Tessa Hofmann
Muriel Mirak-Weißbach's biographical study is the most thorough and comprehensively researched approach to date to portray the historical figure of Otto Liman von Sanders. Was he, as M. Mirak-Weißbach suggests, a Prussian military leader of Jewish descent imbued with the ideas of honor characteristic of his time and milieu? Or did he become an accessory or even an accomplice in the Ottoman genocide against more than three million Christians and thus complicit in crimes of expulsion and genocide? The following remarks account contribute to further document the deportations of Armenians and especially Greeks already dealt with in M. Mirak-Weißbach's book.
Suspicions, insinuations and allegations against Liman von Sanders are not a novelty. Even contemporary, mainly overseas Greek sources painted a negative picture of the Prussian marshal who led the Imperial German Military Mission to the Ottoman Empire. Liman von Sanders was arrested by the British in February 1919 and was the only German officer accused of deporting Armenians. Although Liman demanded a trial to prove his innocence, the matter never came to court. No transgression could be proven against him, he nonetheless remained in custody until 21 August 1919 and did not return to Berlin until September 1919.
Despite Liman's release, suspicions of his personal guilt persisted posthumously. Beginning with the Swiss historian Christoph Dinkel and the Armenian-American social scientist Vahakn N. Dadrian, a number of German-speaking scholars and publicists have since 1991 addressed the question of Germany's shared responsibility for the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians.1 In particular, investigative journalists Wolfgang Gust and Jürgen Gottschlich2 have critically examined the accusation of official Germany's co-knowledge, complicity and culpability. However, both exempt Liman von Sanders from such charges. J. Gottschlich characterized Liman as a "more or less (...) tragic figure"3, and W. Gust has since revised his earlier viewpoint. In conversations with M. Mirak-Weißbach he likened Liman to Oskar Schindler.4
Deportation orders
Forced displacement or deportation is defined by international law as one of a total of eleven ‘crimes against humanity’ (Article 7, Rome Statute, 1998). They are considered so serious that they permit, indeed require, punishment even by third countries.
In his memoirs of Five Years in Turkey, written immediately after the World War and published in early 1920, Liman himself dealt with and vehemently rejected the charges leveled against him personally and against Germany in general of having ordered deportations. Both in his memoirs and in his testimony of 2 June 1921 during the Berlin criminal proceedings against the Armenian assassin and avenger Soghomon Tehlirian, Liman assigned the blame for the extermination of 1.5 million Armenians mainly to the "Turkish gendarmerie" as well as to the "Turkish lower officialdom".5 He vigorously defended himself against "the Levantine slanders" according to which German officers were involved in the Armenian persecutions and justified this with the argument that the German military were not informed: "The German officers were frequently not even sufficiently informed about the military events and measures by the Turkish commanders, let alone about internal political ones. Their position is wholly misjudged if it is believed that they could exercise any influence other than the precisely circumscribed one of their rank, the extent of which the Turks jealously guarded."6
Liman's argument that the German military and civilian authorities in the Ottoman Empire were not adequately informed by their Young Turk allies also seems well-founded in that the entity central to the implementation of the genocide against the Ottoman Armenians does not appear anywhere in the German diplomatic records: The so-called Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), which emerged from two clandestine organizations of the same name, subordinated respectively to the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of War, is not mentioned by German civilians nor military officials, despite its prominent role, especially in the eastern provinces, i.e., in the main Armenian settlement areas.
In 1993, however, Wolfgang Gust contradicted Liman's exculpatory account regarding German deportation orders: "Liman himself knew only too well that Germans issued deportation orders, because he had complained about it to [German ambassador] Wolff-Metternich. His colleague Bronsart von Schellendorff, whom he admittedly hated, had not only demanded deportations in Urla [Grk.: Vurla, Vourla; March 1916], a place about 20 kilometers west of Smyrna, but had also signed the evacuation order himself. Admittedly, they were not Armenians, but Greeks."7
And not only that. According to one accusation from a Greek source, Liman von Sanders himself, according to Greek accusations, ordered a deportation. In a 1918 documentation published in the U.S. by the American branch of the American-Hellenic Society while the World War was still going on, the following is reported about the deportation of the Greek population of Kydonies8 (also Kydonia; Turkish Ayvalık) ordered by Liman in April 1917:
“No doubt remained as to the guilt of Germany after the evacuation of Cydonia (Aivali). The Grand' Vizier acknowledged to the Greek Minister in Constantinople that the transfer of the Greek population was due to the action of the commander of the 5th Corps, Commander-in-Chief Liman von Sanders. The Ottoman government originally objected to this and only yielded to the threat of the Commander-in-Chief, who declared that only on this basis could he assume responsibility for the safety of the army. Even the Ambassador of Germany tried to persuade the said Commander-in-Chief, for reasons of political necessity, not to insist on his decision but the latter was unwilling to yield, claiming that in time of war military necessity takes precedence over political, and that the great German Council of War, before which he had set forth in detail the state of affairs, had already given its consent.
