The Great War for Civilisation (67 page)

Rarely have ethnic cleansing and genocidal killings been given publicity on this scale. British diplomats across the Middle East were themselves receiving first-hand accounts of the massacres. In the former Ottoman city of Basra, Gertrude Bell, who would later be Britain's “Oriental Secretary” in Baghdad, was filing an intelligence report on the outrages received from a captured Turkish soldier.

The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain in twelve hours . . . some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardian-ship of some hundreds of Kurds . . . These Kurds were called gendarmes, but in reality mere butchers; bands of them were publicly ordered to take parties of Armenians, of both sexes, to various destinations, but had secret instructions to destroy the males, children and old women . . . One of these gendarmes confessed to killing 100 Armenian men himself . . . the empty desert cisterns and caves were also filled with corpses . . . The Turkish officers of the battalion were horrified by the sights they saw, and the regimental chaplain (a Muslim divine) on coming across a number of bodies prayed that the divine punishment of these crimes should be averted from Muslims, and by way of expiation, himself worked at digging three graves . . . No man can ever think of a woman's body except as a matter of horror, instead of attraction, after Ras al-Ain.

Even after the United States entered the war, its diplomats continued to compile reports on the atrocities. J. B. Jackson, formerly the American consul in Aleppo, wrote in July 1915 of a group of more than 1,000 women and children from Harput who were handed over to Kurds:

who rode among them, selecting the best-looking women, girls and children . . . Before carrying off those finally selected and subdued, they stripped most of the remaining women of their clothes, thereby forcing them to continue the rest of their journey in a nude condition. I was told by eyewitnesses to this outrage that over 300 women arrived at Ras alAin . . . entirely naked, their hair flowing in the air like wild beasts, and after traveling six days afoot in the burning sun . . . some of them personally came to the Consulate (in Aleppo) and exhibited their bodies to me, burned to the color of a green olive, the skin peeling off in great blotches, and many of them carrying gashes on the head and wounds on the body . . .

The Armenian Holocaust was recorded, too, in countless private letters and diaries—some of them still unpublished—written by Europeans who found themselves in Ottoman northern Syria and southern Turkey. Here, for example, is an extract from a long account written by Cyril Barter, a British businessman who was sent out of Iraq to Aleppo under Turkish guard in 1915:

I may tell you that two days south of Deir [es-Zour] we met the first fringe of Armenian refugees, and for the next three months I was seeing them continually. To attempt to describe their plight would be impossible. In a few words, there were no men of between sixteen and sixty among them, they had all been massacred on leaving their homes, and these, the remainder, old men, women and children were dying like flies from starvation and disease, having been on the road from their villages to this, the bare desert, with no means of subsistence, for anything from three to six months . . . It was a nightmare to me for a long time afterwards.

Barter would later submit a report to the Bryce Commission—which originally printed it anonymously—in which he recorded how carts would be taken through Aleppo for newly dead Armenians, the bodies “thrown into them as one would throw a sack of coal.” Barter, too, would be a witness to the railway deportations, describing how Turks would drive Armenians from their places of refuge and “hustle them down to the railway station, pack them into the trucks like cattle and forward them to Damascus and different towns in the Hidjaz.”

A British prisoner of war in Turkey, Lieutenant E. H. Jones, was to recall the fate of the Armenians of Yozgat, where he himself was held in a POW camp. “The butchery had taken place in a valley some dozen miles outside the town,” he wrote. “Amongst our sentries were men who had slain men, women, and children till their arms were too tired to strike. They boasted of it amongst themselves. And yet, in many ways, they were pleasant enough fellows.” As late as 1923, an Irish schoolboy, John de Courcy Ireland, the future nautical writer and historian, would visit Castel Gandolfo outside Rome, where he would see Armenian refugee children, “dark, fascinating to look at but very quiet in spite of the disorder in which they swarmed.”

As the survivors of the Armenian Holocaust have died, so their children have taken up their story. A number of Armenians not only escaped death in the 1915 deportations but were confronted by a second massacre in the Greek-held Turkish city of Smyrna—now Izmir—in 1922. “My father, Sarkis, not only survived the Syrian desert but barely made it out of Smyrna alive,” his daughter Ellen Sarkisian Chesnut wrote to me.

. . . he and two friends came to Smyrna just when Attaturk [
sic
] and his men had taken it over. Arrested and taken to an abandoned railway yard with several hundred Greeks and Armenians, they were subjected to rounds and rounds of machine gun fire. He survived the onslaught because he fainted. Later he was not so lucky when with fixed bayonets the Turkish soldiers repeatedly stabbed the dead and dying. Wounded badly on his forehead and leg, he nevertheless got up and made for the quay.

Ahead of him he saw two young girls trembling with fright and dazed by what they had seen. He could not leave them there. He grabbed ahold of their hands and the three of them ran for their lives. What they saw on the quay would stay with my father for the rest of his days. Tens of thousands of people crammed together in terror, with the flames of the dying city drawing ever closer. And yet . . . there was no help forthcoming from the British, French and American warships. But, in the distance, my dad saw that another ship was taking people on board. The three of them would have to jump into the water and swim for it. They did and were rescued by Italian sailors.

The first writer to call the Armenian genocide a holocaust was Winston Churchill, including in a list of Turkish wartime atrocities the “massacring [of] uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians, men, women and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust . . . beyond human redress.” For Churchill:

the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be . . . There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions, cherishing national ambitions that could be satisfied only at the expense of Turkey, and planted geographically between Turkish and Caucasian Moslems.

Acknowledging that British and American interest in the “infamous” massacre of the Armenians “was lighted by the lamps of religion, philanthropy and politics,” Churchill said that the atrocities “stirred the ire of simple and chivalrous men and women spread widely about the English-speaking world.”

