Indeed, it would be easier to enumerate the industries and economical developments of Turkey over which Germany has not at the present moment got the control than those over which she has. In particular she has shown a parental interest in Turkish educational questions. She established last year, under German management, a school for the study of German in Constantinople; she has put under the protection of the German Government the Jewish institution at Haifa for technical education in Palestine; from Sivas a mission of schoolmasters has been sent to Germany for the study of German methods. Ernst Marre surmises that German will doubtless become compulsory even in the Turkish intermediate (secondary) schools. In April, 1917, the first stone of the “House of Friendship” (!) was laid at Constantinople, the object of which institution is to create among Turkish students an interest in everything German, while earlier in the year arrangements were made for 10,000 Turkish youths to go to Germany to be taught trades. These I imagine were unfit for military service. With regard to such a scheme Haul Haled Bey praises the arrangement for the education of Turks in Germany. When they used to go to France, he tells us, “they lost their religion” (certainly Prussian Gott is nearer akin to Turkish Allah) “and returned home unpatriotic and useless. In Germany they will have access to suitable religious literature” (Gott!) “and must adopt all they see good in German methods without losing their original characteristics.” Comment on this script is needless. The hand is the hand of Halil Haled Bey, but the voice is the voice of Prussia! Occasionally, but rarely, Austrian competition is seen. Professor Schmoller, in an Austrian quarterly review, shows jealousy of German influence, and we find in October, 1916, an Ottoman-Austrian college started at Vienna for 250 pupils of the Ottoman Empire. But Germany has 10,000 in Berlin. At Adana (where are the German irrigation works) the German-Turkish Society has opened a German school of 300, while, reciprocally, courses in Turkish have been organised at Berlin for the sake of future German colonists. In Constantinople the Tanin announces a course of lectures to be held by the Turco-German Friendship Society. Professor von Marx, of Munich, discoursed last April on foreign influence and the development of nations, with special reference to Turkey and the parallel case of Germany.
So much for German education, but her penetrative power extends into every branch of industry and economics. In November, 1916, a Munich expert was put in charge of the College of Forestry, and an economic society was started in Constantinople on German lines with German instructors. Inoculation against small-pox; typhoid, and cholera was made compulsory; and we find that the Turkish Ministers of Posts, of Justice, and of Commerce, figureheads all of them, have as their acting Ministers Germans. In the same year a German was appointed as expert for silkworm breeding and for the cultivation of beet. Practically all the railways in Asia Minor are pure German concerns by right of purchase. They own the Anatolian railway concession (originally British), with right to build to Angora and Konia; the Bagdad railway concession, with preferential rights over minerals; they have bought the Mersina-Adana railway, with right of linking up to the Bagdad railway; they have bought the Smyrna-Cassaba railway, built with French capital. They have secured also the Haidar Pasha Harbour concession, thereby controlling and handling all merchandise arriving at railhead from the interior of Asia Minor. Meantime railway construction is pushed on in all directions under German control, and the Turkish Minister of Finance (August, 1916) allocates a large sum of paper German money for the construction of ordinary roads, military roads, local government roads, all of which are new to Turkey, but which will be useful for the complete German occupation which is being swiftly consolidated. To stop the mouths of the people, all political clubs have been suppressed by the Minister of the Interior, for Prussia does not care for criticism. To supply German ammunition needs, lead and zinc have been taken from the roofs of mosques and door-handles from mosque gates, and the iron railings along the Champs de Mars at Pera have been carted away for the manufacture of bombs. A Turco-German convention signed in Berlin in January of this year permits subjects of one country to settle in the other while retaining their nationality and enjoying trading and other privileges. In Lebanon Dr. König has opened an agricultural school for Syrians of all religions. In the Horns district the threatening plague of locusts in February, 1917, was combated by Germans; and a German expert, Dr. Bucher, had been already sent to superintend the whole question. For this concerns supplies to Germany, as does also the ordinance passed in the same month that two-thirds of all fish caught in the Lebanon district should be given to the military authorities (these are German) and that every fish weighing over 6oz. in the Beirut district should be Korban also. The copper mines at Anghana Maden, near Diarbekr, are busy exporting their produce into Germany.
There is no end to this penetration: German water-seekers, with divining and boring apparatus, accompanied the Turkish expedition into Sinai; Russian prisoners were sent by Germany for agricultural work in Asia Minor, to take the place of slaughtered ‘Armenians; a German-Turkish treaty, signed January 11, 1917, gives the whole reorganisation of the economic system to a special German mission. A Stuttgart journal chants a characteristic “Lobgesang” over this feat. “That is how,” it proudly exclaims, “we work for the liberation of peoples and nationalities.”
