to be used again later in the war by another of Germany’s wartime propagandists.

  *6 As well as pursuing Jihad, Germany also aimed to stoke nationalist/ethnic resentments of Ukrainians, Finns and Georgians (along with the Crimean Tartars and Kurds) against Russian rule, and foster anti-colonialism among India’s Hindus. The mastermind – if that is the right word – overseeing much of the strategy was Arthur Zimmerman, Under Secretary of State at the German Foreign Office, who ran a programme titled Unternehmungen und Aufwiegelungen gegen unsere Feinde (Seditious Undertakings Against Our Enemies). Zimmerman’s offices supported Russian revolutionaries, Irish republicans and (ironically in the light of later history) Zionists too. Zimmerman’s enduring fame, however, is as the author of the ‘Zimmerman Telegram’, which offered German support for Mexican aggression against the United States.

  *7 Built to entertain passengers travelling on the Orient Express, the Pera Palace features in Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt and Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and it was the creative starting-point for Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

  *8 Hew Strachan’s The First World War, Volume 1, To Arms (2001) was one of the first major books to dedicate chapters to the Jihad strategy (as well as the war in Africa).

  *9 During the Libyan Revolution of 2011, thousands of Senussi fought against Gaddafi. Some carried into battle images of King Idris, and one of the leaders of the revolution was the British-educated Mohammed As-Senussi, a direct descendant of the late king.

  *10 A photograph of the six Indians, probably taken in Baghdad, and which is part of the Hentig Collection of photographs of the expedition, is preserved in a Swiss archive. The annotation on the reverse confirms the presence of Jemadar Mir Mast.

  *11 Among the descendants of the family of Mir Mast and Mir Dast is Dr Shakil Afridi who, in 2011, allegedly assisted the CIA to set up a fake vaccination programme in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad – a programme that eventually helped lead to the location, and subsequent killing, of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. A year later, a Pakistani court sentenced Afridi to thirty-three years in prison for treason. In response, in January 2014, President Obama withheld $33 million from US funds for Pakistan – a million dollars for every year of Dr Afridi’s sentence – until such time as he was released. In 2012, bills were also introduced into the US House of Representatives asking for Dr Afridi to be declared a naturalized US citizen and to award him the US Congressional Gold Medal. If granted, Dr Afridi’s family would add that American award from a global conflict to the haul of medals – British and allegedly German – won by an earlier generation in the global war of 1914–18.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Our Enemies’

  Polyglot PoWs and German schemes

  BRANDENBURG, GERMANY, 2014. Wünsdorf, near Zossen and twenty-five miles to the south of Berlin, is a town whose layout and geography is unlike any other. Nothing about it makes sense. It seems to have no proper town centre, there are too many homes and not enough people, and it has more railway lines and sidings than a settlement of its size could possibly need. The town is ringed by a series of huge but empty facilities – great civic buildings, huge dormitories, abandoned colleges and decaying sports fields. Unidentifiable concrete relics, half-demolished and graffitied, stand in the middle of otherwise empty fields, and there is a web of abandoned roads, some terminating in dead ends, almost all of them slowly crumbling to dust, or being colonized by weeds and saplings. The main roads are in better condition, and lined with neat houses and clusters of suburban streets; yet right beside these oases of domesticity are areas that are overgrown, consumed by forests and sealed off by high walls. There is little here that a town planner would recognize as normal.

  Wünsdorf’s strangeness stems from the fact that it was not shaped by the normal demographic and economic forces of human settlement, but instead by great global forces – military, strategic, and ideological. It has seen too much history, and it has become bizarrely misshapen by it. T
he great dormitory buildings are former barracks, built in different eras, to house different generations of soldiers, of different nationalities, for different wars. The derelict concrete structures are abandoned military facilities – stations for the testing of rocket engines, tank workshops and the largest surviving cluster in Germany of ‘Winkel’ Towers – bizarre blast-proof bomb shelters. Huge, brutalist and conical with thick walls and small doors, they survive in part because they are too expensive to demolish. The twentieth century weighs so heavily on Wünsdorf that the twenty-first century seems unable to gain much purchase. What to do with the place? The local tourist office, adapting an idea from the UK, now markets it incongruously as ‘the Book and Bunker Town’, a tourist destination offering the dual attraction of antiquarian bookshops and military ruins.

  The layers of history at Wünsdorf are a palimpsest of a century’s militaria. The most recent stratum is also the one buried deepest underground – bunkers and subterranean command centres for the Red Army in the former German Democratic Republic – augmented by a new quarter of the town above, which once represented the biggest Soviet military base outside the USSR (‘Little Moscow’ as the German locals called this sealed off community). A direct, daily train service even connected it with the Russian capital. Then, in August 1994, a fleet of railway wagons was assembled on those same tracks and the last Soviet tanks were loaded for the journey home. The remaining Russian in Wünsdorf is Lenin, whose statue, unkempt and discoloured by green lichen, stands on a high plinth, forlorn in a long overcoat, arm outstretched and forsaken by his countrymen.

  Before the Russians, Wünsdorf was the location for a Nazi communications centre code-named ‘Zeppelin’ as well as Maybach I and Maybach II: the Nazi command centres for the regime’s competing military hierarchies of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH; the Supreme High Command of the German Army) and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW; Supreme High Command of the German Armed Forces). The whole complex was disguised to look from the air like a cluster of traditional, high-roofed German villas, no different to thousands of others in the surrounding area, complete with terracotta roof tiles and whitewashed walls. Today they lie dynamited, their spines broken, their heavy roofs collapsed in on themselves, crushing the floors beneath, the remaining innards of ducts, inlets and outlets for the ventilation system rusting away. Yet it was from here that Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was planned in 1941.