“... Perhaps the German people, too, are ignorant of these events. How would it be possible otherwise for the usually truth-loving German press to report the humane treatment of Armenians accused of high treason? But it may be that the German government’s hands are tied by reason of certain contracts.... Every cultured human being is competent to intervene, and it is, in fact, his sacred duty to do so. Our esteem among the generations to come is at stake. The more refined Turks and Arabs shake their heads sorrowfully when they see brutal soldiers bringing convoys through the town of women far advanced in pregnancy, whom they beat with cudgels, these poor wretches being hardly able to drag themselves along.”[180] Dr. Edward Graetner’s letter was dated July 7, 1916, and was written from Basle, Switzerland, to a German theologian in a neutral country: “I am going to tell you more about the Armenian episode, for this time the question was not one of the traditional massacres, but of nothing more or less than the complete extermination of the Armenians in Turkey. This fact Talaat Bey’s Turkish officials cynically admitted with some embarrassment to the German Consul. The government first made out that they only wanted to clear the war zone and to assign new dwellings to the emigrants. “They began by enticing the most warlike of the mountaineers out of their rocky fastnesses. This they did with the help of the securities [promises] of the Turkish Empire, of the heads of their own churches, of the American missionaries and of one German consul.[181] Thereupon began expulsions from everywhere, even from districts to which the war will never be carried. How these were affected is shown from the fact that out of the 18,000 people driven out of Harpoot and Sivas only 350 reached Aleppo, and only eleven out of the 1900 from Erzerum. Once at Aleppo the poorest of these were by no means at the end of their troubles. Those who did not die here (the cemeteries are full) were driven by night to the Syrian steppes, toward the Zor on the Euphrates. Here a very small percentage drag out their existence, threatened by starvation. I state this as an eye-witness. I was there in October of last year and saw with my own eyes several Armenian corpses floating in the Euphrates and lying about the steppes.