I was reading about "Nili", an jewish espionage network in Palestine during WW1, when i heard about the German general Erich von Falkenhayn in Palestine who accordingly to this quote helped preventing the an genocide together with the Vatican:
"..and the Jews of Palestine escaped the tragic fate of the Armenians only due to the intervention of the Vatican, the German government and General Erich von Falkenhayn, commander of the Ottoman-German troops in Palestine." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nili
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This is something i never heard about, i tried to read more about but it, but i'm not sure about the correctness of the Source given by Wikipedia: http://www.israeldailypicture.com/2011/12/did-german-officer-prevent-massacre-of.html
Someone has an answer to this? Or maybe just a tip, where and how i could get more and "safe" informations about this?
Edit: I also found out, that the German historian, where this informations seems to be based on is not taken very seriously by other historians through his publishings about Aliens and Ufos
I work on Egypt during WW1 and I hadn’t heard of this. I can say that the Ottomans expelled a lot of the Zionist settlers from Palestine during the war—a number of them were evacuated on American warships and spent the war years in Egypt.
(Here I’m specifically referring to European Jews who had migrated secretly to the region over the previous 30-40 years; the Ottoman government had rebuffed the Zionist Organization’s request to either purchase or be given some sort of autonomy over Palestine and, knowing their intent was to try to create a Jewish society there, opened the doors to Jewish immigration from Europe as long as they settled anywhere but Palestine).
However, as far as I was able to determine the complicating factors were 1) their European-ness, not their Jewish-ness; the Ottoman government was afraid this was part of some long game plan for Russia to assert sovereignty over Palestine once they were at war with each other; and 2) their illegal status (which provided a legal cover for seizing their property and deporting them.)
As far as I am able to determine, local (Mizrahi or “oriental” Jews) were unaffected by these orders. This isn’t to say they were treated well during the war, but once the Arab Revolt began in 1916, the Ottomans were pretty nasty to all of the Arab speakers in the region, seizing food and resources, and eliciting harsh punishment of all Arabs—Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike.