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November 14, 2006
The issue of German responsibility in the Armenian
Genocide has been researched by a number of scholars
in the past decades. The Ottoman Empire was an ally
of Germany during WWI, when up to a million and a
half Armenians were uprooted from the Empire and
perished in a state-sponsored campaign of mass
annihilation.
On June 15, 2005, the German Parliament passed a
motion honoring and commemorating “the victims of
violence, murder and expulsion among the Armenian
people before and during the First World War.” The
Bundestag deplored “the deeds of the Young Turkish
government in the Ottoman Empire which have resulted
in the almost total annihilation of the Armenians in
Anatolia.”
The Bundestag also acknowledged and deplored “the
inglorious role played by the German Reich which, in
spite of a wealth of information on the organized
expulsion and annihilation of Armenians, has made no
attempt to intervene and stop these atrocities.”
In this interview with Professor Margaret Anderson,
conducted by phone from Beirut, we discuss issues
related to Germany and the Armenian Genocide.
Margaret Anderson is a professor of history at the
University of California in Berkeley. She received
her Ph.D. from Brown University. She has researched
electoral politics and political culture in Germany
and in a comparative European perspective; democracy
and democratic institutions; religion and politics;
and religion and society, -especially Catholicism in
the 19th century. She is the author of Windthorst: A
Political Biography (Oxford University Press, 1981
and , Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political
Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton University
Press, 2000). Her research has more recently
revolved around Germany and the Ottoman Empire
during the Armenian Genocide.
Khatchig Mouradian: How did you first become
interested in the Armenian Genocide?
Margaret Anderson:
It was quite an accident. When I finished my last
book, I needed to do something different so that I
didn’t get stale. A colleague of mine, who
researched Italian history during the same period,
said “You should work on the Armenians.” I told him
that I can’t work on the Armenians, I don’t read
Armenian, I don’t read Turkish. And he said, yes,
but you read German and there is a lot of stuff to
do on Germany.” He was right. There are 56 volumes
in the German Foreign Office devoted to the Armenian
persecutions, as well as many more under other
titles—like the embassy in Constantinople—that are
quite relevant to this horrible story.
I have a colleague, Stephan Astourian, a specialist
in Armenian history, without whom I could never have
begun this. He was immediately helpful in steering
me to the proper Armenian sources and letting me
understand the historiography.
K.M.: How thoroughly have these documents
been researched?
M.A.: Vahakn N.
Dadrian has used them, most notably in German
Responsibility in The Armenian Genocide: A Review of
the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (1996),
and even before that several other people have done
it. Ulrich Trumpener had an excellent chapter in his
1968 book, Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914-1918.
More recently, Rolf Hosfeld's Operation Nemesis: Die
Türkei, Deutschland und der Völkermord an den
Armeniern (2005); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute
Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of
War in Imperial Germany (Cornell, Ithaca, 2005) and
Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide:
Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the
Armenians (Oxford, 2005) employ these documents to
good effect. As far as I know, scholars in Turkey
haven’t published anything using these materials;
though when I was in the German Foreign Office
Archives in Berlin, it was clear that some Turkish
scholars had seen them. When you work in German
archives you have to sign a sheet saying you have
used these documents. So sometimes you can see who
has used them ahead of you. Now, the documents from
the German Foreign Office published by Johannes
Lepsius in 1919 (under the title Deutschland und
Armenien), along with the parts that his edition
left out (which are not as significant as some
scholars have thought) can be found online, edited
by Wolfgang Gust. Gust has inserted in italics the
parts that Lepsius's Deutschland und Armenien left
out. Gust was able to do this by comparing Lepsius’s
collection with the original documents. These are
available online [at
www.armenocide.de ].
K.M.: In German Responsibility in the
Armenian Genocide, Dadrian argues that Lepsius left
these sections out on purpose.
M.A.: I think
Gust himself has now become a little more moderate
on that issue. Most of the phrases and passages left
out are completely insignificant from the standpoint
of the question, Was there an Armenian Genocide and
who was involved? They do not bear significantly on
the question of the Genocide’s character. In some
cases, Lepsius—if it was Lepsius who was responsible
for the omissions—may have been protecting fellow
Germans and Germany’s reputation, but in most of the
cases, it seems to me, he was protecting Armenians.
That is—and the national school of Turkish
historians will be quick to jump on this—he would
soften or leave out cases of Armenian revolutionary
violence, and cover that up. Lepsius presents a
picture of almost complete Armenian victimhood, of a
people with no ability to strike back. Well, we know
that is not true; the Armenians struck back when
they could. But Lepsius was a churchman, and so
disapproved of violence. And he was also trying to
protect Armenians against what he had long known was
the false charge of the German Turkophiles: that the
Armenians were terrorists, that the “deportations”
were a security measure against traitors, and that
the CUP [Committee of Union and Progress] was only
protecting the Ottoman state.
K.M.: Before we discuss Germany and the
Ottoman Empire during WWI, can you put the pre-war
German-Ottoman relations into perspective?
M.A.: Twenty
years before the war and even right before the war,
Germany didn’t have as many interests in the Ottoman
Empire as, for example, the French and even the
Austrians. It had less economic investment and fewer
cultural institutions, but it certainly hoped to
have a future there. Until the second Balkan war
(1912-13), Germany worked very hard to keep the
Ottoman Empire in operation because it was afraid,
as many of the great powers were, that if the
Ottoman Empire disintegrated, another European power
would get it—probably Russia, and maybe even England
or France. There was the fear that any country that
annexed the Ottoman Empire, or parts of it, would
grow too powerful, and the European equilibrium
would grow dangerously unbalanced. Germany would
suffer in particular, because unlike the others it
had no foothold in the Mediterranean. This is why
the Germans didn’t want the Ottoman Empire to
dissolve.
After 1912, the Ottoman Empire began to look as if
it were going to dissolve anyway, whatever Germany
or the other European powers did. This feeling that
it would soon go into “liquidation,” as the German
Foreign Office called it, caused Germany to suddenly
support the Armenians in 1913-14 in ways it had not
done before. Germany in fact now so supported the
reform deal in Eastern Anatolia that the powers
finally forced the Ottomans to sign in February
1914, granting the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia a
certain parity in public offices with the Muslim
population there, and thus a kind of regional
autonomy. Germany had not been in favor of insisting
on reforms in the past, siding with the Ottoman
government in resisting them. But in 1913 and the
first half of 1914, seeing that the dissolution of
the Empire might be near, it wanted to have friends
in what would be the leftover pieces. These friends,
they hoped, would be the Armenians.
K.M.: But this was far from materializing
into something positive for the Armenians, wasn’t
it? According to Hilmar Kaiser, from 1915-16 a
uniform position toward the Ottoman Armenians did
not exist.
M.A.: Well, yes.
But by 1915-16, Germany was in the midst of a World
War, which changed every calculation. And remember,
the German government lacked a uniform position on
many burning issues: about the future of the
Ukraine, which the Germans were occupying in 1915,
and the future of Belgium, which they had occupied
since August 1914. There was no uniform German
position on any of the central questions about the
post-war settlement. Rather, there were huge
conflicts within the German government itself during
WWI as the right-wingers (much of the Army) and the
moderates (mostly the Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg,
and the Foreign Office) struggled for control over
future policy. So the absence of a uniform position
on the Ottoman Armenians is not surprising. However,
having said that, I think it is also true that at
the higher reaches of the German government, the
decision was that they had an ally—the Ottoman
government—and they would not do anything that would
jeopardize their alliance with it. Although there
were many Germans in the Ottoman Empire
itself—businessmen, bankers, engineers,
diplomats—protesting the Ottoman policy, by the time
the issue got to the top in Berlin, the Chancellor’s
position was clear: Whatever the Turks may do, they
are our allies and not the Armenians.
K.M.: So can we say that there was a policy
of denying the extermination of the Armenians.
