Curt Prüfer’s Holy War
How German interference blew up the Middle East in World War I
Alexandria, Egypt. September, 1914.
Robert Mors was in serious trouble.
Immigration officials had stopped him for questioning on his arrival at the port of Alexandria from Constantinople, and they immediately became suspicious. Great Britain and Germany were now at war, and the British-controlled government of Egypt had begun expelling Germans from the country. Why was this man, an admitted German citizen, trying to get back in?
A search of Mors and his luggage yielded two boxes of dynamite blasting caps, a hand-drawn map of the nearby Suez Canal, and slips of paper with cyphered messages. Clearly, they had caught a spy and saboteur.
British intelligence had been observing ominous movements of fighters and agitators across the Middle East for weeks, suspecting that the neutral Turks were plotting to enter the war on Germany’s side. Indeed they were, Mors confirmed. What’s more, a campaign of bombings and guerrilla attacks accompanied by propaganda designed to foment revolt in Egypt was already underway, the opening salvos of a looming Turco-German invasion.
Holy War: An Idea Whose Time Had Come
During interrogation, Mors outed several key figures behind the plots hatching in Constantinople, including his handler Dr. Curt Prüfer, an Arabic linguist and scholar who had served as a diplomat at Germany’s consulate in Cairo before the war. Officially, Prüfer had provided interpretation and translation services for the consulate. Unofficially, he moonlighted as an agent provocateur, inciting Egyptian nationalists and Islamists against Britain through clandestine rabble-rousing meetings, rants in the Egyptian press, and even an anti-British preaching tour among bedouin shaykhs in Syria and Egypt.
Prüfer’s subversion tactics borrowed a page from the “holy war” concept devised a generation earlier by German foreign policy adventurists seeking a strategy for victory in the coming European conflict. Incite Muslim populations in rival European empires to revolt, the thinking went, and they would defect to the standard-bearer of global Islam, the Ottoman Empire. Fighting alongside the Turks as allies, Germany could then destroy enemy forces diverted from Europe to put the fires out, win the war, and gain a greatly expanded Middle East empire.
When holy war strategy became official German policy for the Middle East after the commencement of hostilities in August 1914, Prüfer immediately volunteered his special skills to the German Foreign Office for “inciting unrest in Egypt.” On August 28, he boarded a train bound for Constantinople to run Germany’s espionage, propaganda, and sabotage operations in Ottoman territory alongside his new Turkish allies.
Building a Spy Network
Prüfer’s first priority on arriving in the Ottoman capital was building an intelligence organization. The one German intelligence organization that did exist, the German Army’s Abteilung IIIB, deployed its espionage resources mostly in Europe and North America during the war. No such usable German covert ops organization existed in the Middle East, so Prüfer had to create one from scratch using locally available Egyptian and German expatriates, Levantine Arabs, and Ottoman paramilitary forces. During two frenetically busy weeks in Constantinople, Prüfer labored ceaselessly to organize and equip them with German cash, guns, and propaganda materials and to spur them into action using his considerable powers of persuasion.
While propaganda and sabotage operations were taking shape, Prüfer gleaned his first scraps of intelligence from Germans who had recently left Egypt. Expelled German newspaper editor Wilhelm Schwedler, for instance, informed Prüfer on September 12 about Anglo-Indian troop movements to and from Egypt and the arrest of a pro-Turkish Egyptian royal, Prince ‘Aziz Hassan. Two weeks later, Prüfer wrote in his diary, “Two Germans from Alexandria arrive, say they are seeing construction.”
The covert operations chief left Constantinople on September 20 for a tour of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine to enlist pro-Turkish, urban Arab elites in the Ottoman war effort as media propagandists and roving holy war recruiters. Meanwhile, the first agents of Prüfer’s new spy ring began volunteering for intelligence-gathering duty in Egypt and Sinai. These were mostly Arab men whose professions allowed substantial freedom of movement that provided perfect cover for their activities, men such as the Palestinian mufti of Haifa Shaykh Muhammad Murad, Damascus camel merchant Muhammad al Bassam, and railway mechanic ‘Abd al Hamid Yusuf.
Over the course of the next three months, the Prüfer spy ring assembled an incredibly detailed picture of British fortifications, troop strengths, and weapons in Egypt and at the Suez Canal. Though Prüfer himself became dissatisfied with his agents’ performance, their intelligence misfires hardly surpassed those of British intelligence in Cairo, which frequently had to fly blind during the war’s early months.
