10. GERMANY'S COLOSSAL CRIME IN ARMENIA.
A little pamphlet of 24 pages, obtainable from the G.H. Doran Company, New York, for five cents, is quite enough to damn Germany, past all forgiveness, from now to the end of Time. It is entitled "The Horrors of Aleppo. Seen by a German Eyewitness," and it is "A Word to Germany's Accredited Representatives, by Dr. Martin Niepage, Higher Grade Teacher in the German Technical School at Aleppo."
The enormous extent, and the extreme savagery, of the slaughter of Armenian Christians by the Turkish allies of Germany literally stagger the imagination and sicken the heart. The mind can scarcely grasp the idea of men, women and children being massacred en masse, in 1916, literally by the thousand! But let me quote a few lines of strictly German testimony:
Page 14. "It is utterly erroneous to think that the Turkish government will refrain of its own accord even from the destruction of the women and children unless the strongest pressure is exerted by the German government. Only just before I left Aleppo last May (1916) the crowds of exiles encamped at Ras-el-Ain on the Bagdad Railway, estimated at 20,000 women and children, were slaughtered to the last one."
Page 11. "Many more appalling things were reported by the engineer of the Bagdad Railway ... or by German travelers who met the convoys of exiles on their journeys. Many of these gentlemen had seen such appalling sights they could eat nothing for days. One of them, Herr Grief, of Aleppo, reported corpses of violated women lying about naked in heaps on the railway embankment at Tel-Abiad and Ras-el-Ain. Another, Herr Spiecker, of Aleppo, had seen Turks tie Armenian men together, fire several volleys of small shot with fowling pieces into the human mass, and go off laughing while their victims slowly perished in frightful convulsions.
"The German Consul from Mosul related, in my presence, at the German Club at Aleppo, that in many places on the road from Mosul to Aleppo he had seen children's hands hacked off in such numbers that one could have paved the road with them.... The Arabs of the village declared that they had killed the Armenians by the Government's (Young Turks) orders."
—And so forth, and so on, until you are sick!
Thus do the "Young Turks" of Turkey (on whom may all the curses of Allah alight) who are determined to Turkify all Asia Minor. Thus have 1,500,000 Christians perished, at the hands of Germany's ally,—an ally absolutely under German control, and without one protest or prohibition from the arch-criminals of Potsdam and Berlin. And this under "our dear, good, kind Emperor" William!
The crimes of Germany were not committed by the officers of the Army or the Navy, or of the State, alone. They were perpetrated partly by the common people of Germany, as represented by the fathers, sons and husbands making up the army and the navy. The officers are not alone to blame. Therefore, the curses of mankind, and the punishment of the ages, should fall and will fall upon all the Germans of Germany, and their children unto the tenth generation. To them the Germans of to-day will bequeath a vast legacy of world scorn and world aversion.
Americans should be the last people on earth to talk to outraged England, France, Russia and Servia of "magnanimous" terms to Germany, and peace "without annexations or indemnities." Germany must Pay for her war and her crimes.