Germany's Covert War in the Middle East

Ultimately these cross purposes brought disaster pulling a fatally weak and woefully unprepared Ottoman state into a global war and unleashing vicious internal ethnic repression that brought it defeat and dismemberment. The diaries and official reports of German spy and propagandist Curt Prufer - translated here into English in their entirety for the first time - chronicle the complexities of the fragile Ottoman-German alliance from the perspective of a participant. Much like fellow soldier-scholar T.E. Lawrence Prufer and his colleagues tried to steal the loyalties of the Muslim subjects of the opposing sides. The book explores these episodes of sabotage subversion and subterfuge - from managing spies to preparing for the attack on the Suez Canal in 1915 - and in the process sheds light onto the ways World War I played out across the Middle East. Complemented throughout by in-depth and meticulously researched footnotes this primary source collection is an invaluable addition to the extant corpus of late Ottoman and World War I historical documents.