Politics

The Muslims of Wünsdorf

Since February 2016, refugees from Syria, Iraq and Iran have been housed in the small town of Wünsdorf, on the exact spot where Germany’s first mosque and a camp of 5000 mostly-Muslim POWs stood. Its purpose: convince Muslims to fight for Germany.

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Photo by Karolina Spolniewski
Since February 2016, refugees from Syria, Iraq and Iran have been housed in the small town of Wünsdorf, on the exact spot where, one century ago, Germany’s first mosque and a camp of 5000 mostly-Muslim POWs stood. Its purpose: to convince Muslims to join a holy war… on Germany’s side. It’s late afternoon in Wünsdorf, a small town about 50km south of Berlin. Autumn has left the landscape desaturated and hazy so the lights are already on in the local Erstaufnahmeeinrichtung (refugee reception centre). A team of guards has been watching over the facility since it opened in February of this year. It’s a sprawling campus, complete with its own kindergarten, infirmary and school. Families sleep in the main building, a former government administrative office that until 1994 housed the headquarters of the High Command of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. (In total, as many as 50,000 Soviet troops lived in Wünsdorf along with their families, earning the village the moniker “Little Moscow” by locals. Most of the buildings occupied by the Russians are in disrepair today.) Young single men sleep in new containers built outside, two or three to each room. According to the site manager, Dietmar Loose, the camp currently houses people from Syria, Iraq and Iran. “At the moment we only have 37 people staying here,” Loose says, somewhat apologetically. The camp, which is being managed by the Red Cross, has the capacity to accommodate up to 1000 occupants. Since Angela Merkel made the deal with Turkey to crack down on refugees travelling to Greece by sea, it looks like most of those spots will continue to go unfilled.
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Prefab housing units for male refugees, erected in February on the site of Germany’s first mosque. Photo by Karolina Spolniewski
One of the residents, Laith Al-agaili, is currently working out in the camp’s gym. Since arriving in Germany two months ago, the young Iraqi has tried to spend as much time exercising as he can. “I’m a little fat,” he says through an interpreter. “I want to lose my belly.” Al-agaili cracks a smile that belies his otherwise sombre demeanor. The 23-year-old left his family behind as he fled ISIS in 2014. He came to Germany because his asylum application in Finland got turned down after nearly two years of waiting. He had known very little about Germany before he came, only that Angela Merkel was welcoming refugees at a time when other countries were not. He registered in Berlin before being sent to Wünsdorf. As a devout Muslim, Al-agaili makes sure to pray five times a day in the camp’s prayer room. There is no mosque here – an observation which would be unremarkable in any other East German village. But this is the exact site on which Germany’s first mosque was built. And it is especially ironic that Al-agaili would find refuge here, of all places. After all, this is where Germany once tried to radicalise young Muslim men just like him, using Islam to win over a new army of jihadists ready to wage a holy war – on the side of Prussia.
The Prussian jihad
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The mosque at “Half Moon Camp” was completed in 1915 and demolished in 1930.
It all goes back to a time when World War I was starting to smoulder across Europe. The aristocrat, adventurer and diplomat Max von Oppenheim presented Kaiser Wilhelm II with a grand plan. To boost Germany’s chances of winning the war, he suggested that the country re-engage Muslim soldiers captured from Russian, British and French troops by convincing them to wage jihad against the Entente. In 1914, Von Oppenheim wrote: “In the battle against England … Islam will become one of our most important weapons.” The plan was formally launched by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V shortly after the start of the war, a convenient corollary of the German-Ottoman alliance. From a mosque in Constantinople, the sultan declared Britain, France and Russia the enemies of Islam, calling upon Muslims to rebel against these oppressors and issuing a fatwa against any Muslim that engaged in war against the Ottomans. In the same year, Germany built two camps to accommodate POWs captured from auxiliary Allied troops from Indian and African colonies, as well as from Crimea, Kazan and the Caucasus: one in Wünsdorf and one in the nearby town of Zossen. The former was nicknamed the Halbmondlager (“half moon camp”) because of its high concentration of Muslims, and the prisoners who stayed there, around 5000 at the camp’s peak, received special treatment: a relatively small number of occupants per square metre, friendly prison staff and the free exercise of religion. And a mosque was built – the first in Germany. Complete