The February 2006 issue of the European edition of Time magazine contained a DVD dedicated to the subject of the genocide of the Armenian people. The text introducing the documentary, produced by the French-German TV network arte, said, “‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’Footnote 1 Hitler posed this rhetorical question on August 22, 1939, before embarking upon his campaign to exterminate six million European Jews and other groups.” The introductory paragraph concluded, “His assumption that no one remembered the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkey must have emboldened the Führer to perpetrate the Jewish Holocaust.”Footnote 2
While journalists, politicians, and also historians frequently make use of this Hitler phrase and this argument to raise public awareness for the genocide of the Armenians, their conclusion is wrong.Footnote 3 Most researchers agree today that in summer 1939 Hitler had not yet decided to exterminate the European Jews. By contrast, he clearly aimed, as the rest of his speech reveals, at the total destruction of the Polish state and its nation.Footnote 4
Important for this article, however, is Hitler's claim that no one would have talked about the destruction of the Armenians any more. Yet, “to speak” does not equal “to remember”; the German language distinguishes clearly between both verbs. Thus, this article questions the widespread assumption that after 1933 Germans had forgotten about the mass murder of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. An article by the Swiss historian Dominik Schaller has already pointed us in this direction.Footnote 5 Yet, the text here will not only analyze in more detail the extensive knowledge about the genocide of the Armenians existing within German society before and after 1933, but also demonstrate how persecuted Jews repeatedly referred to the annihilation of the Armenian people during World War I as a deliberate warning what might happen to German Jewry under the progressing Nazi rule.
“Armenische Greuel”: The German Reception of the Ottoman Genocide up to 1933
Exploring the famous diary of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew and university professor of Roman literature in Dresden, one is struck by a surprising, yet illuminating entry. On March 31, 1933, the very day the Nazi party—backed by the new German government under Hitler—promoted a nationwide boycott of Jewish stores and offices for the next morning, Klemperer talked in his diary about the anti-Jewish repression of the previous weeks and concluded his account with the remarkable sentence: “Instead of Germany, one should call it Arminia. This sounds more like Armenia.”Footnote 6 While the former term referred to the German historic hero Arminius, who defeated the Roman intruders, the latter obviously demonstrates that the terror of the first weeks of the Third Reich strikingly reminded Klemperer of the fate of the Armenians. As an academic, he had sufficient knowledge to create this impressive metaphor for the situation of the oppressed Jews. But could the rest of the German population understand Klemperer's allegory in 1933? What did the German society know about the 1915–16 massacres in Turkey?
Many historians see the mass killings of Armenians as the prototype of genocide.Footnote 7 While we no longer perceive the massacres in the Ottoman Empire as the first genocide in the twentieth century (because the German imperial murder of the Herero and Nama deserves the label), the systematic nature of the Ottomans’ persecution bore many characteristics similar to the later Nazi extermination of the European Jewry.Footnote 8 Even the former Greek term holokau[s]ton was first applied to massacres of the Armenians, as Jon Petrie has revealed. In 1913, Duckett Z. Ferriman used the term for the murder of 30,000 Armenians in Cilicia in 1909. Only after World War II has the common idiom Holocaust been increasingly reserved for the mass murder of the Jews.Footnote 9
The Ferriman book of 1913 underlines the fact that the mass murder of the Ottoman Armenians can't be limited to the years of World War I. Massacres under Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1895–96 preceded the systematic murder during World War I, and even under the postwar Turkish government of Mustafa Kemal the crimes did not stop. Still, the Young Turk leaders Enver Pasha (1881–1922), Djemal Pasha (1872–1922), and Talaat Pasha (1874–1921) had orchestrated the most notorious and systematic murder during World War I: the “Committee for Union and Progress,” the base for the Young Turk government, planned to build a homogeneous Turkish nation by destroying the Armenians and other competing minorities. Since fall 1914, the Turks had sided with the Germans against the Entente. After first deporting Greeks, the government targeted the Armenians.Footnote 10 Until April 1915, the Turks disarmed all Armenian