In reply to the letter dated 27 May of this year
Before your request to give Consul Rössler permission to testify as a witness in the criminal proceedings against the Armenian student, S. Tehlirian, can be granted, I request a list of the questions that Mr. Rössler will be asked. Without such a detailed description, the political consequences of the examination of a public official of the German Foreign Office are not clear.
In reply to your kind letter of the 1st inst., I have the honour of replying that Consul Rössler, as I have already written in an earlier letter under today’s date, cannot be authorised to testify as an expert witness on Turkish-Armenian relations, but that the German Foreign Office would have no misgivings if Mr. Rössler were examined on pure facts without judgement on the instigation and its consequences and without any remarks of a political nature whatsoever. With this restriction, however, which would especially exclude all of Consul Rössler’s subjective opinions and value judgements, the examination of Mr. Rössler would lose in importance, particularly when considering the fact that the purely factual relations have been made sufficiently well known in the literature.
As far as the supposed remark on the Turkish desire to have “an Armenia without Armenians” is concerned, this was, as far as we know here, merely the personal remark of a subordinate Turkish official and, therefore, it could not be interpreted as being an official expression of the intentions of the Turkish government.