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The following most interesting and revealing article, which has recently
been sent to us by an Australian supporter, shows that there is nothing new
about the current German desire to flood Europe with a swarm of Muslim
immigrants – and their motivation is still the same! :-
> GERMAN-ISLAM CONNECTION GOES BACK TO WW1
>
>
> A refugee camp in a small German town stands on the spot of a mosque built
> to entice Muslims to fight for the Kaiser.
>
> It all goes back to a time when war was starting to smoulder across
> Europe. The German 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 reasoned that the
> country should re-engage Muslim soldiers captured from Russian, British
> and French forces by convincing them to wage a religious war against the
> allies – the British, French, and Russian alliance.
>
> In 1914, Oppenheim wrote: “In the battle against England … Islam will
> become one of our most important weapons.”
>
> The German-Ottoman alliance
>
> The plan, a convenient corollary of the German-Ottoman alliance, was
> formally launched by Turkish Sultan Mehmed V shortly after the start of
> the war. From a mosque in Constantinople, the Sultan declared Britain,
> France and Russia the enemies of Islam, calling upon the Muslim subjects
> of those countries and their colonies to resist their oppressors.
>
> According to the fatwa that was subsequently issued, any Muslim that
> engaged in war against the Ottomans would have to pay the highest penalty.
>
> In the same year, two prisoner of war camps were built in Wunsdorf and
> Zossen – 7km away. Wunsdorf’s Halbmondlager (Half Moon Camp) – so called
> because of the high concentration of Muslims – held about 5,000 prisoners
> at its peak, while Zossen had more than 12,000.
>
> The prisoners, captured from auxiliary Allied troops from India and
> African colonies, as well as from the Crimea, Kazan and Caucasus, received
> special treatment in Wunsdorf.
>
> The camp had a relatively small number of occupants per square metre,
> friendly prison staff and the free exercise of religion. Complete with a
> cupola, minaret and prayer room, the wooden mosque’s inauguration
> coincided with the beginning of Ramadan in 1915.
>
> Islam was seen as a tool to achieve Germany’s political and military
> objectives. “It was actually the Germans who were observing whether all
> the rituals that belong to [the] Islamic faith were [being] carried out or
> not,” says Reinhard Bernbeck, a professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at
> the Free University of Berlin.
>
> It was the Germans who strongly encouraged the Muslims to pray five times
> a day, for example, Bernbeck adds.
>
> Friday sermons were used to politicise the prisoners, and a propaganda
> newspaper called “al-Jihad” was circulated within the camps. The mosque,
> stylised to remind the prisoners of different Islamic civilisations,
> included calligraphic inscriptions urging them to join the religious war.
>
> Germany’s relationship with Islam
>
> Despite the calculated efforts, only a small proportion of the Muslim
> prisoners of war ended up fighting for the German side. At least 1,100
> people from Tatarstan – now part of Russia – 1,084 Arabs and 49 Indians
> defected.
>
> But some of those soldiers requested to be sent back to the PoW camp
> because the preferential treatment they had enjoyed there was so much
> better than life at the front.
>
> Ultimately the project was considered a failure. Only 15 years after its
> inauguration, the mosque was demolished. The camp stood beside the
> Moscheestrasse (Mosque Street), which exists as a relic in the town, which
> has a current population of 2,485. The town keeps no record of the number
> of immigrants. It is the only
>> street with that name in the entire nation. As if to serve as commentary
>> on Germany’s relationship with Islam, the street is very short – about
>> 100m long – and it leads to a cul de sac.
>
> As Bernbeck puts it: “This was part of the trajectory of German academic
> culture that went straight into the Nazi period.”
>
> Muslim immigrants
>
> By 1917, most of the prisoners were sent to labour camps in Romania. Since
> then the Muslim community in the region has remained small, although it
> has never entirely disappeared.
>
> Out of Germany’s population of 82 million, nearly five million are
> Muslims, according to the most recent census data released in 2015.
>