M.A.: Yes and
no. Yes, it was denied to the public at large. This
was a policy in which other sections of society were
complicit. My work has been on German public
opinion, and the elites knew what was going on. Top
professors of oriental languages; some journalists;
at least six superintendents (roughly bishops) in
the Protestant church; certainly the lay leadership
among German Catholics (such as the Center Party's
leader in parliament Matthias Erzberger, who was
assassinated by Right-wing thugs after the war); the
pope; the head of the Deutsche Bank (as Hilmar
Kaiser and Gerald D. Felman have shown); and other
important members of the Reichstag, such as the
later winner of the Nobel Peace Price, the liberal
Gustav Stresemann, knew. Stresemann decided to keep
silent about it. An Armenian-born graduate student
in Berlin, Frau Elizabeth Khorikian, did a study of
one of the largest circulation (and Left-wing)
newspapers in Berlin during 1915, the Berliner
Tageblatt. This paper issued sometimes three to four
different editions a day, because every time there
was war news, they brought another edition. And She
looked at every single one. And in all of these
issues, she found only five mentions of the
Armenians during that whole period. Three were
interviews with Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Halil
Pasha, and two were reproductions of Turkish news
releases. That’s it. The newspapers knew very well
what was going on. Both the Social Democratic and
the Christian press knew it. Christian journals said
the most, although they said it carefully and in
guarded language. Lepsius gave an interview on the
5th of October, 1915, to a group of newspapermen in
Berlin, to tell them what he had learned on his
recent trip to Constantinople/Istanbul from late
July to early August. An editor of a socialist
newspaper wrote: “If one wanted to apply European
concepts of morality and politics to Turkish
relationships, one would arrive at a completely
distorted judgment.” In general, the newspapers were
willing to follow the view that, We are in a war and
the government thinks this alliance is important to
us, so we will continue this alliance.
K.M.: Are you saying that there was no direct
censorship?
M.A.: There was
also direct censorship. When Lepsius printed 20,500
copies of his documents, many of them were
confiscated by the German General in charge of
censorship for the Berlin area before the Turks had
even protested. But I think that had the press
wanted to break the story, they could have done it.
There was so much self-censorship that the
government didn’t have to intervene. We will never
know what would have happened if the press had tried
to distribute Lepsius’s material, but they didn’t
try, because they believed that it was more
important to have the Turks on their side. The
Allied invasion of Gallipoli began in March 1915.
The defense of Gallipoli, it was believed, was
absolutely central to a German victory, which
Germans equated with their survival. And remember:
1,303 German soldiers died, on average, every day
between August 1914 and armistice in November 1918.
Not surprisingly, Germans were preoccupied by what
was happening in Belgium, France, Galicia and the
eastern front. They were not thinking that much
about Turkey.
For me, that is all the more reason to see Lepsius,
for all his flaws, as a hero. He didn’t pay
attention only to what was best for Germany. Five
days after his son was killed on the eastern front,
he arrived in Constantinople, and according to him
interviewed not just Enver Pasha but also Talaat. In
my view, nobody has looked into the genuine
mysteries behind Lepsius’s trip to
Constantinople/Istanbul enough: Why did the German
Foreign Office give him permission to go? How was he
able to get an interview with Enver, and if he was
telling the truth, also with Talaat? An ordinary
friend of the Armenians and an ordinary writer and
journalist (he wasn’t a pastor anymore since he had
been forced to give that up when he refused to stop
agitating on behalf of the Armenians in 1896)
certainly would not have been able to in wartime
talk to the War Minister or the Interior Minister of
his own country, much less a foreign one. I believe
that he was only able to do that because the German
Foreign Office put pressure on the Turks to receive
him. Why do you think they would have done that?
Isn’t that a question worth asking?
K.M.: Why do you think they did that?
M.A.: In my
view, they did it because at that time Lepsius made
the German Foreign Office believe that the Armenians
were, in fact, militarily important. Lepsius was
playing a very dangerous game. He tried to play up
the military importance of the Armenians on the
Russian side of the border, and argued that they
could be rallied to the side of the Central Powers
(Germany and Austria), and that if they weren’t
rallied behind the German cause—and here was the
dangerous corollary—that they could actually hurt
the Germans and the Turks in the war. That is, of
course, the very excuse the Turkish government uses
to justify what happened. But I think that in fact
Lepsius was trying to exaggerate the military danger
of the Armenian revolutionary movement in order to
get Germany to pressure the Turks to stop the
deportations and massacres. But by the time he got
to Constantinople, by late July or early August
1915, most Armenians had already been deported, and
it was clear to the German government that they had
nothing to offer the Germans and posed no military
threat to the Turks.
K.M.: Are there any documents on this?
