One day in the summer of 1916 my wife went out alone about midday to buy something in the "Grand Rue de Péra." We lived a few steps from Galata-Seraï and had plenty of opportunity from our balcony of seeing the bands of Armenian deportees arriving at the police-station under the escort of gendarmes. Familiarity with such sights finally dulled our sympathies, and we began to think of them not as episodes affecting human individuals, but rather as political events.
On this particular day, however, my wife came back to the house trembling all over. She had not been able to go on her errand. As she passed the "karakol," she had heard through the open hall door the agonising groans of a tortured being, a dull wailing like the sound of an animal being tormented to death. "An Armenian," she was informed by the people standing at the door. The crowd was then dispersed by a policeman.
"If such scenes occur in broad daylight in the busiest part of the European town of Pera, I should like to know what is done to Armenians in the uncivilised Interior," my wife asked me. "If the Turks act like wild beasts here in the capital, so that a woman going through the main streets gets a shock like that to her nerves, then I can't live in this frightful country." And then she burst into a fit of sobbing and let loose all her pent-up passion against what she and I had had to witness for more than a year every time we set a foot out of doors.
"You are brutes, you Germans, miserable brutes, that you tolerate this from the Turks when you still have the country absolutely in your hands. You are cowardly brutes, and I will never set foot in your horrible country again. God, how I hate Germany!"
It was then, when my own wife, trembling and sobbing, in grief, rage, and disgust at such cowardliness, flung this denunciation of my country in my teeth that I finally and absolutely broke with Germany. Unfortunately I had known only too long that it had to come.
I thought of the conversations I had had about the Armenian question with members of the German Embassy in Constantinople and, of a very different kind, with Mr. Morgenthau, the American Ambassador.
I had never felt fully convinced by the protestations of the German Embassy that they had done their utmost to put a check on the murderous attacks on harmless Armenians far from the theatre of war, who from their whole surroundings and their social class could not be in a position to take an active part in politics, and on the cold-blooded neglect and starvation of women and children apparently deported for no other reason than to die. The attitude of the German Government towards the Armenian question had impressed me as a mixture of cowardice and lack of conscience on the one hand and the most short-sighted stupidity on the other.
The American Ambassador, who took the most generous interest in the Armenians, and has done so much for the cause of humanity in Turkey, was naturally much too reserved on this most burning question to give a German journalist like myself his true opinion about the attitude of his German colleagues. But from the many conversations and discussions I had with him, I gathered nothing that would turn me from the opinion I had already formed of the German Embassy, and I had given him several hints of what that opinion was.
The attitude of Germany was, in the first place, as I have said, one of boundless cowardice. For we had the Turkish Government firmly enough in hand, from the military as well as the financial and political point of view, to insist upon the observance of the simplest principles of humanity if we wanted to. Enver, and still more Talaat, who as Minister of the Interior and really Dictator of Turkey was principally responsible for the Armenian persecutions, had no other choice than to follow Germany's lead unconditionally, and they would have accepted without any hesitation, if perhaps with a little grumbling, any definite ruling of Germany's even on this Armenian question that lay so near their hearts.
From hundreds of examples it has been proved that the Germany Embassy never showed any undue delicacy for even perfectly legitimate Turkish interests and feelings in matters affecting German interests, and that they always got their own way where it was a question, for example, of Germans being oppressed, or superseded by Turks in the Government and ruling bodies. And yet I had to stand and look on when our Embassy was not even capable of granting her due and proper rights to a perfectly innocent German lady married to an Armenian who had been deported with many other Armenians. She appealed for redress to the German Embassy, but her only reward was to wait day after day in the vestibule of the Embassy for her case to be heard.