Eyewitness reports of Genocide (not "so-called" deportation)

[winoman]

Count Wolff-MetternichGerman Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire July 10, 1916, cable to the German Chancellor:

"In its attempt to carry out its purpose to resolve the Armenian question by the destruction of the Armenian race, the Turkish government has refused to be deterred neither by our representations, nor by those of the American Embassy, nor by the delegate of the Pope, nor by the threats of the Allied Powers, nor in deference to the public opinion of the West representing one-half of the world."

The "Turkish Government's purpose" - destruction of the Armenians. As reported by the pro-Turkish German ambassador in 1916....

[winoman]

Prince Abdul Mecid Heir-Apparent to the Ottoman Throne, during an interview:

"...I refer to those awful massacres. They are the greatest stain that has ever disgraced our nation and race. They were entirely the work of Talat and Enver. I heard some days before they began that they were intended. I went to Istanbul and insisted on seeing Enver. I asked him if it was true that they intended to recommence the massacres which had been our shame and disgrace under Abdul Hamid. The only reply I could get from him was: 'It is decided. It is the program.' "

[winoman]

Toung Turrk Genocider's speak for themselves -

Enver Pasha:

"You are greatly mistaken. We have this country absolutely under our control. I have no desire to shift the blame onto our underlings and I am entirely willing to accept the responsibility myself for everything that has taken place."

Talaat Pasha (To Dr. Mordtmann of the German Embassy in June 1915):

"Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate (grundlich aufzaumen) its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention."

[winoman]

Turkish Statesman Denounces Atrocities

This account from a senior member of the CUP who split with the party when it abandoned its principles is most revealing and is a must read:

October 10, 1915 (II-19:3,4)

Cherif Pasha Says Young Turks Long Planned to Exterminate the Armenian. An arraignment of a Young Turks, or the Committee of Union andProgress, as having for years plotted the extermination of the Armenian people, is contained in a letter recently addressed by Mehmed Cherif Pasha to the Editor of the Journal de Geneve. The views of this eminent exile should doubtless be considered in the light of the fact that he was obliged to fly from his native land because of his secession from the party now in power in Turkey, but even his enemies-and that he has formidable ones is evidenced by the nearly successful attempt made upon his life by Turkish police agents in Paris about two years ago-must admit that he has had excellent opportunities for observation of the Young Turks policy, since he was prominent in their councils when they first obtained power on the overthrow of the Abdul Hamid regime, and left their ranks to build up the Liberal opposition party only when he became convinced that their leaders had no intention of carrying out the program of reform to which they were pledged. He is the son of the late Said Pasha, who was one of the chief advisers of Abdul Hamid and the first Grand Visier under the new Constitution. His wife is Princess Emanine, the daughter of Prince Halim, and he is the brother-in-law of Prince Said Halim, the present Grand Visier. He, himself, was at one time Turkish minister to Sweden. After branding the Armenian atrocities perpetrated under the present regime as a surpassing the savagery of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, Cherif Pasha continues:"To be sure, the state of mind of the Unionists was not revealed to the civilized world until they had openly taken sides with Germany; but for more than six years I have been at exposing them in the Mecheroutiette (his newspaper, published first in Constantinople and then in Paris) and indifferent journals and reviews, warning France and England of the plot against them and against certain nationalities within the Ottoman borders, notably the Armenians, that was being hatched.

"If there is a race which has been closely connected with the Turks by its fidelity, by its services to the country, by the statesman and functionaries of talent it has furnished, by the intelligence which is manifesting in all domains-commerce, industry, science, and the arts-it is certainly the Armenian. "Cherif Pasha then enumerates some of the contributions which Armenian have made to Turkish civilization, including the introduction of printing and the drama, and gives credit to an Armenian, Odian Effendi, for having collaborated with Midhat Pasha in framing the Ottoman Constitution, and he lays stress upon their fine qualities as agitators against the despotisms of Turkey and Persia-qualities, one suspects which have not highly recommended them to the autocratic "reformers" of the Young Turk regime. And he continues: "Alas! at the thought that a people so gifted, which has served as the fructifying soil for the renovation of the Ottoman Empire, is on the point of disappearing from history-not enslaved, as were the Jews by the Assyrians, but annihilated-even the most hardened heart must bleed: and I desire, through the medium of your estimable journal, to express to this race which is being a assassinated my anger toward the butchers and my immense pity for the victim's. "Having fulfilled this pious duty, let me make some exceptions relating not to the unhappy Armenian nation but to certain individual Armenians and some propagandist groups who have for the last six years somaladroitly constituted themselves the defenders and apologists of this Committee of Union and Progress, the broader of all their present sufferings. How often have I warned them against the bad faith of the unionists, the perversity of whose black souls I knew only too well! Besides, the massacres of Adana, provoked by the Union's orders, to have brought them to a sense of the real state of affairs. Some of them by a wrong appreciation of their interest, others influenced bypolitical alliances of an evil sort-like that poor Constantinople deputy, Zohrab Effendi, who has expiated his errors on the scaffold-all the Armenian political leaders, or almost all, by identifyingthemselves with the political fortune of the Union, have compromised, instead of serving their national cause."If, instead of enrolling themselves under the banner of that baneful and treacherous association, they had ranged themselves openly beside the true liberals who had long been pointing out the danger of their course, even at peril of their lives, they would not only have remained true to their principles, but they would also have spared theirunfortunate brethren the persecutions they suffered before the war and their whole nation the prospect of an extermination unique in the annals of history."