M.A.: Beginning
in late May 1915, Lepsius began contacts with the
German Foreign Office in connection with the Van
massacres and offered himself as a mediator between
the Turks and Armenians. He tried to impress the
Foreign Office with how important the Armenians
could be for Germany. “One cannot treat a nation of
four million as a quantité négligeable,” he said. He
described the Armenians as a rope stretching from
Turkey to Russia, with one half of in Russia and the
other in Turkey. “It cannot be to our advantage, if
one half, the Russian half, is constantly courted
and flattered, while the other, the Turkish half,
faces only oppression.” Like a tug-of-war, the
advantage would go to whichever side can pull that
rope over to its side. “It is impossible to cut that
rope. Language, Literature, Church, Customs are an
unbreakable band. The extermination policy of Abdul
Hamid only wove the rope even tighter.” In early
June 1915, the Undersecretary of State at the German
Foreign Office, Arthur Zimmermann, thought that it
might be true and asked the German Ambassador to
Constantinople, Hans vonWangemheim, to arrange an
interview. Wangenheim said that the Turks don’t want
to see Lepsius, and advised against any visit. But
the Foreign Office insisted, I think, not out of any
particular humanitarianism, but because Lepsius had
managed to convince it that the Armenians would be
helpful to them. Lepsius, of course, knew that they
were being victimized. If Lepsius had been able to
get to Constantinople right away, maybe in early
June, he would not have been able to convince the
CUP. But given his Foreign Office backing, he just
might have been able to bring more German influence
to bear on Turkish policy.
It is not only now that Turkey tries to deny what
happened. Even then the CUP tried to keep everything
absolutely secret in order to maintain “deniability”
at all times. In my view, the major weapon against
what was happening was publicity, and that is what
the Turkish government, and later Lepsius,
understood. But not everyone who supported the
Armenians understood that. On the 16th of July,
1915, the U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople, Henry
Morgenthau, wrote to the American State Department
that “a campaign of race extermination is in
progress,” yet he recommended against any protest,
because he thought it would make the situation
worse. Morgenthau is a hero among the
Armenian-Americans (see, for example, Peter
Balakian’s book, Black Dog of Fate), not only
because of the efforts he made on behalf of the
Armenians while he was in Turkey, but also,
probably, because at the end of the war he writes
memoirs in which he makes himself look brave and
good—and the German diplomatic personnel look all
bad. I don’t deny that Morgenthau helped the
Armenians, and he gave information to Lepsius to
publish. But he was also first and foremost an
employee of the American government (just as German
diplomats in Turkey were first and foremost
employees of their governments). After he left
Constantinople in the late winter of 1916,
Morgenthau even went around making public
appearances with the Turkish ambassador to the U.S.
This infuriated an Armenian journal published in the
United States. Pro-Armenians in America could not
understand how Morgenthau would deign to appear on
the same platform with a representative of the
murderous Turkish government. They couldn’t
understand why Morgenthau would do such a thing. He
did it because he was an Ambassador of the USA and
the USA was a neutral power interested in good
relations with the Turks. In the summer of 1915, he
reported everything to the American government, and
privately did his best to help Armenians (as did
German consuls on the spot). But he also advised his
government that protests might only make matters
worse, and suggested that it inform missionary
groups to do the same, as well.
K.M.: What was the reason he did this?
M.A.: Well,
don't forget that when diplomatic pressure was
brought to bear upon Abdul Hamid in 1896, he
responded by massacring the Armenians in
Istanbul/Constantinople. People like Morgenthau did
not think the Turks were civilized people, for good
reason. I’m not saying there weren’t any civilized
Turks in the Ottoman Empire, but Turks and Kurds had
already behaved so horribly in the 1890s, that some
people didn’t think the Ottoman government would
respond to something like the pressure of European
and American public opinion. Morgenthau didn’t.
Noting that even men like Morgenthau believed this,
I think, gives a little bit of respectability to
other people—like the pope—who believed, however
mistakenly, that you could get more accomplished for
the Armenians by working behind the scenes to
convince Turks to do this or that.
K.M.: Couldn’t the German government
interfere in any way to stop the Genocide and the
deportations?
M.A.: German
soldiers in the Ottoman Empire were not part of the
German Army but were all under Ottoman command—and
that includes the worst of them, like the first
assistant chief of staff of the Turkish General
Staff, Colonel Bronsart von Schellendorf. There was
no practical legal way that the German government
could have ordered them to intervene. What the
German government could have done was to have
ordered them to withdraw from Ottoman service and
come home. It is also sometimes asked, “Why didn’t
the German government threaten to cut off their
supplies to the Ottomans?” That is a good argument.
I used to believe it myself before I read the
interviews with Zimmermann in 1915—interviews that
had nothing, by the way, to do with Armenians—which
revealed that he was in constant anxiety because
Germany was unable to get supplies to the Ottomans.