What were these military necessities? Pretexts of the danger of espionage by the people of Cydonia, who had for a year and more been subjected to the strictest blockade, were advanced as sufficient to justify the destruction of this bulwark of Hellenism and its supplanting in this fertile country, in commerce and other activities, by Germans and Austrians.
The scheme of the Young Turks, completed and perfected, was adopted by the Germans and so the blind passion of the Turks and the egotistical aims of the Germans were satisfied.
Thus those morally guilty and those actually guilty were united in their common struggle to deal a deadly blow to Hellenism in Turkey, the annihilation of which they had vowed to complete.”9
The Greek population of Kydonies/Ayvalık and its environs was deported twice, in July 1915 and April 1917. After the first deportation, on 4 September 1915, Dr. Heribert Schwörbel, the Second Dragoman (interpreter) of the German Embassy in Constantinople, reported that 36,000 people had lived in the almost exclusively Greek town of Kydonies before the war. A third of the population had fled to the offshore island of Mytilene (Lesvos; Lesbos) in 1914. Schwörbel mentions in his report of early autumn 1915 a remaining population in Kydonies of "only about 22000 exclusively Greek inhabitants".10
Thus, Liman's role in deportations in the Ottoman Empire can be summarized as follows: According to his own account, Liman saved Armenians and Jews from deportation in the eastern Thracian capital of Edirne (Greek: Adrianoupolis) in February 1916, and in Smyrna in November 191611. As a defense witness, he stated the following on 2 June 1921 at the Berlin criminal trial of Soghomon Tehlirian:
"I had the opportunity to intervene in February 1916, when the Vali [provincial governor] of Adrianople also tried to expel the Armenians and Jews from Adrianople ... I went to Constantinople and managed to get the matter stopped immediately: by the [German] ambassador Count Metternich and the [Austrian] ambassador Margrave Pallavicini. Another time I came to Smyrna. There the Vali had 600 Armenians taken from their beds in the middle of the night, put into wagons to be deported. I intervened and told the Vali: If one more Armenian is touched, I will have his gendarmes shot by my soldiers. Thereupon the matter was taken back again ...
I would like to emphasize that I never entered Armenia, nor came near Armenia, nor was I ever heard or asked by the Turkish side about any measure against the Armenians. On the contrary, everything was concealed from us so that we could not gain insight into internal political conditions."12
Liman justified his intervention in favor of the Armenians of Smyrna in November 1916 with consideration for the mood among the largely Greek population of Smyrna, a city with a total population at the time of about 40000013: "On 11 Nov. night, the Vali personally sought me out. In a long consultation the Vali explained to me the reasons for the mass arrests of the Armenians. I could not approve of these reasons, which were based on quite inadequate grounds, and emphasized that the military situation absolutely demanded the utmost calm in the city of Smyrna, which was largely inhabited by Greeks."14
It may be the case that Liman's pro-Armenian intervention sprang from the fear that Greece, as the protecting Power of the Ottoman Greeks, but until then neutral, might enter the World War on the side the Entente. Whatever the reason may be, Liman's consideration of the mood of the Smyrniote Greeks did not prevent Greece's eventual entry into the war on 24 November 1916 (by the provisional government) or on 29 June 1917.