soldiers, even those who had fought at the front lines, and forced them to work in labor battalions under the guise of preventing an insurrection. On April 24 and 25, hundreds of prominent Armenians were arrested in Constantinople and other locations. Between May and July 1915, the Ottomans deported Armenians to the eastern provinces. The selected people often only had a few hours to prepare their marches; they had to leave behind homes, stores, and other belongings, which the state expropriated or the neighbors took over. After concentrating the Armenians in certain locations, Turks singled out most men and executed them and forced women, the elderly, and children to march. Many starved, fell ill, and died. Between August 1915 and July 1916, the government ordered the clearing of the rest of Turkey. Only the Armenians in Constantinople, Smyrna, Lebanon, and Palestine were spared from the deportations into the Syrian or Iraqi deserts.Footnote 11 Estimations set the death toll somewhere between 800,000 and 1.5 million people. Just 600,000 Armenians survived, and many of them were forced to adopt Islam or were “turkified” in Turkish homes or orphanages.Footnote 12 In 1919, the new postwar head of the Turkish government, Mustafa Kemal, acknowledged the death of 800,000 Armenians.Footnote 13
The news about the horrible events had reached Berlin via the German consuls and the German embassy in Turkey. On July 7, 1915, the German ambassador Wangenheim informed Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg that the expulsion of the Armenians now extended to the areas not affected by the war, meaning that the Turkish government clearly aimed at the “extermination of the Armenian race in the Turkish empire.”Footnote 14 While the German imperial government downplayed such information as referring to a regular oppression of uprisings, a German activist, the German Protestant missionary and theologian Johannes Lepsius (1858–1926) traveled with the permission of the Foreign Office to Turkey at the end of July 1915. He was able to talk with Enver Pasha, the Turkish war minister, about the current atrocities, yet was denied permission to explore the country. Nevertheless, he managed to gather information and moving eyewitness accounts, often with the help of U.S. ambassador Morgenthau.Footnote 15 Although the German government obtained all necessary information, Berlin would not push hard to stop its close war ally. In Turkey, however, the German diplomat Wangenheim appealed repeatedly to the Ottoman government directly, but to no avail. At the end of 1915, his successor Wolff-Metternich informed the Reich chancellor that he had discussed the atrocities as well as the protests that started to grow in Germany and elsewhere with Enver Pasha, Halil Bey, and Djemal Pasha. The ambassador suggested that the chancellor issue a public critique of the deportations, which the latter declined, using the sinister argument that Germany couldn't punish an ally during war times because the Turkish forces were needed, notwithstanding the fate of the Armenians.Footnote 16
Despite military and political censorship, slow but steady information about the atrocities leaked into the German public via hundreds of returning German army personnel, foreign press reports, Christian newspapers, and public talks of activists.Footnote 17 After his visit to Turkey, Lepsius tried to mobilize both the Protestant and Catholic Churches.Footnote 18 On January 11, 1916, during the 26th session of the Reichstag, the German parliament, the socialist Karl Liebknecht bluntly challenged the German government, saying “Is the Reich chancellor aware of the fact that during the current war within the allied Turkish Empire, the Armenian population has been expelled from their homes and slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands?” Liebknecht even furthered his interrogation, asking whether the German Reich chancellor had undertaken any steps to protect the remaining Armenians and to prevent similar massacres in the future. The representative of the government avoided a clear answer and confirmed only that an interchange of ideas regarding the repercussions of the measures had taken place with the Turkish government. During this meeting of the German parliament, Liebknecht also didn't hesitate to reveal that the German missionary Lepsius had called the treatment of the Armenians “extermination” (Ausrottung).Footnote 19
