Ritter Oskar von Niedermayer was a German general, professor, and super-spy. Sometimes referred to as the German Lawrence of Arabia (just like Wilhelm Wassmuss), Niedermayer was best remembered for having led the 1915–1916 Persian and Indo-German-Turkish mission to Afghanistan and Persia during the First World War. The goal was to entice Emir Habibullah Khan to attack British India as part of a Persian and Hindu German conspiracy as an adjunct to the German war effort. Between the World Wars, Niedermayer was associated with the Universities of Munich and Berlin.
EARLY LIFE
Born on November 8, 1885, Niedermayer came from a Regensburg official and merchant family. On July 15, 1905, he joined the Tenth Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment (Erlangen) as an officer cadet. After being promoted to lieutenant, Niedermayer received an educational opportunity within the Imperial German Army to study natural sciences, geology, and philology at Erlangen University. He was guided by Georg Jacob (a philologist of Semitic cultures) and picked up ‘fairly fluent English and Russian, passable Arabic and Turkish and modern Persian.’
While being retained on full military pay, Niedermayer asked for (and received) a two-year research trip furlough from the German Army. Traveling through Persia and India, he intended to carry out excavations and study Islamic practices in Persia… though military intelligence must have figured in the decision to give Niedermayer two years paid leave. He sketched relief maps of the area between Tehran and the Caspian Sea.
Niedermayer was the first known European to cross the Lut Desert. Having reached Asterabad in the spring of 1913, he spent nearly five months compiling a huge dossier on Shia practices for German intelligence. In May of that year, he met Percy Sykes, Britain’s super-spy in Persia. Not surprisingly, Sykes did not believe Niedermayer’s cover story that he was in Persia to carry out geological and anthropological investigations.
Niedermayer travelled next to Isfahan, and then to Bushire. In February 1914, he was debriefed by Wilhelm Wassmuss. Thoroughly impressed by Niedermayer, Wassmuss promptly recommended him to Max von Oppenheim as the man to lead the German Afghan mission.
THE GREAT WAR
In May 1914, Niedermayer returned to Europe, only months before the outbreak of war across the continent. On December 15, 1914, the German Military Command dispatched Niedermayer with a small expeditionary military team to Afghanistan. The aim was to forge an alliance with the indigenous populations of the region, using Niedermayer’s knowledge of the culture in an attempt to incite a revolt against the British Empire’s presence in India & Persia (a similar strategy would later by used by Lawrence of Arabia against the Ottoman Empire during the Arab Revolt).
On September 26, 1915, the Niedermayer-Hentig Expedition reached Kabul. However, nothing of a decisive practical nature emerged from Niedermayer’s work with Emir Habibullah. In May 1916, his team received orders to withdraw from Afghanistan and attach itself to the authority of the Ottoman Empire. The trek involved a dangerous return march through hostile Russian territory, which was accomplished by Niedermayer’s men on the first of September 1916.
Upon arrival, Niedermayer received orders from the German Military Mission to the Ottomans (commanded by Field Marshal Baron Colmar von der Goltz). His mission was to work with the Arabic tribes within Ottoman Imperial territory aimed at targeting the British Imperial authority in the Middle East. For his work in the Orient, Niedermayer was awarded the Militär-Max-Joseph-Orden.
In early 1918, Niedermayer was recalled to Germany, arriving in Berlin at general HQ on March 28th. Now holding the rank of captain, he was posted to the Western Front. Niedermayer fought in the Champagne and Flanders before the guns fell silent in November 1918.
BETWEEN THE WARS
At the end of World War I, Niedermayer was on leave and had an opportunity to resume his academic life. He studied literature and geography for two semesters at the University of Munich. During that time, he obtained a doctorate in philology (summa cum laude) and was appointed Director of the Publicity Department of Freikorps Epp (the Munich City Council’s Republican Force) on April 29, 1919.
