The object of the deportations is the extirpation of the entire Armenian nation. This intention is also evidenced by the fact that the Turkish Government refuses all help from missionaries, Sisters of Mercy, and Europeans settled in the country, and tries systematically to prevent the giving of any such help. A Swiss engineer was to have come before a court-martial, because he had distributed bread in Anatolia among the starving women and children belonging to a convoy of deported persons. The Government did not scruple to deport Armenian pupils and teachers from the German schools at Adana and Aleppo, and Armenian children from the German orphanages; the protests of the Consuls and of the heads of the institutions were left unheeded. The offer of the American Government to take the deported persons to America on American ships and at America’s expense was refused.
What our German Consuls and many foreigners residing in Turkey think about the massacres of Armenians will one day be known from their reports. As regards the opinion of the German officers in Turkey I am unable to say anything. I often noticed when in their company an ominous silence or a convulsive effort to change the subject whenever any German of strong feelings and independent judgment began to speak about the fearful sufferings of the Armenians.[7]
When Field-Marshal von der Goltz travelled to Bagdad and had to cross the Euphrates at Djerabulus, there was a large encampment of half-starved, deported Armenians there. Shortly before the Field-Marshal’s arrival these wretched people, as I was told in Djerabulus, were driven under the whip a few miles off over the hills, sick and dying persons among the number. When von der Goltz passed through, all traces of the repulsive spectacle had been removed. When, soon afterwards, I visited the place with a few colleagues, we still found in the more out of the way places corpses of men and children, remnants of clothes, and skulls and bones which had been partly stripped of the flesh by jackals and birds of prey.
The author of this report considers it out of the question that the German Government, if it were seriously inclined to stem the tide of destruction even at this eleventh hour, could find it impossible to bring the Turkish Government to reason. If the Turks are really so well disposed to us Germans as people say, then it is surely permissible to show them to what an extent they compromise us before the whole civilised world, if we, as their Allies, are to look on calmly, when hundreds of thousands of our fellow-Christians in Turkey are slaughtered, when their wives and daughters are violated, and their children brought up in the faith of Islam.[8] Do not the Turks understand that their barbarous acts are imputed to us, and that we Germans shall be accused either of criminal connivance or of contemptible weakness if we shut our eyes to the abominable horrors which this war has brought forth, and attempt to ignore facts which are already known to the whole world? If the Turks are really as intelligent as people say, it should surely not be impossible to convince them of the fact that, by extirpating the Christian nations in Turkey, they are exterminating the productive factors and the intermediaries of European trade and general civilisation? If the Turks are really as far-seeing as people say, they will not be blind to the danger, that all civilized European States, after having discovered the things which were done in Turkey during the war, must form the conclusion that Turkey has forfeited the right of governing herself, and has, once for all, destroyed all belief in her capacity for becoming civilized, and in her tolerance. Will not the German Government be acting in Turkey’s own best interests, if she prevents her from committing economic and moral suicide?
With this report I am attempting to reach the ear of the Government through the accredited representatives of the German people. These things, painful as they are, must no longer be passed over in silence at the sittings of the Committees of the Reichstag. Nothing would be more humiliating for us than the erection of a costly palace at Constantinople commemorating German-Turkish friendship, while we are unable to protect our fellow-Christians from barbarities unparalleled even in the blood-stained history of Turkey. Would not the funds collected be better spent in building orphanages for the innocent victims of Turkish barbarism?
When, after the Adana massacres in 1909, a sort of “reconciliation banquet” took place, in which high Turkish officials as well as the heads of the Armenian clergy took part, an Armenian ecclesiastic made a speech, the contents of which were communicated to me by the German Consul, Büge, who was present. He said: “It is true we Armenians have lost much in the days of these massacres, our men, our women, our children, and our possessions. But you Turks have lost more. You have lost your honour.”
If we persist in treating the massacres of Christians in Turkey as an internal affair, of no importance for us except as making us sure of Turkey’s friendship, then it will be necessary to alter the whole orientation of our German cultural policy. We must cease to send German teachers to Turkey, and we teachers must no longer speak to our pupils in Turkey of German poets and German philosophers, of German culture and German ideals, and least of all of German Christianity.
Three years ago the German Foreign Office sent me as higher grade teacher to the German Technical School at Aleppo. The Royal Provincial Education Board at Madgeburg, on my departure, specially enjoined me to show myself worthy of the confidence reposed in me by the granting of leave of absence to take up the office of teacher at Aleppo. I should not perform my duty as a German official and as an authorised representative of German culture if, in face of the atrocities of which I was a witness, I were to remain silent and passively look on while the pupils entrusted to me are driven out to die of starvation in the desert.
To a person inquiring into the reasons which have induced the Young Turkish Government to order and carry out these terrible measures against the Armenians, the following answer might be given:—
The Young Turk has before him the European ideal of a united national State. He hopes to be able to “Turkify” the non-Turkish Mohammedan races—Kurds, Persians, Arabs, and so on—by administrative measures and by Turkish school education and by appeals to the common Mohammedan interest. He is afraid of the Christian nations—Armenians, Syrians and Greeks—on account of their cultural and economic superiority, and their religion appears to him an obstacle impeding “Turkification” by peaceful measures. Therefore they must be extirpated or forced into Mohammedanism. The Turks do not realise that they are sawing off the branch on which they themselves are sitting. Who is to bring progress to Turkey, except the Greeks, the Armenians and the Syrians, who constitute more than a quarter of the population of the Turkish Empire? The Turks, the least gifted among the races living in Turkey, themselves form only a minority of the population, and are still far behind even the Arabs in civilisation. Is there anywhere any Turkish commerce, Turkish handicraft, Turkish manufacture, Turkish art, Turkish science? Even law and religion, even the literary language, is borrowed from the subjected Arabs.