Camp for prisoners of war named 'Halbmondlager'- showing praying Muslims[GETTY]

Published in 1916, it has a ludicrous plot whereby Kaiser Wilhelm II and his glamorous but merciless female agent Hilda von Einem attempt to stir up a Muslim holy war against Britain, and so vin zee Great Var. Then annexe Britain’s Empire. Tomorrow London, the day after: the world! Well, truth is stranger than fiction. Unknown to Buchan he was hitting the reality nail squarely on the head: The Kaiser truly did try and organise a jihad targeting Britain during the First World War. The Kaiser’s embrace of Islam began with an 1889 visit to Turkey, when he enjoyed the dance of the Circassian dancers from Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s harem. A later visit to Jerusalem, then under the auspices of the same flattering sultan, left the impressionable Kaiser declaring that, had he arrived agnostic, “I certainly would have turned Mahometan!” Soon the Kaiser was styling himself “Hajji Wilhelm”, the Protector of Muslims. There was some method in Wilhelm’s half-madness; the Kaiser was savvy enough to understand that the “Mahometans” might be a secret weapon in his game against a “certain meddlesome Power!”, whose Empire he lusted after. Great Britain, in other words. In order to tie the Muslim world to Berlin in ribbons of iron, the Kaiser authorised the building of a railway between the German capital and Baghdad in Iraq. Droves of German military officers were sent to train the Turkish army and navy, the chief Islamic polity, although the role of the men in field grey went far beyond dispensing advice. The German general Liman von Sanders was appointed a marshal in the Turkish army, which effectively became the marionette of wire-pullers in Berlin. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which deposed Wilhelm’s friend, Abdul Hamid II, caused a hiccough to German Weltpolitik. Fortunately for the Kaiser the Young Turk’s minister of war, Enver Pasha, turned out to be more slavishly pro-German than old Abdul the Damned. Almost symbolically, Pasha waxed his moustache in the cow-horn style made famous by the Kaiser himself.

Max von Oppenheim with scorpion bird man [GETTY]

Come the guns of 1914, and Turkey duly joined the Great War on the side of Germany. Out from Istanbul went the declaration: “Know that our state is today at war with the governments of Russia, England and France and their allies, who are the mortal enemies of Islam.” Yet German-backed jihad consisted of more than using Turks as soldiers on the battlefield. The British Empire contained more than 100 million civilian Muslims, and the Kaiser vowed to “inflame” them into an uprising against their British rulers. The Kaiser’s chief agitator for jihad was Max von Oppenheim, a character who could have come straight out of a Buchan or Indiana Jones yarn. T itling himself “Baron”, Oppenheim used his personal fortune (he was the scion of a German banking dynasty) to play at being an explorer and archaeologist. This avid Arabist also served as German consular representative in Cairo, where he distinguished himself in grooming hell-fire mullahs and scribing blood-thirsty diatribes against Britain in the local newspapers. When the war got underway, Oppenheim was the natural choice to become head of Germany’s Intelligence Bureau for the East. As the historian Sean McMeekin points out, the “Intelligence Bureau” would have been better termed “the Jihad Bureau”. From his office in Berlin, Oppenheim dispatched agents to bribe Muslim mullahs, from Istanbul to Kabul, into issuing fatwa rulings against all Europeans except Austrians, Hungarians and Germans. To stoke the jihad fires, Oppenheim’s bureau concocted tales of Britain’s anti-Islamic perfidies. German-sponsored jihadist pamphlets (in French, Persian, Arabic, and Urdu) called on all Muslims, in language uncomfortably similar to that used by IS and Al Qaeda today, to kill Christians. One pamphlet assured the faithful: “The blood of the [Allied] infidels in the Islamic lands may be shed with impunity” and cited the scriptural authority of the Koran as proof.

Turkish minister for war in 1914, who fled to Russia in 1918 after the Turkish surrender [GETTY]

To let loose 300 million Mohametans in a gigantic St Bartholomew’s massacre of Christians An officials

Mad Kaiser Wilhelm’s desire, one of his officials drily remarked, was “to let loose 300 million Mohametans in a gigantic St Bartholomew’s massacre of Christians”. Oppenheim’s “Made in Germany” jihad specifically legitimised outright terrorism. He urged “jihad by bands”, whereby devout Muslims formed cells of assassins to kill any and every Allied white person, civilian or military, male or female, it mattered not a jot. In an attempt to “turn” captured Allied Muslim soldiers they were put in a special Prisoner of War facility at Wunsdorf outside Berlin. It was less a PoW camp, more an Islam-themed resort. Ramadan was observed, and a mosque, modelled on the Dome of the Rock, was erected, the first in Germany. Oppenheim’s bureau pushed the rumour that Hajji Wilhelm himself had paid for the erection of the ornate mosque out of his own wallet. According to Ahmed bin- Hussein, a Moroccan detained in the luxurious Half Moon show camp: “They gave us good meat, pilaf, chickpeas. They gave three blankets, underwear, and a new pair of shoes, etc. "To each of us. They took us to the baths once in every three days and cut our hair.” The Kaiser believed that by giving the Half Moon prisoners all possible perks they would be enticed into changing sides, and engage in jihad for Deutschland. By war’s end Germany had spent a gargantuan three billion marks on its jihad effort, but it was not money well spent. There is no doubting the bravery of Oppenheim’s agents, many of whom were crack Orientalists and intrepid adventurers. Oskar von Niedermayer made a perilous journey across the scorching Persian desert to ask the Emir of Afghanistan to attack British India. Unfortunately for the Kaiser, followers of Allah generally were hard-pressed to see why they should kill some Europeans but not others. The Emir’s main concern, moreover, was money.