Germans Help Turks In Deportation of Greeks

The Lincoln Daily Star, October 28th 1917, page 13.

Germans Help Turks In Deportation of Greeks
ATHENS, Greece, Oct. 27.—Greek authorities have received information which convinces them that not alone the Turk but his German advisors were responsible for the deportations of Greeks from Turkish dominions, as a consequence of which 700,000 have suffered persecution or death.
It is asserted that the Greek legation at Constantinople protested to the then King Constantine of Greece from the beginning of the deportations but received no assistance or encouragement from him. The legation then lodged a protest with Talaat Bey, the Turkish grand vizier.
His reply, as shown by official papers was that “these measures are taken by advice of our German advisors.” The Greek legation then took up the subject with the German general, Liman von Sanders, who is deciated to have replied that the presence of the Greek communities within the Ottoman Empire was dangerous to military operations and that he was “only executing the orders of the German general staff.”
An account of the persecution of the Greeks which has been given to The Associated Press states:
“The method of depopulation adopted has been very similar to the method adopted with regard to the Armenian races. During the night, armed irregular troops of the Turkish army would form a cordon around the doomed district. The inhabitants would be awakened by means of bells and ordered to evacuate the village in ten minutes, for military reasons. No extension of time was allowed, one object being that the victims should not be able to take anything with them, either food or goods. In the event of delay, the troops drove forth the terrified people at the point of the bayonet.
Bandits Loot Homes.
“The moment that the people had gone, hordes of bandits and irregular soldiers poured into the empty villages and looted and burned the houses in a frenzy of destruction, while the inhabitants, old men, women and children as well as the ablebodied, were on the march.
“Soon after the match began, the process of extermination began to be put into effect. Men were separated from their women and children, and parties were made up for a trek to various places, usually locations in far-distant parts of Asia Minor. Needless to say, few of these parties ever reached their destination, being gradually killed off by exposure or starvation. Thousands died in barren desert lands. Without food or drink, and poorly clad, a speedy death at the hands of soldiers would have been welcomed by many. The soldiers, however seldom attempted direct killings at this stage, except of refugees who attempted escape, the soldiery generally being content to let hunger and thirst and exposure do the work of extermination for them.
“The lot of the women and children was the usual one, which has been described many times in accounts of the Armenian deportations. Being defenseless, they fell a prey to the first passer-by. Any Turk along the way who fancied a child or a young woman, merely took possession, and thousands of young Greeks are now interned to Mussulman villages, forcibly “converted” to Islam and forced to live as servants or concubines of the Turkish peasantry.
“In the neighborhood of Constantinople, many of the deporters managed to return and appeared in the streets of the capital, starving, begging and sleeping in the back streets and alleys. government had the police collect hundreds of these wretched persons and concentrated them at Pancaldi, where their fate is not yet known.”
It is declared that, as a result of these deportations, all Greek communities have been eliminated in the Thracian regions of Demotica, Sufli, Istranja, and Eregli, from the coast of the sea of Marmora, from the peninsula of Artaki, from all the villages along the Bosphorus and from the coast of the Black Sea.