It was not until mid-January 1916, after Serbia was
conquered, that German trains could reach Istanbul.
Before then, they could not ship supplies to Turkey
(except for money, which was useless), so there were
no supplies that they could cut off in 1915. Or at
least, so Zimmermann said.
K.M.: What can you say about the Baghdad
Railroad?
M.A.: I have
seen documents from the company archives that show \
the company knew what went on. Representatives on
the spot did in fact, as Kaiser said, try to hide
Armenians and protect them; they also protested and
reported to their home offices. However, the German
officer delegated to be the liaison between the
German army and the Baghdad railroad, Lt. Col.
Böttrich, overrode the Baghdad (Anatolian) railway
personnel and signed a deportation order for some of
their Armenian workers himself. I’m not trying to
say that there weren’t certain Germans in Turkey who
clearly adopted the position of CUP.
K.M.: Reading the literature, I didn’t feel
there was a concerted policy, and this could have
been why some people behaved differently.
M.A.: I haven't
done the kind of intensive research that I would
like to on German military behavior; and most of
Germany's military archives were destroyed by
bombing in World War II, so we will never have the
kind of certainty that we have with the diplomatic
record. But there were two German officers, at
least, who behaved differently. Field Marshall Liman
von Sanders saved the Armenians in Edirne and Izmir.
True, there weren’t many Armenians in those two
towns, so they were less important to the CUP than
the Armenians in Van or Urfa. In that sense, Liman
probably faced less resistance from the Ottoman
authorities than he would have had he attempted
something similar in Eastern Anatolia. But he did
meet resistance, and he absolutely refused to allow
them to be deported. (Liman, however, had a
personality that everyone disliked, and he disliked
everyone, so you can almost predict that he would do
the opposite of what other people wanted him to do.
Had every German office and diplomatic official
behaved like Liman, the results would probably have
been terrible for Ottoman-German relations. On the
other hand, the Ottoman Empire was by then so deeply
involved in the war, and had so many enemies in the
Entente powers already committed to gaining
territory at its expense, that we have to ask, Would
it really have left the German-Austrian alliance?
Probably not. But if the Turks had made a separate
peace with the Entente, it would have given them an
even freer hand with the Armenians. The other German
officer who behaved differently was Colonel (later
General) Kress von Kressenstein, the chief of staff
of Jemal Pasha. He apparently convinced Jemal not to
deport 400 Armenian orphans.
In German-occupied territory in the Russian Empire,
the German army prevented pogroms against the Jewsby
local populations (Ukrainians and Russians, for
example), which were incited by the retreating
Tsarist armies. There was a very similar hysteria
against ethnic minorities throughout Europe during
World War I, and specifically Eastern Europe and
encouraged by the Tsarist army. In some cases, it
was the German minority that was the target; in
others it was the Ukrainians or Poles or Baltic
populations. But the targets almost always included
the Jews. Wherever it went, the German army
protected the Jews. But they had orders to do so
from Berlin. And they were occupying territory they
had conquered. Berlin couldn’t give orders to German
officers who serve in the Ottoman army.
K.M.: Dadrian mentions that these German
officers were misguided by information they received
from Turkish subordinates. Was this a frequent
occurrence?
M.A.: In some
cases that may have been the case. It’s interesting
that Wolffskeel von Reichenberg, a Major in Marash,
was told that Armenians were massacring Turks. He
was there and he saw that the story was not true and
quashed that story. Later on, however, under the
command of Fakhri pasha, he subdued Zeitun and the
Armenians in Urfa, and was there at Mousa Dagh, so I
don’t think that the best explanation for their
behavior is that German officers were given false
information, as much as they adapted and began to
see things from the perspective of the people they
worked for.
K.M.: Is the word “complicity” appropriate,
in your opinion, in describing German involvement in
the Armenian Genocide?
M.A.: In my view
it gives a false impression. I think the German
historians are harshest in judging the Germans
(although Dadrian judges them harshly too),
particularly Tessa Hoffman and Wolfgang Gust, as
well as Swiss historian Christoph Dinkel. They tend
to make these Germans look like early Nazis. That
may be true of a few of these officers, but I think
in general the Germans did what people in all
countries do most of the time, which is to operate
on what they think is best for their own country.
