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The forgotten Holocaust: The Armenian massacre that inspired Hitler
When the Turkish gendarmes came for Mugrditch Nazarian, they did not
give him time to dress, but took him from his home in the dead of night
in his pyjamas.
The year was 1915, and his wife, Varter, knew that she was unlikely to
see her husband alive again. Armenian men like him were being rounded
up and taken away. In the words of their persecutors, they were being
"deported" - but not to an earthly place.
Varter never found out what fate her husband suffered. Some said he was
shot, others that he was among the men held in jail, who suffered
torture so unbearable that they poured the kerosene from prison lamps
over their heads and turned themselves into human pyres as a release
from the agony.
Heavily pregnant, Varter was ordered to join a death convoy marching
women and children to desert concentration camps.
Genocide:The Ottoman Turks murdered more than 1.5million Armenians
between 1915 and 1917
She survived the journey alone - her six children died along the way.
The two youngest were thrown to their deaths down a mountainside by
Turkish guards; the other four starved to death at the bottom of a well
where they had hidden to escape.
Varter herself was abducted by a man who promised to save her - but
raped her instead. Eventually, she was released to mourn her lost
family, the victims of Europe's forgotten holocaust.
The killing of 1.5m Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I
remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious events of the 20th
century, and has been called the first modern genocide.
In all, 25 concentration camps were set up in a systematic slaughter
aimed at eradicating the Armenian people - classed as "vermin" by the
Turks.
Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative
holocaust" and noted: "This crime was planned and executed for
political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing
Turkish soil of a Christian race."
Chillingly, Adolf Hitler used the episode to justify the Nazi murder of
six million Jews, saying in 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the
annihilation of the Armenians?"
Yet, carried out under the cover of war, the Armenian genocide remains
shrouded in mystery - not least because modern-day Turkey refuses to
acknowledge the existence of its killing fields.
Now, new photographs of the horror have come to light. They come from
the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was working in the
region financing a railway network when the killing began.
Unearthed by award-winning war correspondent Robert Fisk, they were
taken by employees of the bank to document the terror unfolding before
them.
They show young men, crammed into cattle trucks, waiting to travel to
their deaths. The Turks crowded 90 starving and terrified Armenians
into each wagon, the same number the Nazis averaged in their transports
to the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.
Behind each grainy image lies a human tragedy. Destitute women and
children stare past the camera, witness to untold savagery.
Almost all young women were raped according to Fisk, while older women
were beaten to death - they did not merit the expense of a bullet.
Babies were left by the side of the road to die.
Often, attractive young Armenian girls were sent to Turkish harems,
where some lived in enforced prostitution until the mid-1920s.
Many other archive photographs testify to the sheer brutality suffered
by the Armenians: children whose knee tendons were severed, a young
woman who starved to death beside her two small children, and a Turkish
official taunting starving Armenian children with a loaf of bread.
Eyewitness accounts are even more graphic. Foreign diplomats posted in
the Ottoman Empire at the time told of the atrocities, but were
powerless to act.
One described the concentration camps, saying: "As on the gates of
Dante's Hell, the following should be written at the entrance of these
accursed encampments: 'You who enter, leave all hopes.'"
So how exactly did the events of 1915-17 unfold? Just as Hitler wanted
a Nazi-dominated world that would be Judenrein - cleansed of its Jews -
so in 1914 the Ottoman Empire wanted to construct a Muslim empire that
would stretch from Istanbul to Manchuria.
Armenia, an ancient Christian civilisation spreading out from the
eastern end of the Black Sea, stood in its way.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were two million Christian
Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Already, 200,000 had been
killed in a series of pogroms - most of them brutally between 1894 and
1896.
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I against the
Allies and launched a disastrous military campaign against Russian
forces in the Caucasus. It blamed defeat on the Armenians, claiming
they had colluded with the Russians.
A prominent Turkish writer at the time described the war as "the
awaited day" when the Turks would exact "revenge, the horrors of which
have not yet been recorded in history".
Through the final months of 1914, the Ottoman government put together a
number of "Special Organisation" units, armed gangs consisting of
thousands of convicts specifically released from prison for the purpose.
These killing squads of murderers and thieves were to perpetrate the
greatest crimes in the genocide. They were the first state bureaucracy
to implement mass killings for the purpose of race extermination. One
army commander described them at the time as the "butchers of the human
species".
