Hysteria Part 2. Hidden Motives: Millions of Murders from the Orient Express
One of the least publicized motives for the First World War arose with the planned
construction of a Baghdad to Berlin Railway in the dying Ottoman Empire in the late
19th and early 20th century. It would connect the famed Orient Express with the
Constantinople Baghdad line. Engineered by Wilhelm von Pressel in 1872, it would
have been largely under German control. In 1888, Sultan Abdul Hamid II., left,
turned to George von Siemens of Deutsche Bank, a leader in electrical development,
for help financing this project.
By 1888, Germany had received permission from the Turks to
begin work on the Anatolian Railway Company, and by 1896,
they had completed the railway line from Angora to Konya.
These lines were the first two sections of the anticipated Baghdad
Railway. The Germans then engineered other lines, but at a very
high cost. With the proposed new railway, Germany could
establish a port on the Persian Gulf and the Ottoman Empire
could assert economic control over Arabia and perhaps even
extend it beyond into Egypt, which was under British control.
In 1901, Germany reported on vast supplies of petroleum around
the Tigris and Euphrates, and in 1902 the Ottoman government
granted a German firm the concession to lay new track eastward
from Ankara to Baghdad. Financial difficulties and problems
tunneling through the Taurus Mountains made progress slow.
Russia, who had by then acquired major influence in Central Asia and half of Persia (Iran), would
have suffered economically from increased German trade into and beyond these areas. France,
having established a foothold in northern Africa as early as the 17th Century and an influence in
Algeria and Tunis in 1881, was determined to keep a Germany (one which she was still bent on
revenge with) out of the picture entirely. Britain had taken Napoleon's old domain of Egypt in 1882
and through it found a way to rule Sudan in 1897. She also held another portion of Persia and
administered Egypt, Cyprus, and Aden on the Red Sea, and had major influence in Afghanistan.
Therefore, she had already committed herself at a great cost to maintaining a choke hold on her
possessions, and she and her old rival, France, made a deal as early as 1904 which gave England a
free hand in Egypt in exchange for France maintaining authority in Morocco.
While on the surface Great Britain initially supported the German railway,  
shrewdly watching as the Germans footed the bill for laying the rails and pouring
money into the project, she was also keenly aware that it would one day compete
with British trade in Mesopotamia and bypass British tariffs in the process.
Therefore, Britain was silently making even more secret deals with France, eyeing
eventual free access by sea to the oil fields of Persia and fast access by rail along
the Gulf coast. She was also picking up more global investors in her interests.
In 1914, the German government was forced to concede that those areas would remain exclusively
under British financial control. The Germans, who had spent a fortune by now, perhaps in vain,
were also required to have two British members sit on the Baghdad Railway Company board and
had to agree not to extend the railroad past Basra or establish a port or railway terminus anywhere
along the Gulf without British approval. Meanwhile, Britain was bankrupt by January 1914, and
when Bank of England notes consequently became emergency legal tender, all gold was removed
from circulation and England’s gold reserves went to the Rothschild's Bank of England to use for
profit-producing warfare.
Thus, while many contentious economic and colonial issues between the French, German and British
governments, such as the financing of the Berlin-Baghdad railway, appeared as "resolved" before the
outbreak of war, an undercurrent of major diplomatic tensions, scheming and plotting bubbled. The
Baghdad railway was soon to be disingenuously portrayed as a "threat of German domination" in
Asia Minor at the same time there was a wave of anti-British and pro-German feelings among the
Egyptian middle class who had developed passionate interests in German success. Kaiser Wilhelm
became "Hacı Wilhelm" in some circles and was thought of as a "great protector of Islam", while the
Turks were guessing that Moslems of India and Egypt were about to revolt and overthrow their
English masters.
By 1915, the railway was in four sections and had big gaps of some 300 miles between the various
railroad lines as well as incomplete tunnels. The American ambassador in Constantinople from 1913
to 1919 was investor and businessman Henry Morgenthau. He spread many false and frightening
claims, including the "fact" that the Turkish Sultan had a plan of operation for the "assassination and
extermination of all Christians except those of German nationality." German interests in the region
were now presented as "imperialistic" and "expansionist" by the entrenched imperialistic and
expansionist powers who did not want anybody having a "place in the sun" but themselves.
Addendum: With the start of war, work on the line was accelerated because of its potential strategic importance, and the
railway became booty to be won. By the end of the war in 1918, the line had been extended from the Bosporus to
Nusaybin, several hundred miles short of Baghdad. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles of course cancelled all German rights
to the Baghdad Railway as Turkey, Italy and France gleefully tried to gobble up interest in the railway by various
clandestine means, and talks dragged on until after 1923. The remaining unfinished stretch and a subsequent extension to
the port of Basra near the Persian Gulf were eventually completed by Syria ( where France took control ) and Iraq
( which Britain controlled ), both having been formed after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Not until the years
1936 to 1940 did the Iraqi state built the Baghdad course to the end. On July 15, 1940 the first passenger train ran from
Istanbul to Baghdad. Today, one still can see the German architecture of the late 19th and early 20th century in the
stations and buildings all along the route.
