Turks themselves have found cynical enjoyment in this measureless cowardice of ours and compared it with the attitude of the Russian Government, who, if they had found themselves in a similar position to Germany, would have been prepared, in spite of the Capitulations being abolished, to make a political case, if necessary, out of the protection due to one poor Russian Jew. Turks have, very politely but none the less definitely, made it quite clear to me that at bottom they felt nothing but contempt for our policy of letting things slide.
Our attitude was characterised, secondly, by lack of conscience. To look on while life and property, the well-being and culture of thousands, are sacrificed, and to content oneself with weak formal protests when one is in a position to take most energetic command of the situation, is nothing but the most criminal lack of conscience, and I cannot get rid of the suspicion that, in spite of the fine official phrases one was so often treated to in the German Embassy on the subject of the "Armenian problem," our diplomats were very little concerned with the preservation of this people.
What leads me to bring this terrible charge against them? The fact that I never saw anything in all this pother on the part of our diplomats when the venerable old Armenian Patriarch appeared at the Embassy with his suite after some particularly frightful sufferings of the Armenian population, and begged with tears in his eyes for help from the Embassy, however late—and I assisted more than once at such scenes in the Embassy and listened to the conversations of the officials—I never saw anything but concern about German prestige and offended vanity. As far as I saw, there was never any concern for the fate of the Armenian people. The fact that time and again I heard from the mouths of Germans of all grades, from the highest to the lowest, so far as they did not have to keep strictly to the official German versions, expressions of hatred against the Armenians which were based on the most short-sighted judgment, had no relation to the facts of the case, and were merely thoughtless echoes of the official Turkish statements.
And cases have actually been proved to have occurred, from the testimony of German doctors and Red Cross nurses returned from the Interior, of German officers light-heartedly taking the initiative in exterminating and scattering the Armenians when the less-zealous local authorities who still retained some remnants of human feeling, scrupled to obey the instructions of "Nur-el-Osmanieh" (the headquarters of the Committee at Stamboul).
The case is well known and has been absolutely verified of the scandalous conduct of two German officers passing through a village in far Asia Minor, where the Armenians had taken refuge in their houses and barricaded them to prevent being herded off like cattle. The order had been given that guns were to be turned on them, but not a single Turk had the courage to carry out this order and fire on women and children. Without any authority whatsoever, the two German officers then turned to and gave an exhibition of their shooting capacities!
Such shameful acts are of course isolated cases, but they are on a par with the opinions expressed about the Armenian people by dozens of educated Germans of high position—not to speak of military men at all.
A case of this kind where German soldiers were guilty of an attack on Armenians in the interior of Anatolia, was the subject of frequent official discussion at the German Embassy, and was finally brought to the notice of the authorities in Germany by Graf Wolff-Metternich, a really high-principled and humane man. The material result of this was that through the unheard-of cowardice of our Government, this man—who in spite of his age and in contrast to the weak-minded Freiherr von Wangenheim, and criminally optimistic had made many an attempt to get a firmer grip of the Turkish Government—was simply hounded out of office by the Turks and weakly sacrificed without a struggle by Berlin.
What, finally, is one to think of the spirit of our German officials in regard to the Armenian question, when one hears such well-verified tales as were told me shortly before I left Constantinople by an eminent Hungarian banker (whose name I will not reveal)? He related, for example, that "a German officer, with the title of Baron, and closely connected with the military attaché," went one day to the bazaar in Stamboul and chose a valuable carpet from an Armenian, which he had put down to his account and sent to his house in Pera. Then when it came to paying for it, he promptly set the price twenty pounds lower than had been stipulated, and indicated to the Armenian dealer that in view of the good understanding between himself (the officer) and the Turkish President of police, he would do well not to trouble him further in the matter! I only cite this case because I am unfortunately compelled to believe in its absolute authenticity.
Shortsighted stupidity, finally, is how I characterised the inactive toleration on the part of our Imperial representatives of this policy of extermination of the Armenian race. Our Government could not have been blind to the breaking flood of Turkish jingoism, and no one with any glimmer of foresight could have doubted for a moment since the summer of 1915 that Turkey would only go with us so long as she needed our military and financial aid, and that we should have no place, not even a purely commercial one, in a fully turkified Turkey.
In spite of the lamentations one heard often enough from the mouths of officials over this well-recognised and unpalatable fact, we tolerated the extermination of a race of over one and a half million of people of progressive culture, with the European point of view, intellectually adaptable, absolutely free from jingoism and fanaticism, and eminently cosmopolitan in feeling; we permitted the disappearance of the only conceivable counterbalance to the hopelessly nationalistic, anti-foreign Young Turkish element, and through our cowardice and lack of conscience have made deadly enemies of the few that will rise from the ruins of a race that used to be in thorough sympathy with Germany.