Even as he was sending spies to infiltrate Egypt and Sinai, Prüfer was closely monitoring the loyalties of his Arab collaborators, some of whom were suspected as enemy spies or clandestine Arab nationalists. Prüfer’s Turkish superiors worried most of all about the shaky loyalties of the stubbornly independent-minded bedouin chieftains inside Arabia, a major concern since the Turks anxiously desired the participation of leaders from the birthplace of Islam in the holy war. Prüfer devoted special attention, then, to keeping tabs on the most prominent Arabian shaykhs through his informants in the camel trade. On November 3, he reported that Sharif Husayn, the emir of Mecca and future leader of the Arab Revolt, “is English through and through, but luckily powerless and in our hand. An encroachment of [future Sa’udi King] ‘Ibn Sa’ud on Medina is unlikely. All the same, ‘Ibn Rashid is so thoroughly preoccupied with him that he is no longer worth considering for our expedition.”
Attack Across the Desert: The Suez Expedition
Throughout the fall of 1914, the Turks dragged their feet at entering the war, but at last on October 29, they allowed the German to carry out a surprise naval attack on Russian ships and shore facilities in the Black Sea. The war in the Middle East had now officially begun.
Two and a half months later, a 17,000-man attack force stood fully assembled at a camp near Beersheba in southern Palestine, ready to push off for the first major military campaign in the Middle East: the attack on Egypt. At midnight on January 13, 1915, the army headed west into the Sinai desert. Prüfer, who had finished his preparations by then, departed with them.
For seventeen days, the army endured rain, sandstorms, bitter cold nights, boredom, and weariness, only occasionally relieved by halts at staging camps throughout Sinai. Quiet reigned unbroken in Prüfer’s sector until an enemy airplane bombed his camp on January 26, his first taste of combat. “I confess that the hammering of the bombs, the powerful explosion, and the black billowing smoke somewhat scared me, although I did my best to hide it,” he confided sheepishly to his diary.
Far worse things awaited the army at the Suez Canal, where 30,000 British and Commonwealth troops had dug in along a 100-mile front shielded by fortified posts, trenches, and armored, artillery-equipped trains. Most ominous were the mobile, floating batteries — battle cruisers — that controlled the flat, open terrain east of the canal. “Seems to me to be a désastre,” Prüfer wrote gloomily on January 30th. “We will be destroyed before we have actually come in the vicinity of the canal.”
He was right.
When troops began dragging their pontoon boats towards the canal to force a crossing in the predawn darkness of February 3, enemy machine-gun fire riddled and sank many of the boats, forcing the attackers to retreat. British forces repelled a second crossing attempt at dawn spearheaded by infantry attacks against shore outposts and an artillery duel with the warships.
Prüfer and a column of engineers waited impatiently all day long for the signal to commence blocking the canal with sandbags after the army had crossed. The signal never came. The entire attack had in fact failed, so the next morning, an orderly retreat back to Palestine began. Prüfer rushed back toward Jerusalem on camelback, stopping February 9 at Hafir al ‘Awja on the Palestine-Sinai border to hammer out two after-action reports.
His report to the German ambassador in Constantinople, Hans von Wangenheim, coolly analyzed the expedition’s failings: poor water, meager provisions, a tremendous mortality rate among the pack camels from fatigue, and too few long-range artillery pieces and aviators. The Arab spies Prüfer had sent into Sinai and Egypt were “cowardly, and as civilians, mostly unreliable in their reports, because they were not able to clearly see the military situation correctly.” Efforts to incite holy war produced neither battlefield defections nor a revolt in Egypt. Still, “although the Turkish losses are heavy, the talk cannot by any means be of a catastrophe nor of a defeat,” he concluded. Actually, the expedition was a “reconnaissance in force,” an overly generous reframing of the sound military defeat spun by the expedition’s top military commanders.
Prüfer’s report to his former mentor in Cairo, Max von Oppenheim, was blunter. The Egyptians were cowards and lacking in patriotism, while the Syrians and Palestinians were “good for nothing,” thanks to the old Arab-Turk enmity. “The holy war is a tragicomedy,” and all the Arabian and Levantine Bedouins, Kurds, and Druze either left the battle early, deserted, or stayed behind in Palestine.
The Prüfer Spy Ring Gets a New Lease on Life
Planning for a second canal attack began immediately after the debacle in February. Prüfer seized the opportunity to reinvent his intelligence organization by replacing his Arab agents with agents from the Jewish expatriate community in Palestine. Many of the Eastern European Jews who had suffered persecution and loss in the bloody Russian and Ukrainian pogroms of 1905 were thirsting for revenge on their tormentors. As the wily spymaster was no doubt aware, the chance to get payback against the Russians by spying for Germany constituted an appealing selling point that an effective recruiter would use to his advantage.
On April 8, Prüfer dispatched three new spies from his base of operations in Jerusalem to Egypt: Minna Weizmann (younger sister of the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann), Maurice Rothschild, and Isaac Cohn. Collectively, they gleaned a wealth of information, including interesting reports of Anglo-Egyptian tensions and discipline problems with Australian and New Zealand troops, who rioted in Cairo in April.
While Prüfer’s agents were in Egypt, Turkish counterintelligence uncovered an Arab nationalist plot to revolt against the Ottoman government. The consequent hanging of eleven suspects in Beirut on August 21, 1915, greatly enraged Ottoman Arabs and sorely tested their loyalties. In November, the Ottoman governor of the Arab provinces, Ahmet Djemal Pasha, sent Prüfer to Haifa, Damascus, and Beirut to gauge whether the new anti-Turkish mood among Jews and Arabs merited “special surveillance.”
Prüfer found tremendous Anglo-French sympathy among Jews and Arab Christians, but in his view, this presented a minimal danger to Ottoman national security. The predominantly Muslim Arab nationalist movement, “thanks to the just and severe measures of the government,” was weakened, while most other Muslims supported the government. New policing measures, he concluded, were unnecessary.
Service with Flight Detachment 300
In early May 1916, Prüfer unexpectedly quit his post as intelligence chief. Disgruntled over disputes with Djemal and a conviction that “the intelligence system [was] being run almost exclusively by the Turks,” he enlisted as an observer with the new German air group in Beersheba, Fliegerabteiliung (Flight Detachment, or FA) 300, to pursue a different approach to collecting intelligence on enemy forces: from the air.
Prüfer’s first ascent in an airplane on May 5 caused him “no feelings of emotional discomfort or feelings of anxiety,” despite narrowly escaping a crash landing. Undeterred, he quickly settled into a routine of flight and weapons training, bombing attacks, and reconnaissance flights over Egypt and Sinai starting the next day.
Handling primitive airplanes in the brutal desert environment made for difficult flying, a source of stress exacerbated by monotony, bad food, accidents, combat injuries, and sickness. During his six weeks at Beersheba, Prüfer frequently escaped to nearby Jerusalem to blow off steam by partying with his comrades, and he even kept at the airbase a dog named Rischah who only understood Arabic, Farsi, Coptic, and even a little English. The good times ended in June when FA 300 moved to its new forward base at el ‘Arish near the northeast Sinai coast.
On June 9, the airmen received electrifying news that would permanently change the shape of the war in the Middle East: Sharif Husayn ibn ‘Ali of Mecca had revolted against the Turks. “The revolt in the Hijaz is intensifying,” Prüfer wrote in his diary that day. “I rightly warned them about the shaykh.”
Sharif Husayn’s propaganda trumpeted the Turkish leadership’s un-Islamic impieties as justification for his uprising. The Turks’ true offense, though, was their rejection of the sharif’s perceived right to rule his own domains as he saw fit. As a response to British promises of support for independence, then, the Arab Revolt took on a symbolic significance as the founding event of Arab nationhood that far outweighed its military value to the British war machine. Coming after a second round of hangings of Arab nationalists in May 1916, it also dealt a crushing blow to the credibility of the holy war.
Momentous as this fire in the Ottoman rear became in subsequent months, the main action in the summer of 1916 still remained the imminent attack on the Suez Canal. It aimed at seizing Britain’s forwardmost defenses in Sinai — fortifications at the village of Romani near the Mediterranean coast — as an advance artillery position for bombarding shipping in the nearby canal.
Logistical headaches and troop redeployments to other fronts had repeatedly delayed this second attack, but all was finally ready by late July. In the three preceding months, the airmen of FA 300 had flown bombing sorties over the canal, tangled with British planes in aerial combat, and conducted aerial reconnaissance of British Army fortifications and movements. By the time Turco-German forces trekked into the Sinai desert again to take on the British Army (now called the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, or EEF), the Germans had spied out enemy positions and gained considerably greater control over the airspace in Sinai than they had possessed the year before.
It didn’t help, though.
The first infantry assaults on EEF defenses started before dawn on August 4. For several hours, the Turks slowly pushed the enemy back with infantry attacks and accurate artillery fire, while Prüfer and his fellow airmen bombed enemy encampments near Romani. Despite these attacks by air and ground forces, the EEF doggedly held the line throughout the day. Deep desert sand, brutal summer heat, and a stream of enemy reinforcements eventually wore the attackers down, and by early the next day, the expeditionary force was retreating, pursued by mounted enemy troops.
Britain’s victory at Romani proved to be the decisive turning point in the Middle East war. The threat to Egypt was destroyed, and the EEF advance now turned eastwards towards the heart of Ottoman territory.
