User:EtienneDolet/Walter Rossler

Walter Rossler (7 October 1871 - 4 April 1929) was a German Consul who served in many cities throughout the world including Mombasa, Jaffa, and Aleppo. While in Aleppo, Rossler provided valuable eyewitness reports and testimonies of the Armenian Genocide.

Life
Walter Rossler was born in Berlin on 7 October 1871. His father, Constantine, was a professor, and his mother's name was Clara.

Rossler became the interpreter at the German consul in Zanzibar. In 1903, he then became the head of the consulate in Mombasa. In 1905, Rossler was transferred to Jaffa where he headed the German consulate there. Thereafter, in 27 May 1910, he became the consul in Aleppo and served this post until 1918.

Rossler died in 4 April 1929 in Berlin from Parkinson's disease.

Witness to the Armenian Genocide
Walter Rossler was stationed in Aleppo during the Armenian Genocide. Aleppo served as a location where many deportation routes of Armenians converged. Traumatized by what he witnessed, Rossler "wept bitterly" upon witnessing the events.

Rossler regularly reported the events via telegraph to his superiors, namely German ambassador Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim. He had urged the central government of Germany to condemn the atrocities found in the areas of deportation. He protested the attempts by the German government to conceal the news of the massacres due to the military alliance between the Ottoman Empire and Germany during World War I. Rossler protested against the German media who made attempts to deny the existence of the massacres.

Rossler worked extensively with Mehmet Celal, the governor of Aleppo who was sympathetic towards the Armenians, in order to prevent further deportations of Armenians into the deserts of Syria. However, with the installment of Eyub Bey in Aleppo, a member of the Interior Ministry, the deportations continued. Rossler believed that this was a strategic appoint to effectively prevent Mehmet Celal's efforts in stopping the deportations. Meanwhile, Rossler reported of massacres taking placing in the province of Diyarbakir. He then reported that the Special Organisation was utilized which consisted of "convicts released from the prisons, and put in military uniform. They were deployed on locations through which the doomed deportee convoy were scheduled to pass".

Rossler reported an account of a German soldier who witnessed the corpses of Armenian men whose throats had been slit. Rossler himself had walked through the deportation route from Baghdad to Aleppo and called it a "Trail of Horror" in which numerous corpses were scattered throughout the route.

In one such report, Rossler wrote about corpses in rivers flowing into Syria: "The aforementioned presence of corpses in the Euphrates, which has been observed in Rumkale, Birecik, and Jerablus, continued for twenty-five days, as I was informed on 17 July. The bodies were all tied together in the same way, in pairs, back to back. This systematic arrangement shows that it is a question, not of random killings, but of a general extermination plan elaborated by the authorities ... The corpses have reappeared, after an interruption of several days, in ever greater numbers. This time, it is essentially a question of the bodies of women and children."

Rossler heard from an "objective" Armenian that around a quarter of young women, whose appearance was "more or less pleasing", were regularly raped by the gendarmes, and that "even more beautiful ones" were violated by 10–15 men. This resulted in girls and women being left behind dying.

"Recently, Armenians from Harput, Erzerum, and Bitlis passed through Ras ul-Ayn (currently the last stop of the Bagdad[bahn]). Reports about the Armenians from Harput indicate that the men were separated from the women in a village a few hours south of the city. They were massacred and their bodies were laid out on both sides of the road down which the women later marched."

"On the report of a perfectly trustworthy German who spent several days in Ras ul-Ayn and the vicinity ... [e]very day, or nearly every day, three hundred to five hundred people are removed from the camp, taken to a place around ten kilometers from Ras ul-Ayn, and slaughtered. The bodies are thrown into the river known as Jirjib el Hamar ... The Chechens settled in the Ras ul-Ayn region are playing the executioners’ roles."