To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Despite its enjoyment of foreign ministry backing, the DTV was not a fully fledged German propaganda agency for Turkey. No such body was up and running until 1915 or even 1916. Thus, German propaganda was reactive rather than innovative, a response to the lukewarm reception to the declaration of holy war rather than a clarion call when it was originally published. Like Turkey’s efforts in the Arab world, Germany’s publications peaked in 1916— after the major successes of Ottoman arms in 1915 and even longer after the initiation of a German revolutionary strategy in 1914.

  Max von Oppenheim suggested a bureau to translate war news for Muslims and to educate Muslim opinion in the ideas of pan-Islam and the Turko-German alliance on 18 August 1914. It was also a theme of his lengthy October 1914 memorandum advocating revolutionary activity in the Islamic territories of Germany’s enemies. With Jagow’s and Zimmermann’s support, he got 100 million marks to establish the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient. He recruited orientalists from universities, and the office was organized according to their academic specialisms. In 1916, by which time the department in Germany was headed by an Egyptologist from Berlin University, Eugen Mittwoch, the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient was spending 300 million marks a year. The diplomats now saw it as marching to the individual enthusiasms of the scholars it employed rather than submitting to the discipline of the foreign ministry. The doubters, already vocal in December 1914, reckoned that Oppenheim had exaggerated the strength of the indigenous revolutionary movements and of Germany’s influence on the ground.44

  It was in recognition of this point that Oppenheim himself went to Constantinople to establish an office there early in 1915. The embassy resented the ‘doubtful-looking’ characters who now arrived at its door with ‘promises to stir up some Mohammedan people for the “Djihad” ‘.45 By the autumn of 1916 the Constantinople station administered twenty-five head offices and sub-offices throughout the east, most of them functioning under the umbrella of the local German consulate. Oppenheim also created a network of seventy information rooms and correspondence offices for the perusal of war reports, newpapers, and other publications throughout Asia Minor and eastern Arabia. In 1917 he established the Balkan-Orient Film GmbH, and rented the largest theatre in Constantinople for cultural shows.46 Relations with the foreign office, or at least with the German embassy in Constantinople, became progressively more fraught, and in April 1917 Oppenheim’s department was hived off as an independent company, Deutschen Uberseedienst GmbH, and told to concentrate on establishing Germany’s commercial position in the east. Military and political material remained in the hands of the embassy’s own press office and of the Nachrichtenstelle in Berlin.

  Oppenheim appreciated the importance of providing information in as many languages as possible. A war chronicle covering the main events was published in Arabic, Thai, Russian, Urdu, Hindi, Chinese, Turkish, and in the dialects of the Tatars and of the Maghreb. Leaflets, pamphlets, books, and brochures in a similar range of tongues poured off the presses. The Nachrichtenstelle claimed that between October 1914 and July 1918 it produced 1,012 publications in nine European and fifteen eastern languages, a total of 3 million copies.47

  The initial image of Germany in the Muslim world was an extraordinarily favourable one. Its embodiment was the Kaiser. His picture, his posturing in flamboyant full-dress uniforms, which worked against German interests in westernized societies, worked for them in the Middle East. Wilhelm’s reputation derived from his visit to Jerusalem and Damascus in 1898 and his declaration of solidarity with Islam. He was dubbed ‘Haj Wilhelm’, implying that he was a ‘saint’ who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Arabs ‘considered the Kaiser King of all Kings of this world’.48 In 1914 Germans were esteemed honorary Muslims, and their military might was a given in popular assumptions.

  But Germany’s handling of its religious credentials was bound to be delicate. Late in 1914 Max Roloff caused outrage in the Islamic world by an account of his mission to Mecca to recruit Muslims; the knowledge that he was a fraud who had drawn a fat salary to go no further than Holland did not negate the fact that the German government had proposed to insert an infidel into the holy city. The following year Oppenheim toured Syria, Simi, and northwestern Arabia, attired in Arab dress and praising Islam while condemning Christianity. Although the British took him seriously, Djemal did not.49 Thereafter, Oppenheim’s propaganda distanced itself from religious themes. The European idea of holy war as a mass movement sweeping across national boundaries and directed against western culture in general and Christianity in particular was not one with which Germany could, for obvious reasons, identify too closely.