On the night of April 24, 1915 - the anniversary of which is marked by
Armenians around the world - the Ottoman government moved decisively,
arresting 250 Armenian intellectuals. This was followed by the arrest
of a further 2,000.
Scroll down for more ...
Turkey refuses to acknowledge the killing fields
Some died from torture in custody, while many were executed in public
places. The resistance poet, Daniel Varoujan, was found disembowelled,
with his eyes gouged out.
One university professor was made to watch his colleagues have their
fingernails and toenails pulled out, before being blinded. He
eventually lost his mind, and was let loose naked into the streets.
There were reports of crucifixions, at which the Turks would torment
their victims: "Now let your Christ come and help you!"
Johannes Lepsius, a German pastor who tried to protect the Armenians,
said: "The armed gangs saw their main task as raiding and looting
Armenian villages. If the men escaped their grasp, they would rape the
women."
So began a carefully orchestrated campaign to eradicate the Armenians.
Throughout this period, Ottoman leaders deceived the world,
orchestrating the slaughter using code words in official telegrams.
At later war crimes trials, several military officers testified that
the word "deportation" was used to mean "massacre" or "annihilation".
Between May and August 1915, the Armenian population of the eastern
provinces was deported and murdered en masse.
The American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, said:
"Squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of
four, and marched to a secluded spot.
"Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air. Those sent to
bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as
usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes."
In urban areas, a town crier was used to deliver the deportation order,
and the entire male population would be taken outside the city limits
and killed - "slaughtered like sheep".
Women and children would then be executed, deported to concentration
camps or simply turned out into the deserts and left to starve to death.
An American diplomat described the deportations or death marches: "A
massacre, however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in
comparison with it."
An eyewitness who came upon a convoy of deportees reported that the
women implored him: "Save us! We will become Muslims! We will become
Germans! We will become anything you want, just save us! They are going
to cut our throats!"
Walking skeletons begged for food, and women threw their babies into
lakes rather than hand them over to the Turks.
There was mass looting and pillaging of Armenian goods. It is reported
that civilians burned bodies to find the gold coins the Armenians
swallowed for safekeeping.
Conditions in the concentration camps were appalling. The majority were
located near the modern Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, in the desert
between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor - described as "the epicentre of
death". Up to 70,000 Armenians were herded into each camp, where
dysentery and typhus were rife.
There, they were left to starve or die of thirst in the burning sun,
with no shelter. In some cases, the living were forced to eat the dead.
Few survived.
In four days alone, from 10-14 June 1915, the gangs 'eliminated' some
25,000 people in the Kemah Erzincan area alone.
In September 1915, the American consul in Kharput, Leslie A. Davis,
reported discovering the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians dumped into
several ravines near beautiful Lake Goeljuk, calling it the
"slaughterhouse province".
Tales of atrocity abound. Historians report that the killing squads
dashed infants on rocks in front of their mothers.
One young boy remembered his grandfather, the village priest, kneeling
down to pray for mercy before the Turks. Soldiers beheaded him, and
played football with the old man's decapitated head before his
devastated family.
At the horrific Ras-ul-Ain camp near Urfa, two German railway engineers
reported seeing three to four hundred women arrive in one day,
completely naked. One witness told how Sergeant Nuri, the overseer of
the camp, bragged about raping children.
An American, Mrs Anna Harlowe Birge, who was travelling from Smyrna to
Constantinople, wrote in November 1915: "At every station where we
stopped, we came side by side with one of these trains. It was made up
of cattle trucks, and the faces of little children were looking out
from behind the tiny barred windows of each truck."
In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being
raped and thrown into a harem. From a wealthy banking family, she was
just one of thousands of Armenian girls to suffer a similar fate. Many
were eventually killed and discarded.
In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 girls crucified, vultures eating
their corpses. "Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes
through her feet and hands," Mardiganian wrote. "Only their hair blown
by the wind covered their bodies."
In another town, she reports that the killing squads played "the game
of swords" with young Armenian girls, planting their weapons in the
ground and throwing their victims onto the protruding blade in sport.
Elsewhere, bodies tied to each other drifted down the Euphrates. And in
the Black Sea region, the Armenians were herded onto boats and then
thrown overboard.
In the desert regions, the Turks set up primitive gas chambers,
stuffing Armenians into caves and asphyxiating them with brush fires.
