His correspondent at the State Department in Washington was Allen Dulles. After the Paris conference, Dulles had served briefly as chief of staff to Bristol, then moved on to Washington to become chief of the State Department’s Near East desk just as “oleaginous diplomacy” was reaching its heyday.
Dulles supported Bristol’s initiatives. “Confidentially the State Department is in a bind. Our task would be simple if the reports of the atrocities could be declared untrue or even exaggerated but the evidence, alas, is irrefutable,” Dulles wrote in reply to Bristol’s requests for State Department intervention with U.S. publishers to shift the tone of news reports still dribbling out of Turkey and Armenia. “[T]he Secretary of State wants to avoid giving the impression that while the United States is willing to intervene actively to protect its commercial interests, it is not willing to move on behalf of the Christian minorities.” Dulles went on to complain about the agitation in the U.S. on behalf of Armenians, Greeks, and Palestinian Jews. “I’ve been kept busy trying to ward off congressional resolutions of sympathy for these groups.”18
The change in the U.S. government’s response to the Armenian massacres presents an acute example of the conflicts that often shape U.S. foreign policy. From 1914 to 1919, the U.S. government and public opinion sharply condemned the Turkish massacres. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau repeatedly intervened with the Turkish government to protest the killings, raised funds for refugee relief, and mobilized opposition to the genocide. A close review of the declassified State Department archives of the period shows that much of the government’s internal reporting on Turkey was strongly sympathetic to the Armenians throughout the war and the first months after the war.19
The Western press, too, was overwhelmingly favorable to the Armenians and hostile to the Turkish government. One recent study by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin found that between April and December of 1915, the New York Times published more than 100 articles concerning the massacres when the killings were at their height. All of the Times coverage was sympathetic to the Armenians, and most of the news stories appeared on the front page or the first three pages of the newspaper. A roughly similar pattern can be found in publications such as the New York Herald Tribune, Boston Herald, and Atlantic Monthly and in the journals of various Christian missionary societies.20 The volume of news coverage rose and fell with events over the next five years, but on the whole it remained strongly sympathetic to the Armenians.21
Yet a remarkable shift in U.S. media content and government behavior took place as the new Harding administration established itself in 1921. “Those who underestimate the power of commerce in the history of the Middle East cannot have studied the postwar situation in Turkey between 1918 and 1923,” Dobkin writes. “There were, of course, other political factors that proved disastrous for the Armenians … but the systematic effort (chiefly by the Harding administration) to turn U.S. public opinion towards Turkey was purely and simply motivated by the desire to beat the [rival Associated] Powers to what were thought of as the vast, untapped resources of that country, and chiefly the oil.”22
“It was not possible to bring about the desired change in public opinion without denigrating what the Armenians had suffered,” she continues. Retired U.S. Admiral William Colby Chester joined Admiral Mark Bristol as a leading public spokesman for reconciliation with Turkey. Chester was not a disinterested party. The Turkish government had granted him an oil concession in Iraq that was potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Writing in the influential journal Current History, Chester contended that the Armenians had been deported not to deserts, but to “the most delightful and fertile parts of Syria … at great expense of money and effort”—a claim that went well beyond even what the Kemal government was willing to argue.23 Dobkin reports that missionary leaders such as Cleveland Dodge and George Plimpton, who had once been instrumental in documenting the genocide, began to lend their names to publicity insisting that the reported Turkish excesses had been “greatly exaggerated.”24
By mid-1923, the complex and interlocking challenges created by the demands for justice in the wake of the Armenian Genocide, on the one hand, and U.S. political and commercial interests in Turkey, on the other, had been settled in favor of a de facto U.S. alliance with the new Kemalist government. The day-to-day details of the U.S. diplomatic shift in favor of Kemal were handled by Ambassador Joseph Grew (who will reappear later in this narrative as acting secretary of state during a pivotal moment in World War II) and the chief of the Near East desk at State, Allen Dulles. The U.S., which had been the principal international supporter of the nascent Armenian Republic, withdrew its promises of aid and protection. Mustafa Kemal soon succeeded through force of arms in suppressing Armenia and in establishing a new Turkish government at Ankara. In July 1923, the Turks and the European allies signed a new agreement, replacing the aborted Treaty of Sèvres with the Treaty of Lausanne.25 Western governments agreed to new Turkish borders, officially recognized Kemal’s government, abandoned any claim on behalf of an Armenian republic, and specifically agreed to an amnesty for all Ittihadists who had been convicted in the earlier trials.26
As things turned out, many of the top Ittihadists who fled Turkey in 1918 were assassinated by Armenian commandos. Talaat, the minister of internal affairs and grand vizier of the Ittihad state, was shot in Berlin on March 15, 1921. Behaeddin Sakir (Chakir), a senior member of the “Commission of Supply,” which had coordinated much of the extermination campaign, and Djemal Azmy, military governor during the height of the killings in Trebizond, were killed in Berlin on April 17, 1922. Enver, the former minister of war, is said to have been killed by the Soviet army in Bukhara in 1922, though many of the details of his death remain uncertain. Djemal, who with Talaat and Enver had constituted the ruling triumvirate of the Ittihad state, was gunned down in July 1922 in Tiflis. He was on his way to a trade conference in Berlin, where he was to buy weapons for the Afghan army.27
Armenians lost a great deal under the terms of the Lausanne treaty while Western commercial interests prospered. The new Turkish leader Kemal agreed to relinquish all claims on the territories of the old Ottoman Empire outside Turkish borders, thus formally opening the door to the Anglo-American control of Middle East oil that was to continue with minimal change for the next fifty years. This was not a simple quid pro quo, of course. The agreement also involved other important elements, notably a settlement of most reparation claims against Turkey and an agreement between Greece and Turkey to repatriate thousands of ethnic Greeks and Turks to their respective countries of origin. There were to be several more years of squabbles before the U.S.-European disputes over the Mosul oilfields were finally settled.
