Rohrbach[36], after personal investigation,
describes as "an institution to be welcomed as unreservedly from the
national as from the humanitarian point of view."

"The factory," he remarks, "not only provides work and bread for 400
persons, but has transplanted one of the most profitable and promising
industries of the East into the sphere traversed by the German Railway,
where German interests are predominant."

He prophesies that the whole carpet industry of Western Asia, "from
which English and other foreign firms in Smyrna now draw such enormous
profits," will soon be concentrated round Urfa in German hands. From
Armenia's evil, apparently, springs Germany's good--but in 1911 Dr.
Rohrbach did not foresee the catastrophe of 1915.

"For the rise of the carpet industry," our German memorialised writes,
"Turkey has to thank capitalists and exporters who are almost all
Armenians, Greeks, Jews, or Europeans. Like the cotton cultivation
introduced by Germany into Cilicia, this carpet industry, in the eastern
provinces, has been deprived of the hands essential to it by the
Armenian deportations."

Eye-witnesses at Urfa describe how the Armenian community there was
massacred in 1915--the third time in twenty years, and this time to
extinction--and it points the irony of the situation that the Turkish
guns were served by German artillerymen[37].

"I have nothing to say," writes Dr. Niepage, the German teacher from
Aleppo, "about the opinion of the German officers in Turkey. I often
noticed among them an ominous silence or a convulsive effort to change
the subject, when any German of warm feelings and independent judgment
talked in their presence of the fearful sufferings of the Armenians."

This moral bankruptcy is more fatal to the future of Germany in Western
Asia than all the material havoc which the Armenian deportations have
caused. For Dr. Niepage is convinced that the blood of the Armenians
will be on Germany's head:

"'The teaching of the Germans,' is the simple Turk's explanation, ...
and more sensitive Mohammedans, Turks and Arabs alike, cannot believe
that their own Government has ordered these horrors. They lay all
excesses at the Germans' door, for the Germans, during the War, are
regarded as Turkey's schoolmasters in everything. The mollahs declare in
the mosques that the German officers, and not the Sublime Porte, have
ordered the maltreatment and extermination of the Armenians.... Others
say: 'Perhaps