Germany and the Armenian genocide

Armin Wegner's description: "Looking at you is the dark [and] beautiful face of Babesheea who was robbed by Kurds, raped, and freed only after ten days; like a wild beast the Turkish soldiers, officers, soldiers, and gendarmes swept down on this welcome prey. All the crimes that had ever been committed against women, were committed here. They cut off their breasts, mutilated their limbs, and their corpses lay naked, defiled, or blackened by the heat on the fields."[7]

The German Empire had been responsible for negotiating the Treaty of Berlin securing the status of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had been skeptical of German participation in the Middle East. This policy began to change under Kaiser Wilhelm II, who negotiated close relations with Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II despite persecution of Armenians such as the Armenian massacres of 1894-1896. By the beginning of World War I an alliance had developed, and the Ottoman Empire under the Committee of Union and Progress entered the war on the side of Germany in the Central Powers.[8]

Beginning in April 1915, many Germans present in eastern and southern parts of Anatolia became witnesses to the genocide.[9][10] German witnesses recognized the genocidal character of the deportations. On 2 June 1915, consul Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter reported that "An evacuation of such a size is tantamount to a massacre because due to a lack of any kind of transportation, barely half of these people will reach their destination alive."[11] Twenty days later, missionary Johannes Lepsius told the Foreign Office that the systematic deportations were

obviously an attempt to decimate the Christian population in the empire as far as possible under the veil of martial law and by putting to use the Muslim elation aroused by the Holy War, abandoning it to extermination by carrying it off to climatically unfavourable and unsafe districts along the border.[12]

By 17 July, the German consul in Samsun reported:

The countermeasures taken involve nothing less than the destruction or enforced Islamisation of a whole people. The destination of those exiled from Samsun is said to be Urfa. It is certain that no Christian Armenian will reach this destination. According to news from the interior, there are already reports on the disappearance of the deported population of entire towns.[12]

According to historian Stefan Ihrig, "German archives hold a vast amount of such reports".[13] Most of the German consuls in Anatolia prepared reports on the genocide and criticized it,[14] but there was also an agreement with the Young Turk government "there was to be no written record of... conversations" on the Armenian issue.[9] Some German diplomats tried to help the Armenians; Walter Rössler, the German consul in Aleppo, was reprimanded for excessive sympathy.[15] Rössler also complained that the German press printed false stories denying atrocities against Armenians.[16]

Those trying to get the word out were confounded by Ottoman censorship.[10] For example, Germans were threatened with imprisonment for taking photographs of the Armenian deportees who died during the death marches.[17] Information about the genocide was also censored in Germany, but penalties were lenient[18] and self-censorship had more of an effect.[19] German newspapers printed denials of the atrocities and regurgitated the Ottoman position of seeing Armenians as a subversive element and their persecution as justified.[16] According to Ihrig, all the information was available to a German audience "yet it did not want to see".[14] Historian Margaret L. Anderson states, "If we look not at the hard-pressed German-in-the-street but at the elites, the close-knit world of movers, shakers, and public opinion-makers, then the answer is clear: everyone. And if we ask, what did they know? The answer, with equal certitude, is: enough."[20]

"An Armenian view of the Baghdad Railway", caricature depicting the railway as composed of human bones

The Baghdad railway was not located on the major routes of Armenian deportations or the main killing fields in the Syrian Desert. Nevertheless, it employed thousands of Armenians before 1915 and became drawn into the genocide.[16] The first use of railways for genocide occurred in early 1915 when Armenian women and children from Zeitun were deported on trains to Konya and later marched into the Syrian Desert. Concentration camps were set up by railroad stations where tens of thousands of Armenians were held before deportation. According to the deputy director of the railway, Franz Günther, an average of 88 Armenians were packed into a single cattle car (usual capacity of 36 men) and newly born infants were taken from their mothers and thrown out of the train.[21] The railway was paid for the deportation of Armenians, however, according to Günther's proposal, this money was spent buying food for them.[22]

In October 1915, a German officer, Lieutenant Colonel Sylvester Boettrich, countersigned the deportation of Armenians working for the railway. Boettrich consistently hampered efforts by the railway to retain its employees and save Armenians, and the Imperial German Army supported him in his conflict with the railway.[23][24] The Foreign Office then undertook an intensive but unsuccessful effort to destroy all copies of this order.[9][25]