Less than six months after his pro-Armenian intervention in Smyrna, Liman ordered the "evacuation" (deportation) of the Greek population from the Ionian town of Kydonies (Ayvalık) and its environs15 in April 1917. Of the first 2500 or so deportees from Kydonies, a scant tenth - about 200 - died on their 42-day forced march to Anatolia.16 As the reason for his approval of Turkish deportation intentions, Liman cites "continuing treason and espionage traffic" of Kydonies/Ayvalık residents with the Entente forces.17 Commenting on this, the German ambassador added: "As was to be expected, the evacuation of so many Greeks (the figures vary between 12 and 20000) caused a great stir and greatly embittered the Greek element. The Greek envoy paid me a visit to attempt to see if I could not reverse the evacuation order. I had to explain to him, however, that in view of the unconditional military necessity of the measure advocated by Marshal Liman von Sanders, I lacked any means of interference. He said that Liman von Sanders' proven pro-Greek sentiments in many cases vouched for the fact that he had decided to take such a drastic measure only under pressure of extreme necessity. The envoy pointed out that the matter would also exert a very bad influence in Athens, detrimental to the king's policy, since such a measure, hostile to the Greeks on a large scale, had this time not emanated from the Turks, but even, with quite a bit of reluctance on the part of the Turks, from the German supreme command."18
Kydonies/Ayvalık is located opposite the Aegean Greek Island of Lesvos (Lesbos), which was controlled by the Allies at the time, and thus from a military standpoint constituted frontline territory. Liman, like other high-ranking German military officers in the Ottoman Empire, considered deportations of the civilian population to be justified under such circumstances. Of greater importance for an evaluation of his actions, however, may have been the circumstances enumerated by the Greek surgeon Dr. med. Konstantinos Makris from Pánormos (also Panderma, Pandırma; Turkish: Bandırma) in his letter of 5 July 1919 addressed to the Military Court of Malta in favor of Liman; K. Makris had become acquainted with Liman during his two-year stay in Panormos.
A statement by Liman (see Appendices) also indicates that it was primarily the Turkish side that made the espionage accusations. In April 1917, during Liman’s visit to Smyrna, a certain Colonel Selahaddin presented him with relevant "evidence" and "documents" allegedly found during house searches, conveniently already translated into German; allegedly, an Allied landing on the Ionian coast was threatening "at Whitsun." The alleged necessity to deport the Armenian population in 1915 had been constructed in a similar fashion. Liman himself did not stay on the spot in Kydonies to personally see whether the accusation of espionage launched by the Turkish side was justified or justified the deportation of the entire Greek population. However, he did in the end agree to the Turkish insistence on a "temporary" or "partial evacuation" of the Greeks from Kydonies, under the following conditions: "I demand, and for this the Commanding General assumes responsibility, that the greatest possible care be taken. No violence of any kind should be allowed to occur. First of all, the civil authorities must provide other accommodations for the expellees, where they can earn their living. Provision would have to be made for carts, lodging and food on the march. The property left behind would have to be taken into safe custody by the authorities. - The implementation of this measure was to be controlled by officers."
Most importantly, however, the functioning of the economically vital oil mills in Kydonies was not to suffer as a result of the deportation of the Greeks. In fact, as early as July 191719, Liman had ordered the businessmen among the deported Greeks from Kydonies/Ayvalık to return, "because otherwise the economy would have collapsed."20
Both the German and Austrian ambassadors mentioned that Liman's order to deport Greeks from Kydonies drew criticism from, of all people, the now head of the government, Mehmet Talat, whose recently constituted cabinet found it difficult to support deportation from Kydonies "after they had pledged moderation and tolerance."21 What galling irony! He, of all people, who as Minister of the Interior from 1915 to February 1917 was mainly responsible for the deportations of two million Ottoman Armenians as well as more than half a million Greeks, now posed as a critic of deportations! At this point, it cannot be conclusively clarified whether Liman, whose difficult relationship with the Young Turkish Minister of War Ismail Enver was universally known, had been deliberately deceived. The fact that throughout the World War Germany’s Young Turk allies tried again and again to justify the need for deportations of Christian parts of the population as militarily necessary or to shift responsibility for their orders to the German military, emerges from many other examples lamented by numerous German contemporaries, who were professionally active in the Ottoman Empire and well-informed eyewitnesses.
As the French-Armenian historian Raymond Kévorkian indicates, the humanitarian interventions by Liman and Henry Morgenthau Sr. did not save all segments of the relatively small Armenian population of the city of Smyrna and the Aydın vilayet during World War I:
„(…) the Armenians of the vilayet of Aydın (…) were subjected to regular harassment until fall 1918. It should be recalled in this connection that all unmarried men from other regions living in Smyrna were gradually arrested and deported to the Syrian deserts. (…) on 1 November 1915, the city’s main Armenian neighborhood, Haynots (…) was surrounded by the army, which proceeded to carry out a systematic search and to arrest some 2,000 people. (…) several hundred people [were] sent in different directions on 28 November [1915] and then again on 16 and 24 December. Among them were a considerable number of British, Italian, and Russian subjects, many of whom died on the road. This suggests that Rahmi had profited from the occasion to eliminate these ‘foreigners’ and lay hands on their property, distributing part of it to police officials and members of the Itthadist club, such as Ali Fikri or Mahmud Bey.
