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Updated: April 30, 2025
Militarily, these tunnels are the most valuable section of the line; economically, they are the most costly and unremunerative. "Economic interests and considerations of expense," Wiedenfeld concedes , "argued strongly for the latter course, but fortunately, as we must admit to-day the military point of view prevailed."
Wiedenfeld lays down, in discussing the agricultural possibilities of the Ottoman territories, "is that to a large extent crops can be grown here which supplement our own economic resources in important respects.... In peace time, of course, no one would think of transporting goods of such bulk as agricultural products any way but by sea; but the War has impressed on us with brutal clearness the value for us of being able on occasions of extreme necessity to import cotton from Turkey by land."
As Rohrbach and Wiedenfeld point out, this political understanding underlies all Germany's economic efforts in Western Asia, and we can see how it has warped them from their proper ends. The track of the Bagdad Railway, for example, has not been selected in the economic interests of the lands and peoples which it ostensibly serves. Dr. Rohrbach himself admits that
Dr. Wiedenfeld drives this home. "Germany's relation to Turkey," his monograph begins, "belies the doctrine that all modern understandings and differences between nations have an economic origin.
Wiedenfeld would say. Therefore Germany does not eye the lands and peoples under Ottoman dominion with a view to their common advantage and her own. She selects a "piece" among them which she can keep under her thumb and so control the square.
She may keep her trade, though Wiedenfeld confesses that "the exchange of commodities between Germany and Turkey has never attained any really considerable dimensions," and that "the German export trade commands no really staple article whatever of the kind exported by England, Austria, and Russia" unless we count as such munitions and other materials of war . Except for the last item, this German trade will probably remain and grow; but the German hegemony, based on railway enterprise and reinsured by "moral conquests," will scarcely survive the Ottoman dominion.
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