Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient

The Intelligence Bureau for the East (German: Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient) was a German intelligence organisation established on the eve of World War I dedicated to promoting and sustaining subversive and nationalist agitations in the British Indian Empire and the Persian and Egyptian satellite states. Attached to the German Foreign Office, it was headed by archaeologist Baron Max von Oppenheim and, during the war, worked intricately with the deposed Khedive Abbas II of Egypt, and Indian revolutionary organisations including the Berlin Committee, Jugantar, the Ghadar Party, as well as with prominent Muslim socialists including Maulavi Barkatullah. Aside from Oppenheim himself, recruits to the Bureau included Franz von Papen, later briefly the Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Wilhelm Wassmuss (sometimes referred to as the German Lawrence), Gunther von Wesendonck, Ernst Sekunna and others. Oppenheim was replaced in 1915 by Schabinger von Schowingen, and later in 1916 by Eugen Mittwoch, internationally the most respected and prestigious German orientalist (and also a respected Orthodox Jewish scholar), who recruited more liberal and cosmopolitan people for the Nachrichtenstelle such as Friedrich Schrader, his Swiss associate Max Rudolf Kaufmann or the young Nahum Goldmann (later President of the World Jewish Congress).