Henry Morgenthau

“ I can hardly exaggerate the effect which the repulse of the Allied fleet produced upon the Turks. They believed that they had won the really great decisive battle of the war. For several centuries, they said, the British fleet had victoriously sailed the seas, and, had now met its first serious reverse at the hands of the Turks. In the first moments of their pride the Young Turk leaders now saw visions of the complete resurrection of their Empire. What had for two centuries been a decaying nation had suddenly started on a new and glorious life. ”

“ Russia was the historic enemy, the nation which had given freedom to Bulgaria and Rumania, which had been most active in dismembering the Ottoman Empire, and which regarded herself as the nation that was ultimately to possess Constantinople. This fear of Russia, I cannot too much insist, was the one factor which, above everything else, was forcing Turkey into the arms of Germany. For more than half a century Turkey had regarded England as her surest safeguard against Russian aggression, and now England had become Russia’s virtual ally. ”

“ As contrasted with Enver’s palace, with its innumerable rooms and gorgeous furniture, Talaat’s house was an old rickety, wooden, three-storey building. All this, I afterwards learned, was part of the setting which Talaat had staged for his career. Like many an American politician, he had found his position as a man of “the people” a valuable political asset, and he knew that a sudden display of prosperity and ostentation would weaken his influence with the Union and Progress Committee, most of whose members, like himself, had risen from the lower walks of life. ”

“ Arabs, bootless and shoeless, dressed in their most gaily-coloured garments, with long linen bags, containing the required five days’ rations, thrown over their shoulders, shambling in their gait and bewildered in their manner, touched shoulders with equally dispirited Bedouins, evidently suddenly snatched from the desert. A motley aggregation of Turks, Circassians, Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, and Jews, showing signs of having been summarily taken from their farms and shops, constantly jostled one another. ”

“ The United States gave us a friendly reception and a home, and made us prosperous and happy. There are many millions just like us; there is no business opportunity and no social position that is not open to us. I do not believe that there is a more contented people in the world than the so-called German-Americans. We have one loyalty and one love, and that is for the United States. Take my children—they are German-Americans of the second generation. Their sympathies all through this war have been with England and her Allies. ”

“ All Mohammedans, young and old, men, women, and children, must fulfil their duty so that the gleam may not fade away, but give light to us forever. How many great things can be accomplished by the arms of vigorous men, by the aid of others, of women and children!... The time for action has come. We shall all have to fight with all our strength, with all our soul, with teeth and nails, with all the sinews of our bodies and of our spirits. If we do it, the deliverance of the subjected Mohammedan kingdoms is assured. ”

“ The more educated Turks, including Enver, realised that the outside world regarded them as a people who had no respect for the sacredness of human life or the finer emotions, and they keenly resented this attitude. I now reminded Enver that Turkey had a splendid opportunity to disprove all these criticisms. “The world may say you are barbarians,” I argued; “show by the way you treat these alien enemies that you are not. Only in this way can you be freed permanently from the ignominy of the capitulations. Prove that you are worthy of being emancipated from foreign tutelage. ”

“ Imagine a great Government, year in and year out, maintaining this attitude toward many millions of its own subjects! And for centuries the Turks simply lived like parasites upon these overburdened and industrious people. They taxed them to economic extinction, stole their most beautiful daughters and forced them into their harems, took Christian male infants by the hundreds of thousands and brought them up as Moslem soldiers. ”

“ You have told me many times that you want to make Turkey a part of the modern progressive world. The way you are treating the Armenians will not help you to realise that ambition; it puts you in the class of backward, reactionary peoples.”
“We treat the Americans all right, too,” said Talaat, “I don’t see why you should complain.”
“But Americans are outraged at your persecutions of the Armenians,” I replied. “You must base your principles on humanitarianism, not racial discrimination, or the United States will not regard you as a friend and an equal. ”

“ Ye who are smitten with happiness and are on the verge of sacrificing your life and your goods for the cause of right, and of braving perils, gather now around the Imperial throne, obey the commands of the Almighty, who, in the Koran, promises us bliss in this and in the next world; embrace ye the foot of the Caliph’s throne, and know ye that the State is at war with Russia, England, France, and their allies, and that these are the enemies of Islam. ”

