Qualla: Halbmondlager

Halbmondlager: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Asif Masimov, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first mosque ever built in Germany stood inside a prisoner-of-war camp. It went up in the sandy pine country south of Berlin and was finished in July 1915 — a large, ornate wooden building modelled on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, requested by the Grand Mufti of Constantinople and paid for by the Prussian Army. The men who prayed in it were captives. They had been taken from the British and French armies, shipped to Brandenburg, and housed in a camp designed to talk them into changing sides. The Germans called it the Halbmondlager, the Crescent Camp, and everything about it was arranged to be seen.

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Image: Asif Masimov | CC BY-SA 4.0

Halbmondlager: Thirty Thousand Men in a Pine Wood

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Around 30,000 Arab, Indian and African prisoners passed through Wünsdorf, all of them soldiers of the British and French empires, most of them a very long way from anywhere they knew. The camp was not exclusively Muslim. About eighty Sikh and Hindu prisoners from British India we...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Halbmondlager: A Theatre for the Wider World

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The Ottoman Sultan's jihad proclamation of 1914 had called on Muslims across the British and French empires to rise against them, and Germany saw an opening. Max von Oppenheim, a diplomat and aristocrat, set up an office near the camp and ran what he intended as a demonstration p...

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Halbmondlager: Voices on Wax

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Where the German state saw a propaganda stage, German scholarship saw a research opportunity. Anthropologists, linguists and musicologists — Robert Lachmann among them — came to Wünsdorf to work under what they described as favourable conditions, meaning a population that could n...

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Halbmondlager: The Experiment Collapses

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Up to 3,000 detainees were eventually recruited into the German Army and sent to fight in North Africa and the Middle East. The units that resulted were plagued by low morale and by outright revolt, and few of the men who joined them appear to have believed in the cause they had ...

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Halbmondlager: What Remains at Wünsdorf

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Assenmacher, CC BY-SA 4.0. The mosque outlived the war by a decade, and in the early 1920s it was still in use — interned Soviet soldiers of Muslim faith, who had fled into East Prussia during the Polish-Soviet War, came to pray there. Built of wood and never meant to last, it fell into disrepair and was d...

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Image: Assenmacher | CC BY-SA 4.0