Lepsius's characterization was based on hard facts. By summer 1916, he had compiled a 300-page “report on the situation of the Armenian people” that contained extensive eyewitness accounts, which he edited as the head of the German Orient-Mission and the German-Armenian society. In the name of humanity, Lepsius distributed 20,000 copies—an impressive number at that time—to mission friends and Protestant church districts all over Germany.Footnote 20 In theory, one out of three German towns would have obtained a copy. Moreover, every Protestant pastor functioned as a multiplier since he could and would talk to his congregation about the content of the book, while the war censorship had forbidden reprints and any use by the press. When a petition to the Reich chancellor, signed by fifty prominent representatives of the Protestant Church, theologians, and missionaries, as well as an intervention of the Catholic Church, did not bear any fruit, Lepsius tried to send the publication to 500 members of the German parliament, the Württemberg parliament, and to prominent newspapers.Footnote 21
By September 9, 1916, the Turkish ambassador complained at the German Foreign office in Berlin about the infamous brochure with all its defamations.Footnote 22 While pro-Armenian news had been suppressed by German censorship, the Turkish Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha could openly defend his anti-Armenian policy in a German newspaper: “The expulsion of the Armenians from the eastern vilayets came to be a military necessity.” He admitted that Turks had attacked and sometimes killed Armenians on their way to Mesopotamia, but it had been impossible to distinguish between guilty and innocent Armenians.Footnote 23
After the war and with it, the military censorship, ended, Lepsius could finally publish an uncensored and augmented edition of his documentation with the eyewitness accounts, now using the revealing title The Death March of the Armenian People. In his extensive new introduction of the revised second edition in 1919, Lepsius described for the first time not only the history of the publication, including details about the war censorship and citations from now-accessible German government documents, but he also disclosed in detail his miserable conversation with Enver Pasha during the war.Footnote 24
At the same time, a Berlin newspaper had printed an open letter about the brutal Turkish deportation of the Armenian people into the desert. The author, the German writer Armin T. Wegner (1886–1978), had himself witnessed the crimes in Turkey as a soldier during the war and had documented with his camera the horror scenes in dozens of pictures. Just before the inauguration of the Paris peace negotiations in January 1919, Wegner had written this open letter to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and described in dramatic terms the fate of the persecuted people, how masses of “Armenians had been robbed, gunned down, strangled, poisoned, stabbed.” Wegner complained that France, England, and Germany had not hindered the Turkish government from executing its unbelievable plan to eradicate two million Armenians from the face of the earth. At the Kemach Gorge alone, tens of thousands had lost their lives, having been slain or thrown alive into the river, as Germans would learn a month later in full detail from the letter that encompassed an entire page of their Berlin newspaper.Footnote 25 Wegner addressed Wilson, since the latter had issued his famous proclamation about the right of self-determination for every nation a year earlier. Among the fourteen points of his peace program, Woodrow Wilson had also demanded guarantees for the existence and autonomous development of all nations under Turkish rule.Footnote 26
The writer's open letter soon also appeared as a booklet in Germany.Footnote 27 The same year, Armin T. Wegner published another book, The Road of No Return: A Martyrdom in Letters (Der Weg ohne Heimkehr) that contained letters describing his personal experiences in the Ottoman Empire and touching upon the Armenian tragedy. It was reprinted by another publisher just one year later.Footnote 28 The cruel fate of the Armenians emerged at that time as a subject even in art journals. In 1919, a journal for culture and art called Der Brenner published poems by Anton Santer (i.e., the Austrian Bruno Sander [1884–1979]) about Turkey, with allusions to the murder of the Armenians; in one of them he exclaimed, “ten farms I count here around, as many others now graveyards for Armenians without coffins.”Footnote 29
After the war, the international public disputed Germany's involvement in the mass murder and/or criticized its nonintervention.Footnote 30 Accusations by Great Britain and France that Germany had been a murder accomplice, as well as a new book by Lepsius, sparked a vivid discussion about the massacres in the German press that lasted through 1920. Parallel to the Death March, Lepsius had published a collection of official German documents, Germany and Armenia.Footnote 31 Aware of the upcoming Paris peace negotiations, the German Foreign Office, which had offered Lepsius this task, wanted to address with this publication—in and outside Germany—the evolving allegations against the German government.Footnote 32 Both of Lepsius's publications prominently shaped the reception of the genocide in Germany and abroad.
