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HISTORY OF WORLD WAR I
THE HORRORS OF ALEPPO SEEN BY A GERMAN EYEWITNESS
The Massacre that never took place. Year of the Lord 1916
(A word to Germany's Accredited Representatives
WHEN I returned to
Aleppo in September, 1915, from a three months' holiday at Beirout, I heard
with horror that a new phase of Armenian massacres had begun which were far
more terrible than the earlier massacres under Abd-ul Hamid, and which aimed
at exterminating, root and branch, the intelligent, industrious, and
progressive Armenian nation, and at transferring its property to Turkish hands.
Such monstrous news left me at first incredulous. I was told that, in various quarters of Aleppo, there were lying masses
of half-starved people, the survivors of so-called "deportation
convoys." In order, I was told, to cover the extermination of the Armenian
nation with a political cloak, military reasons were being put forward, which
were said to make it necessary to drive the Armenians out of their native
seats, which had been theirs for 2,50o years, and to deport them to the Arabian
deserts. I
was also told that individual Armenians had lent themselves to acts of
espionage.
After I had informed
myself about the facts and had made enquiries on all sides, I came to the
conclusion that all these accusations against the Armenians were, in fact,
based on trifling provocations, which were taken as an excuse for slaughtering 10.000
innocents for one guilty person, for the most savage outrages against women and
children, and for a campaign of starvation against the exiles which was
intended to exterminate the whole nation.
To test the conclusion derived from my information, I
visited all the places in the city where there were Armenians left behind by
the convoys. In dilapidated caravansaries (hans) I found quantities of dead,
many corpses being half-decomposed, and others, still living, among them, who
were soon to breathe their last. In other yards I found quantities of sick and
starving people whom no one was looking after. In the neighbourhood of the
German Technical School, at which I am employed as a higher grade teacher,
there were four such hans, with seven or eight hundred exiles dying of
starvation. We teachers and our pupils had to pass by them every day. Every
time we went out we saw through the open windows their pitiful forms, emaciated
and wrapped in rags. In the mornings our
school children, on their way through the narrow streets, had to push past the
two-wheeled ox‑carts, on which every day from eight to ten rigid corpses,
without coffin or shroud, were carried away, their arms and legs trailing out
of the vehicle.
After I had shared this
spectacle for several days I thought it my duty to compose the following report:
"As teachers in the
German Technical School at Aleppo, we permit ourselves with all respect to make
the following report:
We feel it our duty to
draw attention to the fact that our educational work will forfeit its moral
basis and the esteem of the natives, if the German Government is not in a
position to put a stop to the brutality with which the wives and children of
slaughtered Armenians are being treated here.
Out of convoys which,
when they left their homes on the Armenian plateau, numbered from two to three thousand
men, women and children, only two or three hundred survivors arrive here in the
south. The men are slaughtered on the way; the women and girls, with the exception
of the old, the ugly and those who are still children, have been abused by
Turkish soldiers and officers and then carried away to Turkish and Kurdish
villages, where they have to accept Islam. They try to destroy the remnant of
the convoys by hunger and thirst. Even when they are fording rivers, they do not
allow those dying of thirst to drink. All the nourishment they receive is a
daily ration of a little meal sprinkled over their hands, which, they lick off
greedily, and its only effect is to protract their starvation.
Opposite the German
Technical School at Aleppo, in which we are engaged in teaching, a mass of
about four hundred emaciated forms, the remnant of such convoys, is lying in
one of the hans. There are about a
hundred children (boys and girls) among them, from five to seven years old.
Most of them are suffering from typhoid and dysentery. When one enters the
yard, one has the impression of entering a mad-house. If one brings them food,
one notices that they have forgotten how to eat. Their
stomach, weakened by months of starvation can no longer assimilate
nourishment. If
one gives them bread, they put it aside indifferently. They just lie there
quietly, waiting for death.