(…) The Armenian Catholics, who had previously been spared because they were relatively well protected by the Austro-Hungarian consul, came under attack in September 1916. The police searched the Catholic cemetery on 16 and 17 September and claimed to have found bombs there. There is reason to think that this was a provocation engineered by the vali and the Unionists of the port city, for this ‘discovery’ provided justification for the arrest of 300 Armenian Catholics from Smyrna, Cordelio, and Karataş, some of whom were deported to Afionkarahisar, where they were followed on 9 and 10 November by 300 to 400 people from the affluent classes. The choice of the people to be deported seems to have depended on the assets they possessed, coveted by this or that local or governmental official.”22
The charge of forcible removal of children
The forcible transfer of children from one group to another is defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention as one of five offenses, each of which is considered genocide. The two authors of the American Hellenic Society documentation cited above also charged Liman with participating in the state-organized removal of Greek children. They saw his private initiative to establish one or more homes for 180 Greek and Armenian children picked up on the streets of the Bithynian town of Pánormos in a larger demographic context and were apparently particularly outraged by the fact that Liman expected financial security from the victimized Greeks to finance what they saw as an assimilationist institution:
“During the period of the persecutions, as the conversions to Mohammedanism formed part of the system which was planned, it was thought proper quietly to lay aside the laws and regulations and to pursue by every means and in a systematic manner the Islamization of the Christians23. One of the most diabolical methods adopted was the creation of the so-called Orphan Institutions at Panormo, the founder of which was General Liman Von Sanders himself, who had the impudence to demand from the Greeks 10,000 Turkish pounds for the maintenance of these institutions. (Telegram from Constantinople of March 17, 1917. Ministerial Archives, No. 3272.) These Orphan Institutions have in appearance a charitable object, but if one considers that their inmates are Greek boys, who became orphans because their parents were murdered, or who were snatched away from their mothers, or left in the streets for want of nourishment (of which they were deprived by the Turks), and that these Greek children receive there a purely Turkish education, it will be at once seen that under the cloak of charity there lurks the 'boy collecting'24 system instituted in the past by the Turkish conquerors and a new effort to revive the janissary system. The Greek boys were treated in this manner. What happens to the Greek girls? If we review the consular reports about the persecutions from the year 1915 to 1917 we shall hardly find one of them which does not speak of forcible abductions and conversions to Mohammedanism. And it could not have been otherwise, since it is well known that this action, as has been stated above, was decided upon in June, 1915, in order to effect the Turkification of the Hellenic element. This plan was carried out methodically and in a diabolical manner, through the ' mixed settlements' of Greeks and Turks, always with a predominance of Mohammedan males and of Greek females in order to compel mixed marriages. This is evident from a report from Constantinople dated January 14, 1916, in which it is stated that the Turkish Government instructed the Governor of Broussa [also Prusa; Trk.: Bursa] to place the Greek refugees [i.e. deportees; TH] by groups of ten to thirty families in Mussulman villages with a proportion always of ten per cent, to the Mohammedan population.
