Armenian Genocide

1. Armenian Genocide Young Turk Committee in 1909.

2. Ambassador Morgenthau’s memoirs of his years in the service of the United States in Constantinople, (today Istanbul), are an important primary historical resource for the study of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide. During this genocide, approximately 1,500,000 Armenians living in Anatolia were murdered in an attempt to rid Turkey of its non-Turkish populations. Mr. Morgenthau left Turkey a frustrated man, having done all that he was able through diplomatic circles to halt the murders, to no avail.

3. "A LONG LINE THAT SWIFTLY GREW SHORTER One of the most striking photographs of the deportations that have come out of Armenia. Here is shown a column of Christians on the path across the great plains of the Mamuret-ul-Aziz. The zaptieths are shown walking along at one side."

4. The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of Armenian women and children. Before World War I, Armenians occupied a protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Large-scale massacres of Armenians occurred in the 1890s and 1909. The Ottoman Empire suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses—especially the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars—leading to fear among CUP leaders that the Armenians, whose homeland in the eastern provinces was viewed as the heartland of the Turkish nation, would seek independence. During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory in 1914, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians.

5. Ottoman leaders took isolated indications of Armenian resistance as evidence of a widespread rebellion, though no such rebellion existed. Mass deportation was intended to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence. On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from Constantinople. At the orders of Talaat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacres.

6. In the Syrian Desert, the survivors were dispersed into concentration camps. In 1916, another wave of massacres was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of the year. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors were carried out by the Turkish nationalist movement during the Turkish War of Independence after World War I. The Armenian genocide resulted in the destruction of more than two millennia of Armenian civilization. Together with the mass murder and expulsion of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethnonational Turkish state. The Turkish government maintains that the deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action that cannot be described as genocide. As of 2022, 31 countries have recognized the events as genocide, as do the vast majority of historians.

7. Location: Date : 1915–1917 Target: Attack type: Deaths: Perpetrators: Trials: Ottoman Empire Ottoman Armenians Genocide, death march, forced Islamization 600,000–1.5 million Committee of Union and Progress Ottoman Special Military Tribunal

8. Map of the Armenian genocide in 1915

9. Armenians gathered in a city prior to deportation. They were murdered outside the city.

10. On 23 May 1915, Talaat ordered the deportation of all Armenians in Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum. To grant a cover of legality to the deportation, already well underway in the eastern provinces and Cilicia, the Council of Ministers approved the Temporary Law of Deportation, which allowed authorities to deport anyone deemed "suspect. On 21 June, Talaat ordered the deportation of all Armenians throughout the empire, even Adrianople, 2,000 kilometers (1,200 mi) from the Russian front. Following the elimination of the Armenian population in eastern Anatolia, in August 1915, the Armenians of western Anatolia and European Turkey were targeted for deportation. Some areas with a very low Armenian population and some cities, including Constantinople, were partially spared.

11. Overall, national, regional, and local levels of governance cooperated with the CUP in the perpetration of genocide. The Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants (IAMM) coordinated the deportation and the resettlement of Muslim immigrants in the vacant houses and lands. The IAMM, under the control of Talaat's Ministry of the Interior, and the Special Organization, which took orders directly from the CUP Central Committee, closely coordinated their activities. A dual-track system was used to communicate orders; those for the deportation of Armenians were communicated to the provincial governors through official channels, but orders of a criminal character, such as those calling for annihilation, were sent through party channels and destroyed upon receipt. Deportation convoys were mostly escorted by gendarmes or local militia. The killings near the front lines were carried out by the Special Organization, and those farther away also involved local militias, bandits, gendarmes, or Kurdish tribes depending on the area. Within the area controlled by the Third Army, which held eastern Anatolia, the army was only involved in genocidal atrocities in the vilayets of Van, Erzerum, and Bitlis.