with a cupola, minaret and prayer room, the wooden mosque’s inauguration coincided with the beginning of Ramadan in 1915. “ It was actually the Germans who were observing whether the rituals of the Islamic faith were [being] carried out by the prisoners or not,” says Reinhard Bernbeck, a professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Berlin’s Free University. They strongly encouraged the Muslims to pray five times a day, for example. Friday sermons were used to politicise the prisoners, and a propaganda newspaper, al-Jihad, was circulated within the camps. The mosque, stylised to remind the prisoners of different Islamic civilisations, included calligraphic inscriptions calling them to join the jihad. But despite these calculated efforts, only a small proportion of the Muslim prisoners of war ended up fighting for the other side. Eleven hundred people from Tatarstan, 1084 Arabs and 49 Indians were prepared to defect. Once on the front, some of the soldiers requested to be sent back to the POW camp because the preferential treatment they had enjoyed there was so much better than life among the Ottomans. Ultimately, the project was considered to be a failure, and by 1917 most of the prisoners were sent to labour camps in Romania. Just 15 years after its inauguration, the mosque was demolished.
A Wünsdorf welcome
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Photo by Karolina Spolniewski
Today, Moscheestraße (“Mosque Street”) is the only relic of Wünsdorf Muslim history. It is the only street with that name in the entire country – a very short street that leads to a cul de sac. As for the Muslim community in the region, it has remained small, though never completely absent. Down the street from the new refugee camp is Neco’s Grillhaus, a kebab shop run by Ali Ilker. The Turkish German commutes between Berlin and Wünsdorf every day to take care of the business his uncle set up in 1996. Ilker proudly says he knows everyone in the town by name, “from the youngest of children to the oldest residents”. Wünsdorfers’ neighbourly attitude towards the town’s Turkish inhabitants doesn’t necessarily extend towards its refugee newcomers. “Do you think it’s fair that they get money from the government while we have to work?” complains one of Ilker’s customers, a burly German who prefers not to be named. On May 16, 2015, shortly before the planned opening of the new refugee camp, two young locals with alleged links to the extreme right set fire to two waste containers. According to the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, the suspects drove into a heap of sand while fleeing from the police. Fireworks and 20 banners with xenophobic slogans were found in the car. “Sure, some people were against the refugee camp before it opened. This place has a long history with foreigners, you know? But since the refugees arrived at the camp, there have been no problems,” says Ilker. His German customer disagrees. He recalls a scenario in which refugees were caught shoplifting and, to his dismay, nobody called the police. “You can be sure the police would have been called if it had been a German,” he says. A group of similarly disgruntled residents have come together to start a Facebook group called Wünsdorf wehrt sich, “Wünsdorf fights back”. It has 2074 likes (a little less than one-eighth of Wünsdorf’s population) and features posts that, among other things, have celebrated Donald Trump’s election.
History meets present Al-agaili, the Iraqi arrival, recalls an afternoon in October when he and some friends took a walk around town. They came across a former bunker with a sign in front of it. It contained a warning written in several languages, including Arabic, telling people not to walk in the area. Undetonated bombs still lay in the ground. “That made me think of Iraq,” he says. A Syrian refugee who now works for the Red Cross explained to him that the bunker was from World War II. The Syrian also told Al-agaili about the Muslim prisoners kept here during the Great War. When asked about how it made him feel to live in a place with that kind of history, Alagaili just shrugs his shoulders: right now, he just wants to focus on getting his papers and moving on with his life. He smiles politely and goes back to the gym. ************************* The other side of “Half Moon” Wünsdorf’s POW camp was not only the site of political instrumentalisation; it was also used to pursue scientific ends. Linguists, ethnographers and biological anthropologists were invited to study the many Africans, Indians and Middle Easterners now at their disposal. As well as having their bodies and skulls measured, prisoners were made to dance and sing and generally put their cultures on display. In 1915, Wilhelm Doegen put together a “sound archive”, calling on prisoners to record their idioms and fairy tales using a phonograph. As Professor Bernbeck puts it: “This was part of the trajectory of German academic culture that went straight into the Nazi period.” Learn more about Wünsdorf’s Muslim POW camp in Philip Scheffner’s 2007 documentary The Halfmoon Files.