 Those ones who did not sing may
take their fingers out of their ears and
listen to the story of the cattle-wagons
and how it all began.
The story can be told as a group of
German authors, journalists and
filmmakers did who co-operate under the
label LAVA-FILM, feeding TV-stations
rather successfully with different types
of programme-formats …
 Documentary •
Reportage • News • Docu-Soap
• Daily Soap • Reality-TV
…
Produced at nearly every location of the
world …
For German stations and as international
co-production …
CONTROL! START PRE-VIEW, PLEASE!
 THE BAGHDAD
RAILWAY
Autumn 2008 / German TV / ARD 2 x 45 Min
- Part 1: On the Way to the Unknown
- Part 2: On dangerous Tracks
Legendary stories are being kept alive to
this day about the world famous railway
system, which was designed over a hundred
years ago to connect Berlin with Baghdad
and Damascus with Medina. As a daring
enterprise at the time and a masterpiece
of engineering, the Baghdad Railway tied
the destinies of many well-known
personalities, which represented the
rivalling interests of the big European
Empires: Spies, engineers, saboteurs,
diplomats, archaeologists, politicians
and financiers were all intent on winning
what they could for their home countries
– to claim whatever stake they were
able to get of this new lifeline through
the Middle East, or to try and prevent it
from ever being finished.
We are not in another make-up of
„Indiana Jones III“ …
„IV“ … „V“, also
not in the film-set of „Lawrence of
Arabia“ …
Lawrence of
Arabia! Epic rumination on a flamboyant
and controversial British military figure
and his conflicted loyalties during
wartime service ... As hero immortalized
with the blue eyes of Peter O’Toole
in the 1962 Hollywood-success.
He was an inordinately complex man who
has been labelled everything from hero,
to charlatan, to sadist. Thomas Edward
Lawrence blazed his way to glory in the
Arabian desert, then sought anonymity as
a common soldier under an assumed name.
As a young intelligence officer in Cairo
in 1916, he is given leave to investigate
the progress of the Arab revolt against
the Turks in World War I. In the desert,
he organizes a guerrilla army and —
for two years — leads the Arabs in
harassing the Turks with desert raids,
train-wrecking and camel attacks.
Eventually, he leads his army northward
and helps a British General destroy the
power of the Ottoman Empire.
Within four months of 1917, he and his
Bedouins had succeeded to destroy
seventeen locomotives and eighty
railway-bridges …
„Marks of these fights can still be
seen by tourists once they travel along
the line of the Hejaz-Railway across
South-Jordan up to the border with Saudi
Arabia … for example organized by a
GERMAN TRAVEL AGENCY (????) …“
ATTENTION!
The chap from the Transsib-line is here
again, trying to place another of his
promotions!
„TRAVELLING made by Jeller fixes
your know-how! ‚With Steam through
the Orient‘ costs less than two
thousand Euro! ‚Steam on the
Hejaz-Train‘, that‘s the tour
for freaks of railway-photography, costs
only five thousand Euro! Booking through
a GERMAN TRAVEL AGENCY (?????) …
‚On the tracks of Lawrence of Arabia‘
...“
Lawrence of Arabia … Of
course, you know this one? But what was
the name of the man who built everything
what was destroyed by him?
He was
promoted by the
Sultan for all his efforts and was
allowed to call himself Pascha … We
railway-fans know, of course, engineer
Heinrich August Meißner from Leipzig!
It took camel-caravans almost two months
to reach the destination of pilgrims in
the South. By train, they would reach
holy Medina after three or four days. The
Hejaz-Train is rolling for hundreds of
kilometres through the waterless desert
fighting fifty degrees of heat. It was an
unprecedented technical masterpiece to
overcome this hostile emptiness.
The »Holy Train« was financed to a big
part by Muslims from all over the world.
Even the Shah of Persia donated one and a
half million Gold Ducats. In 1908, the
one thousand three hundred kilometre long
line was completed; the line’s
starting point is where a sidetrack of
the Baghdad-rail ends, in the
Hejaz-Station of Damascus. If you enter
today this carefully maintained
waiting-hall, you would think to be
rather in an Oriental seraglio than in a
simple hall for booking and waiting
purposes: feudal lustres provide a dimmed
shine on wooden panels, on the
mirror-like floor a fountain splashes.
This is the place where Osman splendour
combined itself with the vehement wish to
find access to the achievements of the
technical superior Europe.
Baghdad-Railway and Hejaz-Railway were
both symbols of this dream, unfulfilled
and therefore turned into legends.
That mammoth-enterprise at the beginning
of the Twentieth century to open distant
parts of the Osman Empire for the traffic
of goods and merchandise was started with
significant participation of German
corporate business. You will still find
names on locomotives, which came out of
workshops of dinosaurs of the steam-age:
Borsig (Berlin), Jung (Jungenthal) und
Hartmann (Chemnitz).
