After the failure of this expedition , the CUP 's leaders ( Enver , Djemal , and Talaat , known collectively as the " Three Pashas " ) were involved in ordering the deportations and massacres of between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 &ndash; 1916 , known to history as the Armenian Genocide . The government would have liked to resume the " cleansing operations " against the Greek minority in western Anatolia , but this was vetoed by Wangenheim , who informed the Sublime Porte if the operations against the Greeks resumed , then Germany would cease the supply of arms . As the Ottoman Empire had almost no modern industry , the empire was almost entirely dependent upon weapons from Germany to fight the war . In Greece public opinion was badly split between pro-German and pro-Allied factions , the Greek King Constantine I was married to the sister of Wilhelm II , and the Greek royal family were receiving bribes from the '' Auswärtiges Amt '' , and so for all these reasons , it was seen as quite possible to bring Greece into the war on the side of the Central Powers . Seen from the perspective of Berlin , it would be undesirable to have the '' Reich '' 's ally the Ottoman empire to send thousands more ethnic Greek refugees fleeing into Greece . In December 1914 , General Djemal Pasha encouraged by his anti-Semitic subordinate Baha el-Din ordered the deportation of all the Jews living in the southern part of Ottoman Syria known as the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem ( roughly what is now Israel ) under the supposed grounds that most of the Jews came from the Russian Empire , but in reality because the CUP feared the Zionist movement as a threat to the Ottoman state . The deportation order was vetoed by Wangenheim ; Germany 's leaders believed that the Jews had vast secret powers , and if the '' Reich '' were to assist the Jews in the war , the Jews in their turn would assist the '' Reich '' . The Jews in the Yishuv were not deported , but the Ottoman authorities harassed the Jews in various ways . Djemal Pasha told one Zionist : " I have no trust in your loyalty ; had you had no conspiratorial designs you would not have come to live here , in this desolate land , among the savage Arabs who hate you so intensely . We , the Young Turks , deem the Zionists deserving of hanging , but I am tired of hangings . Hence , we will disperse you throughout the Turkish state and will not allow you to congregate in any one place "
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Committee of Union and Progress