Germany, Turkey, and Armenia / A Selection of Documentary Evidence Relating to the Armenian Atrocities from German and other Sources

by Anonymous

9. Extracts from the Records of a German who died in Turkey.

Between the 28th July and the 20th August, 1915, I travelled to Marash. At Beshgöz, between Killis and Aintab, it was a subject of conversation among the villagers that the deportation of the Armenians would begin at Aintab too on the following day. A little while after, a well-dressed gentleman, a Circassian, according to his appearance, being partly in mufti and partly in officer’s uniform, joined the group of talkers and asked: “From what part of the town are people being sent away? By what road do they go? What kind of people are they? Are they people from whom anything is to be got?” When one of the persons present asked him whether he was a civilian or in military service, he said smilingly: “Is there a finer opportunity of being a soldier than now?” The same person said afterwards: “This time Germany has given these unbelieving swine a lesson which they will not forget.”[2]

On hearing this, I could not refrain from replying that it was soiling the name of Germany to mention it in connection with the things which I had just been compelled to hear. On my return journey I heard that the first convoys from Aintab, consisting almost exclusively of well-to-do families, were stripped to their shirts, and I was assured from several sides that this was done with the connivance of the Government authorities, with whom the above-mentioned questionable gentleman must, according to all appearances, have been in relation. At Karaböyük, between Aintab and Marash, I met a convoy of Armenians, consisting of about forty women and children and five or six men. Close in front of them, at a distance of about 180 yards, 100 newly-enlisted soldiers were marching. There was a young lady among the women, a teacher, who for several years had been in German employment; she had just recovered from a serious attack of typhoid fever. The soldiers wanted her and a young wife, whose husband is at present a soldier in Damascus, to spend the night with them, and used force to make them. It was only through the Mohammedan mule drivers coming to the assistance of the women, that the soldiers could be kept off during their three attacks.

On the 6th August the Armenian village of Fundadjak, near Marash, a place of about 3,000 inhabitants, was battered down to the ground. The population, consisting almost exclusively of mule drivers, had, during the preceding three months, been frequently compelled to transport Armenians in the direction of the Euphrates. They had seen the corpses in the Euphrates, and had also observed with their own eyes the selling and raping of women and girls.

In an Armenian school at Marash I saw over 100 women and children with bullet wounds in their legs and their arms, and with all sorts of mutilations; among them were children of one to two years.

On the 13th August, 34 Armenians, including two boys twelve years old, were shot at Marash. Again, on the 15th August, 24 were shot and 14 were hanged. The 24 who were shot were tied together with a heavy chain that went round their necks, and were made to stand up together in one mass. They were shot in the presence of the Mohammedan population behind the American College. With my own eyes I saw the bodies, while still convulsed by the agonies of death, being abandoned to the license of the rough civilian mob, who pulled the hands and feet of the corpses; and during the next half-hour the policemen and gendarmes shot continuously with revolvers on these corpses, some of which were terribly disfigured, while the population looked on with amusement. Afterwards the same people marched up and down in front of the German Hospital and shouted, “Vashasin Almanya” (Long live Germany).[3] Again and again I have been told by Mohammedans that it was Germany which caused the Armenians to be extirpated in this way.

On the way from the town to the farm I saw, on the outskirts of the town, a human head lying on a dung-heap, which was used as a target by Turkish boys. In Marash itself, during my stay there, Armenians were every day killed by the civil population, and the corpses were left for days in the open sewers or elsewhere.

Kadir Pasha said to me at Marash: “I know that, in pursuance of an order from the Government, the whole male population within the area of the 4th Army Corps was killed.”

On the 20th August, 1915[4], at six o’clock in the evening, it was proclaimed at Marash that, according to the order of the Vali of Adana, all males over 15 years of age (5,600 altogether) must be assembled outside the town, ready for marching, by mid-day on Saturday; any one of them found in the town after 12 o’clock would be shot on the spot. Everyone knew the meaning of this order, and we lived through hours of most awful terror. At the last moment the Vali’s order, owing to the intervention of the very humane Governor of Marash, was modified to the extent that the men would be allowed to leave with their families. Only on the 18th August the Vali had sent for the clerical authorities, and had given them an assurance that the Armenians in Marash would not be deported. Thus the first who had to leave the town had to do so without any previous preparation.