Autor/Autorin
On 2 June 2016, the German Bundestag passed a resolution classifying the murder of up to one million Armenians and other Christian minorities during the First World War as genocide. The text of the resolution included a sentence that had already been the subject of parliamentary debate a year earlier, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the crimes. In contrast to the uniqueness of the Holocaust, the resolution stated that „the fate of the Armenians (…) exemplifies the history of mass extermination, ethnic cleansing, expulsions, indeed genocides, which characterised the 20th century in such a terrible way.“[1] Due to the alliance between the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the Bundestag expressly acknowledged the complicity of the German Empire in the crime.
Twenty other states now categorise the massacres committed in the Ottoman Empire in 1915/16 as genocide[2].
The memory and self-image of the Armenians, who were the first ethnic group to adopt Christianity as their state religion in 301, are characterised by an eventful history in the field of interests between the Ottoman and Russian empires. Today’s state territory between Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey[3] comprises only part of the historical settlement area of the Armenians, which was part of the Roman Empire under Emperor Trajan (98-117 AD) and lay between the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, Mesopotamia and the River Kura. Located in eastern Asia Minor, close to Mesopotamia, the Armenian highlands were already of central importance as a trading bridge between Europe, Africa and Asia in pre-Christian times and were therefore also a focal point for cultural exchange. Armenian settlement in this territory can be traced back to the 7th century B.C.[4]
Although under Persian, Byzantine and finally Arab rule between 428 and 885, Armenia was largely able to maintain its religious and cultural independence during this occupation. The invasions of Mongol tribes between the 11th and 13th centuries, however, led to flight, expulsion and the formation of numerous diaspora communities in Asia, Africa and Europe, but above all in the Ottoman Empire. After Ottoman rule was consolidated with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it established a legal system based on Sharia law that denied non-Muslims equality in all areas of life. Non-Muslim communities were thus allowed to continue to exist in the Ottoman Empire, but this was based on a relationship of subordination[5].
1839 saw the beginning of a period of reform in which equality between Muslims and non-Muslims was now being publicised for the first time. This encouraged a spirit of optimism, the spread of European Enlightenment ideas and secularisation tendencies in the Armenian communities.
Until the 1870s, many Armenians living in Constantinople were able to achieve an elevated economic and cultural position in the Ottoman Empire. However, like all non-Muslims, they were denied access to state offices until 1856, when a reform decree made it possible for all citizens of the Ottoman Empire to pursue a career as a civil servant, regardless of their religious affiliation. During this period of awakening, a lively exchange developed with European elites, above all with cultural figures in Paris. The hopes and expectations of Christian Armenians thus increasingly became the focus of European public and political attention[6].
However, the tendencies towards equality and the cultural awakening of the Armenians were met with rejection by the majority of Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. An antagonistic tension between the expectation of maintaining a religious-hierarchical order on the one hand and the hope of equality and participation on the other accompanied domestic political developments in the 19th century, while the Armenian heartland was divided between Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire; however, the Armenian settlement areas in Anatolia[7] initially remained untouched.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, against the backdrop of the rapid disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the growing religious-nationalist tendencies in this context, anti-Christian resentment intensified among the Muslim majority of the population and at the domestic political level. When the Armenian leadership entered into negotiations with the Russian tsar in 1877 during the Ottoman-Russian war to occupy their Anatolian settlement areas and grant them autonomy, this intensified the isolation of the Armenian population.
Armenians were increasingly stylised as „internal enemies“, and anti-Armenian stigmatisation became entrenched, particularly in the Anatolian settlement areas, where attacks on Armenians and Armenian counter-reactions became more frequent. The government and Muslim elites channelled fears and discontent specifically against the Armenian population, the majority of whom considered themselves Ottomans. Between 1894 and 1896, the first nationwide massacres of Armenians finally took place. These mass crimes initiated by the Ottoman government, to which between 80,000 and 300,000 Armenians fell victim,[8] were not yet aimed at expelling all Armenians from the Ottoman Empire. Rather, they were aimed at restoring the old system of subordination of all non-Muslims in the multi-ethnic state.[9] Although the actions were mainly directed against Armenians who were involved in uprisings against the Turkish government, they increasingly developed into general anti-Christian pogroms, a „partial genocide“[10].