[winoman]

Excerpts from report of A. Bernau - special American envoy

I was entrusted by you to go and visit the Armenian encampments all along the Euphrates, Meskene and Der-i-Zor and to give you an account of the state in which the deported Armenians are found in those localities, their present condition and if possible the approximate number of these unfortunate exiles.

It is impossible to give an account of the impression of horror which my journey across the Armenian encampments scattered all along the Euphrates has given me; especially those on the right bank between Meskene and Der-i-Zor. These can hardly be called encampments because of the fact that the majority of these unfortunate people; brutally dragged Out of their native land, of their homes and of their families, robbed of their effects upon their departure or en route, are penned up in the open like cattle, without shelter, almost no clothing, fed barely by food altogether insufficient.

Everywhere you see emaciated and wan faces, wandering skeletons, lurking for all kinds of diseases and victim moreover to hunger. The management which has been entrusted to transport these people through the desert has no intention to feed them. Even it appears that it is a governmental principle to allow them to die of hunger. An organized massacre...would have been more humane.

The remainder of the Armenian nation disseminated on the border of the Euphrates is composed of aged people, of women and children. The middle aged and young men, who have not as yet been massacred, are scattered on the roads of the Empire where they break stones requisitioned for the needs of the army, and are occupied in works for the State.

The young girls, often even very young ones, have become the booty of the Musulmans. They have been captured all along the road of emigration, occasionally violated and sold, if not killed by the gendarmes who conduct the sad caravans, have been thrown into the harems or into the domesticity of their executioners.

They wait any moment to be obliged to change their place of torture; and then begin new forcec marches without bread and water, under the blows of the horsewhip new sufferings, bad treatments worthy of slave dealers of Soudan, and victims all along the road of this abominable calvary.

Those who have some money left are incessantly exploited by their guards, who under threats of sending them further on, take from them gradually their last resources, and when these resources are exhausted, they put these threats into execution.

All that I have seen and heard surpasses all imagination. Speaking of "thousand and one horrors" is very little in this case, I thought I was passing through a part of hell. The few events, which I will relate, taken here and there hastily, give but a weak idea of the lamentable and horrifying tableau. The same scenes repeat in the different localities through which I have passed, everywhere it is the same Governmental barbarism which aims at the systematic annihilation through starvation of the survivors of the Armenian nation in Turkey, everywhere the same bestial inhumanity on the part of these executioners and the same tortures undergone by these victims all along the Euphrates from Meskene to Der-i-Zor.

As far as the eye can reach mounds are seen containing 200 to 300 corpses buried in the ground pele mele, women, children and old people belonging to different families.

As I have already said, these unfortunate people, abandoned, ill-treated by the authorities, put in an impossible position to provide for their food, are gradually dying of hunger. Winter is approaching; cold and dampness will add their ravages to that of famine.

...these unfortunate people are doomed.

[winoman]

exerpts from The Travel Diaries of Robert Anhegger and Andreas Tietze

Note - these two became famous Turkish apologists (and in fact already were - so they do not admit to "Genocide" - this is the best they can do - still observations are very telling...)

In the mid-nineteen thirties, two people who, after the second world war, would gain first-rate reputations as scholars in the field of Ottoman studies, decided to travel the length and breadth of Turkey.

Anhegger and Tietze undertook their travels in Anatolia in 1936-37. Their 1936 trip lasted from 27 August to 24 September and took them through Central Anatolia. The 1937 journey lasted from 5 September to 3 October and covered West- and Southwest-Anatolia.

