Author Muriel Mirak-Weissbach Speaks about New Book at Cultural Foundation

“It is the innocent civilians who bear the greatest suffering,” she stressed.

Some suggest he could have stopped the Armenian Genocide, but Mirak-Weissbach disagreed. In 1915 he was leading the army in Gallipoli. He was in contact with Constantinople regularly, she said, “but it is highly unlikely he could do something about it in late April from Gallipoli. However, in February  1916, after the Gallipoli campaign, when he received a report from the governor of Adrianople (Edirne), had ordered the explain of all Armenians and Jews from the city,” with the aid of  the German and Austrian ambassadors, “he succeeded in reversing the order,” she said.

She detailed several examples of Liman von Sanders coming to the aid of minorities in the Ottoman Empire. In one case, the government wanted to evacuate the Greek citizens “for their own safety. “A leading Greek representative of the community, as well as the Greek ambassador, reached out to the general, asking for his help.

The deportations had started when he arrived. He put a stop to them.

He took similar actions several times. Liman also set up an orphanage for Greek and Armenians, which he funded himself.

“In just about every case, Liman argued on the grounds of the so called military rationale to justify his resistance against deportation orders,” she said.

“In short,” she said, “there appeared to be a humanitarian impulse.”

Liman von Sanders was arrested in Malta in 1919 while he and his officers were leaving for Germany. “The entire affair was Kafkaesque and reads almost like a crime novel,” she said. No charges were ever filed, since neither the British nor the French governments could find anything on him.

He died in 1929.

She wondered why his name is still tainted. “Because they argue that the German commander could have at least prevented the genocide given that he had dictatorial powers,” she said. “The documents show he had no such dictatorial powers. It was the imperial government in Berlin, not the German military in Turkey, who determined imperial policy.”

And the one who devised the imperial policy, Chancellor Theobald Theodor Friedrich Alfred von Bethmann Hollweg , who replied to a question about why Germany was not intervening in the Genocide: “Our only aim is to keep Turkey on our side until the end of the war no matter whether as a result Armenians perish or not.”

The blemish on his record, she said, was that though he himself had tried to help Armenians whenever possible, during his testimony at the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin, “categorically denied any German participation in the atrocities. Why? Above  all, Liman considered himself a man of honor.”

A reception followed the lecture.

Mirak-Weissbach’s book is on sale now at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, through the publisher and elsewhere.