  The fact that the reality was different from the image helped. Over four years of war the portrayal of German invincibility wore thin. Publications such as the Arabic Al ‘Adl harped on a succession of German victories, illustrating their claims with photographs of battleships and Zeppelins. But for those on the periphery of the Ottoman empire, awaiting the results of these German triumphs, the actual evidence in their localities receded rather than multiplied. Therefore, too, holy war where it occurred was a local response. Oppenheim emphasized this element. His department’s propaganda constituted a series of individual initiatives whose commonest themes were opposition to Britain and France. Holy war, in so far as it was invoked, lost its aggressive thrust and became defensive, protecting Islam from the encroachments of godless French civilisation and rapacious British imperialism.50

  The Germans were therefore portrayed not as Muslims, but as Turkey’s allies. This carried a double danger. First, it suggested that Turkey was being exploited by Germany, that the holy war had been subverted for the purposes of European imperialism. Increasingly, actual contact with Germans, and the high-handed behaviour of some of them, endorsed that view. Alternatively, Germany’s aim could be seen as the triumph of the Caliphate. Indeed, by 1916, in its advocacy of holy war, Germany made no secret of this objective. But that could imply not liberation but the extension of the Ottoman empire. Germany’s propaganda became more strident, not more subtle, as its situation became desperate.

  The question of the Caliphate, and its claim to secular as well as religious suzerainty, was a fundamental one for both Turkey and Germany. The summons to holy war in November 1914 had minimized the Caliphate, presenting the Sultan as the organizer of a joint Muslim war effort. Islam was to be the midwife of nationalism and anti-colonialism. A pamphlet, 50,000 copies of which were published in Turkey to coincide with the declaration of holy war, concluded that ‘Hindustan belongs to the Muslims of India, Java to the Muslims of Java, Algeria to the Muslims of Algeria, Tunisia to the Muslims of Tunisia’.51 But in 1916 this acknowledgement of nationalist pretensions rebounded on the Ottoman empire. The Arab revolt argued that the war would be the vehicle, not for an Islamic confederation with Constantinople at its heart but for the disintegration of Turkish power. Thereafter Constantinople’s emphasis on the war as a holy war was redoubled, and the temporal authority of the Caliphate reaffirmed.

  However, Germany’s response to the Arab revolt was diametrically opposed, and thus further confusion entered the propaganda message. The Nachrichtenstelle set itself up as the sponsor of exiled nationalists. Arabs and orientals in Switzerland were observed by a network of Armenian and Tatar agents, answerable to the embassy in Berne, and some of these émigrés became the authors of German propaganda. In June 1915 the director of a German Persian carpet company, Heinrich Jakoby, set up an agency in Switzerland to coordinate these efforts. But his work was hampered by the counter-activities of spies from Switzerland as well as from the Entente. Moreover, his own sources of information were poor, and his contact with the German embassy limited. He failed to establish relations with Muhammed Bas Hamba, a Tunisian exile, who in May 1916 began to publish the Revue du Maghreb with Turkish money. Although the Revue owed no special loyalties to Germany, it pursued freedom for the countries of North Africa, and the Nachrichtenstelle took 200 to 300 copies of each issue. Contact between
Jakoby and the Nachrichtenstelle was also minimal, and so in April 1916 the latter opened a Swiss office, which established contacts with the Gazette de Lausanne and acquired its own publishing house, the Librarie nouvelle. In 1917 the Nachrichtenstelle published Islam dans l’armée française in Lausanne, the work of a Tunisian lieutenant in the French army, Raban Boukabouya, who had deserted in 1915. The coping-stone, and legitimization, of these efforts were the national independence committees set up for India, Persia, Georgia, and Tunisia.52

