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July 25, 1923

Die äussere Politik der Woche (The Lausanne Peace Treaty)

By the late nineteenth century, Germany replaced Britain as the modern Ottoman Empire’s principal European partner. Hence, in 1914 it did not take the Ottoman government long to enter World War I at Germany‘s side, fighting Russia. After Germany‘s defeat, the new government in Berlin in June 1919 accepted the onerous Versailles Treaty. Declaring Germany and its allies the sole responsible parties for the war, it detached territories in Germany‘s east and west, imposed tremendous reparation payments, principally to France, and set strict limits to armed forces and military development (which however were soon bypassed by clandestine cooperation with the Soviets). In the postwar Ottoman Empire / nascent Turkey, developments differed—and were closely followed in Germany. From as early as 1919, especially conservative Germans saw Turkey’s action against the Allies as a model for their country, as Stefan Ihrig‘s Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination (2014) has shown.

A case in point is the text published here, in the elite conservative national daily Neue preussische Zeitung (also Kreuzzeitung), by Otto Hoetzsch (1876-1946), who in 1920-1930 served as a member of parliament for the Deutschnationale Volkspartei, the largest conservative party in the Weimarer Republic (1918-1933). To be sure, the Ottoman/Turkish postwar beginnings were as bleak as Germany‘s. In October 1918, the British-Ottoman Armistice of Mudros demobilized the army, evacuated all non-Anatolian garrisons, and stipulated the Allied occupation of Istanbul and the Straits. And in August 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres, signed by Sultan Mehmet VI but rejected by the subsequently disbanded parliament, affirmed Allied control of the Straits and Istanbul, designated Anatolia’s southwest and center-south as Italian and French influence zones, foresaw a Franco-British-influenced Kurdish state and an Armenian state in present-day eastern Turkey, and gave Thrace and Izmir to Greece, which had invaded western Anatolia in 1919 and was pushing eastwards. But these terms galvanized the Turkish National Movement (TNM), which was begun by Muslim Ottoman officers and notables in post-armistice Anatolia and was galvanized already in 1919 by the Greek invasion. To many Germans’ envy, by September 1922 the TNM was in control of almost all of present-day Turkey, due to its own military and political-diplomatic force, to Greek overreach, and to divergent Allied interests. To replace the Treaty of Sèvres, negotiations ensued from November 1922 with the Allies in the Swiss city of Lausanne. In January 1923, the Turkish and Greek delegations signed the Convention Regarding the Exchange of Greek and Turkish populations (also Lausanne Convention), by which about 1.5 million Greek Orthodox (“Greek”) inhabitants of Anatolia were forcedly exchanged for about 500,000 Muslim (“Turkish”) inhabitants of Greece. And in July 1923, all delegations signed the Treaty of Lausanne. It imposed some conditions on Turkey, including a minority protection regime patterned on earlier League of Nations models for postwar Eastern Europe. But on the whole, it was a great Turkish success. It inter alia internationally recognized the Turkish Republic, returned Istanbul and the Straits to Turkey, abolished the prewar capitulations, and absolved all perpetrators of the anti-Armenian, -Assyrian, and -Orthodox genocide from legal prosecution.

September 18, 1947

Text of Speech Delivered by A.Y. Vyshinsky at the General Assembly of the United Nations, September 18, 1947

The Soviet Union's response to George Marshall's September 17, 1947, speech at the UNGA. Vyshinsky offers the Soviet Union's position on arms control, nuclear weapons, the UN, Korea, Greece, and other issues raised by Marshall

September 17, 1947

George C. Marshall, 'A Program for a More Effective United Nations: Address by the Chief of the U.S. Delegation to the General Assembly'

Marshall speaks about Greece, Palestine, and Korea, as well as the international control of atomic energy and the role and structure of the United Nations.

October 9, 1944

Record of Meeting at the Kremlin, Moscow, 9 October 1944, at 10 p.m.

Churchill, Eden, Stalin, and Molotov discuss the leadership in Poland, Britains interests in Greece and Hong Kong, the actions of Romania and Bulgaria during the war, Turkey, the need for the Great Powers to exert influence on the Balkans to prevent small wars, the leadership of Italy, interests in Bulgaria and Romania, the dividing of Germany and Germany's future, and the American plans in the war against Japan.

March 12, 1947

Truman Doctrine, 'Recommendations for Assistance to Greece and Turkey'

Truman's speech to Congress in which he laid the foundations of the Truman Doctrine by stating that the United States would support Greece and Turkey in order to prevent them from under the sway of the Soviet Union. This speech is often cited as the beginning of the Cold War, and US containment policy.