Sarrail arrests the Central Powers' consuls

On 30 December 1915 aircraft of the Central Powers appeared over Salonika and dropped bombs on the city. That same day the commander of the French Army of the Orient, General Maurice Sarrail, ordered the arrest of the consuls of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, who were still at their posts in the city. Together with their families and staff they were taken aboard a warship and removed from Greece. Salonika formally belonged to a neutral state, but for the past two weeks, since the Entente forces had withdrawn from Serbian Macedonia, it had been above all their fortified base.

Enemies in the city

To many officers the presence of consuls of states with which France and Britain were at war, in the headquarters of the Allied army, seemed absurd. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign wrote that precise information on the strength and disposition of the Entente forces was regularly telegraphed to Berlin, Vienna, Sofia and Constantinople, and that the city teemed with spies whose links with the consulates were easy to demonstrate. Some agents did not even hide, but stood on the quay noting the strength of the units being landed and their regimental badges. The British war correspondent George Ward Price, who was in Salonika at the time, recalled that the Bulgarian consul dined in crowded restaurants at the same table as French and British officers who had no idea who he was.

For a long time, however, Sarrail held that consuls in a neutral country enjoyed the privileges of extraterritoriality until espionage was proved against them. According to Ward Price, that was precisely the hardest part, because the Greek police protected the consuls, and the Entente’s secret agents were shadowed by Greek detectives who warned the suspects.

The raid and the arrests

The raid supplied the pretext. The American consul in Salonika reported in a dispatch of 31 December that the bombs had been dropped by German-Austrian aircraft. Accounts of the damage differ. The Italian historian Luigi Villari wrote of considerable destruction and several killed, but according to French accounts the only victim was a shepherd, and one of the bombs fell near a Greek unit that was holding exercises. What mattered most to Sarrail was that the enemy had bombed the city itself, not the camps around it, and so had itself ceased to treat it as neutral territory. According to Villari, he announced that from then on he regarded the area occupied by the Allies as a war zone.

According to the British official history, at 2.40 p.m. General Bryan Mahon, commander of the British forces in Salonika, received word that Sarrail intended to detain the consuls at 3 p.m., together with an invitation to take part. A small British detachment was hastily assembled so that the operation would look like a joint one. French and British patrols occupied the consulates and arrested the consuls with their families and staff, and some agents were also detained in the consulates. According to French sources, 20 Austrians, 17 Turks, 12 Bulgarians and 5 Germans were detained. All were taken aboard a warship, according to some accounts the French battleship Patrie. The American consul supposed that they would be taken to Volos or Piraeus. In accordance with instructions from Washington he took charge of Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian interests, and at the request of the military authorities also, temporarily, of German and Turkish ones. According to Villari and Ward Price, the archives seized in the consulates confirmed the suspicions of espionage and provided valuable information about the network of agents.

Friction

Not everyone liked the operation. Sarrail was not yet the superior of the British, and Mahon felt slighted at being warned only twenty minutes in advance. His intelligence service had long been preparing a round-up of the whole spy network, and Mahon feared that the haste had alerted some of the agents. The next morning Sarrail expressed regret that his move had looked like a unilateral one, and the two commanders agreed on how to catch the remaining spies. Mahon telegraphed London that the incident was closed, but expressed the hope that the French would not act on their own again. The government of Prime Minister Stefanos Skouloudis protested strongly against the violation of Greek sovereignty. The British official historian, although he considered the presence of enemy consuls in Salonika intolerable, described the operation as the first of the unfortunate incidents in Sarrail’s relations with the British. Ward Price, on the other hand, saw in it the first step by which the Allies began to impose their own order in Salonika.