The railway hired as many Armenians as possible, including those unqualified for the jobs.[19] In late 1915 and early 1916, the Ottoman government demanded the handing over of the Armenian workers as well as an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 widows and orphans who were in camps beside the railway. Although the railway company objected on the grounds that it would bring both construction and travel to a halt, some workers and their families, who until this time were staying in camps by the railway, were deported.[26]

Some German employees tried to document the persecutions by taking photographs and collecting evidence, but an edict by Djemal Pasha required them to turn over all photographs and negatives. After this, photography was classified as espionage, but it continued nevertheless despite the risks. Franz J. Günther, vice-president of the railway, secretly sent information to Berlin, where it was made available to the Foreign Office.[27] German medic Armin Wegner, who worked on the railway, stated:

we often, when we made camp for the night, passed by the camps, the death camps, in which the Armenians, helplessly expelled into the desert, were facing their eventual demise. The Turks avoided and denied these camps. The Germans did not go there and behaved as if they did not see them.[14]

Kaiser Wilhelm II with Enver Pasha, October 1917. Enver was one of the main perpetrators of the genocide.

Toleration of extreme violence against civilians was entrenched in military culture of Imperial Germany.[5] [28] Other Germans, including naval attaché Hans Humann, openly approved of the genocide on nationalist grounds, rather than military necessity.[5] After one group of Armenians was deported from Smyrna, German commander Otto Liman von Sanders blocked additional deportations by threatening to use military force to obstruct them.[29][30]

German diplomats complained of an estimated 9.2 million marks in financial losses to German creditors as a result of the Armenian genocide, which could not be recouped as "abandoned" Armenian properties were confiscated by the Ottoman government. In 1916, Germany received 100 million marks of compensation from the Ottoman government; after the war, this sum was confiscated by the Allies.[31] Although there were occasional German diplomatic protests against the genocide, Ihrig suggests that such protests "were mainly meant to save face and to control the political, reputational, and diplomatic damage the genocide might cause".[32]

Ihrig suggests that the idea of German instigation may have been originally spread by the Young Turk government.[33] Among German eyewitnesses, the most critical was the former interpreter Heinrich Vierbücher, who charged Germany with failing to break with the "Stambul assassins. [The German government] had joined the society of criminals, who had all the aces, and it had succumbed to their stronger will. Everything was subordinated to the pursuit of the phantom of victory".[29][34] Armenian historian Vahakn Dadrian argued that German officials were "indirect accessories to crimes perpetuated by the [Turkish] Special Organization functionaries whose overall goal they endorsed, financed to some extent, and shepherded".[35] According to historian Hilmar Kaiser, "German involvement in the Armenian Genocide covers a spectrum ranging from active resistance to complicity. A uniform German policy did not exist."[23]

According to historian Ulrich Trumpener, the German government had little influence over the Ottoman government, such that "direct protection of the Armenians was completely beyond Germany’s capacity".[29][5] Trumpener further argues that Germany did not welcome or endorse the persecution of Armenians, although it should be faulted for "extreme moral indifference" to the Armenian plight and complete failure to take any measures to help them.[5] Historian Margaret L. Anderson suggests that it would be unreasonable to expect Germany to end its alliance with the Ottoman Empire over the Armenian issue, as the Allies demanded, but that Germany could be faulted for lying to itself about the truth of Ottoman persecutions.[36] According to historian Hans-Lukas Kieser, the best opportunity to intervene would be late 1914, when the Germans could have reiterated and emphasized their commitment to the Armenian reforms. Failing that, "the German authorities could have bargained much better in the summer of 1915 in order to exclude certain groups and regions from removal", although Kieser does not think it possible for Germany to have stopped the genocide.[37] Genocide scholar Donald Bloxham argued that "The idea of a German role in the formation of the genocidal policy . . . has no basis in the available documentation."[38] Ronald Grigor Suny argues that "[t]he best word to describe the German role is complicity (Mitschuld in German) rather than initiation, participation, or responsibility... German diplomats and officers did not intervene forcefully to stop the Armenian deportations and massacres. They had the military power but not the political will to stop the massacres."[39]

Memorial to the Armenian genocide behind St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin

According to British human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, if the Armenian genocide had been perpetrated a century later, the International Court of Justice would "hold Germany responsible for complicity with the genocide and persecution, since it had full knowledge of the massacres and deportations and decided not to use its power and influence over the Ottomans to stop them."[40]

