Mission Impossible: Karl Neufeld’s Holy War Propaganda Trip to Medina (1915)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Martin Strohmeier
Keyword(s):  
Research Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
Holy War ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
Auswärtiges Amt ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
First World

Abstract This article deals with Karl Neufeld’s trip to Medina, undertaken in the framework of German efforts to incite insurrections with the aim of destabilizing British rule in the Muslim world. His specific task was to spread propaganda in the Hijaz and the Sudan; he made it only to Medina, from where he was expelled by the Ottoman government after a stay of six weeks. Neufeld’s diary on which this article is mainly based is the only source about how Holy War propaganda was actually disseminated. Therefore, it goes beyond the existing literature and adds new insight into the discussion of German expeditions organized to counter British influence in the Middle East during the First World War. In contrast to most of the other enterprises, Neufeld accomplished certain goals, which does not, however, change the overall picture that the “jihād made in Germany” was a failure.Materials used include files from the archive of the German Foreign Office (Politisches Archiv, Auswärtiges Amt: pa-aa), the Sudan Archive Durham (Durham University Library: sad), and narrative sources, as well as the pertinent research literature.

BRITISH MIDDLE EAST POLICY-MAKING AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR: THE LAWRENTIAN AND WILSONIAN SCHOOLS

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 773-793
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY J. PARIS
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
Middle East Policy ◽  
First World

In the aftermath of the First World War, two schools of divergent thought emerged among Whitehall's Middle East policy-makers. One, propounded by T. E. Lawrence, found support in the Foreign Office, where many favoured Arab national ideals and backed the Hashemite family for rulership positions in the region. The other, epitomized by Arnold Wilson, the civil commissioner for Iraq, was thought to reflect the India Office view that direct British rule in Iraq was essential and that Hashemite pretensions should be opposed. In this article, the author shows that the lines separating the India and Foreign Offices were not so clearly drawn. Many senior officials in the India Office were disturbed by Wilson's imperial programme for Iraq and some were prepared to support Hashemite aspirations. But Lawrence's 1920 campaign for Hashemite rule and his hyperbolic press attacks on Wilson's policies had the paradoxical effect of moving the India Office to defend Wilson and to revert to their anti-Hashemite stance. The article concludes with an analysis of the reasons behind the triumph of the Lawrentian over the Wilsonian schools at the end of 1920, when Wilson was removed from Iraq and Middle East policy-making was consolidated in the Colonial Office.

The Indian Civil Service 1919–1924: Service Discontent and the Response in London and in Delhi

1984 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Ewing
Keyword(s):  
Civil Service ◽  
First World War ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
British India ◽  
World War ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
First World

The British controlled their empire in India through the twin instruments of the army and the civil services. But the army was never used much to administer British territories and the day-to-day business of law and order was left to the civil services, headed by the élite corps of covenanted officers, the Indian Civil Service. This corps was the vital link that carried the dictates of the centre to the two hundred and fifty districts that made up British India. Obviously a Service only a thousand or so strong had a presence too thin to achieve what some hagiographers have claimed but it was, nonetheless, a vital part of the structure of British rule. In the years immediately following the first world war, this vital part seemed unable to cope with the galaxy of problems with which it was beset: its own members increasingly questioned the value of their role; Indian politicians attacked what they saw as the remnant of imperial control whilst, on the widest scale, the complex task of governing India seemed to be beyond the creaking, anachronistic and overworked I.C.S.

The Foreign Office and British Propaganda during the First World War

1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 875-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
The Creation ◽  
First World ◽  
New Phase

In July 1918 it was the considered opinion of Lord Northcliffe that propaganda and diplomacy were incompatible. When, only five months earlier, Northcliffe had accepted Lloyd George's invitation to take charge of the newly created department of enemy propaganda, his appointment, coupled with that of Lord Beaverbrook as Britain's first minister of information, had held out the promise of a new phase in the efficiency and co-ordination of Britain's conduct of official propaganda in foreign countries. It was then, in February 1918, that the Foreign Office had finally been forced to relinquish its control over such work. However, the creation of the two new departments had produced an intolerable situation. After three years of inter-departmental rivalry and squabbling over the conduct of propaganda overseas, Whitehall closed ranks on Beaverbrook and Northcliffe and united behind the Foreign Office in opposition to any further transference of related duties into their hands. Now, after five months of continued obstruction, Northcliffe expressed the view that:As a people we do not understand propaganda ways…Propaganda is advertising and diplomacy is no more likely to understand advertising than advertising is likely to understand diplomacy.