Part of the German press welcomed the book Germany and Armenia enthusiastically. The newspaper of the social democrats, Vorwärts, commented on June 11, 1919, that the collection of diplomatic documents would offer an intense overview of the atrocities and also demonstrate all of the German government's efforts to protect the Armenians.Footnote 33 Two months earlier, a German general who had spent the war in Turkey as an advisor and a military commander, Liman von Sanders, strongly rebutted the accusation of German participation in the persecution of the Armenians in the illustrated magazine Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert (The Twentieth Century). He believed that because the Turks perceived their relationship to the Armenians to be a domestic problem, they would have resisted involving the Turkish military headquarters and the Germans.Footnote 34 In an article dated July 1919, the Berliner Tageblatt blamed the governments in Berlin and Vienna for not having intervened and also exposed the fact that after all their possessions had been taken, the Armenians had been expelled from their residences and deported to concentration camps in the deserts. The report stated that an estimated one million human beings had been annihilated in unspeakably dreadful ways.Footnote 35
In summer 1919, the Kölnische Volkszeitung called the mass murder of the Armenian people “the biggest crime in world history.”Footnote 36 By just reading their newspapers, Germans now learned many horrific details, such as the fact that during just four days in June 1915, the Turkish army slaughtered between 20,000 and 25,000 people, mostly women and children, at the Kemach Gorge.Footnote 37 As in Germany, the international press covered the crimes and their aftermath, as did fiction and non-fiction books from other countries.Footnote 38
Those responsible for the massacres, Enver and Talaat Pasha, meanwhile lived incognito in Berlin, while a Turkish court—under a new postwar government—had sentenced them to death for war crimes and the anti-Armenian massacres.Footnote 39 Djemal Pasha, who had also taken the escape route to Germany to avoid trial and punishment, published a vindication of the question of the Armenian atrocities in a German national newspaper in September 1919. Both Talaat and Enver Pasha, who—as Djemal emphasized—had dedicated their lives to the well-being of the Turkish state, would be able to prove themselves not guilty of the Armenian cruelties. As for himself, Djemal claimed to have permitted neither attacks nor atrocities against Armenians.Footnote 40
The German newspaper debate didn't stop, however. Drawing from the updated title of the second edition of Lepsius's book, the Essener Volkszeitung raised the question, “The death march of the Armenian people—Germany's guilt?,” in January 1920. The newspaper underlined that files that were now accessible after the war censorship ended would reveal both the scope of the tragedy and the innocence of the German authorities.Footnote 41 The next year, a political assassination in plain daylight shocked the capital of the German Republic. On March 15, 1921, the Armenian student Soghomon Tehlirian (Salomon Teilirian) gunned down the former Turkish minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha, in the center of Berlin.Footnote 42 Police arrested Tehlirian and charged him with cold-blooded murder. During the trial in June 1921, survivors of the Turkish massacres of the Armenians gave moving eyewitness testimonies. The court also listened to the reports of the missionary Lepsius, who emphasized the systematic nature of the extermination. Both accounts convinced the court and the judge to acquit Tehlirian of murder, referring to his traumatization because his whole family had been liquidated.Footnote 43
The trial and its outcome were widely echoed by the German press. Some newspapers called Talaat's death a plain revenge murder, others an infamous assassination; many did report, however, about the survivor testimonies in great detail.Footnote 44 The leftist journalist Maximilian Harden dedicated two editions of his weekly journal Zukunft to the coverage of the trial and criticized wartime Germany for the lack of serious attempts to prevent the extermination.Footnote 45 Right-wing papers blamed the left press for praising the assassin and libeling Talaat Pasha and the Turks in general.Footnote 46 Even the long-standing, seventy-four-year-old political satirical magazine Kladderadatsch dedicated one of its weekly report sections in June 1921 to attacking the murderer and praising the victim: although Talaat had been a hater of the Armenians, he was still perceived to be a friend of Germany.Footnote 47 Overall, the presses’ loyalty to the German-Turkish war alliance dominated. Newspapers even attributed guilt to the Armenians for the alleged murder of 100,000 Turks. The Armenian unrest and secessionist political agenda would have provoked the persecution and massacres. Talaat, as journalists from left to right agreed, had been an intelligent and prospective statesman, and an advocate of the German-Turkish alliance.Footnote 48 Not surprisingly, books that defended the assassinated perpetrator Talaat and criticized the outcome of the trial surfaced during the trial. One of the authors, the physician and Egyptian nationalist Mansur Mustafa Rifat (1883–1926) who lived in Berlin, soon added a second book with a heavy verdict of the tribunal.Footnote 49