Changing townscapes

To what extent was life changing in the provincial towns of Anatolia after fifteen years of Kemalist rule? When answering this question, it is important to make a distinction between the old towns and the new extensions. The old towns largely were in a very bad state of repair, sometimes even in ruins. The traces of war and ethno-religious conflict between 1912 and 1922 were still much in evidence. A town like Kayseri was full of ruins, among other things of churches, which had been shot to pieces. The town had reputedly deteriorated much since the Greek and Armenian communities, which had once made up one third of the population, had been "destroyed." The travellers hear the same story in Niğde: the town has gone down since the "slaughter" of the Armenians. When Linke visits the Black Sea towns of Samsun, İnebolu and Giresun, she is told that the economy (notably the trade in hazelnuts and tobacco) has suffered badly because of the departure of the Pontic Greeks, but that Turks have now filled their places and things have improved. Along the railway from Eskişehir to Afyon-Karahisar and İzmir, she sees lots of deserted and ruinous villages and both the diaries and Linke describe how, thirteen to fifteen years after the great fire, the old Greek and Armenian quarters of Izmir are in ruins. The debris is still being cleared.

The lack of good tailors meant that clothes were often ill fitting and the novelty of the thing meant that people wore combinations, which looked very odd to a European eye. (My note: no Armenian tailors left...)

The state and its representatives are literally everywhere.

Foreigners not only needed a valid passport and visa to enter the country, but their movements within the country were also strictly controlled. They needed to have their residence permits (ikamet tezkeresi) checked and registered as soon as they arrived in any locality. Before travelling to the next destination, a permit for that specific place was required. And specific meant precisely that: when the party visited Birgi, they carried a travel permit for Ödemiş, nine kilometers away. This was duly reported and on their return to Ödemiş they were immediately picked up by two gendarmes and received a thorough dressing down from the district governor. The gendarmerie, which was responsible for law and order in the countryside, seems to have been especially zealous. Gendarmes were everywhere and their posts were connected to the nearest military exchange in the centre of the kaza. In a village near Aksaray, the gendarmes insisted on registering the travellers although they stayed there for less than an hour. In Kayseri they are registered three times, each time when they change trains there. When their bus stops for twenty minutes in a village near Aydın on their second trip, the gendarmerie post is immediately called and the bus has to wait while they are being registered.

Further to the East, she is confronted with a blanket ban on photography in Kars. She is only allowed to travel from Kars to Ardahan in the company of a military officer and once in Ardahan she is forbidden to walk certain streets, to take excursions or to take pictures.

The degree of control over the countryside aimed at, and achieved, by the modernizing state, was not the result of simple policing either. More than once the travellers caught a glimpse of a grimmer reality too. At the train station of Afyon-Karahisar, early into their second journey, they meet Kurds who are being deported. They are dressed in rags and extremely dirty ("much more so than Gypsies"). All they carry in the way of possessions is a wooden trunk, which is opened by the police in order to find a letter from the ministry giving a list of names and the route they are to take. They are "loaded and unloaded like cattle by the officials."

The party came across a similar scene once more, almost a fortnight later in Aydın. There, in the ruins of a mosque which had been struck by lightning and burnt down the year before, they find figures dressed in rags, who, their guides tell them, are the remains of a large transport of Kurds from Tunceli. They "are simply removed there and distributed over the country. They are then dumped anywhere, without a roof over their head or employment. They do not know a single word of Turkish".

Linke's travelogue also contains passages, which make clear that the Kurdish problem was still on everybody’s minds, although the last large-scale insurrections had been in 1925 and 1929-30. She is told in Malatya, that the new governor there "acted with great firmness" against the "wild Kurds", hanging the "most reckless" as an example. She also hears from an incident in the adjoining province to the East, where a whole village was destroyed on the orders of the army commander because two gendarmes had been killed there. According to her spokesman "it worked wonders."

...a state apparatus, which had managed to establish full and effective control over the length and breadth of the country to a degree the Ottoman reformers of the nineteenth century could only dream of.

[winoman]

Report by an Eye-Witness, Lieutenant Sayied Ahmed Moukhtar Baas

CIRCULATED TO THE KING AND WAR CABINET
[December 26, 1916]
ARMENIAN MASSACRES.
Report by an Eye-Witness, Lieutenant Sayied Ahmed Moukhtar Baas.

———————-

In April 1915 I was quartered at Erzeroum. An order came from Constantinople that Armenians inhabiting the frontier towns and village be deported to the interior. It was said then that this was only a precautional measure. I saw at that time large convoys of Armenians go through Erzeroum. They were mostly old men, women and children. Some of the able-bodied men had been recruited in the Turkish Army and many had fled to Russia. The massacres had not begun yet. In May 1915 I was transferred to Trebizond. In July an order came to deport to the interior all the Armenians in the Vilayet of Trebizond. Being a member of the Court Martial I knew that deportations meant massacres.

