Of evidence concerning Germany's efforts to obtain increasing influence over Turkey there is no lack.
We have, in the first place, the fact that in 1882 a German military mission, of which General the Baron Colmar von der Goltz was the principal member, undertook the training of the Turkish Army according to the principles of German military science, with the result that the Turkish Army became a more efficient instrument for the attainment, not only of her own aims or purposes, but those, also, of Germany herself.
The Kaiser, although the supreme head of the Lutheran Church, and although having no Mohammedan subjects of his own, sought to pose as the champion of Mohammedans in general and the Defender of their Faith. During his visit to Damascus in November, 1898, he declared—"May the Sultan, may the three hundred million Mohammedans living who, scattered throughout the earth, honour in his person their Caliph, rest assured that at all times the German Kaiser will be their friend."[77]
Whenever political trouble threatened to fall upon Turkey, as the result of such occurrences as the Armenian and Macedonian atrocities or the insurrection in Crete, it was Germany who became her champion as against the other Powers of Europe.
Everything possible was done to push German trade in Turkey and to establish closer commercial relations with her. There came a time when every city of importance in the Turkish Empire was declared to be "overrun with German bankers, German clerks and German bagmen."
Not only, too, were German engineers active in seeking to get concessions for new railways, and not only were German financiers equally active in endeavouring to control existing ones, but, as Dr. Charles Sarolea points out, in his book on "The Anglo-German Problem," there are, in the agreements between the Baghdad Railway Company and the Porte, financial clauses which must ultimately place Turkey entirely at the mercy of her professed champion. "In Turkey Germany alone would rule supreme"; and the aspirations for a German Protectorate over Turkey, with the Sultan as a vassal of Germany, would then be realised.
Writing on the position as he found it in 1903, M. André Chéradame said in "La Question d'Orient":—
More and more the Germans seem to regard the land of the Turks as their personal property. All the recent German literature relating to Turkey affords proof of the tendency. An ordinary book of travels is entitled, "In Asia Minor, by German Railways." In his "Pan-Germanic Atlas" Paul Langhams gives a map of "German Railways in Asia Minor." So it is, indeed, a matter of the organised conquest of Turkey. Everywhere and in everything, Turkey is being encircled by the tentacles of the German octopus.