  These committees were not simply vehicles for the policies of the Central Powers. They included some of the leading intellectuals of their parent societies, and the latter’s publications—notably the Revue du Maghreb and the Persian Kaveh—put scholarly understanding of their indigenous cultures on a new footing. The role of German academics in German propaganda helped serve the wider purposes of Islam’s culture and history, and the Nachrichtenstelle financed Muslims to study in Berlin. But from this work developed not an acceptance of the Sultan as the Caliph but a demand for autonomy. In the case of the Algerians at least their ambitions were so out of line with Turkish objectives as to include the possibility of reform within the existing political structure rather than its total overthrow. In the second half of the war, therefore, German propaganda in some cases was serving not the needs of Turkey but of Islamic nationalisms.

  A prime, and utilitarian, reason for the absorption of German propaganda in the culture of the Middle East was the need to educate opinion in Germany itself. The foreign office was concerned that the popular image of their Turkish allies was as bloodthirsty bigots. Holy war was seen as a weapon that could rebound in the hands of its instigators. The Nachrichtenstelle was therefore charged with the education of European opinion, both within the Central Powers and in neutral countries, in oriental and Turkish affairs. It commissioned Salih ash-Sharif al-Tunisi, a Tunisian nationalist and friend of Enver, to write Die Wahrheit uber den Glaubenskrieg (The truth about the war of the creeds) (1915), and sponsored him to tour Germany so that he could explain Islam’s aims.53 Its major effort to influence the European press was its publication Korrespondenzblatt für den Orient, recast in April 1917 as a fortnightly periodical, Der neue Orient, with a print-run of 5,000.

  The Nachrichtenstelle was therefore pointed in two directions at once. It had to educate the east in the affairs of the west, and the west in the affairs of the east. Its functions were simply too diverse and too broad. It had to monitor the oriental press for government departments, to translate oriental documents, to censor oriental post, and to advise on the handling of Muslim prisoners of war. The assimilation of incoming material took up most of the working day, and the distribution and dissemination of outgoing propaganda became a secondary exercise. Even the mechanics of adequately addressing its material were neglected. Its geographical orbit embraced all Asia, North Africa, and the Pacific, including the western Americas. The department could not concentrate on a simple purpose with a simple message.

  Ultimately, however, Oppenheim’s work, whatever its range of responsibilities, was fatally debilitated by two further factors, one external and one internal, that were probably beyond rectification in the time available. The bottom line in the Nachrichtenstelle’s tasks was to create an awareness of German culture. The Germans were understandably amused by the Austrian propaganda effort, which aimed to supplant Parisian influences with Viennese. It brought opera to Constantinople, sponsored a fashion show in the Pera Palace Hotel, and arranged for a tour by the band of the Hoch-und-Deutschmeister Regiment Nr. 4.54 But although all this suggested the frivolity of a dying empire, it also recognized that without a general cultural empathy Turkish receptivity to European propaganda would be limited. Curt Prüfer suggested that German propaganda reorientate itself along comparable lines in 1917, but the response was limited. Support for an archaeological institute meant that Theodor Wiegand, the director of antiquities at the Berlin museum, was attached to the 4th Turkish army in Palestine in 1917–18—just as the sites he was sent to visit were being overrun. Germany’s idea was that his finds might be used to liquidate Turkey’s debt. An exhibition of German art, held in Constantinople in April and May 1918, was more successful.55 Second, and interlocking with the first, was the fact that the Nachrichtenstelle could never rid itself of the scholarly backgrounds of its members or of the scholasticism of its message. Karl Schabinger, who ran the office between Oppenheimer’s departure for Constantinople and Mittwoch’s succession the following year, said of his colleagues (and, significantly, he was a dragoman and not an academic): ‘they operated—and this was truly German—much too much with logical and legal concepts, they appealed little or barely at all to the feelings, they had no pathos nor sense of theatre.’56 Most of their publications appeared in print-runs of between 500 and 3,000, reflecting the selective nature of their appeal. But if literacy was low, influencing opinion-makers would not have the same impact as if literacy were high and newspaper-reading were customary. The German consul in Damascus in 1915 arranged for traditional storytellers in the coffee-houses to recount the tales of Germany at war. He at least appreciated that, where the press was weak and governmental authority in question, Germany’s attention should be to the local common denominator.