In the same noble spirit, we must suppose, German legal reforms were introduced in December, 1916, to replace the Turkish Shuriat, and in the same month all the Turks in telegraph offices in Constantinople were replaced by Germans. Ernst Marre, in his “Turks and Germans after the War” (1916), gives valuable advice to young Germans settling in Turkey. He particularly recommends them, knowing how religion is one of the strongest bonds in this murderous race, to “trade in articles of devotion, in rosaries, in bags to hold the Koran,” and points out what good business might be built up in gramophones. Earlier in this year we find a “German Oriental Trading Company” founded for the import of fibrous materials for needs of military authorities, and a great carpet business established at Urfa with German machinery that will supplant the looms at Smyrna. A saltpetre factory is established at Konia by Herr Toepfer, whose enterprise is rewarded with an Iron Cross and a Turkish decoration. The afforestation near Constantinople ordered by the Ministry of Agriculture is put into German hands, and in the vilayet of Aidin (April, 1916) ninety concessions were granted to German capitalists to undertake the exploitation of metallic ores. Occasionally the German octopus finds it has gone too far for the moment and releases some struggling limb of its victim, as, for instance, when we see that in September, 1916, the German Director’s stamp for the “Imperial German Great Radio Station” at Damascus has been dis-carded temporarily, as that station “should be treated for the present as a Turkish concern.”
A “Trading and Weaving Company” was established at Angora in 1916, an “Import and Export Company” at Smyrna, a “Trading and Industrial Society” at Beirut, a “Tobacco Trading Company” at Latakieh, an “Agricultural Company” at Tripolis, a “Corn Exporting Company” in Lebanon, a “Rebuilding Commission” (perhaps for sacked Armenian houses) at Konia. More curious yet will be a Tourist’s Guide Book—a Baedeker, in fact—for travellers in Konia and the erection of a monument in honour of Turkish women who have replaced men called up for military duty. Truly these last two items—a guide book for Anatolia and a monument to women—are strange enterprises for Turks. A new Prussian day is dawning, it seems, for Turkish women as well, for the Tanin (April, 1917) tells us that diplomas are to be conferred on ladies who have completed their studies in the Technical School at Constantinople.
It is needless to multiply instances of German penetration: I have but given the skeleton of this German monster that has fastened itself with tentacles and suckers on every branch of Turkish industry. There is none round which it has not cast its feelers—no Semitic moneylender ever obtained a surer hold on his victim. In matters naval, military, educational, legal, industrial, Germany has a strangle-hold. Turkey’s life is already crushed out of her, and, as we have seen, it has been crushed out of her by the benevolent Kultur-mongers who, among all the Great Powers of Europe, sacrificed their time and their money to the achievement of the Pan-Turkish ideal. Silently and skilfully they worked, bamboozling their chief tool, Enver Pasha, even as Enver Pasha bamboozled us. As long as he was of service to them they retained him; for his peace of mind at one time they stopped up all letter-boxes in Constantinople because so many threatening letters were sent him. But now Enver Pasha seems to have had his day; he became a little autocratic and thought that he was the head of the Pan-Turkish ideal. So he was, but the Pan-Turkish ideal had become Pan-Prussian, and he had not noticed the transformation. Talaat Bey has taken his place; it is he who in May, 1917, was received by the Emperor William, by King Ludwig, and by the Austrian Emperor, and he who is the mouthpiece of the German efforts to make a separate peace with Russia. Under Czardom, he proclaimed, the existence of Turkey was threatened, but now the revolution has made friendship possible, for Russia no longer desires territorial annexation. And, oh, how Turkey would like to be Russia’s friend! Enver Pasha has been thrown aside for contumacy, and I cannot but think it curious that when on April 2, 1917, he visited the submarine base at Wilhelmshaven he was very nearly killed in a motor-accident. But it may have been an accident. Since then I cannot find that he has taken any more active part in Pan-Turkish ideals than to open a soup-kitchen in some provincial town.
I have left to the end of this essay the question of Germany’s knowledge of and complicity in the Armenian massacres. From the tribune of the Reichstag on January 15, 1916, there was made a definite denial of the existence of such massacres at all; on another subsequent occasion it was stated that Germany could not interfere in Turkish internal affairs.
In view of the fact that there is no internal affair appertaining to Turkey in which Germany has not interfered, the second of these statements may be called insincere. But the denial of the massacres is a deliberate lie. Germany—official Germany—knew all about them, and she permitted them to go on. The proofs of this are here shortly stated.
(1) In September, 1915, four months before the denial of the massacres was made in the Reichstag, Dr. Martin Niepage, higher grade teacher in the German Technical School at Aleppo, prepared and sent, in his name and that of several of his colleagues, a report of them to the German Embassy at Constantinople. In that report he gives a terrible account of what he has seen with his own eyes, and also states that the country Turks’ explanation with regard to the origination of those measures is that it is “the teaching of the Germans.” The German Embassy at Constantinople therefore knew of the massacres, and knew also that the Turks attributed them to orders from Germany. Dr. Niepage also consulted, before sending his report, with the German Consul at Aleppo, Herr Hoffman, who told him that the German Embassy had been already advised in detail about the massacres from the consulates at Alexandretta, Aleppo, and Mosul, but that he welcomed a further protest on the subject.
(2) These reports, or others like them, had not gone astray, for in August, 1915, the German Ambassador in Constantinople made a formal protest to the Turkish Government about the massacres.