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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 han 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 civilization 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 agonizing 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.
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 Baghdad 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 chance 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 Baghdad 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 degrees 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.
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 Baghdad 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 stem 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 civilized 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 farsighted as is said, can they blind themselves to the danger that, when the civilized States of Europe have taken cognizance 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 civilization?
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, however painful they are. Nothing could put us more to shame than the erection at Constantinople of a Turco-German palace of friendship at huge expense, while we are not in a position to shield our fellow Christians from barbarities unparalleled even in the bloodstained history of Turkey...
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 organized 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, in May, 1916, the crowds of exiles encamped at Ras-el-din on the Baghdad Railway, estimated at 20,000 women and children, were slaughtered to the last one.
Source: Source Records of the Great War, Vol. III, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923
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 han 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 civilization 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 agonizing 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.
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 Baghdad 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 chance 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 Baghdad 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 degrees 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.
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 Baghdad 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 stem 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 civilized 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 farsighted as is said, can they blind themselves to the danger that, when the civilized States of Europe have taken cognizance 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 civilization?
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, however painful they are. Nothing could put us more to shame than the erection at Constantinople of a Turco-German palace of friendship at huge expense, while we are not in a position to shield our fellow Christians from barbarities unparalleled even in the bloodstained history of Turkey...
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 organized 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, in May, 1916, the crowds of exiles encamped at Ras-el-din on the Baghdad Railway, estimated at 20,000 women and children, were slaughtered to the last one.
Source: Source Records of the Great War, Vol. III, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923