Tremendous growth of the German economy had partially enabled by the clever development
of the German banking system, especially Deutsche Bank, who had formed finance and holding
companies which issued bonded loans and shares for the construction of power plants, tramways,
electric railways and municipal lighting systems. By 1897, there were 750 power plants located
across Germany and the bank even built a power plant in Argentina and had invested in the Edison
General Electric Company in the United States. These banks not only controlled credit but also
dominated the capital market.
Unbeknownst to the Germans and certainly to most Americans, colonialist France and colonialist
Britain made a secret pact in 1916, later called the Sykes-Picot Agreement, by which they connived
to conquer and divide large parts of the Middle East among themselves, redrawing the map of the
Middle East and assigning areas of control and influence to each other using underhanded techniques
such as setting up puppet regimes under Arab monarchs and staging Arab "revolts." The treaty was
hinged on dividing up the remains of the Ottoman Empire once it had been dismantled. Both colonial
powers ended up trying to cheat one another in the process. The Sykes- Picot Agreement was kept
secret until documents were found in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Morgenthau was a huge contributor to Woodrow Wilson's election campaign in 1912 and was made financial
chairman of the democratic party in 1912 and again in 1916.  He and Josephine Sykes were the parents of rabid
German-hater Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who drew up the World War Two genocidal plan which would have
castrated and sterilized Germans.
Morgenthau was also the originator of one of the most celebrated anti-German propaganda myths of WWI, the fictitious
"Crown Council" story. Morgenthau charged to the media that he had proof that the Kaiser had called together a "Crown
Council" of leading German government officials, ambassadors and bankers on July 5,1914, confiding to them that he
planned to start a European war, to which the bankers responded by demanding two weeks in which to call in loans and
sell securities. The Kaiser then went on a cruise, pretending nothing was up, so that England, France and Russia would be
lulled into a "false sense of security" and taken by surprise by the plotting, conniving Germans.
It turned out that this story was a terrific bonus at the end of the war for the Anti-German Allied propaganda already in
use and it was later used in Lloyd George's campaign of 1918 where he advocated the hanging of the Kaiser. It was also
cited when the vindictive Treaty of Versailles was drawn up as proof of sole German responsibility for starting the war. It
was later proven to be a complete hoax and impossible to have taken place as some of the Kaiser's people alleged to
have been at the meeting were not even in Berlin at the time, but because of his stature, nobody held Morganthau
responsible for his lies.
If Germany did not wish to be forced into the position of a second or third rate power in this era, it
had to enlarge its sphere and create a self-sufficient economy in order to ensure access to raw
materials and protect its exports. Such a railway would link Germany with its new African colonies,
and the trade of goods and agricultural products would benefit from a port on the Persian Gulf,
which in turn could provide direct access to Middle East oil, the same oil that now fueled a British
Navy bloated from its relentless colonialism. Worse for Britain, the new German railway would
bypass the Suez Canal which opened in 1869, and this plan stepped on some big toes: an 1875 loan
to the British from the Rothschild banking family put the British in line for eventual major control of
the Canal and its anticipated profits. International bankers in both London and New York recognized
the need for petroleum with the advent of the internal combustion engines, and control over that
necessary fuel would be key to great profit and political power. The Berlin-Baghdad railway project
was, therefore, emblematic of the perceived threats to Britain's oligarchical financial system and
British financial interests would go to great lengths to protect British hegemony at a time when an
economically successful Germany was adopting more modern economic development systems and
Britain was lagging behind in energy sources, technology, agriculture and industry.
Above: Heinrich August Meissner, 1862-1940, was a Leipzig born engineer on the Baghdad Railroad, and later a railway
farmer and a chair at the Technical University of Istanbul for railway design. He became a pasha and died in Turkey.
We will begin with a story about an exotic railroad, ambition and a rapidly expanding global economy
The Big Boys Play Dirty
In 1911, after the railway company proposed a branch line which would have spiked trade with
Northern Syria and the Northern Mesopotamian valley, the plan was vetoed by Great Britain's vested
financial interests. In 1913, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill “anticipated” a world war
that would need oil-powered ships, and on June 17, 1914, he urged the British government to spend
£2 million to buy a majority interest of Anglo-Persian Oil Company, financed in part by his father's
old friends at the Rothschild Bank. The London Petroleum Review published a map on May 23, 1914
of  Mesopotamia showing the oilfields that Britain hoped to eventually obtain. The interests of Britain
and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company became inseparable, and British foreign policy and Rothschild
foreign policy became one and the same. As war loomed, the military alliances.. already forged to
create a “balance of power” tipped in Britain's favor.. were based in good measure on banker’s loans
and investments.
The building of the line from Konya to Mosul and Baghdad and Basra continued, but at 200 back-
breaking, expensive kilometers at a time. When the Ottoman Government gave permission to
Germany for the railway line from Konya to Baghdad in 1903, Russia, France, and Britain became
alarmed at the threat a Baghdad to Berlin Railway would pose to their dominance.