Some months later, Armin T. Wegner provided the public with the entire protocol of the trial. In his emotional introduction to the publication, he denounced the Turks of mass murder in Armenia.Footnote 50 In 1922, he published The Scream from Ararat (Schrei vom Ararat), a book with an appeal for Armenian rights.Footnote 51 Once two other Young Turks involved in the genocide, Behaeddin Shakir and Azmi Bey, were assassinated in Berlin the same year, the German press went into hysterics.Footnote 52 As the discussion about the mass murder didn't disappear, Djemal Pasha edited his memoirs in German, in which he bluntly admitted the death of 600,000 Armenians, but blamed the deportation orders on Talaat and Enver. Yet in the end, he defended the decision to deport the Armenians to the desert during the war with the argument that the Armenians—manipulated by the Russians—would have only waited to stab the Turkish Caucasus army in the back.Footnote 53 During the next years, a bunch of World War I memoirs would be published in Germany, which also dealt with Turkey and the murder of the Armenians.Footnote 54 Even famous German war heroes, such as Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, briefly discussed the Armenian question in their recollections of World War I printed in 1919 and 1920.Footnote 55
Between 1919 and 1922, Lepsius considered it one of his main tasks to raise money in Germany to equip aid missions for the survivors. Public talks as well as leaflets distributed among the Protestant church districts served as appropriate and developed (during the first crises of 1896 and 1909) means. Now, more than a dozen leaflets were printed, with chilling titles such as Im Tal des Fluches Kemach-Boghasi (In the Gorge of the Curse: Kemach), Der Todesweg eines Christenvolkes (The Death Path of a Christian Nation), and Im Lande des Blutes und der Tränen (In the Land of Blood and Tears).Footnote 56 For his mission, he received support from other theologians and orientalists; the editor of the journal Die Christliche Welt, Martin Rade, as well as Ewald Stier, Paul Rohrbach, Friedrich Loofs, and Adolf Harnack, published articles and helped in other practical ways.Footnote 57
Just months after the August 1920 peace treaty of Sèvres, which guaranteed the Armenians protection and an independent national home (including former Ottoman territories, although much smaller than previously envisioned by Woodrow Wilson), the new Turkish state attacked the Democratic Republic of Armenia, founded in 1918, and occupied parts of the territory. Soon the Soviet Union incorporated the remaining parts into its evolving empire. Both powers divided the territory de facto and destroyed the new state. This was made possible after March 1921 when a new friendship developed between Turkey and the Soviet Union, both of which felt threatened by the Treaty of Sèvres. With the prospect of an independent Armenian state at their borders, the two countries had signed an agreement, as the Germans could read about in articles written by Elias Hurwicz, a translator and sociologist, for the Weltbühne.Footnote 58 In one of his articles in the Weltbühne, Hurwicz brought up the mass destruction of the Armenians and cited a response by the notorious Enver Pasha, who had secretly built new bridges between Turkey and the Soviet Union: “What do you think [. . .] Did we slaughter them just for fun?”Footnote 59
Facing the facts of the occupation by Turkey and the Soviet Union, the League of Nations capitulated and arranged for a new peace agreement with Turkey. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne no longer mentioned the Armenians and their right to an independent state.Footnote 60 The diplomatic fiasco didn't silence the critics of the lack of resistance among the European powers, though. In 1926, the Weltbühne published a series of eight articles on Orient politics.Footnote 61 In one of them, Franz Carl Endres, former head of staff of General Liman von Sanders, blamed the European powers for still not agreeing on a unified policy after the horrible experience of the extermination of four-fifths of the Christian Armenians and hundreds of thousands of Greeks by the Turks, and for giving way to the Turkish state by watching only their own national agendas.Footnote 62
