The mysterious Dr Abdul Hafiz

The mysterious Dr Abdul Hafiz Lukas Vogel The following article was first published on 31 July 2021 in German on my website www.historianostra.ch. One of the two Indians tried in absentia in the Zurich Bomb Trial of June 1919 was Dr Abdul Hafiz. In its verdict of 13 June 1919, the court concluded that he had violated the explosives legislation and sentenced him to the highest penalty handed down in the trial, namely four years in prison and a CHF 2,000 fine. Who is this Abdul Hafiz? Unlike his colleague Virendranath “Chatto” Chattopadhyaya, there is hardly any secondary literature on him, and the sources are also very thin. Hafiz thus remains a shadowy figure who can only be grasped in outline. Birth and origin Even his origins are not entirely clear. Born in 1884, 1886 or 1887, depending on the source, he first gave his birthplace as Hoshiarpur, Punjab, India, only to change it later to Sherpur, Afghanistan. In the doctoral files of the University of Leipzig, the entry “Sherpur (Afghanistan)” is accompanied by the explicit note that Hafiz stated that he was not born in Hoshiarpur as noted in the Leipzig ex-matriculation. For the University of Leipzig, he was therefore previously applied as a British citizen, whereas later, during the war, he stated his nationality as “Afghan”. The student card of the University of Birmingham, where he had studied before Leipzig, has not survived. There are also different statements about his language skills. From 1904 he attended Birmingham University, where his master's thesis in mining, written in English, was accepted in 1908. From 1910 to 1913 he studied at the University of Leipzig and graduated with a dissertation in chemistry in German. Other documents state that he spoke English, German, various North Indian languages as well as Pashto and Persian – the language of the Afghan royal court. However, the German consul in Naples complained to the Foreign Office in early January 1915 that Hafiz, who landed in Naples on his way from Chicago to Berlin, did not speak a word of German. The latter seems closer to the truth: the professors who gave him his oral examinations on 15 July 1913 noted that Hafiz had had “great difficulties with the language”. In the service of Kabul? Muhammad Yusuf-Mohsin, the former general manager of the Pakistani arms factory POF, testifies in the only short biography that can be found to Abdul Hafiz's special closeness to the court of the Emir of Kabul. He had, writes Yusuf-Mohsin, submitted his dissertation to the University of Birmingham in the name of the Afghan Emir Habibullah (1872-1919), whereupon the university had refused to award him a doctorate. 2 Whether legend or not, this story coincides with information from German sources, according to which Hafiz is said to have entered the service of the Emir of Afghanistan around 1907 – that is, while still studying in Birmingham. Admittedly, this source relocates the event to Germany. German sources also report that shortly before the outbreak of the war, he was invited in writing by the Afghan hereditary prince – it must have been Nasrullah, the brother of Emir Habibullah, who was known to be “extremely anti-British” – to take up a professorship at the extended University of Kabul, but was unable to do so because of the outbreak of war. He was also a friend of Kadir Bakhsh (Qader Baksh), who had spent some time in Germany as an emissary of the Emir. On 27 April 1915, before the Niedermayer-Hentig mission left Istanbul for Afghanistan, Hafiz asked the expedition leader Werner Otto von Hentig by telegraph to hand over the private letter he had received to the Afghan Emir Abdul Rahmann personally. A remarkable instruction since Abdur Rahman had already died on 1 October 1901 and had been inherited by his son Habibullah. When it became clear that the Niedermayer-Hentig mission in Kabul was failing to achieve its goal, the Indian Independence Committee in Berlin launched the idea of sending a second mission in February 1916, following in the footsteps of the first, in which Abdul Hafiz would have taken part. The latter then travelled several times to Istanbul and possibly also to Baghdad. Of course, all the information from both the German and Turkish general staffs indicated that a crossing of Persia had become impossible in the meantime. After some back and forth, preparations for the second mission were abandoned in April 1916, not without causing disagreements between Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, the German supreme commander of the 6th Ottoman Army in Baghdad, and the Foreign Office in Berlin. It was in this context that Hafiz was first referred to as a “reliable Afghan government official”, a very questionable statement to say the least. Chemist Hafiz's first studies in Birmingham applied to mining and metallurgy. His second studies in Leipzig were devoted to chemistry – but to electrolysis, so he stayed close to the extraction of metals. After his studies, he left Germany. At the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, he worked for the remedy manufacturer Abbot Alkaloidal Co. in Chicago. In contrast, German sources say he was sent to the USA by the Emir of Afghanistan "for further study of explosives". In November 1914, he was summoned from Chicago to Berlin, where he arrived in early January 1915. Here he wanted to learn specifically how to produce smokeless gunpowder - its use caused the British in Gallipoli great distress, for example, because it made it massively more difficult to locate guns. Interrupted by many trips abroad, he devoted himself to this training until around June 1916, after which his requests to continue with the responsible German authorities came to nothing. The reference by Yusuf-Mohsin, according to which Hafiz was responsible for ammunition supply in Austria towards the end of the war and was appointed captain for this purpose, cannot be verified. The employment as chief chemist in a munitions factory in Vienna, which is also mentioned, sounds plausible in view of his further career, but cannot be nailed down either. 