The advance of the German banks in Turkey was almost certain to be the first step in a more general industrial and commercial penetration. This will be the more readily understood if one recalls the close coöperation which characterized the relationships between the German banks and the business interests of the empire. This coöperation which amounted, in effect, to financial interdependence—was one of the striking features of the German economic advance in the generation before the Great War. It strengthened German industrial enterprises at home and promoted German trade and investments abroad. If a great business needed capital, the banks furnished the necessary funds by the purchase of securities which made them at once creditors and copartners in that business. Sooner or later this connection would find expression in the appointment of a representative of the bank on the supervisory council of the industrial enterprise; occasionally a “captain of industry” would be elected to the board of directors of the bank. Although this procedure of interlocking directorates was not unique to Germany—it was an established practice in the United States, certainly—there was no country in which these alliances were so far-reaching, or in which financial power was so centrally controlled, as in the German Empire. In Germany finance and industry were wedded—permanently united for better or for worse.[20] Of this alliance of banking and business the _Deutsche Bank_, chief promoter of the Bagdad Railway, was a shining example. Its industrial connections were too numerous to catalogue. It enjoyed intimate financial relations with hundreds of companies engaged in every important branch of manufacturing in Germany; it was represented on the directorates of the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American steamship lines; it was the organizer of and chief stockholder in the German Petroleum Company. It was the owner of a number of overseas banking corporations stretching their activities from South America on the west to China on the east. The officers of the _Deutsche Bank_ firmly believed that the export of capital and the export of commodities should go hand in hand. The other banks associated in the Bagdad Railway enterprise likewise were closely affiliated with important industrial enterprises. For example, the _Dresdner Bank_ held the vice-chairmanship of Ludwig Loewe & Company, prominent manufacturers of munitions, and the chairmanship of the Orenstein Koppel Company, manufacturers of railway supplies. The _Bank für Handel und Industrie_ possessed interests in the _Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft_, the German General Electric Company. A still further evidence of this close association of financial and industrial interests was furnished in January, 1905, when the chief German banks entered into a “community of interests” with August Thyssen and Hugo Stinnes, the steel and coal barons of Germany.[21]