Milliyetçilik Araştırmaları Dergisi

Abstract

In the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, the state of the army played an important role. After the Ottoman-Russian war of 1877-78, the Ottoman Empire accelerated the modernisation of the army to ensure its survival. Abdülhamit II, preferred to get closer to Germany rather than the colonial powers of England and France in the face of the Russian threat which had marched to the front of Istanbul in the 1877-78 war. The political alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire, which established its political unity in 1871 after defeating France, the paradigm army of the time, naturally extended to the military sphere. The tenuous contacts with Prussia established under Sultan Mahmut II gained a solid foundation under Sultan Abdülhamit II, making the empire dependent on Germany in many areas, from the arms industry to military training and education. The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War as an ally of Germany because of these political and military relations between the two states. As a result of the war, the Ottoman Empire was brought to the brink, both militarily and politically, by the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, which imposed harsh conditions on it. Otto Liman von Sanders, who arrived in Turkey in December 1913 as head of the German military mission and served in high command in the Turkish army throughout the war, arrested and exiled to Malta by the British after the war. Sanders wrote a memorandum for the German authorities explaining the defeat. This memorandum was intercepted by British intelligence and translated into English. This article examines the historical origins of political, military, and economic cooperation between the Ottoman Empire and Germany and discusses Sanders’ memorandum entitled ‘The Reasons for The Military Downfall of The Turkey’. In this memorandum, published for the first time in Turkish, the reasons for the defeat in World War I, which led to the political collapse of the Ottoman Empire, are revealed from the perspective of Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission.