Austrian, as well as German, trade would be carried over the Bagdad lines to the Orient, and Austrian industries would be able to secure raw materials from Anatolia and Mesopotamia. If the railway was to run from Berlin to Bagdad, it also was to run from Vienna to Bagdad. Third, similarly, German industry was to profit by the Austrian railway to Salonica, for it opened a new route to German commerce to the Aegean. "Germany's road to the Orient lay, literally as well as figuratively, across the Balkan Peninsula."[17] The Drang nach Osten was near to the hearts of both allies!
It was not without warning that the German nation permitted itself to be drawn into the imperial ramifications of the Bagdad Railway. Anti-imperialists sensed the dangers connected with such an ambitious project. Herr Scheidemann, leader of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, for example, warned the German people that the railway was certain to raise increasingly troublesome international difficulties, and he expressed the fear that the German protagonists of the plan would come to emphasize more and more its political and military, rather than its economic and cultural, phases.[18] Karl Radek, also a Socialist, wrote that "The Bagdad Railway possessed great political significance from the very moment the plan was conceived." He prophesied that German economic penetration in Turkey would prove to be only the first step toward a formal military alliance, which, in turn, would heighten the fear and animosity of the Entente Powers. "The Bagdad Railway," he said, "constitutes the first great triumph of German capitalistic imperialism."[19] Business men and politicians of imperialist inclinations did not deny the charges of their pacifist opponents. Herr Bassermann, so far from deprecating a greater political influence in the Ottoman Empire, came to glory in it. Baron von Schoen qualified his earlier
