"For the rise of the carpet industry," our German memorialised writes, "Turkey has to thank capitalists and exporters who are almost all Armenians, Greeks, Jews, or Europeans. Like the cotton cultivation introduced by Germany into Cilicia, this carpet industry, in the eastern provinces, has been deprived of the hands essential to it by the Armenian deportations." Eye-witnesses at Urfa describe how the Armenian community there was massacred in 1915--the third time in twenty years, and this time to extinction--and it points the irony of the situation that the Turkish guns were served by German artillerymen[37]. "I have nothing to say," writes Dr. Niepage, the German teacher from Aleppo, "about the opinion of the German officers in Turkey. I often noticed among them an ominous silence or a convulsive effort to change the subject, when any German of warm feelings and independent judgment talked in their presence of the fearful sufferings of the Armenians." This moral bankruptcy is more fatal to the future of Germany in Western Asia than all the material havoc which the Armenian deportations have caused. For Dr. Niepage is convinced that the blood of the Armenians will be on Germany's head: "'The teaching of the Germans,' is the simple Turk's explanation, ... and more sensitive Mohammedans, Turks and Arabs alike, cannot believe that their own Government has ordered these horrors. They lay all excesses at the Germans' door, for the Germans, during the War, are regarded as Turkey's schoolmasters in everything. The mollahs declare in the mosques that the German officers, and not the Sublime Porte, have ordered the maltreatment and extermination of the Armenians.... Others say: 'Perhaps the German Government has its hands tied by certain agreements defining its powers, or perhaps it is not an opportune moment for intervention.' "Our presence had no ameliorating effect, and what we could do ourselves was negligible.... The abusive epithet 'Giaur' is heard once more by German ears.... "We think it our duty to draw attention to the fact that our educational work in Turkey forfeits its moral basis and the natives' esteem, if the German Government is not in a position to prevent the brutalities inflicted here upon the wives and children of murdered Armenians. "The writer considers it out of the question that the German Government, if it seriously desired to stem the tide of destruction in this eleventh hour, would find it impossible to bring the Turkish Government to reason.... "If we persist in treating the massacres of Christians as an internal affair of Turkey, which is only important to us because it ensures us the Turks' friendship, then we must change the orientation of our German _Kulturpolitik_. We must stop sending German teachers to Turkey, and we teachers must give up telling our pupils in Turkey about German poets and philosophers, German culture and German ideals, to say nothing of German Christianity.