An Anticlimactic Ending
The Romani battle also ended Prüfer’s combat service. Exhausted and sick after two years of constant action, he returned to Berlin, where he was promoted to lead the Constantinople branch of the News Bureau for the Orient, the German Foreign Office’s official disseminator of holy war propaganda.
The Foreign Office had by then abandoned its propaganda’s shrill Islamist tone and adopted a new, nongovernmental front organization — the German Overseas Service — to cloak its propaganda activities. Despite the changes, Germany’s messaging efforts in the Middle East were languishing. For months after returning to Constantinople in late March 1917, Prüfer fought a losing battle to procure subject-appropriate materials for Turkey and to lift censorship springing from Turkish resentment of German activity in Muslim lands. He also repeatedly urged switching the focus from the overabundant praise of the German war effort and the “weepy accusations” against the enemy to Germany’s peaceful activities, which he hoped would build affection in the Middle East for Germany similar to that enjoyed by France before the war.
As Prüfer’s propaganda effort muddled its way forward, the EEF offensive, which had stalled in southern Palestine, roared to new life again, overrunning Beersheba and Jerusalem by December 1917. Prüfer’s zone of operations had begun to steadily shrink, so the Foreign Office assigned him a new mission as government minder for Khedive ‘Abbas Hilmi II, the former ruler of Egypt.
The khedive had been banned from Egypt and deposed by the British after publicly throwing in his lot with the Turks in 1914. Three years of attempting to cajole the British, Germans, and Turks to support his return to the throne had failed, but concerns about enemy influences on his loyalties induced the Turks to invite the khedive to move to Constantinople in October 1917. The Germans assented to this, hoping to keep the khedive in their pocket as a future client ruler in an Egypt under German or Turkish control.
In order to burnish his relations with Germany, ‘Abbas Hilmi toured Germany and Belgium meeting with government VIPs throughout July and August 1918. On July 31, the khedive met Kaiser Wilhelm II at Spa, Belgium, where they chatted about “questions of a general nature,” Prüfer reported, while “oriental policy, especially as regards Egypt, seems not to have been discussed.” The khedive was “gladdened” by his reception, yet “somewhat disappointed” at Germany’s seemingly half-hearted Egyptian policy. The kaiser’s parting words to Prüfer that day — which Wilhelm delivered “in a jocularly threatening manner: ‘Next time, I insist on seeing you again in free Egypt!’” — tellingly suggested that Germany’s leadership now considered all hopes of conquering Egypt a joke.
The likelihood of a German defeat in Europe had by then begun to dawn on the khedivial party, despite the outside appearance of normalcy. In June, Prüfer was still repeating happy talk regarding “open rumors about a special peace for Turkey.” By the launch of the Allies’ 100 Days Offensive in France in August, he pronounced the “entire world very depressed,” a despondency the khedivial entourage attempted to dispel with “boozing, dancing and flirting, hectic room parties, and the like.” Clearly, the end was drawing near.
Final Defeat
Bulgaria’s surrender on September 30 and the liberation of Damascus on October 1 spelled what the Turks realized was certain defeat. On October 30, they surrendered to the British at Mudros on the Aegean island of Lemnos. Germany itself surrendered in France on November 11.
The “holy war” had utterly flopped. Islamist propaganda manufactured by Christian foreigners to promote German and Turkish domination failed to rally the global Muslim community to the Ottoman flag, while the Turks had proved too weak to play the role of the standard-bearer of global jihad that holy war propaganda had assigned to them.
The British and the French, by contrast, had beat the Germans and Turks at their own game by publicly offering independent nationhood to willing Ottoman Arab defectors. Once the Turks were defeated, though, the British and French reneged on their promises to their Arab partners by seizing the liberated Ottoman Arab provinces for themselves as spoils of war. Across the Arab world, riots and insurrections broke out in protest against this cynical thwarting of self-rule.
Street protests broke out in Egyptian cities in 1919 that the British brutally suppressed with shocking violence, followed in 1920 by armed insurrections in Syria and Mesopotamia. Most ominously, the first rumblings of conflict between Palestine’s Arabs and Jews — a conflict still in progress today — began to appear. Slowly, the bitter grievance caused by the Arab world’s stolen opportunity to rule itself metastasized into a perpetual cycle of violence, terrorism, and war that drove the Europeans out after 1945.
Although the urge to dominate foreigners for national benefit had burned German, British, and French hands alike before and after 1918, Curt Prüfer did not learn the lesson. In a subsequent world war, Prufer again willingly served a belligerent, expansionist German government as its ambassador to Brazil. Once again, German aggression brought defeat and ruin.
Since 1945, other western nations have taken up the struggle to control the Middle East that had made Germany stumble. Predictably, each of them in turn have stumbled too, and still, a century after the Ottoman defeat, the Middle East continues to burn with no end in sight.
