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The unlikely prophet of the jihad was German aristocrat, adventurer and diplomat Max von Oppenheim. The 54-year-old had returned to the Heimat after 20 years of travel and study in the Orient and, before Britain had even declared war on Germany, had convinced the Kaiser that Islam was Germany’s secret weapon. Oppenheim believed that a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign would stir up a mass Muslim uprising against Britain and France from within colonial territories such as India, Indo-China and north and west Africa.

“A lot of Germans thought he was a crank,” says Eugene Rogan, the author of forthcoming book The Fall of the -Ottomans.

“He had idiosyncratic views about the irrational extremist way that Muslims would behave.” The Kaiser, though, took him at his word. Wilhelm vowed to “inflame the whole Mohammedan world” against the British and on August 2 1914 a secret treaty between Germany and the Ottoman Empire marked the beginning of a bizarre political marriage between the Kaiser and Sultan Mehmed V.

That same day Oppenheim moved into his bureau in -Berlin, the headquarters of his jihad propaganda machine.

The PoWs, who had fought valiantly for the Allied powers in the early battles of the First World War, were prime -targets, confined as they were to a controlled environment a short distance from Oppenheim’s HQ. “I’m sure the -Germans believed they would be fairly malleable to a -message that turned them against the Entente and played on their Islam,” says Rogan.