The Armenian Bishop of Trebizond was ordered to proceed under escort to Erzeroum to answer for charges trumped up against him. But instead of Erzeroum he was taken to Baipurt and from there to Gumush-Khana. The Governor of the latter place was then Colonel Abdul-Kadar Aintabli of the General Staff. He is famous for his atrocities against the Armenians. He had the Bishop murdered at night. The Bishop of Erzeroum was also murdered at Gumush-Khana.

Besides the deportation order referred to above an Imperial "Iradeh" was issued ordering that all deserters when caught, should be shot without trial. The secret order read "Armenians" in lieu of "deserters". The Sultan's "Iradeh" was accompanied by a "fatwa" from Sheikh-ul-Islam stating that the Armenians had shed Moslem blood and their killing was lawful. Then the deportations started. The children were kept back at first. The Government opened up a school for the grown up children and the American Consul of Trebizond instituted an asylum for the infants. When the first batches of Armenians arrived at Gumush-Khana all able-bodied men were sorted out with the excuse that they were going to be given work. The women and children were sent ahead under escort with the assurance by the Turkish authorities that their final destination was Mosul and that no harm will befall them. The men kept behind, were taken out of town in batches of 15 and 20, lined up on the edge of ditches prepared beforehand, shot and thrown into the ditches. Hundreds of men were shot every day in a similar manner. The women and children were attacked on their way by the ("Shotas") the armed bands organised by the Turkish Government who attacked them and seized a certain number. After plundering and committing the most dastardly outrages on the women and children they massacred them in cold blood. These attacks were a daily occurrence until every woman and child had been got rid of. The military escorts had strict orders not to interfere with the "Shotas".

The children that the Government had taken in charge were also deported and massacred.

The infants in the care of the American Consul of Trebizond were taken away with the pretext that they were going to be sent to Sivas where an asylum had been prepared for them. They were taken out to sea in little boats. At some distance out they were stabbed to death, put in sacks and thrown into the sea. A few days later some of their little bodies were washed up on the shore at Trebizond.

In July 1915 I was ordered to accompany a convoy of deported Armenians. It was the last batch from Trebizond. There were in the convoy 120 men, 700 children and about 400 women. From Trebizond I took them to Gumish-Khana. Here the 120 men were taken away, and, as I was informed later, they were all killed. At Gumish-Khana I was ordered to take the women and children to Erzinjian. On the way I saw thousands of bodies of Armenians unburied. Several bands of "Shotas" met us on the way and wanted me to hand over to them women and children. But I persistently refused. I did leave on the way about 300 children with Moslem families who were willing to take care of them and educate them. The "Mutessarrif" of Erzinjian ordered me to proceed with the convoy to Kamack. At the latter place the authorities refused to take charge of the women and children. I fell ill and wanted to go back, but I was told that as long as the Armenians in my charge were alive I would be sent from one place to the other. However I managed to include my batch with the deported Armenians that had come from Erzeroum. In charge of the latter was a colleague of mine Mohamed Effendi from the Gendarmerie. He told me afterwards that after leaving Kamach they came to a valley where the Euphrates ran. A band of Shotas sprang out and stopped the convoy. They ordered the escort to keep away and then shot every one of the Armenians and threw them in the river.

At Trebizond the Moslems were warned that if they sheltered Armenians they would be liable to the death penalty.

Government officials at Trebizond picked up some of the prettiest Armenian women of the best families. After committing the worst outrages on them they had them killed.

Cases of rape of women and girls even publicly are very numerous. They were systematically murdered after the outrage.

The Armenians deported from Erzeroum started with their cattle and whatever possessions they could carry. When they reached Erzinjian they became suspicious seeing that all the Armenians had already been deported. The Vali of Erzeroum allayed their fears and assured them most solemnly that no harm would befall them. He told them that the first convoy should leave for Kamach, the others remaining at Erzeroum until they received word from their friends informing of their safe arrival to destination. And so it happened. Word came that the first batch had arrived safely at Kamach, which was true enough. But the men were kept at Kamach and shot, and the women were massacred by the Shotas after leaving that town.

The Turkish officials in charge of the deportation and extermination of the Armenians were: At Erzeroum, Bihas Eddin Shaker Bey; At Trebizond; Naiil Bey, Tewfik Bey Monastirly, Colonel of Gendarmerie, The Commissioner of Police; At Kamach; The member of Parliament for Erzinjian. The Shotas headquarters were also at Kamach. Their chief was the Kurd Murzabey who boasted that he alone had killed 70,000 Armenians. Afterwards he was thought to be dangerous by the Turks and thrown into prison charged with having hit a gendarme. He was eventually executed in secret.