After the genocide, Germany attempted to portray its role in the best light.[16] In 1919, Lepsius published Germany and Armenia, a collection of German diplomatic communications on the genocide. However, he expunged German anti-Armenianism and information that reflected badly on Germany, leading the book to be described as apologetic.[51][16] Lepsius stated that he had full access to the German archives and that no document had been altered, which was not accurate.[16] However, the book also exposed the reality of the genocide to a wide audience.[52]

In 2015, President of Germany Joachim Gauck acknowledged Germany's "co-responsibility" for the genocide.[53] In 2016, the Bundestag voted almost unanimously to recognize the genocide.[54][55] The resolution also stated:

The Bundestag regrets the inglorious role of the German Empire, which, as a principal ally of the Ottoman Empire, did not try to stop these crimes against humanity, despite explicit information regarding the organized expulsion and extermination of Armenians, including also from German diplomats and missionaries.[6]

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• Anderson, Margaret Lavinia (2011). "Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians?". In Suny, Ronald Grigor; Göçek, Fatma Müge; Naimark, Norman M. (eds.). A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-979276-4.
• Dadrian, Vahakn N. (2004). The history of the Armenian genocide: ethnic conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. Berghahn Books. ISBN 1-57181-666-6.
• Gust, Wolfgang (2014). The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915-1916. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-78238-143-3.
• Hofmann, Tessa (2015). "The Genocide against the Ottoman Armenians: German Diplomatic Correspondence and Eyewitness Testimonies". Genocide Studies International. 9 (1): 22–60. doi:10.3138/gsi.9.1.03. S2CID 152834321.
• Hosfeld, Rolf (2016). "Jürgen Gottschlich, Beihilfe zum Völkermord. Deutschlands Rolle bei der Vernichtung der Armenier, Berlin: Links 2015, 343 S., EUR 19,90 [ISBN 978-3-86153-817-2]". Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift (in German). 75 (1): 245–248. doi:10.1515/mgzs-2016-0041. ISSN 2193-2336.
• Ihrig, Stefan (2016). Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-50479-0.
• Kaiser, Hilmar (1998). "The Baghdad Railway and the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1916: A Case Study in German Resistance and Complicity". Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-2777-7.
• Kieser, Hans-Lukas (2010). "Germany and the Armenian Genocide of 1915–17". In Friedman, Jonathan C. (ed.). The Routledge History of the Holocaust. Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9780203837443.ch3. ISBN 978-1-136-87060-6.
• Robertson, Geoffrey (2016). "Armenia and the G-word: The Law and the Politics". The Armenian Genocide Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 69–83. ISBN 978-1-137-56163-3.
• Suny, Ronald Grigor (2015). "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-6558-1.

• Dadrian, Vahakn N. (1996). German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity. Blue Crane Books. ISBN 978-1-886434-02-8.
• Gottschlich, Jürgen (2015). Beihilfe zum Völkermord: Deutschlands Rolle bei der Vernichtung der Armenier [Aiding and Abetting Genocide: Germany's Role in the Annihilation of the Armenians] (in German). Ch. Links Verlag. ISBN 978-3-86153-817-2.
• Hofmann, Tessa (1985). ""German Eyewitness Reports of the Genocide of the Armenians, 1915–1916". In Chaliand, Gérard (ed.). A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide. Zed Books / Permanent Peoples' Tribunal. ISBN 978-0-86232-423-0.
• Robertson, Geoffrey (2014). An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians?. Biteback Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84954-822-9.
• Sarukhanyan, Tigran (2004). "Die Frage der materiellen Verantwortlichkeit für den Genozid an den Armeniern und Großbritannien, 1915–1924" [The question of substantive liability for the genocide against the Armenians and Great Britain, 1915–1924]. In Hofmann, Tessa (ed.). Verfolgung, Vertreibung und Vernichtung der Christen im Osmanischen Reich 1912-1922 [Persecution, Expulsion and Extermination of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1922] (in German). LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 79–92. ISBN 978-3-8258-7823-8.
• Weber, Sebastian (2014). Der Völkermord an den Armeniern: Die Rezeption der Armenischen Frage in Deutschland von 1894-1921 (in German). Diplomica Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8428-9001-5.
• Nienass, Benjamin (2020). "Transnational Memories, National Memory Regimes: Commemorating the Armenian Genocide in Germany". German Studies Review. 43 (1): 127–147. doi:10.1353/gsr.2020.0006.