3 Bombs in his luggage Erwin Briess told the examining magistrate Otto Heusser that he had met Abdul Hafiz in Zurich in the spring of 1915 through Chatto. Through Hafiz, he came into contact with Italian anarchists in Zurich. Together they talked about the elimination of Italian politicians – Italy entered the war on 23 May 1915 on the side of the Entente. The anarchists complained that they did not have sufficient means for such projects. Briess reports that about 14 days after this conversation Hafiz suddenly left and returned to Zurich again 14 days later to suddenly pick up heavy boxes at the baggage claim of the main railway station, which had been delivered via the German legation in Bern. Briess only discovered their contents in his office at Lintheschergasse 10, where they were temporarily stored: Explosives and hand grenades. Ker mentions 22 July 1915 as the date of this operation. The materials were gradually transferred from Briess's office to Hafiz's flat, where they were later handed over to the Italian anarchist Arcangelo Cavadini. As soon as this was completed, Briess reports, Hafiz was quite nervous and left immediately, although Briess had to accompany him as far as Winterthur. Delayed departure On 24 August 1915, Hafiz reported to the Indian Independence Committee in Berlin via the German Consul General in Zurich that he would be leaving soon. On 7 September, however, he is still in Zurich (where he also has a mistress). On 15 September, the Foreign Office asks the embassy in Bern to bring to Hafiz's attention that he is apparently under surveillance by the British. At the end of September, he is in Berlin, but on 13 October 1915 he is back in Zurich, where he is still (or again) on 22 January 1916, from where he travels on to Istanbul in midFebruary. From this point on, at the latest, Briess loses sight of him. He tells the examining magistrate that he assumed Hafiz had travelled to Afghanistan to build a bomb factory there. However, in autumn 1917 he claims to have heard that Hafiz was seen in Berlin's noble hotel “Fürstenhof” in the company of German officers. He does not resolve this contradiction in the interrogation. Hafiz's colleague Chatto was expelled from Switzerland in December 1915. No similar case of Hafiz himself has been handed down, yet he no longer appears in Switzerland after January 1916. After it became known that Hafiz was apparently being monitored by the British, the German authorities' suspicions fell on Briess in January 1916 at the latest. Propaganda The delivery of bombs to Switzerland was apparently organised and coordinated by Germany's military, not civilian, leadership. An interim head of the German Consulate General in Zurich, Horst P. Falcke, complained on 20 October 1918 in a somewhat tortuous formulation for the attention of the Imperial Chancellor Prince Max von Baden: “All in all, the activities of the 4 Zurich authority [i.e. the Consulate General] have apparently been systematically influenced for years by military interference in a way that, in my opinion, is incompatible with the tasks of the Imperial Office. In my opinion, this cannot be reconciled with the tasks of the imperial consulates, directly contradicts the regulations for foreign service known to me, especially those issued for times of war, and exposes us to the danger of hatred and contempt even in neutral foreign countries.” Hafiz apparently had two clients. In addition to organising an assassination plot against Italian politicians on behalf of the German General Staff, he was also active in written propaganda, which was the responsibility of the Intelligence Agency for the Orient and thus ultimately of the Foreign Office in Berlin. In a letter to the German embassy counsellor Schubert in Bern, Louis Hoffmann complained in Geneva that he had written several papers on behalf of Chatto and Hafiz, whom he had met in Geneva in August 1915, but had not yet received the promised fee. The writings are generally directed against England and only a few parts deal with India. During the interrogation, Briess pointed out that Hafiz not only carried out Indian nationalist propaganda from Switzerland, but also organised and distributed, for example, the pro-German pamphlet “La Guerre qui vient”, which was intended for France. Further life After January 1916, our sources on Hafiz dry up. Yusuf-Mohsin is the only one who still has information on Hafiz, but some factual errors make it advisable to be cautious about his further information. According to Yusuf-Mohsin, Hafiz is said to have worked as a chief chemist in a munitions factory in Austria towards the end of the World War, where he also met and married his wife, the Vienna-based Aynmar Rishta Mahrun Nisa. Furthermore, the ousted Ottoman general Cemal Pasha, who was in charge of modernising the Afghan army, is said to have ordered Hafiz to Kabul in 1920 to build an ammunition and explosives factory, but this was thwarted by the British. Later, he served Kemal Atatürk's Turkey as chief chemist in the construction of a weapons and munitions factory. He was general director in Turkey until 1947. In 1948, he contacted the government of newly independent Pakistan to encourage the establishment of the Pakistan Ordnance Factory (POF). In this context, Yusuf-Mohsin describes him as a great patriot and quotes him as saying: “During my 40 years abroad, I never once forgot that my motherland was under the British”. However, Hafiz was unhappy in the face of incompetence and outdated thinking in the POF and resigned in 1957 (i.e. at the age of about 75). He died in 1964, impoverished. Sources Interrogations and confession of Erwin Briess: Federal Archives Bern, E21#1000/131#14364* and following University Archive Leipzig University Archive Birmingham 5 Political Archive of the Foreign Office, Berlin Austrian State Archives Vienna Literature Yusuf-Mohsin, Muhammad (2000).Dr. Abdul Hafeez. Sub-continent's great defence-scientist.In: Defence Journal, Karachi, June/July 2000. https://web.archive.org/web/20110609134240/http://www.defencejournal.com/2000/june/drabdul.htm; and https://web.archive.org/web/20090106132328/http://www.defencejournal.com/2000/july/abd ul-hafeez.htm (02.11.2020) Popplewell, Richard J. (1995). Intelligence and imperial defence: British intelligence and the defence of the Indian empire 1904-1924. Ker, James Campbell (1917, 20152). Political trouble in India, 1907-1917.