The point was nonetheless clear. Western governments had discarded wartime promises of action against the Ittihadists who had murdered about a million people in order to help their political maneuvering over oil concessions in the Middle East. The dominant faction in Turkish society never accepted Armenian claims as legitimate, despite the strong evidence of genocide established by Turkey’s own courts. In fact, the Turkish government even today continues to refuse to acknowledge Ittihadist responsibility for the Armenian massacres, and has instead in recent years financed a large and sophisticated publicity campaign aimed at rewriting the history of the war years.28
As the Western powers sparred over Middle East oil, a series of events was unfolding in Germany that would test the Associated Powers’ commitment to punish war crimes. The Berlin government was hostile to the war crimes clauses that had been approved by President Wilson and the rest of the Big Four at the Paris Conference. Inside Germany, only the radical left wing favored trials of the leaders of the old regime. The German military elite, who were the main targets of the war crimes and war guilt clauses of the peace treaty, strongly opposed any cooperation with the Associated Powers in this matter. Because the newly established republican government in Germany was heavily dependent upon even lukewarm support from the military to avoid a coup, it t
oo resisted cooperation, though it continued to seek an armistice. Most German politicians and the press referred to the war crimes provisions of the Versailles Treaty as the Schamparagraphen—the shame paragraphs29—and contended that these provisions would open the way to harsh reparations.
“In the manner of waging war,” German Foreign Minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau told the delegates at Versailles, “Germany was not the only one who erred.” The Associated Powers’ blockade of German ports had continued after the armistice, prolonging the extreme food shortages in some German cities and killing hundreds of thousands of noncombatants, Brockdorff contended. Although he overestimated the number of dead and the effectiveness of the blockade, the suffering was real enough. The blockade of food had been carried out “coolly and deliberately after our opponents had won a certain and assured victory. Remember that,” he told Western leaders, “when you speak of guilt and atonement.”30 Meanwhile, the new German government created its own legal commission to refute each Allied war crimes charge, even enlisting the famous sociologist Max Weber in an effort to find a means of sidestepping responsibility for the war.31
This conflict over war crimes nearly led to the collapse of the armistice and a return to open warfare. In mid-June 1919, the Associated Powers gave the German government seven days to sign the treaty drawn up at Paris or face an invasion by Allied troops. The German cabinet refused to acquiesce, and the ruling coalition collapsed. The German defense minister warned that he had met with a group of army officers, many of whom were prepared to overthrow the government and renew the war if the treaty was signed with the Schamparagraphen intact. The Catholic Center party managed to tack together a new government on the basis of a French envoy’s promise—subsequently retracted—that the war guilt clauses would be cut from the treaty. The Vatican attempted to intervene on Germany’s behalf, but without success. Western governments then issued a new ultimatum, stating that unless the treaty was signed as it stood, their troops would march into Germany in less than twenty-four hours. Germany signed only minutes before the deadline.32
Over the next several months, the Associated Powers drew up a list of 901 Germans whom they accused of war crimes. In most instances, the offenses were quite specific: The British charged one German submarine captain, Lieutenant Commander Karl Neumann, with the deliberate sinking of the hospital ship Dover Castle on May 26, 1917—seemingly a direct violation of the Hague convention. (Neumann’s defense was that he had been ordered by his superiors to sink the ship.) They also brought an indictment against the U-boat captain responsible for the destruction of the hospital ship Llondovery Castle in June 1918, in which 234 soldiers and nurses were killed. The German captain was said to have acted in violation of direct orders not to attack the ship and was further accused of shelling the survivors’ lifeboats in order to conceal what he had done. Other cases involved gross mistreatment of prisoners and similar offenses.33
But despite the provisions of the recently signed treaty, the German government refused to turn the suspects or evidence over to military courts of the victorious powers. After much negotiation, the Allies agreed to let Germany try the accused criminals in its own courts, in a special proceeding at Leipzig.34
The Leipzig trials were a farce. Roughly half of the defendants simply “escaped,” and the court acquitted the U-boat captain, Neumann. The handful who were convicted of serious crimes, including the mass murder of unarmed prisoners, received prison sentences of less than ten months. In the Llondovery Castle case, the German court convicted two junior officers of offenses under Germany’s own military code and handed down four-year sentences. But both prisoners escaped from jail with the connivance of their guards less than six months later, made their way to asylum in Switzerland, and were hailed as heroes by the German press.35
“Thus ended the Leipzig trials,” records a United Nations report on the event. “The net result of the trials was that out of a total of 901 cases of revolting crimes brought before the Leipzig court, 888 were acquitted or summarily dismissed, and only 13 ended in a conviction; furthermore, although the sentences were so inadequate, those who had been convicted were not even made to serve their sentence. Several escaped, and the prison wardens who had engineered their escape were publicly congratulated.”36