The massacres certainly attracted attention in the USA and Europe, with the New York Times using the term „Holocaust“ in 1895.[11] However, the US government and European states stood idly by and watched the persecution.
On the eve of the First World War, more than 1.2 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire; in today’s Turkey, there is only a relatively small Armenian community with around 70,000 members[12].
The genocide of the Armenians, the first murder of millions of Armenians in the 20th century and, in retrospect, the „genocide before the genocide“, was ordered by the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turk movement had been working towards a constitutional form of government with a nationalist orientation since 1876. The aim was the political, military and economic modernisation of the Ottoman Empire, which was threatened with collapse. After an initial orientation towards nationalist and economically liberal positions, the Young Turks subsequently became increasingly nationalist and conservative, and from 1913 at the latest also aggressively racist towards non-Muslim minorities. They seized power in a coup in 1908 and were initially able to hold on to it until 1912. After another coup in 1913, they ruled dictatorially as part of a triumvirate until 1918. Under this regime, the Ottoman Empire entered the war in 1914 alongside the Central Powers led by the German Empire.
The Young Turks assumed that the Turks were superior to other peoples and wanted to restructure the Ottoman Empire into an exclusively Turkish-Muslim state – even by force. Land losses in the course of the Balkan wars (1912/13) and the resulting mass exodus and expulsion of Muslim Ottomans from the Balkans, who mainly flocked to the Anatolian settlement areas of Armenia, strengthened the Young Turks in their endeavours to transform the multi-religious Ottoman multi-ethnic state into an Islamic-monotheistic Turkey. They did not shy away from the physical annihilation of ethnicities and population groups that they considered unassimilable.[13] As the increasing marginalisation of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire from the 1870s onwards triggered growing resistance to the Turkish government and secessionist efforts, which were also accompanied by attacks on Turkish institutions, the stigmatisation of the Armenian population as „enemies within“ had some success. However, there is a broad consensus among (non-Turkish) historians that the Armenian side posed no real military threat to the warring Ottoman Empire.[14] After the Ottoman army suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of Russian troops in the Caucasus in 1914/15, the Turkish government accused Armenia of collaborating with Tsarist Russia and blamed the Christian minority for the military debacle. Against the backdrop of this „stab-in-the-back“ legend in 1915, the regime set in motion the systematic genocide of the Armenians[15] The Armenians themselves used their own terms for the genocide, such as Mets Jerern (great iniquity) or Aghet (the deed that penetrates and destroys, the catastrophe).
The systematic persecution began with the arrest of numerous intellectuals in Constantinople (Istanbul) on 24 April 1915. A few months after the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of the German Empire, police units arrested more than 200 representatives of the Armenian elite living in the capital, including members of parliament, journalists, teachers, doctors and merchants. Those arrested were accused of collaborating with the enemy, above all with Russia. The arrest campaign was extended to numerous provincial towns, Armenian leaders were tortured and publicly executed as a deterrent. Men of military age were murdered, old people, women and children were sent on death marches. As a result, the government forced an entire population onto death marches. Tens of thousands starved to death or died of thirst on the forced marches into the Syrian and Mesopotamian desert, where tens of thousands more perished due to the hostile conditions. Around 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives and hundreds of thousands fled as part of an unprecedented systematic extermination campaign[16].
