A few months later Germany, as part price of Turkey's intervention in the War, had to leave the Young Turks a "free hand" to exterminate the nation which was the indispensable instrument of her Turkish policy. On the 9th August, 1915, the German Ambassador at Constantinople handed in a formal protest against the deportations, in which his Government "declined all responsibility for the consequences which might result." On the 11th January, 1916, in the German Reichstag, the Chief of the Political Department of the Foreign Office replied to a question from Dr. Liebknecht that "an exchange of views about the reaction of these measures upon the population was taking place," and that "further information could not be given." And while Germany was maintaining this "correct attitude" before the world, she was assisting in Turkey at the destruction of her own work.
Even the atrocities of 1909 had damaged the economic prospects of the
Adapa district from which Dr. Rohrbach[34] hoped so much, for
"The first thing the Turkish peasants did was to destroy all the steam-ploughs and nearly all the threshing machines (there were over a hundred of them) which the Armenian villagers had imported for the cultivation of the Civilian plain[35]."
By the atrocities of 1915 the economic life of Western Asia was completely ruined, and the fruits of German enterprise were swept away in the flood.
"I have before me," writes our German memorialised, "a list of the customers of a single Constantinople firm of importers which places its orders principally in Germany and Austria. The accounts which this firm has outstanding amount to date to £13,922 (Turkish), owing from 378 customers in 42 towns of the interior. In consequence of the Armenian deportations these debts are no longer recoverable. The 378 customers, with all their employees, goods, and assets, have vanished from the face of the earth. Any of the owners that are still alive are now beggars on the borders of the Arabian desert."
At Urfa, after the atrocities of 1896, philanthropists of all nations had founded orphanages and started native industries. Attached to the German orphanage there was a carpet factory, with dyeing vats and a spinnery, which Dr. Rohrbach[36], after personal investigation, describes as "an institution to be welcomed as unreservedly from the national as from the humanitarian point of view."
"The factory," he remarks, "not only provides work and bread for 400 persons, but has transplanted one of the most profitable and promising industries of the East into the sphere traversed by the German Railway, where German interests are predominant."
He prophesies that the whole carpet industry of Western Asia, "from which English and other foreign firms in Smyrna now draw such enormous profits," will soon be concentrated round Urfa in German hands. From Armenia's evil, apparently, springs Germany's good—but in 1911 Dr. Rohrbach did not foresee the catastrophe of 1915.
"For the rise of the carpet industry," our German memorialised writes, "Turkey has to thank capitalists and exporters who are almost all Armenians, Greeks, Jews, or Europeans. Like the cotton cultivation introduced by Germany into Cilicia, this carpet industry, in the eastern provinces, has been deprived of the hands essential to it by the Armenian deportations."
Eye-witnesses at Urfa describe how the Armenian community there was massacred in 1915—the third time in twenty years, and this time to extinction—and it points the irony of the situation that the Turkish guns were served by German artillerymen[37].