Among the eight million soldiers who went to war for France in World War I, were also half a million men from North Africa and the French colonies in West Africa, as well as from Madagascar and Indochina. Likewise, the British Empire contributed to the immense contingent of people who fought in the trenches of the Positional War. These soldiers included Canadians, Australians (also Aborigines) but most of all Indians. On the Russian side, many non-Russians fought, often of the Muslim faith.

In the first months of the war,  more than one million soldiers from both sides were captured. Germany collected the colonial soldiers in special camps to „turn them around“ so that they could fight against their colonial masters in the name of Jihad. One of the fathers of this idea was Max Freiherr von Oppenheim.

The Jihad was an idea from the time from the prophet Mohamed, and more or less forgotten until the Islamic world was faced again with the threat of colonialism.

The „Half Moon Camp“ was one of those special prisoner-of-war-camps in Wünsdorf not far from Berlin Germany. The camp housed between 4,000 and 5,000 Muslim prisoners of war.

Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, a German diplomat, lead a propaganda campaign, which he had thought out in detail when the war started. A dossier with the title „Memorandum on revolutionizing the Islamic territories of our enemies“ of October 1914 summarized his ideas. The memo argued for enlisting the Sultan to call on the world’s Muslims to engage in a Holy War against the colonial powers, France and Great Britain. To develop the necessary propaganda, the intelligence Bureau for the east was established in Berlin. Sâlih al-Sharîf was Oppenheim’s partner and served as a spiritual leader for the detainees. Nevertheless, the whole experiment was a failure. Many soldiers died in the camps and never returned to their countries of origin.

In the end, the British and French had begun to divide the Ottoman Empire among themselves calling it the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. Great Britain was interested in Iraq’s oil reserves and France wanted access to the Mediterranean coast.

In the theatre play „El Dschihad“ – I thematized the instrumentalization of Islam during World War I and examined how Islam is again used as a political weapon today. In all the confusion of tendentious media coverage, I tried to take an overarching view through historical contexts.

 

POW’s from the Camp showing a Sowjet Muslim Soldier, Soldier from Upper Volta and from Algeria