For example, the Jews in England were horrified at
the treatment of the Jews in Russia before the war;
yet just like the friends of Armenians in Germany
with regard to Turkey, they didn’t want England to
have an alliance with Russia. They really hated it
when the Entente with Russia was established in
1907. Then came the war and England allied with
Russia, even though the Russian army “evacuated”
three million Jews. (You can call it deportation.)
They didn’t usually massacre them, but they did
forcibly evacuate them, as a “security measure,” and
as a punitive measure, accusing them of
collaborating with the Germans. In many cases, the
evacuees lost everything they had: homes, furniture,
businesses, everything. And the Tsarist armies were
complicit in the pogroms that sometimes ensued. Jews
in England protested, and they were allowed to
protest. That is a difference. But did their
protests against Russian treatment of the Jews
affect the policy of the British government? No. And
in fact, the British Ambassador to St. Petersburg,
Sir George Buchanan, wrote back to his government
saying that “There cannot be the slightest doubt
that a very large number of Jews in German pay and
have acted as spies during the campaigns in Poland.”
That is, he believed and transmitted all those lies
the Russian army was telling about the Jews. Well, I
have to say that the German diplomats in the Ottoman
Empire were more objective and honest than that.
They carefully looked into the charges the CUP was
making against the Armenians. They were convinced
that the majority of the Armenians were innocent of
the charges against them, that the mass of the
Armenian people had not behaved as traitors. And
they informed their own government of the truth. I
think the term “complicity” sets up a false
impression of the behavior of German officials. I
don’t want to say the Germans were “good,” but they
behaved the way officials of most countries would.
K.M.: What do you think about the view that
the Armenian Genocide was a precursor to the
Holocaust and that some officers who served in the
Ottoman army were later high ranking Nazi officials?
M.A.: There are
certainly some carry-overs, although the fact that
men who later served the Nazis also spent time in
Turkey is not surprising given the war and given the
importance of the Constantinople post and the
Ottoman Empire generally. Many of the same people
also spent time in Belgium and France. One of the
worst Germans, as far as being unwilling to help the
Armenians, was Constantin von Neurath. He was chargé
d’affairs in the German Embassy at Constantinople
and later became the first Foreign Minister under
Hitler, though he was not a member of the Nazi
Party. He wrote Berlin, in the fall of 1915, that he
hoped the friends of the Armenians in Germany [The
German-Armenian Society founded by Lepsius] could be
made to keep quiet, though he admitted that the
German government couldn’t actually shut them down.
He thought that the money they were collecting for
Armenian relief would be better used for German
relief. So he was clearly a heartless guy.
However, I should also mention one of the true
ironies. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter was the
vice-consul of Erzerum and an officer in the
Bavarian army. He had been sent out to eastern
Anatolia to organize Muslim guerrillas behind the
Russian lines, much like the way some people have
argued the Russians were organizing Armenians.
However, when he got there, the consul of Erzerum
had just been captured by the Russians, and so
Scheubner-Richter was made the vice-counsul in his
place. This man constantly protested the treatment
of the Armenians to his government. He was also
extremely bold in protesting it to the Ottoman
government. He got reprimanded by his own government
for being too undiplomatic towards the Turks. He
took out of his own money to feed some Armenian
refugees going through Erzerum. At this stage, he is
a true hero. After the war, he became a Nazi and in
1923 was shot down in Munich, marching next to
Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch. He was at that time
Hitler’s main right-hand man for the party's
finances. Hitler refers to him in letters from the
period as “my delegate.” He served as the liaison
between the early Nazi movement, the military
interests, and the business interests.
The worst person in Germany, as far as the Armenians
were concerned, was Ernst Jäckh, a journalist who
also had some academic credentials. He founded an
important pro-Turkish lobby in Germany, the
German-Turkish Union, and advertised himself as
close to Enver Pasha. His wartime activities were
largely confined to propaganda, but he worked hard
to see that a pro-Turkish message was constantly
disseminated to the German public. He was
practically an employee of the Turkish government,
someone who joined the German-Armenian Society in
order to spy on them. He also spied on Lepsius and
reported on his activities to his government, and
was always working to twist information in a
pro-Turkish direction. After the war, he became a
leading spokesman in Germany for the movement on
behalf of the League of Nations. In 1933, he left
Germany for New York, and became a professor in
Columbia University and a big-time democrat and
liberal. In fact, he had always been a liberal. So,
I don’t think you can draw any straight line between
the perpetrators in WWI and those later on in the
Nazi regime.