On December 12th that same year. Niedermayer returned to the army from academia. Initially, he served in the HQ of the 23rd Division and was adjutant to Reichswehr Minister Otto Gessler. On December 23, 1921, Niedermayer ostensibly resigned from the army, but this was used as cover for work in the unofficial “Soviet Union Section” of the German Army. He worked in the Reichswehr office in Moscow until 1932.
Niedermayer soon returned to Germany and officially rejoined the Wehrmacht, being assigned to the Second Prussian Artillery Regiment. On January 29, 1933 (the eve of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power), he again resigned from active service with the rank of lieutenant colonel and returned yet again to a scholastic career.
On July 31, 1933, Niedermayer presented a thesis entitled Growth and Migration in the Russian Nation and took up a position as a lecturer in geography at the University of Berlin. On July 27, 1937 (at the express request of Hitler), Niedermayer took up a teaching post at the Institute for Compulsory Military Doctrine at Berlin University. Meanwhile, he had reenlisted as a reserve officer in the Wehrmacht on the first of November 1935. One month after Germany invaded Poland, Niedermayer was called up from the reserve list and appointed to a post in the supreme command of the Wehrmacht with the rank of full colonel.
WORLD WAR II
With the second world conflict underway, the Nazi leadership sought to utilize Niedermayer’s knowledge of Slavic culture to assist with the management of occupied Poland. However, Niedermayer twice rejected the request from the Army High Command, including one personally to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (the head of the OKW) one month before the launch of Operation Barbarossa. Instead, he used personal contacts among the army general staff in order to obtain a more active role in the war for himself.
In the winter of 1943, Niedermayer was responsible for the formation of the 162nd Turkestan Division. Initially, it was an irregular unit in the hinterland of the main army group in the southern Ukraine, comprising five Azeri and six Turkestan artillery and infantry units. The 162nd retained many enlisted German personnel, and it also contained Georgian, Armenian, Caucasian, and Turkestani POWs (although they were collectively referred to as “Turks”).
Generalmajor Oskar von Niedermayer was named commander of the 162nd on May 13, 1943. He was chosen because of his reputation and expertise vis many articles and memoirs as a connoisseur of the geography and peoples of the profiled regions. The motley force was initially deployed to the Ukraine, where Niedermayer was responsible for the training of the so-called “Ostlegionen”. But by mid-1943, the soldiers were relocated to Neuhammer (now Świętoszów) in Lower Silesia. Soon, these men fought against Slovene partisans in the Battle of Kočevje, where Niedermayer managed to rescue the besieged garrison.
In October 1943, the division was sent to northern Italy. The 162nd became the largest division of the entire Ostlegionen. Infantry battalion Number 450 was also drawn from ethnic Turks and Azeris.
In March 1944, the Ostlegionen relocated to the Ligurian coast as a part of the German Tenth Army. Their task was to halt the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula.
But on May 21, 1944, Oskar von Niedermayer was removed from command of the 162nd Turkestan Division. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had written a personal assessment of Niedermayer weeks earlier. Kesselring noted the following:
“His education is above average… It is, however, more of a scholastic nature than of use in a practical fighting command application. In decision-making, he is hesitant, and his command leadership style is too slow in reaction.”
TO PERISH IN PRISON
In August 1944, Niedermayer voiced opinions which were disparaging of Hitler’s Ostpolitik. Two staff officers reported his remarks to Nazi authorities… and Niedermayer was arrested and charged with advocating defeatism against Nazi Germany. He was promptly court-martialed at Torgau.
Numerous friends and associates (including SS chief Heinrich Himmler) provided character references during the hearing. They stated Niedermayer’s merits and history of service to the Fatherland, but he was sent to prison in Torgau (where he remained until the end of the war).
After the capitulation of Nazi Germany on May 9, 1945, Niedermayer was attempting to return home to Regensburg. But at Carlsbad, the Red Army arrested him, and Niedermayer was deported to the Soviet Union. Soon, he contracted tuberculosis awaiting trial in a Moscow. A Russian court martial sentenced him to twenty-five years in Vladimir prison.
On September 25, 1948, Oskar von Niedermayer died in the prison hospital at the age of sixty-two.