“ A GERMAN SUPERMAN AT CONSTANTINOPLE I AM writing these reminiscences of my ambassadorship at a moment when Germany’s schemes in the Turkish Empire and the Near East have achieved an apparent success. The Central Powers have disintegrated Russia, have transformed the Baltic and the Black Seas into German lakes, and have obtained a new route to the East by way of the Caucasus. Germany now dominates Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Turkey, and regards her aspirations for a new Teutonic Empire, extending from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf, as practically realised. ”

“ The races which had been maltreated and massacred for centuries by the Turks’ could not transform themselves overnight into brothers, and the hatreds, jealousies, and religious prejudices of the past still divided Turkey into a medley of warring clans. Above all, the destructive wars and the loss of great sections of the Turkish Empire had destroyed the prestige of the new democracy. ”

“ I had always remarked that the Turks regard practically every question as a personal matter, yet this point of view rather stunned me. It was, however, a complete revelation of Turkish mentality; the fact that, above all considerations of race and religion, there are such things as humanity and civilisation never for a moment enters their mind. They can understand a Christian fighting for a Christian and a Jew fighting for a Jew, but such abstractions as justice and decency form no part of their conception of things. ”

“ Thus Wangenheim’s mission was to make it absolutely certain that Turkey should join Germany in the great contest that was impending.
Wangenheim believed that, should he succeed in accomplishing this task, he would reap the reward which for years had represented his final goal—the Chancellorship of the Empire. His skill at establishing personal relations with the Turks gave him a great advantage over his rivals. Wangenheim had precisely that combination of force, persuasiveness, geniality, and brutality needed in dealing with the Turkish character. ”

“ He saw a Government which the first enterprising man who came along might seize, and he determined to be that man. Of all the Turkish politicians I met, I regarded Talaat as the only one who really had extraordinary innate ability. He had great force and dominance, the ability to think quickly and accurately, and an almost superhuman insight into men’s motives. His great geniality and his lively sense of humour also made him a splendid manager of men. He showed his shrewdness in the measures which he took, after the murder of Nazim, to gain the upper hand in this distracted Empire. ”

“ Undoubtedly religious fanaticism was an impelling motive with the Turkish and Kurdish rabble who slew Armenians as a service to Allah, but the men who really conceived the crime had no such motive. Practically all of them were atheists, with no more respect for Mohammedanism than for Christianity, and with them the one motive was a cold-blooded, calculating state policy.
The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey who have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. ”

“ Yet Djemal’s expedition represented Turkey’s most spectacular attempt to assert its military power against the Allies. As Djemal moved out of the station, the whole Turkish populace felt that an historic moment had arrived. Turkey in less than a century had lost the greater part of her dominions, and nothing had more pained the national pride than the English occupation of Egypt. All during this occupation, Turkish suzerainty had been recognised; as soon as Turkey declared war on Great Britain, however, the British had ended this fiction and had formally taken over this great province. ”

“ The descendants of Osman hardly resemble any people I have ever known. They do not hate, they do not love; they have no lasting animosities or affections. They only fear. And naturally they attribute to others the motives which regulate their own conduct. “How stupid you are!” Wangenheim would tell Talaat and Enver, discussing the English attitude. “Don’t you see why the English want you to keep out? It is because they fear you. Don’t you see that, with the help of Germany, you have again become a great military power? No wonder England doesn’t want to fight you!” ”

“ It is absolutely true that I am not opposed to the Armenians as a people. I have the greatest admiration for their intelligence and industry, and I should like nothing better than to see them become a real part of our nation. ”

“ In a speech in Liberty Square, Saloniki, in July, 1908, Enver Pasha, who was popularly regarded as the chivalrous young leader of this insurrection against a century-old tyranny, had eloquently declared that, “To-day arbitrary government has disappeared. We are all brothers. There are no longer in Turkey Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbians, Rumanians, Mussulmans, Jews. Under the same blue sky we are all proud to be Ottomans.” That statement represented the Young Turk ideal for the new Turkish state, but it was an ideal which it was evidently beyond their ability to translate into a reality. ”

“ If we are properly to appreciate this new Talaat and Enver, and the events which now took place, we must understand the Turk who, under Osman and his successor, exercised this mighty but devastating influence in the world. We must realise that the basic fact underlying the Turkish mentality is its utter contempt for all other races. A fairly insane pride is the element that largely explains this strange human species. ”

“ Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915. ”