“The Methods of Barbarism” and the “Rights of Small Nations”: War Propaganda and British Pluralism

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Use Of Force ◽  
First World War ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
World War ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
Liberal Vision ◽  
First World

The “methods of barbarism” and the “rights of small nations” are perhaps the most recognizable of British slogans arising out of the wars of the early twentieth century. They are instantly associated with the Boer War and the First World War respectively, but seldom are they associated with each other. However, the Pro-Boer rhetoric of “the methods of barbarism” and the First World War propaganda of “the rights of small nations” are intimately linked through their roots in the pluralist Liberal vision of Britishness.These slogans and the propaganda campaigns that they epitomized must be understood within the context of a multicultural Britain and opposing notions of British national identity. Defining “barbarism” as the oppression of small nations through the brutal use of force, the Pro-Boers associated the term with the Anglocentric vision of the British nation reflected in the “New Imperialism” of the Conservatives. Through their belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, the Conservative imperialists maintained that small nations like those of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Boers would either be assimilated or swept aside by the historical progress of an expanding Anglo-Saxon nation state. In contrast to this notion of Conservative “barbarism,” the Pro-Boer Liberals drew on the Gladstonian heritage of their party in defining the United Kingdom as a multinational state at the center of a multinational empire. They eschewed the use of force in the maintenance of empire and argued that the bonds of imperialism must be based upon mutual goodwill, voluntarism, and the recognition of the principle of nationality.When the First World War broke out in 1914, propagandists drew upon these contrasting constructions of Liberal cultural pluralism and Conservative cultural uniformity. In terms similar to those employed by the Pro-Boers, British propagandists depicted the First World War as a struggle against German “barbarism” and as a fight to vindicate the “rights of small nations.” Solidly based upon the Liberal construction of the multicultural and multinational nature of Britishness, Britain's role as the champion of the principle of nationality was proclaimed with an eye not only to the international context of Europe but to the domestic context of the British state and empire as well.

The Career of Sir Eyre Crowe: A Reassessment

1972 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Cosgrove
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
First World War ◽  
Evil Spirit ◽  
Prime Mover ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
British Policy ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
British Foreign Office ◽  
First World

Among the myths of the origins of World War I is that of the ability of obscure bureaucrats to influence the foreign policy of their country through intrigue and deceit. The foremost example in the volumious literature involved the unlimited capacity for evil attributed to Friedrich von Holstein of the German Foreign Office. One of his contemporaries left the. following portrait: “His life was devoted to poisoning human and international relationships. Holstein's diplomacy by intrigue, his vicious disloyalties, and the way he placed his own revengeful purposes before his country's good contributed largely towards the outbreak of the First World War.” Labeled the Grey Eminence of the Wilhelmstrasse in the aftermath of defeat, Holstein became the scapegoat for the disasters of German diplomacy in 1914.Other bureaucrats of the pre-war era whose careers followed a similar pattern have received like treatment. On the British side, it was asserted, there operated a civil servant whose anti-German animus steered Britain into conflict with Germany. Allegedly possessing a fatal fascination for Sir Edward Grey, Sir Eyre Crowe was credited by historians with enormous surreptitious influence. The hostility toward Germany manifested by Great Britain in the decade prior to 1914, the argument runs, reflected Crowe's personal hatred and suspicion of German power. “The vast influence exercised by Sir Eyre Crowe upon British policy between 1908 and 1914,” wrote the distinguished Austrian historian A. F. Pribram in 1951, “only became generally known outside the Foreign Office, and especially abroad, in recent years.” Apologists for Germany cited Crowe as the prime mover of British policy, and one German historian termed him the ‘böse Geist’ [evil spirit] of the British Foreign Office.

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