Who can give a different meaning to these instructions when one considers the daily conversions in different parts of the country, in which the starvation to which the Greek populations have been condemned plays a prominent part?”25
What was the state policy regarding orphans in the Ottoman Empire during the World War I years? The Committee of Union and Progress party (Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti; a.k.a. Young Turks) was involved in government policy on orphans on various levels and in different areas. Beginning in the 1860s, the Ottoman Empire established job-qualifying orphanages to remove stray, begging children from the streets. The homes were intended to serve beautification and rejuvenate urban societies. Quite a few of them were interfaith.26 During World War I conflicting goals led to contradictory decisions and actions. On the one hand, homeless street children and related problems such as prostitution and the spread of epidemics were still to be avoided. On the other, efforts were made to "re-educate" or physically destroy Christian children if they were deemed too old to be effectively influenced. The activities of foreign charitable institutions were prohibited or, if they were institutions of neutral or allied states, at least severely hindered. Even more directly, and as early as 1915, the authorities suppressed Armenian or Greek orphanages, while at the same time the number of state-run orphanages (darüleytams) increased rapidly. The latter initially and primarily served the orphans of Muslim war dead referred to as ‘martyrs’ (şehit). However, some of the state-run homes also took in Armenian or Christian orphans. In some places, new homes were established specifically to "re-educate" Christian or Armenian orphans. In 1917, there were nine state-run orphanages in the capital Constantinople alone. In the Ottoman provinces, the Directorate for Orphanages counted sixteen state-run homes in May 1915 in Kayseri, Hüdavendigar Province, or Bursa - which included the city of Panormos -, in Adana, Edirne, Urfa, Kastamonu, Konya, Ankara, Diyarbekır, Niğde, as well as four more institutions in the making in Samsun, Teke, Aydın (Greek: Aidinio), and Bolu (Greek: Βιθύνιον - Bithynion).27 By the beginning of 1917, the number of homes had already increased to 68 with over 10,000 orphans.28
The fate of Christian children of Ottoman nationality was decided by various ministries - Interior, Education, War Ministry - and agencies such as the Directorate of Orphanages. A key role was played by Interior Minister Mehmet Talat, in office in this capacity until February 1917. As can be seen from his telegraphic orders, decrees, and statements, he took varying radical positions over the course of 1915 to 1917. On 16 September 1915, the Talat-led Interior Ministry ordered that "the treatment, previously communicated as to be carried out in regard to the male population of certain known individuals [Armenians], be expanded to also apply to their women and children and that it be applied by reliable officials."29 Such was the coded paraphrase of an extermination order. The Ministry of the Interior expressed a very similar view on 18 November 1915, when it ordered that the children of Armenian notables be collected in their respective provinces and deported as well.30 The Ministry also opposed the admission of Armenian children into Muslim families, whether as servants or ‘adopted31.’ Talat personally ordered the governor of Aleppo, Mustafa Abdülhalik, to deport the orphans from Aleppo on 21 September 1915 and categorically rejected the establishment of an orphanage in the provincial capital: "There is no need for such an orphanage. It is not the time for expending one’s time [and energy] on the provisioning and preserving of the [orphans’] lives out of some sensitivity [to their plight]. We eagerly await [your] reporting on their deportation. Send them [to the desert] and let us know."32
The mortality rate in the state-run Ottoman ‘homes’ was, probably intentionally, between 50 to 90 percent. At least one out of every two orphans perished there as a result of neglect and starvation. In the capital town of Mezre in the province of Mamuret ül-Aziz (also Harput-Mezre; today Elazıg), after the general deportation of the Armenian population, 500 boys between the ages of four and eight were rounded up in the countryside or in the abandoned neighborhoods of the city and placed in so-called orphanages. These homes were in fact abandoned houses where the children were left without food and water. "In three days, 200 of them perished. The missionaries (…) were not allowed to visit these ‘institutions.’ The odor of the children’s rotting corpses led to protests from the Turkish population, which demanded that the authorities bring this experiment to an end. The surviving children were ultimately deported to the southwest on 22 October. Those who did not die on the road were thrown into the Euphrates at Izoli, a short distance from Malatia [Trk. Malatya].”33
Finally, not even the Germans, who were allied with the Ottoman Empire in the war, were allowed to maintain orphanages for Armenian children. In January 1916, pressure mounted on the Danish director of the orphanage run by the German Hilfsbund für christliches Liebeswerk im Orient [German Relief Association for Christian Charity in the Orient] in Mezre. The director finally relented and turned over 300 boys to the authorities in exchange for a solemn assurance "that these children would be taken safely and unharmed to their destination." Two days later, two of the orphans returned to the German orphanage "covered with sweat from running for so long" and informed their former protectors that "their comrades were being burned alive" two hours away from Mezre. Director Genny Jansen confessed that at first she did not believe a word of this "very incredible story," but when she went with the German sisters the next day to the place the orphans had described, she found a "still smoldering black heap" and the "poor children's charred skeletons."34 Instances of burning Christian children alive or drowning them were not isolated cases limited to Mezre. Most orphans, however, ended up in private families, despite orders to the contrary from the Young Turk Ministry of the Interior. Apart from isolated cases of genuine altruism, they were exploited or abused as laborers and sexual slaves.