Through all the public discussions, the Armenian massacres had become part of common knowledge in Germany in the meantime. The 1923 edition of a popular German encyclopedia, the Brockhaus, the self-claimed “Handbook of Knowledge” in four volumes, contained an entry on Talaat Pasha that called him “the instigator of the Armenian persecutions.”Footnote 63 Remarkably, the encyclopedia editors felt no need to offer more details on dates or locations, or any further explanation of the matter. Obviously, the German society obtained sufficient knowledge about the Turkish massacres against the Armenians during World War I to identify and remember the crime. At times, when information was a scarce resource and not easily available via TV or Internet as today, citizens depended on almanacs to access the contemporary body of public knowledge. Sets of such small popular encyclopedias could be found in many German homes at that time, because the literacy rate was very high. The notorious rival of the Brockhaus, the multivolume Meyers Lexikon, offered an entire entry in its seventh totally revised edition in 1924 on the so-called Armenian question. The paragraph briefly described the Ottoman massacres against Armenians in 1895 and in 1915–16 and called them “Armenische Greuel” (“Armenian atrocities”).Footnote 64
In 1915, the German ambassador Wolff-Metternich had already used the same term in the letter to the Reich chancellor cited above.Footnote 65 During the Tehlirian trial, one of the defense lawyers, Dr. Niemeyer, had also used the phrase, the “Armenian atrocities,” as a common synonym for the mass extermination organized by the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 66 The origin of the term went back to the first massive attack against Armenians under Abdul Hamid II. It was coined in 1896 during a debate about the horrific events, which the same missionary Lepsius, who would lobby for the Armenians twenty years later, had instigated. Following a trip to the Ottoman Empire, he had published documentation on “Armenia and Europe” with a plea to the Christian powers in Europe to save the Armenians. Within only two years, the book appeared in five editions with more than 8,000 copies, yet it produced split reactions in Germany.Footnote 67 The theologian Friedrich Naumann wrote something in 1898 that foreshadowed the German government response during World War I: “While the facts about the atrocities collected by Lepsius would be overwhelming and the immediate reaction would be to demand that the Turks be stopped, one could not do this, since the Turks would say, ‘we are also just fighting for our survival,’ and one tends to believe them.”Footnote 68 An article in the journal Ethische Kultur sounded differently, though. Under the striking title “Armenische Greuel,” the author blamed all European powers for not intervening against the nameless cruelties revealed by Lepsius and the press reports about his book, since the states perceived their interests as not being tangent.Footnote 69 Both lines of thinking would dominate the political discussion and public perception for the next decades in Germany.
Even at the end of the 1920s, the debate about the Armenian case would not cease.Footnote 70 While some apologetic books by Turkish authors also surfaced, the High Commissioner of the League of Nations, Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), described the terrible fate of the Armenians in 1928 in a book called Betrogenes Volk (Deceived Nation) as well as his personal efforts to create resettlements for Armenian refugees in the Armenian part of the Soviet Union. Using Lepsius's accounts, he documented the mass murder by the Turks in German and estimated the number of murdered Armenians at one million and the value of the stolen property in the billions. Nansen criticized the international politics after the last peace treaty, which did not protect the Armenians from further Turkish expansion.Footnote 71 Although its spiritus rector had passed away in 1926, the Lepsius Orient Mission still promoted help and justice for the Armenian survivors via the frequent publication of small brochures in Germany.Footnote 72
Magnus Hirschfeld's Sexual History of the World War, Volume 2, published in 1930, called the extermination (Ausrottung) of the Armenian people in Turkey with its 1.2 million civilian victims the greatest crime of the recent war and—hitherto unprecedented in world history—an accumulation of robbery and lust murder, rape, theft, and white slavery.Footnote 73 A theater play about the Armenian massacres, Das Schlachthaus (The Slaughterhouse), written by the unknown Peter Eberhard Mayer, was also published in 1930 in Berlin. Several theaters, such as the state theater in Darmstadt, discussed the play; unfortunately no production came to light.Footnote 74
