German-Turkish treaty in Berlin

On 11 January 1917 in Berlin representatives of the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire signed not one treaty but a whole package of them: ten agreements, later called “legal treaties” (Rechtsverträge) in the German law gazette. All were drawn up in two copies and bore the same date, and the German law gazette later published them in parallel in German and Turkish. They were to regulate anew the position of Germans in Turkey and of Turks in Germany, and on a principle that the Porte had long demanded: reciprocity and the equality of the two states.

The end of privileges

In the background lay the capitulations, the old system of privileges that for centuries had exempted foreigners in the empire from the jurisdiction of Turkish courts and from some taxes. On 9 September 1914 the Ottoman government announced their abolition with effect from 1 October. All the powers protested at the time, Germany included, although it was already bound to Turkey by a secret alliance. When a few weeks later the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, Berlin had to accept the fait accompli. For more than two years, however, the status of German citizens, firms and consulates in Turkey remained unsettled.

The Turks also wanted their allies to recognise them as equal partners on paper as well. At the end of 1916 the Porte informed Berlin and Vienna that it regarded as void the Treaty of Paris of 1856 and the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, which had placed the empire under the collective tutelage of the powers. It also announced the abolition of the autonomy of Lebanon, which had been overseen by the consuls of the Christian states. The New York monthly Current History, which reprinted the note, wrote that its text reached Washington on 1 January 1917, and commented that Turkey had thus proclaimed its “declaration of independence”. The Berlin agreements were Germany’s response to these demands.

Ten agreements

According to the texts published in the German law gazette (Reichsgesetzblatt), the following were signed on 11 January:

• a consular convention, which laid down how the two states received each other’s consuls and what privileges and powers these had;
• an agreement on legal protection and mutual legal assistance in civil matters;
• an extradition agreement;
• a settlement agreement (Niederlassungsvertrag), which regulated the conditions of residence of the citizens of one state on the territory of the other, assistance for the needy and the return home of persons expelled;
• an agreement on the mutual surrender of draft evaders and deserters from the army and navy;
• and five agreements extending these provisions to the German colonies, and the settlement agreement also to the Ottoman provinces of the Hejaz, Yemen and Nejd.

In January 1917 this last part had a rather symbolic significance. Almost all the German colonies were already in Allied hands, and since June 1916 the Hejaz had been in the grip of the Arab Revolt, whose leader Hussein Great Britain had recognised in December as King of the Hejaz.

Signatures and ratification

On behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm II the agreements were signed by officials of the German Foreign Office: the director Johannes Kriege and the legation counsellor and legal adviser of the Office, Walter Simons, later Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic. Some of the agreements were signed by another official in place of Simons. On behalf of Sultan Mehmed V they were signed by the ambassador in Berlin, the former Grand Vizier İbrahim Hakkı Pasha, and by Ahmed Reşid Bey, director-general of political affairs at the Ottoman Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to a semi-official statement quoted by Current History, the treaties were based “on the idea of reciprocity and mutual recognition of equal rights” and replaced the capitulations. The monthly dated their signing to 15 January, but the texts in the law gazette bear the date of 11 January.

Their entry into force took time. On 6 August 1917 the Reich passed an implementing act allowing the jurisdiction of German consuls in Turkey to be abolished by imperial decree and cases pending before the consulates to be transferred to courts in Berlin. The instruments of ratification were exchanged in Berlin only on 10 April 1918, and in May the agreements were published in the law gazette. The consular convention was to come into force three months after the exchange of ratifications and remain in force for 20 years. The defeat of the Central Powers meant that the Berlin agreements soon lost their significance. The capitulations were finally buried only by the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923.