The initiatives of German private individuals as well as diplomats such as Martha Koch or Consul Walter Rössler (Aleppo) or Liman von Sanders in Panormos have to be considered against the background of such a genocidal, at best assimilationist orphan policy. As persons with direct knowledge of local conditions, and without any illusions, they were obviously intent on protecting Christian orphans – Armenian children in Aleppo, Greek and Armenian in Panormos – from state ‘treatment’ or an uncertain fate on the streets.35 Unfortunately, I am not aware of any other sources on the further course of the orphanages in Panormos.
To conclude, let me quote the German military surgeon and Pomeranian regional poet Theo(dor) Malade (1869-1944), who became well acquainted with Liman von Sanders at his headquarters in Panormos between mid-November 1916 and March 1917. His report illustrates the circumstances under which Liman von Sanders lived and worked there. In his war diary, Malade describes him as a generous, humanitarian-minded person who was particularly concerned about the deported Armenians, but also about the Greek population. Panormos also served as a transit station for Greeks deported to Anatolia. Before Theo Malade's arrival, 7,000 Greeks had been deported from Panormos proper, and Liman von Sanders (whom the German ambassador classified as “pro-Greek”) had been unable to prevent their expulsion.
Malade's account is all the more credible because it does not seek to idealize Liman; nor does not seek to idealize Liman; nor does it omit mention of his weakness for a favored nurse or Liman’s resentment of Malade. Apparently Liman was not not capable of dealing with Malade's criticisms.
Marshal Liman von Sanders in Panormos, November 1916.
"It was not until about ten o'clock in the evening, after a five-hour drive [from Constantinople], that we stopped before the lights of Panderma rising in terraces in the darkness.
An orderly was waiting for me at the bridge: I was to come immediately to the commander-in-chief, the Ottoman Marshal Liman von Sanders, chief of the German military mission. I was quite eager to meet the man whose character was judged so diversely according to different people’s opinions, but who after all bore the not insignificant distinction of being the victorious defender of the Dardanelles, but I was sorely disappointed: a stocky old gentleman with a wobbling head who embarrassingly avoids looking you in the eye. He seemed very worried about the nurse who looks after the small barracks hospital on the top of the bluff and provides him important support in caring for the population. She had apparently contracted poisoning. He also personally took care of my accommodation. These are signs of great kindness. It is said, however, that it easily turns into the opposite, especially if he somehow senses criticism of his private life ...
I am here in the staff of the Dardanelles Army, in the very midst of the German military mission. The Marshal lives on his own ... Panderma is situated on a large oval bay with partly steep, mountainous shores and should make an ideal war port. My barracks are set up a bit distant, right at the edge of the sea. Right before me, the blue, long waves roll in majestic force and above them a refreshing sea breeze blows constantly. Behind it rises the city, which probably counts 40,000 inhabitants. Thanks to strict hygienic regulations, it makes a clean impression, but typhoid fever is endemic. The clean facade, however, cannot hide the hardship the population suffers. Food, although about half as cheap as in Constantinople, is hard to come by. Above all, with the onset of cold weather, the lack of coal is very noticeable. It is not possible to determine how much of the blame lies with the embezzlement and misappropriation of funds by Turkish authorities and officials. But in this regard, the situation is wild. For the right baksheesh one can find everything. Even the other day, when we were ordered by the Marshal to visit the displaced Armenians on the other side of the bay, we had to wait the whole morning until the government steamer had collected the necessary coals.
The Marshal does a lot of good for these unfortunates and is seeking to alleviate their distress as much as possible by means of private funds. Here at Panderma they are housed, clothed and fed under his personal care. The other day we took them large kettles of warm soup. The people were vegetating in caves and huts, half-starved and all sick. The Turks are very sensitive when one interferes in the Armenian Question. For them, the Armenian is an insidious traitor to the state, a cowardly assassin. Those with whom we came into contact with allegedly helped English submarines. All of us can counter this misery only as private persons. It is similar with the Greeks, who are likewise arch enemies of the Turks. Some time ago, 7000 Greeks were expelled and shipped out of Panderma within an hour. The worst of it is: the rumor is being circulated, even if not officially, but left unchallenged, that the Germans ordered these persecutions. The German High Command lodged an official, serious objection to this…
I am clear about my task here. I have contacted the civil authorities, been in the prisons, the public buildings, in all the caves and shelters, and I know the health conditions. Up in the Greek school I found an unexpectedly good military hospital with suitable rooms for a bacteriological laboratory. The doctors are all Greeks, intelligent, industrious people, greatly intimidated, slaves of the Turkish military authorities, exploited in every respect, always under the Damocles sword of deportation."36
1. Christoph Dinkel, German Officers and the Armenian Genocide, in: Armenian Review 44 (1991), Nr. 1/173, S. 77-133; Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity, Watertown 1995; Wolfgang Gust, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern. Die Tragödie des ältesten Christenvolkes der Welt, München 1993; Der Völkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16. Dokumente aus dem Politischen Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Springe 2005; Hans Lukas Kieser/Dominik Schaller (Hrsg.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoa, Zürich 2002; Rolf Hosfeld, Tod in der Wüste: Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, München 2015.
2. Gottschlich, Jürgen: Beihilfe zum Völkermord: Deutschlands Rolle bei der Vernichtung der Armenier, Berlin 2015; Gottschlich, Jürgen: Die Deutschen und der Völkermord. „Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung“, 26. April 2016, https://www.bpb.de/geschichte/zeitgeschichte/genozid-an-den-armeniern/218106/deutschlands-rolle
3. J. Gottschlich, Beihilfe zum Völkermord, p. 108
4. Correspondence by Muriel Mirak-Weißbach an Tessa Hofmann, 28 April 2021, p. 2
5. Otto Liman von Sanders, Fünf Jahre Türkei, Berlin 1920, p. 201
6. Ibid.
7. W. Gust, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, p. 278
8. The ancient town of Kydonies/Kydonia is now a village located opposite the island of Lesvos, not far from the town of Ayvalık, which was built as the main port in northwestern Asia Minor in the third decade of the 19th century.
9. Caroll N. Brown/Theodore P. Ion, Persecutions of the Greeks in Turkey since the Beginning of the European War; translated from official Greek documents. New York 1918, p. XIV f. https://archive.org/details/persecutionsofgr00greece/page/20/mode/2up?q=Liman.
10. Kaiserliche Botschaft in Konstantinopel, Anlage II zu Bericht Nr. 550, 4. 9.1915, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Türkei Nr. 168, Bd. 14, f. Bd. 15, quoted from: Konstantinos Emm. Fotiadis, Der Genozid an den Pontosgriechen. Bd. 12: Unveröffentlichte Dokumente aus den Archiven Deutschlands, Österreichs, Italiens und des Vatikan, Thessaloniki 2003, p. 90
11. Cf. http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/armgende.nsf/$$AllDocs/1916-11-12-DE-001;
http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/armgende.nsf/$$AllDocs/1916-11-17-DE-001
12. Der Völkermord an den Armeniern vor Gericht: Der Prozess Talaat Pascha. Neuauflage hrsg. und eingeleitet von Tessa Hofmann im Auftrag der Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, 2nd, expanded ed., Göttingen 1980, p. 62f.
13. This figure by Liman differs from that of Johannes Lepsius, which is about half as. The German documentarist of the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, offered these figures: "Smyrna has among 210,000 inhabitants only 52,000 Turks, against 108,000 Greeks, 15,000 Armenians, 23,000 Jews, 6,500 Italians, 2,500 French, 2,200 Austrians and 800 English (mostly Maltese). The dominant language is not Turkish, but Greek. Armenians have a very significant share in the trade. For the most part, imports into the interior are in their hands." Cf. Lepsius, Johannes: Der Todesgang des Armenischen Volks; Bericht über das Schicksal des Armenischen Volkes in der Türkei während des Weltkrieges. Potsdam, 1930; Reprint Heidelberg: Deutsch-Armenische Gesellschaft, 1980, p. 129. Based on the official Ottoman salmane (statistical yearbook), the German consulate at Smyrna estimated in 1909 that at the beginning of the 20th century Smyrna’s overall population was 300,000 with a relative Greek-Orthodox majority of 140,000 and a minority of 90,000 Muslims. - Report of 18 November 1909 by the Imperial consul Mordtmann (Smyrna): German diplomatic documents; Annual commercial rapports of the Imperial Consulate of Smyrna. Quoted from: Georgelin, Hervé: Smyrne, septembre 1922 : une cité grecque-orthodoxe et arménienne non assimilable par le nationalisme turc. « Yevrobatsi », 3 Décembre 2005, footnote 2, http://www.yevrobatsi.org/st/item.php?r=0&id=1086. – Note that Ottoman statistics were based on the millet-system, giving figures for ethno-religious groups (Muslims, Christian denominations, Jews) only.