But there were other, less chivalrous men whose interest in the Armenian Holocaust—gleaned at first hand—would prove to be a useful experience in a new and brutal Europe. Franz von Papen, for example, was chief of staff of the Fourth Turkish Army during the 1914–18 war and served as Hitler's vice chancellor in 1933. During the Second World War, he was the Third Reich's ambassador to Turkey. Another German who knew the intimate details of the Armenian genocide was Lieutenant General Hans von Seeckt, who was chief of the Ottoman General Staff in 1917. He laid the groundwork for the Wehrmacht in the 1920s and was honoured by Hitler with a state funeral on his death in 1936. Much more sinister was the identity of a young German called Rudolf Hoess, who joined the German forces in Turkey as a teenager. In 1940 he was appointed commandant of Auschwitz, and he became deputy inspector of all Nazi concentration camps at SS headquarters in 1944.

In a work of remarkable scholarship, the Armenian historian Vahakn Dadrian identified Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter as one of the most effective Nazi mentors. Scheubner-Richter was German vice-consul in Erzerum and witnessed Turkish massacres of Armenians in Bitlis province, writing a long report on the killings for the German chancellor. In all, he submitted to Berlin fifteen reports on the deportations and mass killings, stating in his last message that with the exception of a few hundred thousand survivors, the Armenians of Turkey had been exterminated (
ausgerottet
). He described the methods by which the Turks concealed their plans for the genocide, the techniques used to entrap Armenians, the use of criminal gangs, and even made a reference to the Armenians as “these ‘Jews of the Orient' who are wily businessmen.” Scheubner-Richter met Hitler only five years later and would become one of his closest advisers, running a series of racist editorials in a Munich newspaper which called for a “ruthless and relentless” campaign against Jews so that Germany should be “cleansed.” When Hitler staged his attempted coup against the Bavarian government, Scheubner-Richter linked arms with Hitler as they marched through the streets and was shot in the heart and killed instantly by a police bullet.

We do not know how much Hitler learned of the Armenian Holocaust from his friend, but he was certainly aware of its details, referring to the genocide first in 1924 when he said that Armenians were the victims of cowardice. Then in August 1939 he asked his rhetorical and infamous question of his generals—in relation to Poles—“Who, after all, is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?” There have been repeated attempts—especially by Turkey—to pretend that Hitler never made such a remark but Dadrian has found five separate versions of the question, four of them identical; two were filed in German High Command archives. Furthermore, German historians have discovered that Hitler made an almost identical comment in a 1931 interview with a German newspaper editor, saying that “everywhere people are awaiting a new world order. We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy . . . remember the extermination of the Armenians.” And there came another fateful reference to the century's first genocide when Hitler was demanding that the Jews of Hungary be deported; he ended a tirade to Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian regent, in 1943 with a remark about “the downfall of a people who were once so proud—the Persians, who now lead a pitiful existence as Armenians.”

Historical research into the identity of Germans who witnessed the destruction of the Armenians and their later role in Hitler's war is continuing. Some Armenian slave labourers—male and female—spent their last months working to complete a section of the German-run Baghdad railway and were briefly protected by their German supervisors. But other German nationals watched the Armenians die— and did nothing.
⁷³
What was so chilling about Hitler's question to his generals, however, was not just his comparison—the whole world knew the details of the Turkish destruction of its Armenian population—but his equally important knowledge that the perpetrators of these war crimes were rewarded with impunity.

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Turkish courts martial were held to punish those responsible and Turkish parliamentarians confessed to crimes against humanity. A Turkish military tribunal, unprecedented in Ottoman history, produced government records that were used as evidence at the trial. One exchange over the telegraph had a Nazi ring to it. An official says of the Armenians: “They were dispatched to their ultimate destination.” A second voice asks: “Meaning what?” And the reply comes back: “Meaning massacred. Killed.” Three minor officials were hanged. The triumvirate itself—Jemal, Enver and Talaat— was sentenced to death in absentia.

But the Turkish courts lacked the political will to continue, and the Western allies, who had boldly promised a trial of the major Turkish war criminals—the Armenian mass killings were described as “crimes against humanity” in an Allied warning to the Ottoman government in May 1915—lacked the interest to compel them to do so. Indeed, what was to come—the systematic attempt, which continues to this day, to deny that the mass killings were ever perpetrated—is almost as frightening as the powerlessness of the Allies who should have prosecuted those who devised the Armenian genocide. Talaat Pasha, the former interior minister, was assassinated in Berlin by an Armenian whose family had died in the genocide. Soghomon Tehlirian's trial and subsequent acquittal in 1921 meant that details of the Armenian Holocaust were widely known to the German public. Franz Werfel, the German-Jewish novelist, wrote a prophetic warning of the next Holocaust in his account of Armenian resistance to the Turkish killers,
The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh
. He lectured across Germany in 1933, only to be denounced by the Nazi newspaper
Das Schwarze Korps
as a propagandist of “alleged Turkish horrors perpetrated against the Armenians.” The same paper—and here was another disturbing link between the Armenian Holocaust and the Jewish Holocaust still to come—condemned “America's Armenian Jews for promoting in the U.S.A. the sale of Werfel's book.”

Already, the century's first genocide was being “disappeared.” Winston Churchill continued to emphasise its reality. In 1933, the same year that Werfel toured Germany, Churchill wrote that

the Armenian people emerged from the Great War scattered, extirpated in many districts, and reduced through massacre, losses of war and enforced deportations adopted as an easy system of killing . . . the Armenians and their tribulations were well known throughout England and the United States . . . Their persecutors and tyrants had been laid low by war or revolution. The greatest nations in the hour of their victory were their friends, and would see them righted.