"I have nothing to say," writes Dr. Niepage, the German teacher from Aleppo, "about the opinion of the German officers in Turkey. I often noticed among them an ominous silence or a convulsive effort to change the subject, when any German of warm feelings and independent judgment talked in their presence of the fearful sufferings of the Armenians."
This moral bankruptcy is more fatal to the future of Germany in Western Asia than all the material havoc which the Armenian deportations have caused. For Dr. Niepage is convinced that the blood of the Armenians will be on Germany's head:
"'The teaching of the Germans,' is the simple Turk's explanation, … and more sensitive Mohammedans, Turks and Arabs alike, cannot believe that their own Government has ordered these horrors. They lay all excesses at the Germans' door, for the Germans, during the War, are regarded as Turkey's schoolmasters in everything. The mollahs declare in the mosques that the German officers, and not the Sublime Porte, have ordered the maltreatment and extermination of the Armenians…. Others say: 'Perhaps the German Government has its hands tied by certain agreements defining its powers, or perhaps it is not an opportune moment for intervention.'
"Our presence had no ameliorating effect, and what we could do ourselves was negligible…. The abusive epithet 'Giaur' is heard once more by German ears….
"We think it our duty to draw attention to the fact that our educational work in Turkey forfeits its moral basis and the natives' esteem, if the German Government is not in a position to prevent the brutalities inflicted here upon the wives and children of murdered Armenians.
"The writer considers it out of the question that the German Government, if it seriously desired to stem the tide of destruction in this eleventh hour, would find it impossible to bring the Turkish Government to reason….
"If we persist in treating the massacres of Christians as an internal affair of Turkey, which is only important to us because it ensures us the Turks' friendship, then we must change the orientation of our German Kulturpolitik. We must stop sending German teachers to Turkey, and we teachers must give up telling our pupils in Turkey about German poets and philosophers, German culture and German ideals, to say nothing of German Christianity.
"Three years ago I was sent by the Foreign Office as higher-grade teacher to the German Technical School at Aleppo. The Prussian Provincial School Board at Magdeburg specially enjoined upon me, when I went out, to show myself worthy of the confidence reposed in me in the grant of furlough to take up this post. I should not be fulfilling my duty as a German official and an accredited representative of German culture, if I consented to keep silence in face of the atrocities of which I was a witness, or to look on passively while the pupils entrusted to my charge were driven out into the desert to die of starvation.
"The things of which everybody here has been a witness for months past remain as a stain on Germany's shield in the minds of Oriental nations."
What will be left to Germany in Western Asia after the war? She may keep her trade, though Wiedenfeld confesses that "the exchange of commodities between Germany and Turkey has never attained any really considerable dimensions," and that "the German export trade commands no really staple article whatever of the kind exported by England, Austria, and Russia"—unless we count as such munitions and other materials of war[38]. Except for the last item, this German trade will probably remain and grow; but the German hegemony, based on railway enterprise and reinsured by "moral conquests," will scarcely survive the Ottoman dominion.