The great Armenian persecutions--The system of Talaat and Enver--A
denunciation of Germany as a cowardly and conscienceless accomplice.
In spite of all, I returned to Constantinople from my first visit to
the Dardanelles with very little diminution of friendly feeling towards
the Turks. My first experience when I returned to the capital was the
beginning of the Armenian persecutions. And here I may as well say at
once that my love for present-day Turkey perished absolutely with this
unique example in the history of modern human civilisation of the most
appalling bestiality and misguided jingoism. This, more than everything
else I saw on the German-Turkish side throughout the war, persuaded me
to take up arms against my own people and to adopt the position I now
hold. I say "German-Turkish," for I must hold the German Government as
equally responsible with the Turks for the atrocities they allowed
them to commit.
Here in neutral Switzerland, where so many of these unfortunate
Armenians have taken refuge and such abundance of information is
available, so much material has been collected that it is unnecessary
for me to go into details in this book. Suffice it to say that the
narration of all the heart-rending occurrences that came to my personal
knowledge during my stay in Turkey, without my even trying to collect
systematic information on the subject, would fill a book. To my deep
sorrow I have to admit that, from everything I have heard from reliable
sources--from German Red Cross doctors, officials and employees of
the Baghdad Railway, members of the American Embassy, and Turks
themselves--although they are but individual cases--I cannot regard
as exaggerated such appalling facts and reports as are contained for
example in Arnold Toynbee's _Armenian Atrocities_.[1]
In this little book, however, which partakes more of the nature of an
essay than an exhaustive treatise, my task will be rather to determine
the system, the underlying political thought and the responsibility
of Germany in all these horrors--massacres, the seduction of women,
children left to die or thrown into the sea, pretty young girls
carried off into houses of ill repute, the compulsory conversion to
Islam and incorporation in Turkish harems of young women, the ejection
from their homes of eminent and distinguished families by brutal
gendarmes, attacks while on the march by paid bands of robbers and
criminals, "emigration" to notorious malaria swamps and barren desert
and mountain lands, victims handed over to the wild lusts of roaming
Bedouins and Kurds--in a word, the triumph of the basest brutality and
most cold-blooded refinement of cruelty in a war of extermination in
which half a million men, and according to some estimates many more,
have perished, while the remaining one and a half million of this
most intelligent and cultured race, one of the principal pioneers of
progress in the Ottoman Empire, see nothing but complete extinction
staring them in the face through the rupture of family ties, the
deprivation of their rights, and economic ruin.
The Armenian persecutions began in all their cruelty, practically
unannounced, in April 1915. Certain events on the Caucasus front, which
no number of lies could explain away, gave the Turkish Government
the welcome pretext for falling like wild animals on the Armenians
of the eastern vilajets--the so-called Armenia Proper--and getting
to work there without deference to man, woman, or child. This was
called "the restoration of order in the war zone by military measures,
rendered necessary by the connivance of the inhabitants with the enemy,
treachery and armed support." The first two or three hundred thousand
Armenians fell in the first rounding up.
That in those outlying districts situated directly on the Russian
frontier a number of Armenians threw in their lot with the advancing
Russians, no one will seek to deny, and not a single Armenian I
have spoken to denies it. But the "Armenian Volunteer Corps" that
fought on the side of Russia was composed for the most part--that at
least has been proved beyond doubt--of Russian Armenians settled in
Transcaucasian territory.
So far as the Turkish Armenians taking part are concerned, no
reasonable being would think of denying Turkey as Sovereign State the
formal right of taking stringent measure against these traitors and
deserters. But if I expressly recognise this right, I do so with the
big reservation that the frightful sufferings undergone for centuries
by a people left by their rulers to the mercy of marauding Kurds and
oppressed by a government of shameless extortioners, absolutely absolve
these deserters in the eyes of the whole civilised world from any moral
crime.