Meanwhile, Lansing’s (and Wilson’s) position prevailed with respect to a trial for the former German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Associated Powers had agreed at Paris to a compromise provision in the Versailles Treaty calling for an arraignment of the kaiser for “a supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity of treaties”—that is, for instigating the war. This was, in truth, perhaps the weakest of the plausible charges against Wilhelm; the claim that he alone should bear responsibility for beginning the war was obviously suspect even in 1919. Be that as it may, the charges against the kaiser outlined in the treaty were offenses against moral as distinct from legal sensibilities, and there were no mechanisms for punishing him even if he was convicted. In any event, Wilhelm fled to Holland and gained asylum with the tacit cooperation of the British Foreign Office. The other Associated Powers buried their demands for a trial of the kaiser within months after having announced them.37
Taken as a whole, world experience with atrocities showed that even though these crimes were highly politicized during the war, exploited for their propaganda value, and often condemned (or justified, depending upon a government’s relationship to the atrocity) largely for political effect, governmental attitudes changed rapidly after the war. The definitions of the offenses, the selection of courts used for trying suspects, and the punishments meted out to perpetrators each became charged political issues capable of igniting new wars.
This was at least in part because of the mass nature of many of the atrocities themselves. The genocide of Armenians involved thousands of perpetrators and tens of thousands of beneficiaries of looted Armenian property. Thus, even Turkey’s own postwar government found it difficult to try individual ringleaders without putting the country itself on trial. Each detail of legal interpretation, even in cases of seemingly extreme and obvious atrocities, became for many Turks a matter upon which national honor or even survival seemed to depend.
Importantly, the pressures against justice came not only from the defendants but also from a coalition of both victorious and defeated powers. Secretary of State Lansing’s actions at Paris and the U.S.-British-French squabble over the Mosul oilfields indicate that, only months after the war had drawn to a close, powerful factions among the victors were willing to sacrifice the most elementary standards of justice in the name of national security or economic expediency.
The victors’ inability or unwillingness to investigate offenses by their own forces also undermined efforts to make sanctions against atrocities work. “The French suggestion to establish an international criminal court associated with the League of Nations was scarcely given a hearing,” legal historian James Willis points out. “The German offer to submit cases of accused war criminals to preliminary judgment of an international court of neutral jurists, if the [Associated Powers] would do the same, was not considered at all.… If there had been a thorough debate of the problem of war crimes committed by the Allies as well as the crimes of the Germans, it is possible that the peace conference could have made provisions for punishment of war crimes a permanent part of international relations.”38 As it was, serious consideration of international sanctions against atrocities was largely forgotten until the height of the Nazi Holocaust, when the problem reappeared with new and frightening immediacy.
There was another important obstacle after World War I to establishing international sanctions against atrocities: money. All of the powers agreed in principle that the perpetrators of war crimes should pay damages or reparations to those they had wronged. But in a war that had resulted in millions of deaths and crippling injuries, such damages would total tens of billions of dollars, particularly if the war itself was judged to be a criminal act.
Soon it became clear to victors and vanquished alike that the definition of what would be classed as a war crime had sweeping implications for European trade and commerce in the decade ahead.
4
Bankers, Lawyers, and Linkage Groups
Germany alone had instigated World War I, at least as far as the British, the French, and several of the smaller Associated Powers saw things in 1919. The war had been desperately destructive, and many believed that Germany should offer compensation for all damage left by the war, regardless of who had been the perpetrator. Others limited their claims to the costs of military pensions and medical treatment for wounded soldiers—though even this came to tens of billions of dollars worth of the currencies of the day.
The British delegation to the Paris Conference brought a demand for the equivalent of about $90 billion in reparation payments plus a share of German colonies abroad and German-owned industrial properties in Eastern Europe. The French demanded $200 billion.1 The U.S. delegation’s official point of view was that $25-$30 billion would be appropriate. Its confidential position, however, was that $25 billion was excessive, but a public claim for that amount was necessary to pacify political constituencies in both Europe and the United States. In any case, Germany must be permitted to retain “a requisite working capital,” as U.S. negotiator Norman Davis put it, to rebuild a private-enterprise economy in the wake of the war.2
John Foster Dulles arrived at the Paris Peace Conference as a junior legal counsel to the U.S. delegates responsible for negotiating German reparations. By the time he left a few months later, he had emerged as an important negotiator in his own right, the drafter of much of the proposed treaty language concerning war reparations, and the principal U.S. legal expert in this lucrative new field.
The Splendid Blond Beast Page 5