During the course of that same year, at least four books entirely dedicated to the subject hit the German bookshelves. Lepsius's Death March was printed in a fourth edition of 28,000 copies.Footnote 75 Heinrich Vierbücher (1893–1939), a German labor union representative and peace activist, had been a translator for General Liman von Sanders in 1915–16 and witnessed the mass murder. He blamed the Turks for the slaughter of a civilized people and cited the results of the Tehlirian trial as evidence.Footnote 76 Vierbücher troubled the reader by pointing out that fifty long months of terror during World War I did not find its climax in the battlefields of Vaux and Doumaumont, but in the Caucasus passes with the Golgotha drama that went beyond all imaginations of horror, even beyond the visions of Grünewald, Goya, and Bruegel.Footnote 77 Vierbücher's publication was widely discussed in newspapers and journals.Footnote 78 In addition, a tome of a Swiss pastor, who was very active in establishing welfare for Armenian orphans in his country, was translated for the German market.Footnote 79 An Armenian writer who lived in Germany published the fourth book. Melkon Krischtschian discussed the annihilation of one million Armenians in Turkey and Germany's involvement in this tragedy. Three years before the Third Reich emerged, he underlined in his introduction that a major part of the German people still treasured the memory of the perished Armenians with great compassion.Footnote 80
“Wanderungen ins Nichts?” How German Jews Used the Genocide Knowledge after 1933
After reviewing the post-World War I public discussion, the March 1933 diary entry where Klemperer renamed Germany “Arminia” cited above loses its startling effect and appears in a different light. Rich information about the mass murder of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire seems to have been part of German public knowledge in 1933. And that is not surprising, considering the fact that just seventeen years had passed since the atrocities. Even if the horrible World War I, defeat, revolution, Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and the Roaring Twenties might have served as huge distractions, the unprecedented slaughter was no more years away for the Germans than the genocide in Rwanda is for us today.
People not only in Germany, but also abroad remembered the mass murder and started to draw parallels to the beginning persecution of the Jews. The New York Times wrote on March 30, 1933, “No matter what people are called, or what religion they profess, the modern world cannot sit by in silence when they are singled out for exceptional punishment [. . .]. Sympathy and aid for Armenian sufferers and outlaws had nothing to do with their descent or language or religious belief. They were thought of as helpless human beings in the habitation of cruelty, and that was enough. It is enough today.”Footnote 81 Other English-speaking newspapers, which were still available in Germany at press stands, in bookstores, and in libraries, also referred to the Armenian massacres when reporting about the situation of the Jews.Footnote 82
The new Franz Werfel novel, Die 40 Tage des Musa Dagh (The 40 Days of Musa Dagh), received a lot of attention, nationally and internationally. The then well-known writer Werfel developed his story about the resistance of the Armenians against persecution by the Ottoman Empire during World War I when he visited Damascus in 1929 and finished the manuscript—already under the growing shadow of the persecution of the Jews in Germany—in March 1933.Footnote 83 While avoiding outspoken analogies to Nazi actions, Werfel described Turkish measures as part of the developing story (e.g., the confiscation of passports, disarmaments, arrests, lock downs of shops, prohibitions of Armenian newspapers, and public executions).Footnote 84 This could and would be read, however, as writing on the wall for the Jews in fall 1933 when the book was published. Mostly, Werfel stuck to the historical facts in his novel, as in the description of the meeting of Johannes Lepsius with Enver Pasha, which he copied exactly from the preface of the 1919 edition of the Death March.Footnote 85 Some phrases in Werfel's book were missing in the original, however. Those were clearly drawn from recent Nazi propaganda, as only in Werfel's version did Enver Pasha state, “Between humankind and the plague bacillus there will be no peace.”Footnote 86 Herbert Friedenthal, who reviewed the novel for a German-Jewish audience in February 1934, underscored in the magazine Der Morgen that Werfel had delivered an incredibly impressive portrait of the meeting between the German missionary and “the smiling god of war” Enver Pasha.Footnote 87