  Finally, the pay-off for all propaganda lay on the battlefield. With the declaration of holy war, both Germany and Turkey hoped to destabilize Entente governments and win allies throughout the east. Very quickly it became evident that the power of the sword was mightier than the pen: the Central Powers had to provide men and munitions, and victories, to redeem their pledges.

  THE CAUCASUS, 1914–1915

  Russia’s military concern for the Caucasus in 1914 was not its defence against Turkey but its internal security. Until 1864 Georgia had been Russia’s principal frontier problem, guerrilla warfare in the region shaping the soldiering experience of many, including Tolstoy. The extension of the Russian border in 1878 to a line south of the River Aras had increased the polyglot composition of the province’s peoples. It also re-emphasized the colonial nature of Russian rule. In 1897 only 34 per cent of the population was Ukrainian or White Russian; the balance included three major groupings: Georgians (11.6 per cent), Armenians (12 per cent), and Tatars (16.3 per cent). The Georgians were concentrated in the west and centre, around Tiflis, and the Tatars to the east around Baku. The Armenians, as in Ottoman Turkey, had no obvious geographical focus, although they did constitute a narrow majority in Erivan. Thus, the region was not ethnically Russian, but nor was it—if viewed as a whole—anybody-else’s.57

  MAP 25. THE CAUCASUS

  That it was economically desirable was no longer in question. Before and during the war 7.5 million tonnes of Russia’s naptha, or 80 per cent of its total supply, came from the area every year. In 1913 the value of the goods passing through Baku exceeded that of all other Russian ports, and 85 per cent of them were petroleum products. Transcaucasia produced 1 million tonnes of manganese in 1913, a third of the world’s total. Copper, silver, zinc, iron, gold, cobalt, salt, and borax were all to be found in the region. In addition to its natural resources, the Caucasus stood on the land route to Europe from Central Asia. Between 1908 and 1914 70 per cent of Persia’s exports were routed through Russia.

  This rapid economic growth confirmed rather than submerged the ethnic tensions. In 1897 79 per cent of the population were employed in agriculture; Georgians, Tatars, and even more the small remaining group of Osman Turks were over-represented in peasant farming. On the other hand, the Armenians were under-represented on the land, and strong in the towns. Tiflis grew five times between 1876 and 1912, and 71 per cent of its merchants were Armenian. Urban growth and the pattern of trade drew labour across the border from Persian Azerbaijan. Between 1891 and 1904 the Russian consulate in Tabriz issued 312,000 entry visas to Persians.58 Eighty-one per cent of Persians in independent employment in the southern Caucasus were based in the towns.

  Russia’s solution to all this inherent
volatility was Russification. Between 1878 and 1880 75,000 Osman Turks were repatriated. Twelve thousand Russian peasant families were settled from elsewhere in the empire. Proportionately, the Muslim population declined. In 1897 4.59 million of the population were Orthodox, 1.13 million Gregorian, and 3.2 million Muslim. But nationalism, already strong among the Georgians, surfaced along with middle-class intellectualism among the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis. The 1905 revolution moderated Russian policy temporarily but sufficiently to increase the foothold of the local independence movements. In 1907 the Dashnaktsutiun, the Armenian revolutionary federation, formally adopted socialism. In 1912 a secret Azerbaijani organization, Musavat, was formed in Baku, its public aim to achieve political equality for all Muslims in Russia, its private appeal resting on its call for the unification of all Muslim peoples.59 In the years preceding the war Russia’s policy in the region tightened once again. But nationalism, Islam, and socialism, sometimes in conjunction, sometimes separately, threatened the stability necessary to sustained economic growth.