“ National policy: that is the profound moral reason why we must, as statesmen, show ourselves indifferent to the sufferings of the Christian peoples of Turkey, however painful that may be to our human feelings.... That is our duty, which we must recognise and confess before God and before man. If for this reason we now maintain the existence of the Turkish state, we do it in our own self-interest, because what we have in mind is our great future.... On one side lie our duties as a nation, on the other our duties as men. ”

“ The Young Turks, as I have said, believed that while they were at war with these nations they had no representatives in Turkey who could interfere with their internal affairs. Only one Power could successfully raise objections, and that was Germany. But Germany had never attempted to stop massacres in Turkey. In 1898, when all the rest of Europe was ringing with Gladstone’s denunciations and demanding intervention, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second had gone to Constantinople, visited Abdul Hamid, pinned his finest decorations on that bloody tyrant’s breast, and kissed him on both cheeks. ”

“ You don’t think that the United States will fight. You don’t understand President Wilson; you think that he is an idealist and a peace man, and that under no circumstances will he take up arms. You are making the greatest and most costly mistake that any nation could make. ”

“ Most of us believe that torture has long ceased to be an administrative and judicial measure, yet I do not believe that the darkest ages ever presented scenes more horrible than those which now took place all over Turkey. Nothing was sacred to the Turkish gendarmes; under the plea of searching for hidden arms they ransacked churches, treated the altars and sacred utensils with the utmost indignities, and even held mock ceremonies in imitation of the Christian sacraments. ”

“ Though Talaat, Enver, and Djemal all came of the humblest families, the same fundamental ideas of master and slave possessed them that formed the statecraft of Osman and the early Sultans. We now discovered that a paper constitution, and even tearful visits to Christian churches and cemeteries, could not uproot the inborn preconception of this nomadic people, that there are only two kinds of people in the world—the conquering and the conquered. ”

“ The only important thing is to win. That’s the only thing we have on our mind. If we win, everything will be all right; if we lose, everything will be all wrong, anyhow. Our situation is desperate, I admit it, and we are fighting as desperate men fight. We are not going to let the Armenians attack us in the rear.”
The question of relief to the starving Armenians became every week a move pressing one. Enver still insisted that Americans should keep away from the Armenian provinces.
“How can we furnish bread to the Armenians,” Enver declared, “when we can’t get it for our own people? ”

“ In November Wangenheim began discussing this subject. It was part of Germany’s system, he told me, not only to be completely prepared for war, but also for peace. “A wise general, when he begins his campaign, always has at hand his plans for a retreat, in case he is defeated,” said the German Ambassador. “This principle applies just the same to a nation beginning war. There is only one certainty about war—and that is that it must end some time. So, when we plan war, we must consider also a campaign for peace.” ”

“ Indeed, in all his activities, grave and gay, Wangenheim displayed this same restless spirit of the chase. Whether he was flirting with the Greek ladies at Pera, or spending hours over the card-table at the Cercle d’Orient, or bending the Turkish officials to his will in the interest of Germany, all life was to him a game, which was to be played more or less recklessly, and in{5} which the chances favoured the man who was bold and audacious and willing to pin success or failure on a single throw. ”

“ The practical effect of the event, as I have said, was to isolate the Turkish Empire from all the world, excepting Germany and Austria. England, France, Russia, and Italy, which for a century had held a threatening hand over the Ottoman Empire, had now lost all power to influence or control. The Turks now perceived that a series of dazzling events had changed them from cringing dependents of the European Powers into free agents. For the first time in two centuries they could now live their national life according to their own inclinations and govern their peoples according to their own will. ”

“ For a large part the Armenians are not agriculturists; their talents are chiefly for business and commercial life; though many of them do cultivate farms and engage in sheep-herding, many lived in cities and large towns, and, as I have already said, they represent the economic force of the country. To seize such peoples by the million and send them into one of the most barren parts of Asia would have been an act of the most inhuman spoliation. As a matter of fact, the Turks never had the slightest idea of re-establishing the Armenians in this new country. ”

“ Indeed, I might rewrite all these interviews with Enver, use the word Belgium in place of Armenia, put the words in a German general’s mouth instead of Enver’s, and we should have almost a complete exposition of the German attitude toward subject peoples. But the teachings of the Prussians go deeper than this. There was one feature about the Armenian proceedings that was new, that was not Turkish at all. For centuries the Turks have ill-treated their Armenians and all their other subject peoples with inconceivable barbarity. Yet their methods have always been crude, clumsy, and unscientific. ”