12. Many perpetrators came from the Caucasus (Chechens and Circassians), who identified the Armenians with their Russian conquerors. Nomadic Kurds committed many atrocities during the genocide, but settled Kurds only rarely did so. Perpetrators had several motives, including ideology, revenge, desire for Armenian property, and careerism. To motivate perpetrators, state-appointed imams encouraged the killing of Armenians and killers were entitled to a third of Armenian movable property (another third went to local authorities and the last to the CUP). Embezzling beyond that was punished. Ottoman politicians and officials who opposed the genocide were dismissed or assassinated. The government decreed that any Muslim who harbored an Armenian against the will of the authorities would be executed.

13. Death marches Although the majority of able-bodied Armenian men had been conscripted into the army, others deserted, paid the exemption tax, or fell outside the age range of conscription. Unlike the earlier massacres of Ottoman Armenians, in 1915 Armenians were not usually killed in their villages, to avoid destruction of property or unauthorized looting. Instead, the men were usually separated from the rest of the deportees during the first few days and executed. Few resisted, believing it would put their families in greater danger. Boys above the age of twelve (sometimes fifteen) were treated as adult men. Execution sites were chosen for proximity to major roads and for rugged terrain, lakes, wells, or cisterns to facilitate the concealment or disposal of corpses. The convoys would stop at a nearby transit camp, where the escorts would demand a ransom from the Armenians. Those unable to pay were murdered. Units of the Special Organization, often wearing gendarme uniforms, were stationed at the killing sites; escorting gendarmes often did not participate in killing.

14. At least 150,000 Armenians passed through Erzindjan from June 1915, where a series of transit camps were set up to control the flow of victims to the killing site at the nearby Kemah gorge. Thousands of Armenians were killed near Lake Hazar, pushed by paramilitaries off the cliffs. More than 500,000 Armenians passed through the Firincilar plain south of Malatya, one of the deadliest areas during the genocide. Arriving convoys, having passed through the plain to approach the Kahta highlands, would have found gorges already filled with corpses from previous convoys. Many others were held in tributary valleys of the Tigris, Euphrates, or Murat and systematically executed by the Special Organization. Armenian men were often drowned by being tied together back-to-back before being thrown in the water, a method that was not used on women. Authorities viewed disposal of bodies through rivers as a cheap and efficient method, but it caused widespread pollution downstream. So many bodies floated down the Tigris and Euphrates that they sometimes blocked the rivers and needed to be cleared with explosives. Other rotting corpses became stuck to the riverbanks, and still others traveled as far as the Persian Gulf. The rivers remained polluted long after the massacres, causing epidemics downstream.

15. Armenians died along the roads and their bodies were buried hastily or, more often, simply left beside the roads. The Ottoman government ordered the corpses to be cleared as soon as possible to prevent both photographic documentation and disease epidemics, but these orders were not uniformly followed. Women and children, who made up the great majority of deportees, were usually not executed immediately, but subjected to hard marches through mountainous terrain without food and water. Those who could not keep up were left to die or shot. During 1915, some were forced to walk as far as 1,000 kilometers (620 mi) in the summer heat. Some deportees from western Anatolia were allowed to travel by rail. There was a distinction between the convoys from eastern Anatolia, which were eliminated almost in their entirety, and those from farther west, which made up most of those surviving to reach Syria. For example, around 99 percent of Armenians deported from Erzerum did not reach their destination.

16. Armenian genocide The corpses of Armenians beside a road, a common sight along deportation routes

17. Percent of prewar Armenian population "unaccounted for" in 1917 based on Talaat Pasha's record. Black indicates that 100 percent of Armenians have disappeared. "Resettlement" zone is displayed in red.

18. 1914; January 7: 280 high-ranking officers and a total of 1,100 officers of the Ottoman Army are “immediately dismissed” and replaced by officers affiliated with the Young Turk party, who then take control of the army. 1914; January 30: The Young Turk daily Ikdam denies claims that there is a plan “whose objective is to remove Armenians from the provinces they inhabit and to deport them to Mesopotamia establish Armenia Muslims who can unify with other Muslims of the Caucasus and form a serious resistance to Slavic encroachments. 1914; February-June: The Young Turk Central Committee puts in place in the course of several secret meetings a “plan to homogenize” Anatolia and to liquidate its “non-Turkish concentrations”. This plan aimed above all the expulsion of the Greeks from Thrace and Anatolia, particularly the Aegean coastal areas or to “move them to the interior” by the spring of 1914. It also recommended the transfer of the Armenian population to Syria and Mesopotamia. 1914; July 16: Around twenty individuals along with approximately 100 Armenian militants of the Social Democratic Hentchak Party are arrested and interned in Istanbul. 1914; August 2: Negotiations conducted between the German ambassador to Istanbul, Baron Wangenheim, and members of the Young Turk Central Committee lead to the signing of a secret treaty that would provide for a military alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire against Russia. 1914; August 3: Order of general mobilization and imperial decree puts the Ottoman Parliament in recess. Beginning of the conscription of Ottoman Armenians between the ages of 20 and 40.