Amid such surroundings,
how are we teachers to read German Fairy Stories with -our children, or,
indeed, the story of the Good Samaritan in the Bible? How are we to make them decline
and conjugate irrelevant words, while round them in the yards adjoining the German Technical School
their starving fellow-countrymen are slowly succumbing? Under such
circumstances our educational work flies in the face of all true morality and
becomes a mockery of human sympathy.
And what becomes of
these poor people with have been driven in thousands through Aleppo and the
neighbourhood into the deserts, reduced almost entirely, by this time, to women
and children? They
are driven on and on from one place to another. The
thousands shrink to hundreds and the hundreds to tiny remnants, and even these
remnants are driven on till the last is dead. Then at last they have reached
the goal of their wandering, the “New Homes assigned to the Armenians”, as the
newspapers phrase it.
“Ta'alim el aleman” (the
teaching of the Germans) is the simple Turk's explanation to everyone who asks
him about the originators of these measures.
The educated Moslems are
convinced that, even though the German nation discountenances such horrors,
the German Government is taking no steps to put a stop to them out of
consideration for its Turkish Ally.
Mohammedans, too, of
more sensitive feelings—Turks and Arabs alike—shake 'their heads in disapproval
and do not conceal their tears when they see a convoy exiles marching through
the city, and Turkish soldiers using cudgels upon women in advanced pregnancy
and upon dying people who can no longer drag themselves along. They cannot
believe that their Government has ordered these atrocities, and they hold the
Germans responsible for all such outrages, Germany being considered during the
war as Turkey's schoolmaster in everything. Even the mollahs in the mosques say that
it was not the Sublime Porte but the German officers who ordered the
ill-treatment and destruction of the Armenians.
The things which have
been passing here for months under everybody's eyes will certainly remain as a stain
on Germany's shield in the memory of Orientals.
In order not to be
obliged to give up their faith in the character of the Germans, which they have
hitherto respected, many educated Mohammedans explain the situation to themselves
as follows: 'The German nation,' they say, 'probably knows nothing about the
frightful massacres which are on foot at the present time against the native
Christians in all parts of Turkey. Knowing the German love of truth, how
otherwise can we explain the articles we read in German newspapers, which
appear to know of nothing except that individual Armenians have been deservedly
shot by martial law as spies and traitors?' Others again say: Perhaps the
German Government has had its hands tied by some treaty defining its powers, or
perhaps intervention is inopportune for the moment.'
I know for a fact that
the Embassy at Constantinople has been informed by the German Consulates of all
that has been happening. As, however, there has not been so far the least
change in the system of deportation, I feel myself compelled by conscience to
make my present report."
At the time when I
composed this report, the German Consul at Aleppo was represented by his
colleague from Alexandretta—Consul Hoffmann. Consul Hoffmann informed me that
the German Embassy had been advised in detail about the events in the interior
in repeated reports from the Consulates at Alexandretta, Aleppo and Mosul. He
told me that a report of what I had seen with my own eyes would, however, be
welcome as a supplement to these official documents and as a description in detail. He said he
would convey my report to the Embassy at Constantinople by a sure agency. I
now worked out a report on the desired lines, giving an exact description of
the state of things in the ban opposite our school.
Consul Hoffmann wished to add some photographs which he had
taken in the han himself. The
photographs displayed piles of corpses, among which children still alive were
crawling about.
In its revised form the
report was signed by my colleague, Dr. Graeter (higher grade teacher), and by
Frau Marie Spiecker, as well as by myself. The head of our institution,
Director Huber, also placed his name to it and added a few words in the
following sense: " My colleague Dr. Niepage's report is not at all
exaggerated. For
weeks we have been living here in an atmosphere poisoned with sickness and the
stench of corpses. Only the hope of speedy relief makes
it possible for us to carry on our work."