Everywhere, there were Armenian corpses: in lakes and rivers, in empty
desert cisterns and village wells. Travellers reported that the stench
of death pervaded the landscape.
One Turkish gendarme told a Norwegian nurse serving in Erzincan that he
had accompanied a convoy of 3,000 people. Some were summarily executed
in groups along the way; those too sick or exhausted to march were
killed where they fell. He concluded: "They're all gone, finished."
By 1917, the Armenian 'problem', as it was described by Ottoman
leaders, had been thoroughly "resolved". Muslim families were brought
in to occupy empty villages.
Even after the war, the Ottoman ministers were not repentant. In 1920,
they praised those responsible for the genocide, saying: "These things
were done to secure the future of our homeland, which we know is
greater and holier than even our own lives."
The British government pushed for those responsible for the killing to
be punished, and in 1919 a war crimes tribunal was set up.
The use of the word "genocide" in describing the massacre of Armenians
has been hotly contested by Turkey. Ahead of the nation's accession to
the EU, it is even more politically inflammatory.
The official Turkish position remains that 600,000 or so Armenians died
as a result of war. They deny any state intention to wipe out Armenians
and the killings remain taboo in the country, where it is illegal to
use the term genocide to describe the events of those bloody years.
Internationally, 21 countries have recognised the killings as genocide
under the UN 1948 definition. Armenian campaigners believe Turkey
should be denied EU membership until it admits responsibility for the
massacres.
Just as in the Nazi Holocaust, there were many tales of individual acts
of great courage by Armenians and Turks alike.
Haji Halil, a Muslim Turk, kept eight members of his mother's Armenian
family safely hidden in his home, risking death.
In some areas, groups of Kurds followed the deportation convoys and
saved as many people as they could. Many mothers gave their children to
Turkish and Kurdish families to save them from death.
The Governor-General of Aleppo stood up to Ottoman officials and tried
to prevent deportations from his region, but failed.
He later recalled: "I was like a man standing by a river without any
means of rescue. But instead of water, the river flowed with blood and
thousands of innocent children, blameless old men, helpless women and
strong young people all on their way to destruction.
"Those I could seize with my hands I saved. The others, I assume,
floated downstream, never to return."
[N
When the Turkish gendarmes came for Mugrditch Nazarian, they did not
give him time to dress, but took him from his home in the dead of night
in his pyjamas.
The year was 1915, and his wife, Varter, knew that she was unlikely to
see her husband alive again. Armenian men like him were being rounded
up and taken away. In the words of their persecutors, they were being
"deported" - but not to an earthly place.
Varter never found out what fate her husband suffered. Some said he was
shot, others that he was among the men held in jail, who suffered
torture so unbearable that they poured the kerosene from prison lamps
over their heads and turned themselves into human pyres as a release
from the agony.
Heavily pregnant, Varter was ordered to join a death convoy marching
women and children to desert concentration camps.
Genocide:The Ottoman Turks murdered more than 1.5million Armenians
between 1915 and 1917
She survived the journey alone - her six children died along the way.
The two youngest were thrown to their deaths down a mountainside by
Turkish guards; the other four starved to death at the bottom of a well
where they had hidden to escape.
Varter herself was abducted by a man who promised to save her - but
raped her instead. Eventually, she was released to mourn her lost
family, the victims of Europe's forgotten holocaust.
The killing of 1.5m Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I
remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious events of the 20th
century, and has been called the first modern genocide.
In all, 25 concentration camps were set up in a systematic slaughter
aimed at eradicating the Armenian people - classed as "vermin" by the
Turks.
Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative
holocaust" and noted: "This crime was planned and executed for
political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing
Turkish soil of a Christian race."
Chillingly, Adolf Hitler used the episode to justify the Nazi murder of
six million Jews, saying in 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the
annihilation of the Armenians?"
Yet, carried out under the cover of war, the Armenian genocide remains
shrouded in mystery - not least because modern-day Turkey refuses to
acknowledge the existence of its killing fields.
Now, new photographs of the horror have come to light. They come from
the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was working in the
region financing a railway network when the killing began.
Unearthed by award-winning war correspondent Robert Fisk, they were
taken by employees of the bank to document the terror unfolding before
them.
They show young men, crammed into cattle trucks, waiting to travel to
their deaths. The Turks crowded 90 starving and terrified Armenians
into each wagon, the same number the Nazis averaged in their transports
to the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.
