Germany’s Secret Weapon in World War One: A Global Jihad

England had Lawrence of Arabia to mobilize the Arabs to undermine the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally. Germany had Baron Max von Oppenheim to arouse the millions of Muslims in the British Empire to shake off the imperial yoke. He was the scion of a Jewish banking family from Cologne, though his father had converted to Catholicism. He was also a former guards officer and an amateur archeologist.

Oppenheim had conducted a shoot-out with bandits in the Rif Mountains and established a personal harem in Cairo in which his principal concubine was changed annually. Lawrence described Oppenheim’s work, From the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf (1889), “the best book of the region I know.” Oppenheim is forgotten. (History is written by the winners.) Lawrence is not.

Oppenheim shared the Kaiser’s Islamic enthusiasm, which was fired during Wilhelm’s first visit to Constantinople in 1889, a year after he ascended the throne. There he enjoyed the sultan’s lavish hospitality. (The empress, however, complained of the many flies and the unsanitary conditions generally.) Neither realized that the sultan’s authority was largely make-believe. Sheiks ruled the moribund empire and only five percent of taxes was ever collected.

In 1898, Wilhelm returned to the Ottoman Empire and, wearing a glittering uniform, rode into Jerusalem through a breach in its walls specially carved out for him in the ancient stone to make room for his spiked helmet.

Industrialists and bankers also had a love affair with the Near East. The hugely ambitious project of the Berlin–Bagdad railway, rightly considered a hostile act by the British and the Russians, was one of the results. But it was by no means a certainty that the Ottoman Empire would side with Germany when, in 1914, the war clouds gathered. There was much to be said for them joining the Entente. (Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was one of the negotiators soliciting them.) It was a triumph of German diplomacy when Turkey eventually sided with Berlin. Baron Max von Oppenheim was appointed to lead an Islamic propaganda bureau and became the “prophet of global jihad.” He began recruiting agents. Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the General Staff, instructed the foreign office that “revolution in India and Egypt, and also in the Caucasus, is of the highest importance.”

In his book, The Berlin-Baghdad Empress: The Ottoman Empire and Germany, Sean McMeekin writes: “Baron Oppenheim aside, Arab charm was generally lost on the Germans. Unlike Lawrence, field agents were fluid enough in Arabic to understand Bedouin culture as it existed on the plane of reality rather than in the romantic Oxbridge imagination. Far from being loyal to the Islamic holy war, Arab irregulars attacked whenever they felt like it, generally those offering possibilities for plunder and who were least able to resist.”

German agents promised the Arabs, the Shah of Persia and others gold and arms, but were able to deliver very little. The emir of Afghanistan, who received £400,000 a year from the British, agreed to a secret treaty whereby he sold himself to the Germans for ten million pounds – the equivalent of five billion dollars in modern money – but the cash was never paid.

In 1939 – this is almost totally incredible – Oppenheim became a stooge of the Nazis in their relations with the virulently anti-Semitic Mufti of Jerusalem. But he was no more successful in aiding Hitler than in promoting the Kaiser’s interests. He died in Germany in 1946, at the age of eighty-six.

Source: Review of Sean McMeekin’s book by Max Hastings in The New Review of Books, December 9, 2010