on the grounds that they were only following orders and that their commanding officer alone was responsible. Patzig, however, had fled to Danzig, then an independent city, and thus was never prosecuted as a result. Outside of Germany, the trials were seen as a travesty of justice because of the small number of cases tried and the perceived leniency of the court. According to American historian Alfred de Zayas, however, "generally speaking, the German population took exception to these trials, especially because the Allies were not similarly bringing their own soldiers to justice." (See Victor's justice.) Ottoman military tribunals As Turkish war crimes had been far more systematic and heinous than anything done by the Kaiser's Germany, the effort to prosecute Ottoman war criminals was taken up by the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and ultimately included in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) with the Ottoman Empire. After the war, the British Foreign Office demanded 141 Turks be tried for crimes against British soldiers, and 17 for involvement in the Armenian genocide. The initial prosecution of war criminals was established between 1919 and 1920 by the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress which charged and tried several former leaders and officials for subversion of the constitution, War profiteering, and with what is now called genocide against both Pontic Greeks and Armenians. At the same time the British Foreign Office conducted its own investigation into alleged Turkish war crimes, as they doubted that the process was being adequately dealt with by Turkish courts martial. The court sat for nearly a year, from April 1919 through March 1920, although it became clear after just a few months that the tribunal was simply going through the motions. The judges had condemned the first set of defendants (Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, et al.) only when they were safely out of the country, but now, with other Turkish lives on the line, the Tribunal, despite making a great show, had no intention of actually finding anyone guilty. Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe protested to the Sublime Porte, took the trials out of Turkish hands, and removed the proceedings to Malta. There an attempt was made to seat an international tribunal, but the Turks deliberately botched the investigations and mishandled the evidence so that nothing of their work could be used in court. Meanwhile, the Turkish Republican Government in Ankara was strictly opposed to any attempts to prosecute