Adolf Hitler: "Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?"
April 26th, 2007 – 11:43 PM by Eric Black
Staff Writer and Big Question blogger
Star Tribune [Minneapolis]
gquestion/?p=686
Good Friday morning Fellow Seekers,
(Apologies for being three days late with this post. April 24 is the day
usually designated to mark the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
That was the date in 1915 when about 300 Armenian intellectual and
professional leaders in the Ottoman Empire’s capital of Constantinople
were rounded up, beginning a three-year killing spree.)
During the period 1915-1918, the Ottoman Turks murdered between 1.2 and
1.3 million Armenians out of a pre-World War I population of about 4
million Armenians within the Ottoman Empire.
Seven Aprils back, I interviewed Vahakn Dadrian, a leading historian of
the genocide, and I’ve never forgotten the effect he produced in me. The
full story is on this attached page:
/?page_id=687
For reasons that I take to be a mixture of legal worries and national
pride, the modern nation of Turkey refuses to acknowledge that the
Ottomans perpetrated an intentional mass killing. And they apply
significant pressure on other nations not to officially recognize the
slaughter as a genocide.
A perpetual campaign is waged within the U.S. Congress to officially
call this genocide a genocide. Presidential candidates cultivating votes
among Armenian-Americans – including the current incumbent when running
for president in 2000 – have indicated support for this idea but, for
fear of offending the important Turkish ally, have disappointed the
Armenians.
Turkey claims that the number of deaths has been overstated, and that
they occurred more or less accidentally when the Ottomans were trying to
move a potentially troublesome Armenian population out of the war zone.
(Like other ethnic groups that lived within the empire, some Armenian
intellectuals and political leaders were agitating for independence.)
For those who don’t click through to the full story, here’s the section
explaining how so many accidental deaths occurred:
"The way the Armenians were killed are staggeringly grisly and provide a
macabre contrast to the relatively bureaucratic and hi-tech methods that
the Nazis would employ 25 years later.
In a policy that Dadrian said was ‘unparalleled in the annals of human
history,’ the Turks ‘decided to rely not on soldiers but on bloodthirsty
criminals.’ Dadrian said 30,000 to 35,000 convicts were released from
prison to participate in the slaughter.
With a world war raging, Dadrian said, Ottoman officials were anxious
not to waste bullets or powder on the Armenians, so they employed four
main methods to kill the Armenians:
Many were beaten to death or killed with daggers, swords and axes.
Massive drowning operations were conducted in the tributaries of the
Euphrates River and the Black Sea. Bargeloads of Armenians were
intentionally sunk. Dadrian, quoting [Henry]Morganthau [who was U.S.
ambassador to the Ottoman court at the time], said that in places the
Armenian corpses became so numerous that the rivers were forced out of
their beds, in one case changing the course of a river for a 100-meter
stretch.
The method that Dadrian called "the most fiendish" was to pack Armenian
women and children into stables or haylofts and then set them ablaze,
burning the victims alive. Dadrian estimated that about 150,000 were
killed by this method.
Hundreds of thousands more died of hunger, thirst or exposure during
forced marches in the desert. Dadrian said the Armenians were told they
were being relocated but were marched along routes chosen to maximize
the chances that none of the marchers would survive.
What difference does it make now, whether the genocide is recognized as
a genocide?
I led off that story with the Hitler remark quoted in the headline of
this post. The top went like this:
"Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?"
That remark was uttered by Adolf Hitler a few days before Germany’s 1939
invasion of Poland, which started World War II.
Hitler said he had ordered death squads to ‘exterminate without mercy or
pity, Polish men, women and children’ who got in the way of Germany’s
aims. They needn’t worry about history’s judgment, he said, because
history had already forgotten the massacre of more than a million
Armenians by the Ottoman Empire just 25 years earlier."
After the Holocaust that Hitler subsequently organized against the Jews,
Roma, homosexuals and other undesireables that fell into his clutches,
the world pledged that it would "never again" allow such a thing to
occur. It has failed in that pledge a few times. It’s not completely
clear how the world could arrange to keep the pledge.
And it’s not at all clear that Hitler, or some future sociopath, would
be dissuaded from going down the path of mass murder if they understood
that the crime would come to dominate their historical reputation.
But it has to be considered at least a disincentive. And when a people
has been more than decimated by such a crime, don’t they at least
deserve to have the crime called by its real name?
***
[responses omitted]
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About Eric Black
Eric Black writes about national and world news for the Star Tribune. He
specializes in pieces that try to put the news into historical
perspective. He has been a journalist since 1973, with the Star Tribune
since 1977, and is the author of 1.74 million newspaper articles and
five books.
Black launched the Big Q in December 2005 to see if he could save the
world from ignorance and error. Ignorance and error are still running
slightly ahead in the polls, so, in February 2007, Black recruited the
lovely D.J. Tice as a co-blogger.
About D.J. Tice
D.J. Tice has been Politics and Government Team Leader at the Star
Tribune since 2003, supervising coverage of Minnesota political news.
Earlier, Tice was a columnist and editorial writer at the St. Paul
Pioneer Press for 12 years.
He’s also earned a paycheck as publisher of the since-vanished Twin
Cities Reader, as an inflight magazine editor for the since-vanished
TWA, and as a writer/editor for several additional enterprises that have
perished from the earth. Tice has written two hard-to-find books and
joins the Big Q in hopes of enlightening a benighted world or at least
learning to set up a hyperlink.