The Sultan of Constantinople, what is
today Istanbul, had contracted German
engineers already at the end of the
Nineteenth century in order to open wide
areas of his territory through an
efficient railway-network. The Osman
Empire stretched from Egypt to the
Persian Gulf, and the Emperor wanted to
connect the provinces with his capital.
The Anatolian Railway was the first
project; the main line was completed by
1896 and reached until Konya. Later, this
line became the first leg of the Baghdad
Railway. When in October 1903 the first
effort was practically made to build the
Baghdad-line the political situation had
turned into a difficult one. After six
hundred years of existence the Osman
Empire was crippled; the European powers,
Great Britain, France and Russia, were
watching the »ill man at the Bosporus«
in order to inherit him. They were
alarmed when suddenly, with the young
German Empire; a competitor appeared on
the chessboard. The visit of Wilhelm II.
who came in 1889 to see Sultan Abdul
Hamid II. in full military regalia did
not go unnoticed and brought German
companies the concession to construct all
railway-lines.
The longest line, the one of the Baghdad
Railway, went across Turkey, the
main-territory of the Osman Empire.
Dramatically changing topography made it
necessary to build hundreds of bridges
and viaducts. In Anatolia, construction
had to challenge wild ranges of the
Taurus Mountains, which, for thousands of
years had prohibited easy access to the
South. This mountain range with summits
up to three thousand metres proved to be
the most complicated section of the whole
enterprise. Over a distance of only
sixty-four kilometres, there were
forty-four tunnels necessary and the
highest point of the line was one
thousand four hundred and seventy-eight
metres. By the end of the First World
War, some two thousand kilometres of
tracks were laid. However, the
Baghdad-line was far from completion and
those daring plans, which had been seen
as an epochal exploit, were stuck.
Please allow us, Herr Jeller,
here from the cattle-wagons to contribute
some facts to those „daring plans“
and to this „epochal exploit“.
If it had been
completed earlier, the
Berlin-Baghdad (and, ultimately, Basra)
railway linkages would have enabled
transport and trade from Germany through
a port on the Persian Gulf, from which
trade goods and supplies could be
exchanged directly with the farthest of
the German colonies, and the world. The
journey home to Germany would have given
German industry direct supply of oil. In
both directions, the journey would have
bypassed the Suez Canal. This access to
resources, with trade less affected by
British control of shipping would have
been beneficial to German economic
interests in industry and trade, and
threatening to British economic dominance
in colonial trade.
The railway also threatened Russia, since
it was accepted as axiomatic that
political influence followed economic,
and the railway was expected to extend
Germany's economic influence towards the
Caucasian frontier and into north Persia
where Russia had a dominant share of the
market.
Thus, the construction of the Baghdad
Railway contributed to an approach of
Great Britain, France and Russia against
Germany, one of several reasons for the
outbreak of the First World War. …
German Empire banks and companies mainly
provided funding and engineering; in the
1890s they had helped to build the
Anatolian Railway. However, Kaiser and
government had to put pressure on the
bank since it did not see it as a
profitable enterprise despite Mesopotamia’s
oil-attraction. However, the Osman and
later the Turkish government ensured that
the bank would not face a loss, in the
opposite, it made a profit since it was
guaranteed that the operating company
would receive stable and high income per
rail-kilometre, no matter whether a train
would roll or not.
—
effendi — effendi — effendi ...
Do you hear this? We are rolling
on a track of the formerly renown
Baghdad- and Hejaz Railway —
somewhere in Turkey, Syria or Jordan,
pulled by an almost one hundred years old
steam engine. It was in 1924 when a train
rolled for the last time from one end to
the other …
Outside we
see messages from a
surreal world: tracks leading to nowhere,
skeletons of burnt-out wagons, rusting
locomotives, bent aside like struck by
great tiredness. Sandstorms sweep through
tiny abandoned railway stations. There is
still heaps of gravel for the support of
rails, waiting, worthless. Masts of
telegraphic lines have been used as
firewood by desert-dwellers long time
ago.
The most famous passenger on this stretch
of the Baghdad Railway has been Agatha
Christie. She used, between 1928 and
1930, first the famous „Orient-Express“
from Great Britain to Istanbul and then
the Taurus-Express to Syria where her
husband, the well-known archaeologist Max
Mallowan, was busy with excavations. She
told about her travel-experiences in her
1946-autobiography „Come, tell me
how you live“, and, of course, she
used them in some of her novels.
—
effendi — effendi — effendi ...