The relief did not come. I
then thought of resigning my post as higher grade teacher in the Technical
School, on the ground that it was senseless and morally unjustifiable to be a
representative of European civilisation with the task of bringing moral and
intellectual education to a nation if, at the same time, one had to look on
passively while the Government of the country was abandoning one's pupils'
fellow-countrymen to an agonising death by starvation.
Those around me, however, as well as the head of our
institution, Director Huber, dissuaded me from my intention. It was pointed out to me that there was value in our continued presence
in the country, as eye-witnesses of what went on. Perhaps, it was suggested,
our presence, might have some effect in making the Turks behave more humanely
towards their unfortunate victims, out of consideration for us Germans. I see
now that I have remained far too long a silent witness of all this wickedness.
II
Our presence had no ameliorating effect whatever, and what
we could do personally came to little. Frau Spiecker, our brave, energetic
colleague, bought soap, and all the women and children in our neighbourhood who
were still alive—there were no men left—were washed and cleansed from lice.
Frau Spiecker set women to work to make soup for those who could still assimilate
nourishment. I, myself, distributed two pails of tea and cheese and
moistened bread among the dying children every evening for six weeks; but when
the Hunger-Typhus or Spotted-Typhus spread through the city from these charnel
houses, six of us succumbed to it and had to give up our relief work. Indeed, for the exiles
who came to Aleppo, help was really useless. We could only afford those doomed
to death a few slight alleviations of their death agony.
What we saw with our own
eyes here in Aleppo was really only the last scene in the great tragedy of the
extermination of the Armenians. It was only a minute fraction of the horrible
drama that was being played out simultaneously in all the other provinces of
Turkey. Many more appalling things were reported by the
engineers of the Bagdad Railway, when they came back from their work on the
section under construction, or by German travellers who met the convoys of
exiles on their journeys. Many of these gentlemen had seen such appalling sights that
they could eat nothing for days.
One of them, Herr Greif,
of Aleppo, reported corpses of violated women lying about naked in heaps on the
railway embankment at Tell 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. Other men had their hands
tied behind their back and were rolled down steep cliffs. Women were standing
below, who slashed those who had rolled down with knives until they were dead. A Protestant pastor who, two years before, had given a very warm welcome
to my colleague, Doctor Graeter, when he was passing through his village, had
his finger nails torn out.
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 lying hacked off in such numbers that one could have
paved the road with them. In the German hospital at Ourfa there was a little
girl who had had both her hands hacked off.
In an Arab village on the way to Aleppo Herr Holstein, the
German Consul from Mosul, saw shallow graves with freshly-buried Armenian
corpses. The Arabs of the village declared that they had killed
these Armenians by the Government's orders. One asserted proudly that he personally had
killed eight.
In many Christian houses
in Aleppo I found Armenian girls hidden who by some chalice had escaped death;
either they had been left lying exhausted and had been taken for dead when
their companions had been driven on, or, in other cases, Europeans had found an
opportunity to buy the poor creatures for a few marks from the last Turkish
soldier who had violated them. All these girls showed symptoms of mental derangement;
many of them had had to watch the Turks cut their parents' throats. I know poor things who
have not had a single word coaxed out of them for months, and not a smile to
this moment. A girl about fourteen years old was given shelter by Herr Krause,
Depot Manager for the Bagdad Railway at Aleppo. The girl had been so many times
ravished by Turkish soldiers in one night that she had completely lost her
reason. I saw her tossing on her pillow in delirium with burning lips, and
could hardly get water down her throat.
A German I know saw hundreds of Christian peasant women who
were compelled, near Ourfa, to strip naked by the Turkish soldiers. For the
amusement of the soldiers they had to drag themselves through the desert in
this condition for days together in a temperature of 40° Centigrade, until
their skins were completely scorched. Another witness
saw a Turk tear a child out of its Armenian mother's womb and hurl it against
the wall.
