The German authorities reacted in a generally callous and indifferent manner. Part of this was due to the context of the mid-war in which all sides sought to mobilize ethnic minorities against their enemy. This meant the Russians tried to appeal to the Czechs and the Germans the Baltic states. The Russian occupations of Eastern Anatolia stoked the fears that they would use the Armenian population to further tear the Ottoman Empire apart. The German consuls in Trabzon and Erzerum complained to the German ambassador Hans von Wangenheim about the massacres. Von Wageheim belatedly issued a formal protest, but its language was quite mild. Within Germany proper, the military and foreign ministry elites asserted that the massacres were a regrettable military necessity.

To add further hypocrisy, after the collapse of the Russian Empire many German officials within the Ottoman Empire and in the Foreign Ministry tried to restrain the Ottoman's campaigns of ethnic cleansing in eastern Anatolia because it counteracted German plans to carve out a client state in the Caucasus. At one point in 1918, the Germans threatened to pull out all of its personnel if the Ottomans did not halt their advance into Georgia.

This callous opportunism had a strong prewar component. In the aftermath of the 1909 Adana massacres, von Wangenheim reported "it will be a great asset to have the native Armenian population on our side when we are asserting our rights in Asia Minor." So military expedience and geopolitical ambitions resulted in the German government being indifferent to its Ottoman ally's actions.

sources

Bartov, Omer, and Eric D. Weitz. Shatterzone of Empires Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

Reynolds, Michael A. Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.