After the armistice between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire, some of the Young Turk officials responsible for the genocide fled on board a German submarine with the consent of the German Reich. Talaat Pasha (1874-1921), as Minister of the Interior of the Young Turk regime and the main person responsible for the genocide, settled in Berlin, where he was murdered in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian (1897-1960), an Armenian activist.[17] Tehlirian was acquitted in a sensational trial before the Berlin Regional Court. Although the details of the 1921 genocide had not been disclosed, it was known that a crime of monstrous proportions had been committed and that the German military leadership was complicit in it.[18] The court circumvented a corresponding determination by not dealing with the actual responsibility of the former Ottoman interior minister, but focussing instead on Tehlirian’s motive for the crime. As the latter had been convinced of Pasha’s guilt and had therefore wanted to establish justice before history, it acquitted him[19] and thus indirectly took a position.
There is no doubt that the German government at the time was aware of the Turkish policy of extermination. Documents show that German military officers and diplomats were in favour of deportations – not systematic murder. In view of the existing but limited possibilities of exerting influence on the allied Ottoman Empire, the German government can at least be accused of failing to provide assistance or aiding and abetting mass murder.[20] Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (1859-1915), Berlin’s ambassador to the Bosporus, received protest notes and dispatches from numerous cities in the Ottoman Empire. As early as the beginning of July 1915, he wrote to the Foreign Office in Berlin and to the Reich Chancellor that „what is happening now is aimed at the destruction of the Armenian race.“[21] Political, economic and military influence was available, but the German Reich did not utilise it.
In 1919, under British, Italian and French occupation rule, courts martial were set up, which for the first time spoke of „crimes against humanity“. Seventeen leading Young Turks were sentenced to death, and only three of the sentences were carried out. Talaat Pasha was also sentenced to death in absentia. This first genocide trial, hardly recognised by the Turkish side as „victor’s justice“, focused for the first time on mass crimes committed by the state and was, as it were, a precursor to the Nuremberg Trials. However, the dispute faded into the background at the beginning of the 1920s in view of the rising Turkish national movement. Modern Turkey, founded in 1923, is no longer a multi-ethnic state like the Ottoman Empire was. The fact that the ethnic homogenisation of the Turkish Republic is based on genocide can hardly be integrated into the founding myth, which centres on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938),[22] even today.
However, the Turkish position that it was a case of isolation and resettlement of an internal enemy necessary for the war, which resulted in war-related casualties, is not tenable in view of the proven planning and the ideological-racist background that has been identified. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, close to the Young Turks but not personally involved in the genocide, established the modern republic after 1923 as the legal successor to the Ottoman Empire with a Young Turk state apparatus. Although he described the extermination of the Armenians as an „outrage“[23], there has been no further debate in Turkey to date. The current Turkish government, as demonstrated by its reaction to the resolution of the German Bundestag,[24] continues to deny the genocide.
It is debatable whether parliaments and governments are the right institutions to make historical categorisations by resolution. The danger of political instrumentalisation is always present here; under certain circumstances, such resolutions are already the result of instrumentalisation.
However, the denial of a historical crime contrary to historiographical findings is always in the context of political instrumentalisation. In this respect, the political positioning of the twenty states in favour of the historical truth is nevertheless an important step.
[1] Text of the motion of 31 May 2016, which was adopted by a cross-party majority on 2 June 2016: http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/18/086/1808613.pdf.
[2] The European Parliament categorised the atrocities as genocide as early as 1987. Similar resolutions were passed by the parliaments of France, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg and Brazil, among others. Pope Francis categorised the massacres as the „first genocide of the 20th century“.
[3] Today’s national territory: https://www.google.de/maps/search/armenien+map+1914/@40.0489819,42.7975061,7z/data=!3m1!4b1 , Armenian settlement areas in 1914 before the genocide: http://www.dw.com/de/der-armenier-komplex-wann-ist-ein-genozid-ein-genozid/a-18394100, territory of the first Armenian Republic (1919-1922): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/D_R_Armenia.png.
[4] Cf. on this: http://www.bpb.de/internationales/europa/tuerkei/184985/die-armenische-gemeinschaft.