There are other
occurrences, worse than these few examples which I give here, recorded in the
numerous reports which have been sent in to the Embassy from the German
Consulates at Alexandretta, Aleppo and Mosul. The Consuls are of opinion that, so far,
probably about one million Armenians have perished in the massacres of the last
few months. Of this number, one must reckon that at least half are women and
children who have either been murdered or have succumbed to starvation.
It is a duty of
conscience to bring these things into publicity, and, although the Turkish
Government, in destroying the Armenian nation, may only be pursuing objects of
internal policy, the way this policy is being carried out has many of the
characteristics of a general persecution of Christians.
All the tens of
thousands of girls and women who have been carried off into Turkish harems, and
the masses of children who have been collected by the Government and
distributed among the Turks and Kurds, are lost to Christendom, and have to
accept Islam. The abusive epithet "giaour" is now heard once again by
German ears.
At Adana I saw a crowd
of Armenian orphans marching through the streets under a guard of Turkish soldiers;
their parents have been slaughtered and the children have to become Mohammedans. Everywhere
there have been cases in which adult Armenians were able to save their lives by
readiness to accept Islam.
III
Sometimes however, the Turkish officials first made the
Christians present a petition to be received into the communion of Islam, and
then answered very grandly, in order to throw dust in the eyes of Europeans,
that religion is not a thing to play with. These officials preferred to have
the petitioners killed. Men like Talaat Bey and Enver Pasha, when prominent
Armenians brought them presents, often tempered their thanks with the remark
that they would have been still better pleased if the Armenian givers had made
their presents as Mohammedans. A newspaper reporter was
told by one of these gentlemen: "Certainly we are now punishing many
innocent people as well. But we have to guard ourselves even against those who
may one day become guilty." On such grounds Turkish statesmen justify the
wholesale slaughter of defenceless women and children. A German Catholic
ecclesiastic reported that Enver Pasha declared, in the presence of Monsignore
Dolci, the Papal Envoy at Constantinople, that he would not rest so long as a
single Armenian remained alive.
The object of the deportations is the extermination of the
whole Armenian nation. This purpose is also
proved by the fact that the Turkish Government declines all assistance from
Missionaries, Sisters of Mercy and European residents in the country, and
systematically tries to stop their work. A Swiss engineer was to have been
brought before a court-martial because he had distributed bread in Anatolia to
the starving Armenian women and children in a convoy of exiles. The Government has not
hesitated even to deport Armenian pupils and teachers from the German schools
at Adana and Aleppo, and Armenian children from the German orphanages, without
regard to all the efforts of the Consuls and the heads of the institutions
involved. The Government also rejected the American Government's offer to take
the exiles to America on American ships and at America's expense.
The opinion of our
German Consuls and of many foreigners resident in the country about the
Armenian massacres will some day become known through their reports. I can say nothing about
the verdict of the German officers in Turkey. I often noticed, when in their
company, an ominous silence or a convulsive effort to change the subject when
any German of warm sympathies and independent judgment began to speak about the
Armenians' frightful sufferings.
When Field-Marshal von der Goltz was travelling to Bagdad
and had to cross the Euphrates at Djerablus, there was a large encampment of
half-starved Armenian exiles there. Just before the Field-Marshal's arrival, so
I was told at Djerablus, these unhappy people, the sick and dying with the
rest, were driven under the whip several kilometres away over the nearest
hills. When von der Goltz passed through, there were no
traces left of the repulsive spectacle; but when I visited the place shortly
afterwards with some of my colleagues, we found corpses of men, women and
children still lying in out-of-the-way places, and fragments of clothes,
skulls and bones which had been partly stripped of the flesh by jackals and
birds of prey.
The author of the
present report considers it out of the question that, if the German Government
is seriously determined to stern the tide of destruction even at this eleventh
hour, it would find it impossible to bring the Turkish Government to reason. If
the Turks are really so well inclined to us Germans as people say, cannot they
have it pointed out to them how seriously they compromise us before the whole
civilised world, if we, as their Allies, have to look on passively while our
fellow-Christians in Turkey are slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands,
their women and daughters violated, their children brought up as Mohammedans?