And yet I would willingly have gone so far for the benefit of the
Turks, in spite of their terrible guilt towards this people, as perhaps
to keep my own counsel on the subject, if it had merely been a case of
the execution of some hundreds under martial law or the carrying out
of other measures--such as deportation--against a couple of thousand
Armenians and these strictly confined to men. It is even possible that
Europe and America would have pardoned Turkey for taking even stronger
steps in the nature of reprisals or measures of precaution against the
male inhabitants of that part of Armenia Proper which was gradually
becoming a war zone. But from the very beginning the persecutions were
carried on against women and children as well as men, were extended
to the hundred thousand inhabitants of the six eastern vilajets, and
were characterised by such savage brutality that the methods of the
slave-drivers of the African interior and the persecution of Christians
under Nero are the only thing that can be compared with them.
Every shred of justification for the Turkish Government in their
attempt to establish this as an "evacuation necessary for military
purposes and for the prevention of unrest" entirely vanishes in face
of such methods, and I do not believe that there is a single decent
German, cognisant of the facts of the case, who is not filled with real
disgust of the Young Turkish Government by such cold-blooded butchery
of the inhabitants of whole districts and the deportation of others
with the express purpose of letting them die _en route_. Anyone with
human feelings, however pro-Turkish he may be politically, cannot think
otherwise.
This "evacuation necessary for military purposes" emptied Armenia
Proper of men. How often have Turks themselves told me--I could mention
names, but I will not expose my informants, who were on the whole
decent exceptions to the rule, to the wrath of Enver or Talaat--how
often have they assured me that practically not a single Armenian
is to be found in Armenia! And it is equally certain that scarcely
one can be left alive of all that horde of deported men who escaped
the first massacres and were hunted up hill and down dale in a state
of starvation, exposed to attacks by Kurds, decimated by spotted
typhus, and finally abandoned to their fate in the scorching deserts
of Northern Mesopotamia and Northern Syria. One has only to read the
statistics of the population of the six vilajets of Armenia Proper to
discover the hundreds of thousands of victims of this wholesale murder.
But unfortunately that was not all. The Turkish Government went
farther, much farther. They aimed at the whole Armenian people, not
only in Armenia itself, but also in the "Diaspora," in Anatolia Proper
and in the capital. They were at that time some hundred thousand. In
this case they could scarcely go on the principle of "evacuation of the
war zone," for the inhabitants were hundreds of miles both from the
Eastern front and from the Dardanelles, so they had to resort to other
measures.
They suddenly and miraculously discovered a universal conspiracy among
the Armenians of the Empire. It was only by a trick of this kind that
they could succeed in carrying out their system of exterminating the
entire Armenian race. The Turkish Government skilfully influenced
public opinion throughout the whole world, and then discovered, nay,
arranged for, local conspiracies. They then falsified all the details
so that they might go on for months in peace and quiet with their
campaign of extermination.
In a series of semi-official articles in the newspapers of the
Committee of Young Turks it was made quite clear that _all_ Armenians
were dangerous conspirators who, in order to shake off the Ottoman
yoke, had collected firearms and bombs and had arranged, with the help
of English and Russian money, for a terrible slaughter of Turks on the
day that the English fleet overcame the armies on the Dardanelles.
I must here emphasise the fact that all the arguments the Turkish
Government brought against the Armenians did not escape my notice. They
were indeed evident enough in official and semi-official publications
and in the writings of German "experts on Turkey." I investigated
everything, even right at the beginning of my stay in Turkey, and
always from a thoroughly pro-Turkish point of view. That did not
prevent me however, from coming to my present point of view.
Herr Zimmermann, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, has only
got to refer to the date of his letter to the editorial staff of my
paper, in which he speaks of my confidential report to the paper on
this subject which went through his hands and aroused his interest, and
he will find what opinions I held as early as the summer of 1916 on the
subject of the Armenian persecutions--and this without my having any
particular sympathy for the Armenians, for it was not till much later
that I got to know them and their high intellectual qualities through
personal intercourse.
Here I can only give my final judgment on all these pros and cons, and
say to the best of my knowledge and opinion, that after the first act
in this drama of massacre and death--the brutal "evacuation of the war
zone" in Armenia Proper--the meanest, the lowest, the most cynical,
most criminal act of race-fanaticism that the history of mankind has to
show was the extension of the system of deportation, with its wilful
neglect and starvation of the victims, to further hundreds of thousands
of Armenians in the Capital and Interior. And these were people who,
through their place of residence, their surroundings, their social
status, their preoccupation in work and wage-earning, were quite
incapable of taking any active part in politics.
Others of them, again, belonged to families of high social standing and
culture, bound to the land by a thousand ties, coming of a well-to-do,
old-established stock, and from traditional training and ordinary
prudence holding themselves scrupulously apart from all revolutionary
doings. All were surrounded by a far superior number of inhabitants
belonging to other races.
This diabolical crime was committed solely and only because of the
Turkish feeling of economic and intellectual inferiority to that
non-Turkish element, for the set purpose of obtaining handsome
compensation for themselves, and was undertaken with the cowardly
acquiescence of the German Government in full knowledge of the facts.
Of this long chain of crime I saw at least the beginning thousands of
times with my own eyes. Hardly had I returned from my first visit to
the Dardanelles when these persecutions began in the whole of Anatolia
and even in Constantinople, and continued with but slight intermissions
of a week or two at different times till shortly before I left
Constantinople in December 1916.
That was the time when in the flourishing western vilajets of Anatolia,
beginning with Brussa and Adabazar, where the well-stocked farms
in Armenian hands must have been an eyesore to a Government that
had written "forcible nationalisation" on their standard, the whole
household goods of respectable families were thrown into the street
and sold for a mere nothing, because their owners often had only an
hour till they were routed out by the waiting gendarme and hustled off
into the Interior. The fittings of the houses, naturally unsaleable
in the hurry, usually fell to the lot of marauding "_mohadjis_"
(Mohammedan immigrants), who, often enough armed to the teeth by
the "Committee," began the disturbances which were then exposed as
"Armenian conspiracies."
That was the time when mothers, apparently in absolute despair, sold
their own children, because they had been robbed of their last penny
and could not let their children perish on that terrible march into the
distant Interior.
How many countless times did I have to look on at that typical
spectacle of little bands of Armenians belonging to the capital being
escorted through the streets of Pera by two gendarmes in their ragged
murky grey uniforms with their typical brutal Anatolian faces, while a
policeman who could read and write marched behind with a notebook in
his hand, beckoning people at random out of the crowd with an imperious
gesture, and if their papers showed them to be Armenians, simply
herding them in with the rest and marching them off to the "Karakol" of
Galata-Seraï, the chief police-station in Pera, where he delivered up
his daily bag of Armenians!
The way these imprisonments and deportations were carried on is a most
striking confutation of the claims of the Turkish Government that they
were acting only in righteous indignation over the discovery of a great
conspiracy. This is entirely untrue.
With the most cold-blooded calculation and method, the number of
Armenians to be deported were divided out over a period of many months,
indeed one may say over nearly a year and a half. The deportations
only began to abate when the downfall of the Armenian Patriarchate in
summer 1916 dealt the final blow to the social life of the Armenians.
They more or less ceased in December 1916 with the gathering-in of all
those who had formerly paid the military exemption tax--among them many
eminent Armenian business men.
What can be said of the "righteous, spontaneous indignation" of the
Armenian Government when, for example, of two Armenian porters
belonging to the same house--brothers--one is deported to-day and the
other not till a fortnight later; or when the number of Armenians to
be delivered up daily from a certain quarter of the town is fixed at
a definite figure, say two hundred or a thousand, as I have been told
was the case by reliable Turks who were in full touch with the police
organisation and knew the system of these deportations?
Of the ebb and flow of these persecutions, all that can be said is that
the daily number of deportations increased when the Turks were annoyed
over some Russian victory, and that the banishments miraculously abated
when the military catastrophes of Erzerum, Trebizond, and Erzindjan
gave the Government food for thought and led them to wonder if perhaps
Nemesis was going to overtake them after all.