But we are turning our train not
in the ORIENT EXPRESS — SORRY TO ALL
FANS OF INSPECTOR POIROT — and we
are not inviting Agatha Christi, but a
man who will be able to widen out
tunnel-view … Please, welcome as a
witness of that time and its events:
Ernst Christoffel, founder of the
Christian Blind Mission in the Orient and
missionary in Turkish Kurdistan …
„We saw
how the loveless Islam did not
have an organ in order to understand the
distress of these members of the race. We
saw how this petrified Oriental
Christianity walked by the blind brother,
the blind sister — unconcerned .“
—
effendi — effendi — effendi ...
„The
Osman State had
recruited forced labour for construction
of the railway. They would cost just
bread and water; those who died were
buried next to the rails. With begin of
the First World War the forced labour was
extended for the benefit of the Baghdad
Railway construction. Military strategy
forced such intensification, more labour
was needed. And it was readily available
since the Osman government had decided in
1914 to drive away all Armenians from the
territory of Anatolia. They were blamed
to collaborate with the Russian enemy. In
October 1914, all Armenians between
sixteen and sixty years of age were
driven together for work. Once they had
finished their work some were simply
stabbed with a bayonet by an officer in
charge because the deportation of the
Armenians was supposed not to end with
resettlement, but, according to the
Minister of Interior, Talat Pascha:
nowhere; the Armenians had to work for
the construction of the Baghdad Railway
until the Minister of Interior would have
declared the mass deportation as
successfully finalized. That was the case
in 1916. The last Armenians who were
killed in this genocide were labourers at
the Baghdad Railway.
The operators of the construction site
were not only involved in the genocide
which did cost the lives of one and a
half million Armenians because the forced
labour wore out ten thousands of Armenian
workers; but the company also offered
transport capacity to get Armenians from
their homeland into the Syrian desert.
That happened during the final phase of
deportation, from 1915 onwards.
The
railway-company sold
tickets to Armenians who hoped this would
help them to avoid the cruel foot-walk in
columns towards southeast …
The Baghdad Railway owned wagons for the
transport of goats and sheep. These
wagons were divided in an upper and a
lower part to allow transport of live
stock in both sections. The deported were
loaded in such wagons. It was not
possible to stand upright and the wagons
were overcrowded. Men, women and
children, healthy ones and sick ones, all
were transported in this way. Sick people
died, pregnant women delivered.“
—
effendi — effendi — effendi ...
Ernst
Christoffel, you were a
shocked eyewitness of this horror. The
German Lieutenant Colonel Boettrich was
not shocked when he, as Chief of Railway
Logistics, signed deporting orders for
Armenians who were supposed to slave
along the Baghdad Railway site. For him,
for his commanders and for the political
leadership in Berlin, was mass murder no
issue; everything that was of value was
the military pact between Germany and
Turkey; the Baghdad Railway was part of
this pact.
Well, we have heard about a railway
station made of marble, which was erected
near Lake Baikal in memory of
railway-constructors. We have heard about
a Christ-statue made of bronze hovering
over a railway-tunnel in the Argentine
Andes.
With regard to the Baghdad Railway, we
are erecting here and now a memorial for
this witness, made of letters:
Ernst
Jakob Christoffel …
… was born in 1876 in
Rheydt in the Rhineland, Germany.
He was a pastor and founded the
Christian Blind Mission in the
Orient, which he directed for
many years. There were two
occasions when he seemed to be
standing on the edge of an abyss.
In 1908, he set off on a journey
to Turkey, founded a home for the
blind, otherwise disabled, and
orphans in Malatia in southeast
Anatolia. Only a small group of
friends supported him. He also
took care of Armenian orphans who
had survived the genocide of 1915
and following years. During the
political revolution in 1919,
Christoffel was expelled.
As soon as he was no longer
forbidden to enter the country,
Christoffel set out for Anatolia,
but he could not use the house in
Malatia. Attempts to make a new
start in Istanbul resulted in a
ban. Christoffel travelled
further to Iran. Between 1925 and
1928, he set up two homes for
blind and otherwise disabled
young people in Tebris and
Isfahan.
In the Second World War,
everything was perished again.
However, Christoffel did not want
to abandon his fosterlings. In
1943, he was arrested and had to
spend three years in detention
camps. Nevertheless, his will was
unbroken.
In 1951, when the political
situation had improved somewhat,
Christoffel — by this time
over 70 and frail — again
set out for Isfahan in order to
do what he had seen as his task
throughout his entire life: to
help the disabled, impoverished
and abandoned. Ernst J.
Christoffel died on 23 April 1955
in Isfahan. The inscription on
his gravestone in the town's
Armenian cemetery reads „Father
of the blind, deaf and dumb and
children of nobody.“
„I have always rejected one
principle and still do so today,
that is, to find out whether the
person receiving help is worthy
of doing so or not. As soon as I
come across this principle,
either at home or elsewhere, I
become angry. What does it mean
to be worthy or unworthy of
support?
Where would we be if God were to
deal with us in this way? —
The deed of love is the sermon
that everyone understands.“ |
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