Between 1914 and 1917, during World War I, the Sublime Porte expelled Britons as enemy aliens from the Ottoman Empire, thus leaving the joint administration of Mount Zion Cemetery to the Evangelical Protestants of German nationality. Until January 1917 the German Imperial Army laid out a section of the cemetery as a non-denominational war cemetery for Austro-Hungarian (5), British (2) and German soldiers (11) of all religious denominations killed in action in the battles close to Jerusalem since 1916 and retrieved by the German medical corps. After the British capture of Jerusalem on 9 December 1917 the British army also buried its soldiers on Mount Zion Cemetery, before the separate Jerusalem War Cemetery was inaugurated on Mount Scopus in February 1918. A total of 104 British soldiers were buried here, of which 100 were later reburied at the War Cemetery, although four who died between the Armistice of November 1918 and the end of Commonwealth War Graves Commission registration in August 1921 remained maintained there.