[5] Cf. http://www.bpb.de/internationales/europa/tuerkei/184985/die-armenische-gemeinschaft.
[6] On this: http://www.bpb.de/internationales/europa/tuerkei/184985/die-armenische-gemeinschaft.
[7] Cf. http://www.dw.com/image/18398703_403.png.
[8] Gunnar Heinsohn, Lexikon der Völkermorde. Reinbek 1999, p. 78.
[9] Cf. Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York 2006, especially p. 42.
[10 ] Thus Dominik J. Schaller, „La question arménienne n’existe plus.“ The Armenian Genocide during the First World War and its Representation in Historiography. In: Micha Brumlik, Irmtrud Wojak (eds.), Genocide and War Crimes in the First Half of the 20th Century. Frankfurt 2004, pp. 99-128, here: S. 103.
[11] http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9D05E5DD113DE433A25753C1A96F9C94649ED7CF.
[12] Stanford Jay Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw, „ The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975″, in: History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey . Vol. 2: Reform, Revolution, and Republic. Cambridge 1988, pp. 239-241 on the basis of a census carried out by the Ottoman government in 1914; a census carried out by the Armenian Patriarchate in 1913/14 on the basis of baptismal registers and church records speaks of more than 1.9 million. See Raymond Kévorkian, Les Armeniens dans l’empire Ottoman à la veille du génocide. Paris 1992, p. 53 f. On the latter figure: http://www.bpb.de/internationales/europa/tuerkei/184985/die-armenische-gemeinschaft.
[13] Thus http://honorarkonsulat-armenien.de/voelkermord.htm.
[14] Cf. Martin Bitschnau (ed.), Armenia: Taboo and Trauma 1: The Facts at a Glance. Vienna 2010, passim.
[15] An initial overview: https://www.bpb.de/internationales/europa/tuerkei/184976/vom-reich-zur-republik; for further information see: Rolf Hosfeld/Christin Pschichholz (eds.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Völkermord an den Armeniern. Göttingen 2017 and Eckhard Lisec, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern im 1. Weltkrieg – Deutsche Offiziere beteiligt? Berlin 2017; Wolfgang Gust, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16: Dokumente aus dem Politischen Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes. Springe am Deister 2005.
[16] Seyhan Bayraktar, Politik und Erinnerung: Der Diskurs über den Armeniermord in der Türkei zwischen Nationalismus und Europäisierung , Bielefeld 2010, Mihran Dabag, Kristin Platt (eds.), Genozid und Moderne , Band 1: Strukturen kollektiver Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert. Opladen 1998.
[17] Cf. https://www. ndr.de/kultur/film/Die-Chronologie-des-Genozids-an-Armeniern,chronologie108.html; now Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide . Princeton 2018; Annette Schaefgen, Difficult to Remember: The Armenian Genocide . Berlin 2006; Rolf Hosfeld, Operation Nemesis: Turkey, Germany and the Armenian Genocide . Cologne 2005.
[18] Cf. Howard M. Sachar, Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War. London 2007, especially p. 15 and p. 17.
[19] An introduction: https://www.ndr.de/kultur/film/Die-Chronologie-des-Genozids-an-Armeniern,chronologie108.html.
[20] Cf. Jürgen Gottschlich, Aiding and abetting genocide: Germany’s role in the extermination of the Armenians . Berlin 2015 from a journalistic perspective, as before: Melkon Krishchian et al, Germany and the Extermination of Armenians in Turkey . North Charleston (South Carolina) 2014 (first edition 1930), detailed Rolf Hosfeld, Tod in der Wüste: Der Völkermord an den Armeniern . Munich 2015.
[21] Gottschlich, Beihilfe, passim.
[22] Cf. as an introduction: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article139981810/Warum-die-Tuerkei-den-Genozid-nicht-anerkennt.html.
[23] Cf. http://www.bpb.de/geschichte/zeitgeschichte/genozid-an-den-armeniern/218058/einfuehrung.