And then the method of transport! Every day towards evening, when
these unfortunate creatures had been collected in the police-stations,
the women and children were packed into electric-trams while the men
and boys were compelled to go off on foot to Galata with a couple of
blankets and only the barest necessities for their terrible journey
packed in a small bag. Of course they were not all poor people by any
means.
This dire fate might befall anyone any day or any hour, from the
caretaker and the tradesman to members of the best families. I
know cases where men of high education, belonging to aristocratic
families--engineers, doctors, lawyers--were banished from Pera in
this disgusting way under cover of darkness to spend the night on
the platforms of the Haidar-Pasha station, and then be packed off in
the morning on the Anatolian Railway--of course they paid for their
tickets and all travelling expenses!--to the Interior, where they died
of spotted typhus, or, in rare cases after their recovery from this
terrible malady, were permitted, after endless pleading, to return
broken in body and soul to their homes as "harmless." Among these
bands herded about from pillar to post like cattle there were hundreds
and thousands of gentle, refined women of good family and of perfect
European culture and manners.
For the most part it was the sad fate of those deported to be sent
off on an endless journey by foot, to the far-off Arabian frontier,
where they were treated with the most terrible brutality. There, in
the midst of a population wholly foreign and but little sympathetic
to their race, left to their fate on a barren mountain-side, without
money, without shelter, without medical assistance, without the means
of earning a livelihood, they perished in want and misery.
The women and children were always separated from the men. That was the
characteristic of all the deportations. It was an attempt to strike
at the very core of their national being and annihilate them by the
tearing asunder of all family ties.
That was how a very large part of the Armenian people disappeared.
They were the "persons transported elsewhere," as the elegant title
of the "Provisional Han" ran, which gave full stewardship over their
well-stocked farms to the "Committee" with its zeal for "internal
colonisation" with purely Turkish elements. In this way the great goal
was reached--the forcible nationalisation of a land of mixed races.
While Anatolia was gradually emptied of all the forces that had
hitherto made for progress, while the deserted towns and villages and
flourishing fields of those who had been banished fell into the hands
of the lowest "_Mohadjr_"--hordes of the most dissipated Mohammedan
emigrants--that stream of unhappy beings trickled on ever more slowly
to its distant goal, leaving the dead bodies of women and children, old
men and boys, as milestones to mark the way. The few that did reach
the "settlement" alive--that is, the fever-ridden, hunger-stricken
concentration camps--continually molested by raiding Bedouins and
Kurds, gradually sickened and died a slower and even more terrible
death.
Sometimes even this was not speedy enough for the Government, and a
case occurred in Autumn 1916--absolutely verified by statements made
by German employees on the Baghdad Railway--where some thousands of
Armenians, brought as workers to this stretch of railway, simply
vanished one day without leaving a trace. Apparently they were simply
shipped off into the desert without more ado and there massacred.
This terrible catalogue of crime on the part of the Government of
Talaat is, however, in spite of all censorship and obstruction, being
dealt with _officially_ in all quarters of the globe--by the American
Embassy at Constantinople and in neutral and Entente countries--and at
the conclusion of peace it will be brought as an accusation against the
criminal brotherhood of Young Turks by a merciless court of all the
civilised nations of the world.
I have spoken to Armenians who have said to me, "In former times the
old Sultan Abdul-Hamid used to have us massacred by thousands. We
were delivered over by well-organised pogroms to the Kurds at stated
times, and certainly we suffered cruelly enough. Then the Young Turks,
as Adana 1909 shows, started on a bloodshed of thousands. But after
what we have just gone through we long with all our hearts for the
days of the old massacres. Now it is no longer a case of a certain
number of massacred; now _our whole people_ is being slowly but surely
exterminated by the national hatred of an apparently civilised,
apparently modern, and therefore infinitely more dangerous Government.
"Now they get hold of our women and children and send them long
journeys on foot to concentration camps in barren districts where they
die. The pitiful remains of our population in the villages and towns of
the Interior, where the local authorities have carried out the commands
of the central Government most zealously, are forcibly converted to
Islam, and our young girls are confined in Turkish harems and places of
low repute.
