"I have before me," writes our German memorialised, "a list of the
customers of a single Constantinople firm of importers which places its
orders principally in Germany and Austria. The accounts which this firm
has outstanding amount to date to £13,922 (Turkish), owing from 378
customers in 42 towns of the interior. In consequence of the Armenian
deportations these debts are no longer recoverable. The 378 customers,
with all their employees, goods, and assets, have vanished from the face
of the earth. Any of the owners that are still alive are now beggars on
the borders of the Arabian desert."

At Urfa, after the atrocities of 1896, philanthropists of all nations
had founded orphanages and started native industries. Attached to the
German orphanage there was a carpet factory, with dyeing vats and a
spinnery, which Dr. Rohrbach[36], after personal investigation,
describes as "an institution to be welcomed as unreservedly from the
national as from the humanitarian point of view."

"The factory," he remarks, "not only provides work and bread for 400
persons, but has transplanted one of the most profitable and promising
industries of the East into the sphere traversed by the German Railway,
where German interests are predominant."

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.

"For the rise of the carpet industry," our German memorialised writes,