19. 1915; May 25-27, Erzincan: Authorities gather the Armenian population of Erzincan in the Armenian cemetery of Kuyubaşı, situated about fifteen minutes from the town. The evening of Thursday 27, the entire population of the town and the villagers from the surrounding areas are interned under the surveillance of Special Organization bands. The deportees are regrouped by quarter and the men from the ages of forty to fiftee are separated, then massacred by the gendarmes and the bands. The remainder is sent on May 28, under the supervision of Halet Bey, to the neighboring gorges of Kemah, in small groups leaving in one-hour intervals in order to escape detection. The deportees’ throats are slashed and they are thrown into the Euphrates by S.O. squads commanded by Jafer Mustafa. Hundreds of women and children also jump together over the edge. Infants of six or seven months of age are collected in the villages of the plain, tied in sacks, and thrown into the Euphrates. 1915; End of May, kaza of Pülumer/Polormor: The villagers of Perkri, Gersenoud, and Dantseg are massacred on the spot by a Special Organization squad. 1915; July: The second caravan from Erzerum reaches the plain of Fırıncılar, to the south of Malatya—one of the main killing fields employed by the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, which is supervised by the deputy from Dersim, Haci Baloszade Mehmed Nuri, and his brother, Ali Pasha, who are under order from two Kurdish chiefs from the Reşvan tribe, Zeynal Bey and Haci Bedri Agha, along with Bitlisi Emin, a retired Gendarmerie Commander. Three thousand six hundred deportees are executed there at the knife, 2,115 of which are men.

20. 1916; October 24, Der el-Zor: Around 2,000 orphans gathered by Hakkı Bey, the inspector of the CUP, of the northern camps, are bound together in twos and thrown into the Euphrates. 1917; September 11 and 12, Mosul region: General Halil Kut has 15,000 Armenians executed in two nights by Kurds and irregulars, and has them thrown into the Tigris, bound together in groups of ten 1921; March 15, Berlin: The former Grand-Vizier, Mehmed Talat, who had taken refuge in Germany since November 1918, is assassinated by an Armenian militant, Soghomon Tehlerian. 1922; April 17,Berlin: Bahaeddin Şakir and Cemal Azmi are executed in the street by two Armenian militants. 1922; July 25, Tiflis (Georgia): Ahmed Cemal is assassinated by an Armenian militant.

21. Armenian population map published in 1896

22. An Armenian woman kneeling beside a dead child in a field outside of Aleppo year 1915

23. Members of the Young Turks: İshak Sükuti, Serâceddin Bey, Tunalı Hilmi, Âkil Muhtar, Mithat Şükrü, Emin Bey, Lutfi Bey, Doctor Şefik Bey, Nûri Ahmed, Doctor Reshid and Münif Bey

24. Young Turks was a political reform movement in the early 20th century that favored the replacement of the Ottoman Empire's absolute monarchy with a constitutional government. They led a rebellion against the absolute rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. With this revolution, the Young Turks helped to establish the Second Constitutional Era in the same year, ushering in an era of multi-party democracy for the first time in the country's history. Jakob Künzler (March 8, 1871 – January 15, 1949) was a Swiss who resided in an oriental mission in Urfa and who witnessed the Armenian genocide. From 1915 to 1917 Künzler became an eyewitness to the Armenian genocide, the subject of his 1921 book In the Land of Blood and Tears. Despite mortal danger he helped provide, when he could, for thousands of Armenian orphans and resumed his hospital enterprise in Urfa.