"The race is to vanish to the very last man, and why? Because the
Turks have recognised their intellectual bankruptcy, their economic
incompetence, and their social inferiority to the progressive Armenian
element, to which Abdul-Hamid, in spite of occasional massacres, knew
well enough how to adapt himself, and which he even utilised in all its
power in high offices of state. Because now that they themselves are
being decimated by a weary and unsuccessful war of terrible bloodshed
that was lost before it was begun, they hope in this way to retain the
sympathy of their peoples and preserve the superiority of their element
in the State.
"These are not sporadic outbursts of wrath, as they were in the case
of Hamid, but a definitely thought-out political measure against our
people, and for this very reason they can hope for no mercy. Germany,
as we have seen, tolerates the annihilation of our people through
weakness and lack of conscience, and if the war lasts much longer the
Armenian people will have ceased to exist. That is why we long for the
old régime of Abdul-Hamid, terrible as it was for us."
Has there ever been a greater tragedy in the history of a people--and
of a people that have never held any illusions as to political
independence, wedged in as they are between two Great Powers, and who
had no real irredentistic feelings towards Russia, and, up to the
moment when the Young Turks betrayed them shamefully and broke the ties
of comradeship that had bound them together as revolutionaries against
the old despotic system of Abdul-Hamid, were as thoroughly loyal
citizens of the Ottoman Empire as any of the other peoples of this
land, excepting perhaps the Turks themselves.
I hope that these few words may have given sufficient indication of the
spirit and outcome of this system of extermination. I should like to
mention just one more episode which affected me personally more than
anything I experienced in Turkey.
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.
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.
An intelligent German Government would, in face of the increasingly
evident Young Turkish spirit, have used every means in their power
to retain the sympathies of the Armenians, and indeed to win them in
greater numbers. The Armenians waited for us, trembled with impatience
for us, to give a definite ruling. Their disappointment, their hatred
of us is unbounded now--and rightly so--and if a German ever again
wants to take up business in the East he will have to reckon with this
afflicted people so long as one of them exists.
To answer the Armenian question in the way I have done here, one does
not necessarily need to have the slightest liking or the least sympathy
for them as a race. (I have, however, intimated that they deserve at
least that much from their high intellectual and social abilities.)
One only requires to have a feeling for humanity to abhor the way in
which hundreds of thousands of these unfortunate people were disposed
of; one only requires to understand the commercial and social needs
of a vast country like Turkey, so undeveloped and yet so capable of
development, to place the highest value on the preservation of this
restless, active, and eminently useful element; one only requires to
open one's eyes and look at the facts dispassionately to deny utterly
and absolutely what the Turks have tried to make the world believe
about the Armenians, in order that they might go on with their work of
extermination in peace and quiet; one only requires to have a slight
feeling of one's dignity as a German to refuse to condone the pitiful
cowardice of our Government over the Armenian question.
The mixture of cowardice, lack of conscience, and lack of foresight
of which our Government has been guilty in Armenian affairs is quite
enough to undermine completely the political loyalty of any thinking
man who has any regard for humanity and civilisation. Every German
cannot be expected to bear as light-heartedly as the diplomats of Pera
the shame of having history point to the fact that the annihilation,
with every refinement of cruelty, of a people of high social
development, numbering over one and a half million, was contemporaneous
with Germany's greatest power in Turkey.
In long confidential reports to my paper I made perfectly clear to
them the whole position with regard to the Armenian persecutions and
the brutal jingoistic spirit of the Young Turks apparent in them. The
Foreign Office, too, took notice of these reports. But I saw no trace
of the fruits of this knowledge in the attitude of my paper.
The determination never to re-enter the editorial offices of that
paper came to me on that dramatic occasion when my wife hurled her
denunciation of Germany in my teeth. I at least owe a personal debt of
gratitude to the poor murdered and tortured Armenians, for it is to
them I owe my moral and political enfranchisement.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: This and other works on the subject came to my notice
for the first time a few days before going to press. Before that (in
Turkey, Austria, and Germany) they were quite unprocurable.]