14. http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/armgende.nsf/$$AllDocs/1916-11-17-DE-001
15. In his memoirs, Liman von Sanders does not mention the deportation of April 1917, but wrote in connection with his inspection trip to Ayvalık in the summer of 1915 that "the German in Turkey" can be "subjected to virtually senseless attacks" and gave the following example: "In the summer of the same year, during the Dardanelles battles, I received a letter from the German ambassador, by which King Constantine of Greece inquired whether I had actually told the mayor of Edremid 'that all Greeks deserved to be thrown into the sea'. Now, I had neither seen nor spoken to the mayor of Edremid, nor any similar personage, during the short stay in the said city, and, of course, I had not made any statements about the Greeks, with whom I had nothing to do there. I could therefore reject this shameless invention with a few words. (...) As a Turkish general, I was a stumbling block to various fanatical Greeks." Liman von Sanders, Fünf Jahre Türkei p. 70 f.
16. W. Gust, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, p. 279
17. Telegram from the German Ambassador to Constantinople, 7 April 1917, forwarded by State Secretary Arthur Zimmermann on 8 April 1917, Political Archives of the Foreign Office, File Turkey (Türkei), No. 168, Vol. 15 and 16. Cited by K. E. Fotiadis, Der Genozid an den Pontosgriechen, p. 150f.
18. Ibid.
19. According to Liman's own account, this return was on the orders of the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior.
20. W. Gust, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern p. 279
21. Austrian Ambassador Trautmannsdorf in his telegram of 3 April 1917, Vienna, HHStA, Turkey (Türkei) XII, liasse 467 LIV. Quoted after: K. E. Fotiadis, Der Genozid an den Pontosgriechen, p. 312f.
22. Kévorkian, op. cit., p. 569
23. In contemporary Greek texts, ‘Christians’ is synonymous with Greeks, or more precisely, Greek Orthodox Christians or members of the "rum millet," the "(Eastern) Roman" faith nation.
24. Known in Turkish as Devşirme (from devşirmek / دوشيرمك / 'to pick, to gather'); also ‘boys’ toll’. The term refers to the enlistment or forced recruitment and conversion practiced primarily in the Ottoman-controlled Balkans, but also in Anatolia, from the late 14th to the early 18th century, in which Christian, predominantly male youths were abducted from their families and forcibly Islamized for subsequent use in the military and administrative service of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, the Ottoman elite force of the Janissaries was at times recruited primarily from the ‘boys' gathering’.
25. Brown/Ion, Persecutions of the Greeks, op. cit., p. 19f.
26. Nazan Maksudyan, Orphans, Cities, and the State: Vocational Orphanages (Islahhanes) and ’Reform‘ in the Late Ottoman Urban Spaces. ”International Journal of the Middle East Studies“ 43/3 (2011), p. 493-511; Nazan Maksudyan, Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire, Syracuse 2014
27. Nazan Maksudyan, Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I., Syracuse/New York 2019, p. 25
28. Ibid.
29. Taner Akçam, Killing Orders: Talat Pasha‘s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide,Cham, Switzerland 2018, p. 179.
30. Ibid., p. 178.
31. Ibid. The Ottoman legal system did not know any formal adoption and did not possess any right of adoption. There was the traditional institution of emahnah Allah (literally: safekeeping in God's faithful hands; freely translated: ‘God's pledge’).
32. T. Akçam, Killing Orders, p. 184.
33. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, London/New York 2011, p. 395
34. Ibid.
35. Cf. Tessa Hofmann, Christian Orphans in the Late Ottoman Empire (1914-1922) and the C.U.P. and Kemalist Policy of Forcible Child Transfer: A Comparative Documentation. “Asiatica: Труды по философии и культурам Востока“, Tom 14, No. 2, 2020, pp 50-123;
https://www.academia.edu/44578921/Christian_Orphans_in_the_Late_Ottoman_Empire_1914_1922_and_the_C_U_P_and_Kemalist_Policy_of_Forcible_Child_Transfer_A_Comparative_Documentation?auto=download
36. Theo Malade, Von Amiens bis Aleppo: Ein Beitrag zur Seelenkunde des Großen Krieges; aus dem Tagebuch eines Feldarztes, München 1930, p. 174ff.
