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Updated: June 18, 2025
The first point Rohrbach makes in his book on the Bagdad Railway is that German colonisation in Anatolia is impossible for political reasons. "No worse service," he declares, "can be done to the German cause in the East than the propagation of this idea," and the rise of Turkish Nationalism has proved him right . There remain the Arab lands; And Germany herself is hard up for men.
But it is far more probable that Germany checked the Austrians because she was not yet fully ready for vigorous action. The doctrine of complete preparedness was edifyingly set forth by a well-informed writer, Rohrbach, who, in 1912, urged his countrymen to be patient. In 1911 they had been wrong to worry France and England about Morocco, where German interests were not vital.
Parsons says that men fight not because they are warlike, but because they are fearful. Rohrbach thinks that if Germany and England could each be sure the other would not be aggressive there would be no war between them. It is this aspect of the foreign as the unknown that especially plays upon the motive of fear.
Until the Bagdad and Hedjaz Railways had neared their goals, Turkish co-operation in an attack on Egypt would be weak. Besides, adds Rohrbach, the Kiel-North Sea Canal was not ready, and Heligoland and other coast defences were not sufficiently advanced for Germany confidently to face a war with England.
Rohrbach disposes of the Mouhadjirs they are a drop in the bucket, and are no more adapted to the climate than the Germans themselves. "There is really nothing for it," he bursts out in despair, "but the introduction of Mohammedans from other countries where the climatic conditions of Irak prevail."
But we do know that the German colonial enthusiast, Paul Rohrbach, who has seen the draft treaty, has said that the concessions made by Britain were astonishingly extensive, and met every reasonable German demand. This sounds as if the proposals of the treaty, whatever they were, had been recklessly generous.
He prophesies that the whole carpet industry of Western Asia, "from which English and other foreign firms in Smyrna now draw such enormous profits," will soon be concentrated round Urfa in German hands. From Armenia's evil, apparently, springs Germany's good but in 1911 Dr. Rohrbach did not foresee the catastrophe of 1915.
"It is useless," as Rohrbach puts it, "to sink from 150 to 600 million marks in restoring the canal system, and then let the land lie idle, with all its new dams and channels, for lack of cultivators. Yet Turkey can never raise enough settlers for Irak by internal colonisation ."
Southern Mesopotamia the Irak of the Arabs and Babylonia of the Greeks lies desolate like the North, but is a contrast to it in every other respect. Its aspect is towards the Persian Gulf, and Rohrbach grudgingly admits that down the Tigris to Basra, and not upstream to Alexandretta, is the natural channel for its trade.
When, a short time after, the rebellion broke out in Stuhlingen, and he heard that everywhere the peasants were rising against the monks and nobles, he, too, followed the black, red and yellow banner, first serving with Hans Muller of Bulgenbach, then with Jacklein Rohrbach of Bockingen, and participating with the multitude in the overthrow of the city and castle of Neuenstein.
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