Behind each grainy image lies a human tragedy. Destitute women and
children stare past the camera, witness to untold savagery.
Almost all young women were raped according to Fisk, while older women
were beaten to death - they did not merit the expense of a bullet.
Babies were left by the side of the road to die.
Often, attractive young Armenian girls were sent to Turkish harems,
where some lived in enforced prostitution until the mid-1920s.
Many other archive photographs testify to the sheer brutality suffered
by the Armenians: children whose knee tendons were severed, a young
woman who starved to death beside her two small children, and a Turkish
official taunting starving Armenian children with a loaf of bread.
Eyewitness accounts are even more graphic. Foreign diplomats posted in
the Ottoman Empire at the time told of the atrocities, but were
powerless to act.
One described the concentration camps, saying: "As on the gates of
Dante's Hell, the following should be written at the entrance of these
accursed encampments: 'You who enter, leave all hopes.'"
So how exactly did the events of 1915-17 unfold? Just as Hitler wanted
a Nazi-dominated world that would be Judenrein - cleansed of its Jews -
so in 1914 the Ottoman Empire wanted to construct a Muslim empire that
would stretch from Istanbul to Manchuria.
Armenia, an ancient Christian civilisation spreading out from the
eastern end of the Black Sea, stood in its way.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were two million Christian
Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Already, 200,000 had been
killed in a series of pogroms - most of them brutally between 1894 and
1896.
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I against the
Allies and launched a disastrous military campaign against Russian
forces in the Caucasus. It blamed defeat on the Armenians, claiming
they had colluded with the Russians.
A prominent Turkish writer at the time described the war as "the
awaited day" when the Turks would exact "revenge, the horrors of which
have not yet been recorded in history".
Through the final months of 1914, the Ottoman government put together a
number of "Special Organisation" units, armed gangs consisting of
thousands of convicts specifically released from prison for the purpose.
These killing squads of murderers and thieves were to perpetrate the
greatest crimes in the genocide. They were the first state bureaucracy
to implement mass killings for the purpose of race extermination. One
army commander described them at the time as the "butchers of the human
species".
On the night of April 24, 1915 - the anniversary of which is marked by
Armenians around the world - the Ottoman government moved decisively,
arresting 250 Armenian intellectuals. This was followed by the arrest
of a further 2,000.
Scroll down for more ...
Turkey refuses to acknowledge the killing fields
Some died from torture in custody, while many were executed in public
places. The resistance poet, Daniel Varoujan, was found disembowelled,
with his eyes gouged out.
One university professor was made to watch his colleagues have their
fingernails and toenails pulled out, before being blinded. He
eventually lost his mind, and was let loose naked into the streets.
There were reports of crucifixions, at which the Turks would torment
their victims: "Now let your Christ come and help you!"
Johannes Lepsius, a German pastor who tried to protect the Armenians,
said: "The armed gangs saw their main task as raiding and looting
Armenian villages. If the men escaped their grasp, they would rape the
women."
So began a carefully orchestrated campaign to eradicate the Armenians.
Throughout this period, Ottoman leaders deceived the world,
orchestrating the slaughter using code words in official telegrams.
At later war crimes trials, several military officers testified that
the word "deportation" was used to mean "massacre" or "annihilation".
Between May and August 1915, the Armenian population of the eastern
provinces was deported and murdered en masse.
The American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, said:
"Squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of
four, and marched to a secluded spot.
"Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air. Those sent to
bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as
usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes."
In urban areas, a town crier was used to deliver the deportation order,
and the entire male population would be taken outside the city limits
and killed - "slaughtered like sheep".
Women and children would then be executed, deported to concentration
camps or simply turned out into the deserts and left to starve to death.
An American diplomat described the deportations or death marches: "A
massacre, however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in
comparison with it."
An eyewitness who came upon a convoy of deportees reported that the
women implored him: "Save us! We will become Muslims! We will become
Germans! We will become anything you want, just save us! They are going
to cut our throats!"
Walking skeletons begged for food, and women threw their babies into
lakes rather than hand them over to the Turks.
There was mass looting and pillaging of Armenian goods. It is reported
that civilians burned bodies to find the gold coins the Armenians
swallowed for safekeeping.