K.M.: And what is the line that we can draw
between the Armenian Genocide and German
responsibility?
M.A.: In that
regard, I think the connection is “ethnic
cleansing.” The CUP was very influenced by
integralist nationalism and—as Sukru Hanioglu has
shown—social Darwinism and European racist thought
as the basis of a powerful nation-state. German
intellectuals were powerful contributors to these
currents and German successes seemed to demonstrate
the truth of the argument: homogeneous nation,
powerful state.
K.M.: There is Marshal Colmar von der Goltz
who has proposed something like ethnic cleansing.
M.A.: Some
people say that but I haven’t seen the proof. They
also say that about the publicist, Paul Rohrbach,
which I doubt very much, at least in the sense
attributed to him. Rohrbach was certainly a German
nationalist and an imperialist—as were most men in
the educated classes in those days—although he
advocated “peaceful imperialism”: spreading German
culture and “ideas” through development help,
schools and cultural exchanges. He was actually a
friend of Armenians, and on the board of directors
of Lepsius’s Geman Armenian Society. People say
Rohrbach thought it would be a good idea to remove
the Armenians along the route of the prospective
Berlin-Baghdad railway and plant Germans there, but
I don’t think that can be true. When Rohrbach found
out about the deportations he was devastated, and
resigned his membership in Jäckh's German-Turkish
Union. I don’t know about von der Goltz; I’d like to
see the hard evidence on that.
The continuity between the two regimes—CUP and
Nazi—is in their common desire to create an
ethnically homogeneous state. The Young Turks got
that idea from Europe, but the Nazis were the first
European country to try hard to put it in effect in
any consistent and rigorous way. I think the CUP
were like the Nazis, but I don’t think they were
that way because there were Germans who were allied
with the Turks in WW1, and then these Germans did it
themselves the second time around. Sukru Hanioglu,
of Princeton, has shown in his two volumes on the
CUP, that even before 1908 they had adopted Social
Darwinist ideas. Rather, the both movements “drank
from the same well” of integralist nationalism. I
think the CUP was the Turkish version of what would
later be called "Fascists."
A colleague of mine who teaches Turkish history in
the United States (let us not give his name because
I don’t think he could visit his family in Turkey if
his name is published) told me that he has no doubt
that there was a Genocide. For him, the only
question is how far the responsibility goes within
the CUP. How many people were involved in the
decision? Because it was a dictatorship. An
interesting difference between the CUP Genocide and
the Nazi one is that in the Third Reich when the
Jews are being killed, there are no protests from
German officials ever! In Turkey, several valis and
lower Ottoman officials did protest. And paid the
price. In Turkey, also, some Kurds, Arabs and even
some Turkish Muslims criticized the policy and
rescued Armenians openly. In Germany, those few
Germans who did rescue Jews did not do it openly.
Unless you count the riot by the Christian wives at
the Rosenstrasse Berlin railway station over the
deportation of their husbands. And that was unique.
Perhaps this difference with Turkey is because
Germany was such an "organized" country and it was
much harder to get away with behavior that was
counter to official policy (or at least, so people
may have thought) than it was in Turkey.
K.M.: What about Germany today? Does it have
the moral responsibility to acknowledge the
Genocide?
M.A.:
Absolutely! As does Turkey. However, Turks have been
raised on one view of history. If they are told by
foreigners that they have to change their view of
history, they may end up signing on the dotted
line—if, for example, that is the price for entering
the EU—but it won’t make them believe it. My hope
comes from the fact that there are Turkish
historians in Turkey today who absolutely know the
truth and don’t dare to, right now, say what it is.
But that is changing. As Turkey becomes more
democratic and as the army becomes more and more
discredited, there will be freedom of debate in
Turkey. And I think then historians who want to be
credible outside of Turkey will have to look at the
evidence the same way we look at it.
Khatchig Mouradian is a Lebanese-Armenian writer,
translator, and journalist. He is an editor of the
daily newspaper Aztag, published in Beirut.
zmag org
First world war
massacres | Related
issue:
Armenian Genocide by Turkish Muslims against
Christians
Turkey faces international pressure to recognise
that more than 1 million Armenians were massacred
during a 1915 campaign of ethnic cleansing by
Ottoman Turks. Turkish officials claim that most
deaths were caused by hunger and disease.
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