The jihad campaign of the German Empire during the First World War has long been the subject of a separate area of ​​research.

A decade and a half ago, historians such as Tilman Lüdke and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz spoke of a jihad made in Germany.

Since then, not only have regular studies been added to aspects of this propagated "holy war".

Recently, the subject has even appeared as a sub-chapter in overviews of the Holocaust, such as the anthology “Nouvelle histoire de la Shoah” (publisher: Passés composés) recently published in Paris.

Previous studies on various Islamic countries in the region have shown why the German Reich failed with its jihadist "revolution strategy" in World War I.

Little was known about attempts by Germany to exert political influence in the Hijaz.

The journey of the German merchant, writer and adventurer Karl Neufeld (1856 to 1918), who had converted to Islam, to Medina in the summer of 1915 was briefly discussed by Lüdke in 2005.

The Islamic scholar Martin Strohmeier, emeritus professor at the University of Cyprus, has now studied Neufeld's travel diary more closely ("Mission Impossible: Karl Neufeld's Holy War Propaganda Trip to Medina 1915" in: Die Welt des Islam, Vol. 61, 2021, Issue 3 / Brill) .

As a "prisoner of the Mahdi" Neufeld had published in 1899 with his book "In Chains of the Caliph.

Twelve years imprisonment in Omdurman” achieved world fame.

Active in cross-border trade with the Sudan in Aswan in southern Egypt, Neufeld was captured by the Sudanese as a caravan leader in 1887 and was only freed by British soldiers in 1898.

After that he lived on his own farm near Aswan and also worked as a desert guide for European guests of a boarding house that his sister ran in the city.

This carefree life with his Abyssinian wife and two daughters ended abruptly when, after the outbreak of World War II, the British expelled him from Egypt like other German citizens.

Anti-French agitation

He was soon hired by the Foreign Office for a propaganda mission in Medina.

Accompanied by four Yemeni assistants, Neufeld posed as a Tunisian merchant who had allegedly fled the French colonial regime on a pilgrimage.

After his arrival in Medina in mid-July 1915, the German Muslim quickly made contact with educated circles in the city thanks to an acquaintance – which at first seemed accidental – with the Ottoman officer Cheri Bey.

There he met a striking number of legal scholars from the Maghreb who had actually found refuge in the city from French repression.

Neufeld's anti-French agitation was particularly well received by them.

And that Germany and the allied Ottoman Empire are on the winning side in the war,

he was able to illustrate with reference to Warsaw, which had just been conquered by the German army, and the Entente's first setbacks in the Battle of the Dardanelles.

However, Neufeld found it difficult to incite those interlocutors against the British who had an Egyptian or Sudanese background, since from their point of view British colonial rule had also brought progress.

Neufeld did not want to or could not see that there were clear limits to the German influence on the Bedouin tribes in the region, with whom he established relations: that, as the German believed, they were loyal to the Ottoman state was just as simplistic as his view, according to Strohmeier that the Bedouins are religious fanatics and can therefore easily be mobilized against the western powers.

More realistic, however, was Neufeld's assessment of German propaganda methods in the Orient.

He considered film screenings to be inefficient because electricity was rarely available, which is why magazines, photos and maps or even your own newspapers should be used.

Neufeld noted that he personally always spoke to the Arabs "as if he were talking to big children" - it was by no means the only diary entry

Strawmeier suspects that Neufeld's Ottoman "supervisor" Cheri Bey was actually tasked with observing the German, which eventually led to his expulsion from Medina after a six-week stay.

However, on November 11, 1915, in the detailed report by the writer Emil Ludwig, who had spoken to Neufeld in Constantinople, in the “Berliner Tageblatt” there was nothing to be read;

on the other hand, some things about what "passion against the English" prevailed in the city of the prophet.