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By Leila Almazova, November 2025
A short drive from Berlin lies the small, unassuming settlement of Zossen. Today it hardly draws the eye—quiet streets, a modest train station. In the old cemetery, an obelisk is inscribed in stone with Tatar names where one might expect German ones. What strange path led these Tatars to Zossen?
The story hidden behind this unexpected fact turned out to be remarkably dramatic: during the First World War, Zossen was home to prisoner-of-war camps. One of them, fenced off with its own gate and watchtower, was reserved for Muslim Tatars—some ten thousand men captured from the Russian army. The German Empire, in its imperial pragmatism, hoped to treat these former enemies decently enough to persuade them to take up arms for the Ottoman Empire against Russia. Three empires, each with their own agenda, converged on this small corner of Brandenburg—each seeking to make use of a people whose own needs were the least of their concerns.
At one point when the German administration decided to organize schools to keep the prisoners occupied, the Tatars took the idea and made it their own. They formed several classes and drew up a curriculum in the spirit of the "jadid" (from Arab. - new) reformist schools—emphasizing literacy, arithmetic, and geography. It was a quiet, dignified act of resistance: as if to say, "you may have your plans for us, but we will do what we know how to do."
The German plot finally, came to nothing. The Ottomans were slow and indecisive, the war dragged on, and then the October Revolution swept the chessboard clean—its red tide washing away the careful plans of the empires that had imagined themselves masters of the world.
What remained was a cemetery. The Germans buried 405 Tatar prisoners with respect. The Tatars died not by violence but mostly from disease and epidemics that ravaged the war years. A German architect, Otto Stiehl, designed a small monument adorned at each corner with gilded turbans. On the stone was inscribed: "Gravesite of Muslim Kazan Tatars who died as prisoners of war under the reign of Wilhelm II during the World War."
In front of it stretched the burial ground—rows of black wooden slabs, each elegantly cut, each bearing a name, a regiment number, a span of years. The cemetery endured until the end of the Second World War, after which the area came under the control of the Red Army. The Soviet officers, not burdened by sentiment, turned the graveyard into a tank training ground and the Tatar gravestones were demolishing together with the personal obelisks erected over the graves of Indian prisoners whose camp had stood nearby.
From that proud Soviet period, two eloquent symbols remain: on the survived main entrance obelisk once dedicated to the fallen Indians, someone scratched the word “Dembel”—slang for termination of conscription—and on Otto Stiehl’s monument to the Tatar prisoners, a single vulgar word “Khuy.” That was all the heirs of the Russian Empire—the soldiers of a new entity —had to say to the dead.
After the reunification of Germany, the authorities of the Federal Republic decided to restore the old war cemeteries around Zossen. The British Embassy took care of the obelisks dedicated to the Indian soldiers—then subjects of Her Majesty the Queen. The Tatar cemetery, however, met a different fate. Since no state institution took responsibility for its restoration, the German side chose to erect a single memorial stele, bearing the names of the buried, as preserved in the archives.
Among them are names a Tatar ear would recognize—Ismagilow Iskak (d. 1920), Jakupoff Jussup (d. 1915), Gizatulin Idiatula (d. 1917)—recorded with minor errors (missing double letters, for instance). And then there are others, clearly the victims of transcription gone wild: Awelijam Pochomja, Bankiros Charambun, Idelanachutim Nuchtaraff. Some defy any attempt at reconstruction; others hint faintly at what they once were. Perhaps Nuchtaraff was Musharraf—but to prove it, one would need to sift through prisoner cards, compare places of birth, and match them with surviving parish registers in Tatar villages. Only then could we know whose name each fragment of stone was meant to honor.
Yet indifference to the sound of names was hardly the monopoly of German officers. In Soviet times, the fate of a Tatar child’s name often rested in the hands of a distracted clerk at the registry office. Thus the graceful Dibaja—“the first page of a beautifully written, ornamented, usually sacred book”—became the meaningless Dibaga. Munauwara, “enlightened,” was transformed into Munavira. A boy named Jawid—“the horseman, the knight”—became Zavid.
One of my acquaintances, whose surname is Chemaletdinov, once told me that his great-grandfather’s family name had originally been Jamaletdinov—“beauty of faith.” It had been mangled beyond recognition by a clerk’s careless ear. And our grandmothers, who once bore beautiful names like Jamila (“beautiful”) and Hadicha (from Arabic, “early”—and in the Islamic tradition, the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife), became Zoya and Katya, so that their Russian-speaking neighbours would find them easier to remember.
More recently, there has been a cautious attempt to treat matters of language and naming with greater respect. In 2025, the German filmmaker Markus Schlaffke released a film about the Tatar prisoners’ cemetery in Zossen. More than a documentary, it was an act of restoration: he traced each burial, matched every name he could, and gave voice to those who had lost theirs. The film’s title—How to Spell Empire—carries its own quiet irony. Schlaffke recorded it in three languages: German, English, and Tatar. It is a rare and moving thing—to hear the story of a people who lived between three empires told, at last, in their own melodic, meaning-rich tongue.
