Completely by chance I stumbled on the above 100 year old postcard image, which made me curious to know what it was all about, because a mosque somewhere in the vastness of the Mark Brandenburg I had never seen before. The postcard shows parts of the so-called Half Moon Camp in Wünsdorf including the camp’s own mosque.

The Half Moon Camp was built at the beginning of WW I in what was then Wünsdorf near Zossen as a camp for about 30,000 Muslim Arabs, Africans and Indians (but also Hindus and Sikhs) prisoners of war who were sent from the colonies as part of the British and French armies in 1914/1915 to fight in the merciless and man-eating trench and position warfare on the Somme and elsewhere.

Former site of the camp/mosque in Wünsdorf

In addition to the inmates of these two colonial armies, however, Muslim members of the Imperial Russian Army were also interned there. In the Crescent Camp itself, active attempts were now being made to persuade the prisoners of war detained there to switch sides as part of a Muslim ‘holy war’ against the two colonial powers, England and France, “in order to wage a kind of guerrilla warfare with local rulers and tribal lords, thereby tying up as many English and French troops as possible, who would then be missing from the European battlefield.” (1)

Recreation and food distribution in the Wünsdorf Crescent Camp around 1915

At the request of the Mufti of Constantinople, therefore, the wooden mosque pictured above was also built in the camp in 1915 (the first mosque ever built in Germany). This was “supplemented by visits and speeches, especially by Turkish, Tatar and Arab politicians and journalists, who sought to influence the prisoners not only in the sense of German-Ottoman brotherhood in arms and pan-Islamic solidarity.” (2) In addition to the daily briefings, there were also propagandistic camp newspapers in several languages; besides, special attention was paid to the strict observance of Muslim rules (e.g. fasting during Ramadan). However, there is no doubt as to how many camp inmates actually changed sides.

From a historical point of view, this strategy – pushed on the German side by the orientalist and diplomat Max von Oppenheim – is in any case nothing new. “Already the legendary Muslim ruler Saladin had repeatedly entered into alliances with the Franks against rival Muslims or Christians. … The Ottoman Empire had called for holy war in most, not to say all, of the military conflicts in its history.” (3) As a relic of this dubious past in Brandenburg, however, only the Indian cemetery of Zehrensdorf can be found today; nothing remains of the Half Moon Camp itself except the street name Moscheestr. in today’s community of Waldstadt (district of Zossen), a road leading to the former site of the Half Moon Camp mosque, but today a postmodern wasteland.

Indian relief on the cemetery in Zehrensdorf

Finally, located outside of Zossen about 500 meters off the L74 highway in a wooded area is the cemetery of honor for the 206 Indian soldiers of the Half Moon Camp who died in captivity. This final resting place was rededicated in 2005 as the Zehrensdorf Indian Cemetery in the deserted area of the former Zehrensdorf. Also on the grounds is a memorial and grave marker for the Muslim Tatars from Russia who died here on site.

A bronze memorial plaque at the entrance to the Indian cemetery reads in German and English that the Indian soldiers buried here fell for their country, and that is a bit cynical, because no German, Austrian or Ottoman soldier ever set foot on Indian soil during World War I or before or after to cause trouble there or even to occupy this faraway land. And who would want to die far from home in a completely senseless war? And so it is not surprising that in the former colonies of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, India, Pakistan and Singapore there was great resistance and also real uprisings against the war effort in faraway Europe, which was, however, ruthlessly suppressed everywhere by the colonial powers. And without these colonial troops (especially those from India) the course of the war would have been different.

Indian single grave at the cemetery in Zehrensdorf

The cemetery is very well maintained and it is good that there are these places of remembrance, where a critical examination of history can take place. During my visit, gardeners were busy removing the traces of autumn, I also noticed many new individual gravestones, but it is a rather remote and somehow forgotten place in the vastness of the Mark Brandenburg hemmed in by the typical Mark Brandenburg pines and forests. So how often do visitors really get stranded here? I saw only a few traces of visitors, withered remains of memorial wreaths that are probably laid there once a year. The slightly foggy and hazy weather and the cold and damp wind of Autumn exactly matched these irritating alien impressions of another era.

(1)  Loth/Hanisch (Hrsg.), Erster Weltkrieg und Dschihad, München 2014, S. 15
(2)  Gerhard Höpp, Muslime in der Mark, Berlin 1997, S. 73
(3)  Stefan M. Kreutzer, Dschihad für den deutschen Kaiser, Graz 2012, S. 61