Conditions in the concentration camps were appalling. The majority were
located near the modern Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, in the desert
between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor - described as "the epicentre of
death". Up to 70,000 Armenians were herded into each camp, where
dysentery and typhus were rife.
There, they were left to starve or die of thirst in the burning sun,
with no shelter. In some cases, the living were forced to eat the dead.
Few survived.
In four days alone, from 10-14 June 1915, the gangs 'eliminated' some
25,000 people in the Kemah Erzincan area alone.
In September 1915, the American consul in Kharput, Leslie A. Davis,
reported discovering the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians dumped into
several ravines near beautiful Lake Goeljuk, calling it the
"slaughterhouse province".
Tales of atrocity abound. Historians report that the killing squads
dashed infants on rocks in front of their mothers.
One young boy remembered his grandfather, the village priest, kneeling
down to pray for mercy before the Turks. Soldiers beheaded him, and
played football with the old man's decapitated head before his
devastated family.
At the horrific Ras-ul-Ain camp near Urfa, two German railway engineers
reported seeing three to four hundred women arrive in one day,
completely naked. One witness told how Sergeant Nuri, the overseer of
the camp, bragged about raping children.
An American, Mrs Anna Harlowe Birge, who was travelling from Smyrna to
Constantinople, wrote in November 1915: "At every station where we
stopped, we came side by side with one of these trains. It was made up
of cattle trucks, and the faces of little children were looking out
from behind the tiny barred windows of each truck."
In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being
raped and thrown into a harem. From a wealthy banking family, she was
just one of thousands of Armenian girls to suffer a similar fate. Many
were eventually killed and discarded.
In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 girls crucified, vultures eating
their corpses. "Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes
through her feet and hands," Mardiganian wrote. "Only their hair blown
by the wind covered their bodies."
In another town, she reports that the killing squads played "the game
of swords" with young Armenian girls, planting their weapons in the
ground and throwing their victims onto the protruding blade in sport.
Elsewhere, bodies tied to each other drifted down the Euphrates. And in
the Black Sea region, the Armenians were herded onto boats and then
thrown overboard.
In the desert regions, the Turks set up primitive gas chambers,
stuffing Armenians into caves and asphyxiating them with brush fires.
Everywhere, there were Armenian corpses: in lakes and rivers, in empty
desert cisterns and village wells. Travellers reported that the stench
of death pervaded the landscape.
One Turkish gendarme told a Norwegian nurse serving in Erzincan that he
had accompanied a convoy of 3,000 people. Some were summarily executed
in groups along the way; those too sick or exhausted to march were
killed where they fell. He concluded: "They're all gone, finished."
By 1917, the Armenian 'problem', as it was described by Ottoman
leaders, had been thoroughly "resolved". Muslim families were brought
in to occupy empty villages.
Even after the war, the Ottoman ministers were not repentant. In 1920,
they praised those responsible for the genocide, saying: "These things
were done to secure the future of our homeland, which we know is
greater and holier than even our own lives."
The British government pushed for those responsible for the killing to
be punished, and in 1919 a war crimes tribunal was set up.
The use of the word "genocide" in describing the massacre of Armenians
has been hotly contested by Turkey. Ahead of the nation's accession to
the EU, it is even more politically inflammatory.
The official Turkish position remains that 600,000 or so Armenians died
as a result of war. They deny any state intention to wipe out Armenians
and the killings remain taboo in the country, where it is illegal to
use the term genocide to describe the events of those bloody years.
Internationally, 21 countries have recognised the killings as genocide
under the UN 1948 definition. Armenian campaigners believe Turkey
should be denied EU membership until it admits responsibility for the
massacres.
Just as in the Nazi Holocaust, there were many tales of individual acts
of great courage by Armenians and Turks alike.
Haji Halil, a Muslim Turk, kept eight members of his mother's Armenian
family safely hidden in his home, risking death.
In some areas, groups of Kurds followed the deportation convoys and
saved as many people as they could. Many mothers gave their children to
Turkish and Kurdish families to save them from death.
The Governor-General of Aleppo stood up to Ottoman officials and tried
to prevent deportations from his region, but failed.
He later recalled: "I was like a man standing by a river without any
means of rescue. But instead of water, the river flowed with blood and
thousands of innocent children, blameless old men, helpless women and
strong young people all on their way to destruction.
"Those I could seize with my hands I saved. The others, I assume,
floated downstream, never to return."
[N