How German Militarism and Ottoman Panic Wiped Out the Greeks of Asia Minor
Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz When we look back at the disaster of 1922 and the violent uprooting of the Greeks from Asia Minor, we usually fall into two traps. The first story claims that the Ottoman Empire was just a helpless puppet, blindly following orders written in Berlin. The second story completely lets Germany off the hook, calling the wartime alliance a coincidence and the persecutions just a chaotic, local outburst. The truth is much darker. The tragedy was born out of a deadly synergy: a deep, long-standing connection between Prussian military mindset and the sheer panic of the Ottoman leadership. It was a marriage of convenience. Germany provided the modern blueprint for "total war," and Turkish nationalists used that blueprint to carry out a brutal ethnic cleansing. German influence didn't just appear out of nowhere in 1914. It started thirty years earlier when a German general, Colmar von der Goltz, arrived in Constantinople to rebuild the ...