Cannot the Turks be made to understand that their barbarities are reckoned to
our account, and that we Germans will be accused either of criminal complicity
or of contemptible weakness, if we shut our eyes to the frightful horrors which
this war has produced, and seek to pass over in silence facts which are already
notorious all over the world? If the Turks are really as intelligent as is
said, should it be impossible to convince them that, in exterminating the Christian
nations in Turkey; they are destroying the productive factors and the
intermediaries of European trade and general civilization? If the Turks are as
far-sighted as is said, can they blind themselves to the danger that, when the
civilized States of Europe have taken cognisance of what has been happening in
Turkey during the war, they may be driven to the conclusion that Turkey has
forfeited the right to govern herself and has destroyed once for all any belief
in her tolerance and capacity for civilisation? Will not the German Government
be standing for what is best in Turkey's own interest; if it hinders Turkey
from ruining herself morally and economically?
In this report I hope to
reach the Government's ear through the accredited representatives of the
German nation.
When the Reichstag sits
in Committee, these things must no longer be passed over howeveir painful they
are. Nothing could put us more to shame than the erection at Constantinople of
a Turco-German palace of friend‑ship - at huge expense, while we are not in
a position to shield our fellow-Christians from barbarities unparalleled even
in the blood‑stained history of Turkey. Would not the funds collected be
better spent in building orphanages for the innocent victims of Turkey's
barbarities?
After the massacres of
1909 a kind of reconciliation banquet was held at Adana, in which the heads of
the Armenian clergy took part as well as high Turkish officials. The German
Consul, Büge, who was present, related that an Armenian ecclesiastic got up and
said in his speech: "It is true that we Armenians have lost much in these
days of massacre—our men, our women, our children and our goods. But you Turks
have lost more, you have lost your honour."
If we persist in
treating the massacres of Christians as Turkey's internal affair, which is not
important for us except as making us sure of the Turks' friendship, then we
must change the whole orientation of our German culture policy. We must stop
sending German teachers to Turkey, and we teachers must give up telling our
pupils in Turkey about German poets and philosophers, German culture and German
ideals —to say nothing of German Christianity.
Three years ago I was
sent by the Foreign Office as higher grade teacher to the German Technical
School at Aleppo. The Prussian Provincial School Board at Magdeburg specially enjoined
upon me, when I went out, to show myself worthy of the confidence reposed in me
in the grant of furlough to take up this educational post at Aleppo. I should
not be fulfilling my duty as a German official and an accredited representative
of German culture if I consented to keep silence in face of the atrocities of
which I was a witness, or to look on passively while the pupils entrusted to me
were driven out to die of starvation in the desert.
If anyone enquires into
the motives which induced the Young Turkish Government to decree and carry out
these frightful measures against the Armenians, one might give the following
explanation:
The Young Turk has the
European ideal of a united national state always floating before his eyes. He hopes to turkify the
non-Turkish Mohammedan races—Kurds, Persians, Arabs, and so on by
administrative methods and through Turkish education, reinforced by an appeal
to their common interests as Mohammedans. The Christian nations—Armenians,
Syrians and Greeks—alarm him by their cultural and economic superiority, and he
sees in their religion an obstacle to turkifying them by peaceful means. They have, therefore, to be exterminated or converted to Mohammedanism
by force. The
Turks do not suspect that, in doing this, they are sawing off the branch on
which they are sitting themselves. Who is to bring
progress to Turkey if not the Greeks, Armenians and Syrians, who constitute
more than a quarter of the population of the Empire?
The Turks, the least
gifted of all the races living in Turkey, are themselves only a minority of the
population, and are still far behind even the Arabs in civilization. Where is
there any Turkish trade, Turkish handicraft, Turkish manufacture, Turkish art,
Turkish science? Even their law, religion and language, so far as it can be
given literary form, have been borrowed from the conquered Arabs.
We teachers who have
been teaching Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Turks and Jews in German schools in
Turkey for years, can only declare that the pure Turks are the most unwilling
and incapable of all our pupils. When, for once in a way, a Turk achieves
something, in nine cases out of ten one can be certain that one is dealing with
a Circassian, an Albanian, or a Turk with Bulgarian blood in his veins. From my
personal experience I can only prophesy that the Turks proper will never
achieve anything in trade, manufacture or science.
We are told now in German newspapers of the Turks' hunger for education and of how they are thronging eagerly to learn German. There are even reports of language courses for adults which have been started in Turkey. They are certainly started, but with what results? They go on to tell one of a language course at a Technical School which opened with twelve Turkish teachers as pupils. The author of this story forgets, however, to add that, after four lessons, only six pupils put in an appearance; after five lessons, five; after six lessons, four, and, after seven lessons, only three, so that after eight lessons the course came to an end, through the laziness of the pupils, before it had properly begun. If the pupils had been Armenians they would have persevered until the end of the school year, learnt patiently, and come away with a respectable mastery of the German language.
What is Germany's duty
and, indeed, the duty of every civilised Christian nation in face of the
Armenian massacres? We must try every means of saving the half million of Armenian
women and children who may still be alive in Turkey today, and who are abandoned
to death by starvation, from an end which would be a disgrace to the whole
civilised world. The
hundreds of thousands of deported women and children who have been left lying
on the borders of the Mesopotamian desert, and on the roads leading thither, can
only maintain their miserable existence a short time longer. How long can people really support life by picking grains of corn out of
horse-dung and depending for the rest upon grass? Months of insufficient
nourishment and the prevailing dysentery will have brought countless numbers
into a state past help. But at Konia a few thousand Armenians are still
alive—educated people from Constantinople, who were in easy circumstances
before their deportation, doctors, writers, merchants—and these could still be
helped before they too succumb to the fate that threatens all. There are 1,500 Armenians in good health —men, women and children,
including grandmothers sixty years old and many children of six and seven—who
are still at work on a section of the Bagdad Railway between Eiran and Entilli,
near the big tunnel, breaking stones and shovelling earth. For the moment they are
being looked after by Herr Morf, Superintendent Engineer of the Bagdad Railway
but the Turkish Government has registered their names too. As soon as their work is finished, as it will be in perhaps two or three
months' time from now, and they are no longer wanted, "new homes will be
assigned to them"—that is, the men will be taken off and slaughtered, the
pretty women and girls will find their way into harems, the remainder will be
driven hither and thither without food through the desert until all is over.
The Armenian nation has
a claim to German help. When
Armenian massacres threatened to break out in Cilicia several years ago, a
German warship appeared off Mersina. The Commander called on the Armenian
Katholikos at Adana and assured him that, so long as Germany had any influence
in Turkey, massacres like those under Abd-ul-Hamid would be impossible. The same assurance was given by the German Ambassador, von Wangenheim,
to the Armenian Patriarch and to the President of the Armenian National Council
in an interview last April.
Even apart from our
common duty as Christians, we Germans are under a special obligation to stop
the complete extermination of the half-million Armenian Christians who still
survive. We are Turkey's allies and, after the elimination of the French,
English and Russians, we are the only foreigners who have any say in Turkish
affairs. We
may indignantly refute the lies of our enemies abroad, who say that the
massacres have been organised by German Consuls. We shall not be able to
dissipate the Turkish nation's conviction that the Armenian massacres were
ordered by Germany, unless energetic steps are at last taken by German
diplomatists and officers. And even if we cleared ourselves of everything but
the one reproach that our timidity and weakness in dealing with our ally had
prevented us from saving half a million women and children from slaughter or
death by starvation, the image of the German War would be disfigured for all
time in the mirror of history by a hideous feature.
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
exercised 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.
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