At the end, Werfel's book described the miraculous liberation of 6,000 Armenian resisters by a French battleship.Footnote 88 Persecuted German Jews, whether in European exile or—as recent research demonstrates—in Palestine, perceived his portrayal of the Armenian case as a striking parallel to their own recent situations.Footnote 89 Even in Germany, where the book was banned since February 1934, it would move its clandestine Jewish readers.Footnote 90 The historian and teacher Willy Cohn from Breslau reported to his diary on August 17, 1934, with dark foresight, “Now I am reading a book by Werfel, The 40 Days of Musa Dagh. This great novel deals with the fate of the Armenians during the World War. How much relation is there to the fate of the Jews? In the end, however, nobody in the world helped the Armenians, and this nation perished.”Footnote 91 In Paris, a recently established newspaper for the German-speaking exiles covered an interview with the author about the book under the subheading, “His New Novel about the Armenian Atrocities.” Leaving out any date or location in the subtitle, the German editors of the Pariser Tageblatt obviously assumed its readership knew of the Armenier Greuel.Footnote 92
Around the same time, the first volumes of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye had been published in Yiddish in Paris, where the editors had fled from Berlin after Hitler came to power. The entry on Armenia, printed in 1937, referred to the massacres as follows: “The Turks considered all Armenians agents of Russia and therefore systematically exterminated or evacuated the Armenian population from the war regions, in a similar way that the Russians had done with the Jews in 1915, but only more savagely. It is estimated that during the evacuation of the Armenian population to Mesopotamia, some 300,000 people were killed and approximately 300,000 died en route from hunger or illness; 200,000 fled to Russia, and around 400,000 were saved by converting to Islam. The Turkish portion of Armenia remains without Armenians.”Footnote 93
Some historians assumed that the Ottoman mass murder of the Armenians was not debated in Nazi Germany, but instead the Armenians’ Aryan race.Footnote 94 Yet, a renewed edition of the Brockhaus encyclopedia, now called The New Brockhaus, appeared in 1938 and still openly discussed the bloody Ottoman persecution of the Armenians and the extermination of a major part of this people in its entry on Armenia. The encyclopedia even provided the reader with further references of several book titles, including the Nansen report of 1928 and Lepsius's Death March.Footnote 95 Yet, the Brockhaus rival Meyer had established a slightly different agenda in its eighth revised edition in 1936. Although it still referred to the mass murder as “Armenian atrocities,” it now blamed Turkey's brutality on the Armenians, who provoked the Ottoman state with an uprising during the war in support of the Russians.Footnote 96 Later, during World War II, in 1942, small brochures prepared German administrative staff and ordinary soldiers for their colonizing mission by informing them about the nations and their conflicts in the Soviet empire. These publications criticized the Armenians for their nationalism, which caused Turkish reprisals. In the Völker des Ostraumes, the anonymous author claimed that the “Greater Armenian” aspirations were precisely the reason that “the Armenians had to atone in extreme ways in Turkey.” Here again, no further details seemed necessary to remind the Germans of the “Armenian atrocities.”Footnote 97
After 1933, the memory of the mass murder of the Armenians played an increasing role for the German-speaking public in relation to the persecution of the German Jews. In February 1936, David Frankfurter assassinated the head of the NSDAP in Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff. Immediately, the Gestapo ordered the prevention of anti-Jewish riots because they would not be perceived in a positive light by the international audience awaiting the Olympic Games in Nazi Germany.Footnote 98 The German state would try to intervene heavily in the trial held in the Swiss town of Chur in December 1936, however. The trial against Frankfurter, a Jew, received huge international attention, because the discrimination against the German Jews since 1933 was documented in great detail. The German exile press naturally covered the event as well. At the end of the trial, when the defense lawyer Eugen Curti gave his closing argument, he portrayed the persecution in Nazi Germany as being responsible for the traumatization of his client. Curti referred extensively to cases of precedence, for example, the assassination of Talaat Pasha in Berlin. He pointed out that a German court had acquitted Tehlirian, who, in contrast to Frankfurter, had planned the murder for weeks; he claimed that expert witnesses, such as the missionary Lepsius and General Liman von Sanders, would have acknowledged the right for vengeance for the Armenian atrocities, which today had been paralleled by the Nazi cruelties toward the German Jews.Footnote 99 Nonetheless, under tremendous political and diplomatic pressure by Nazi Germany, the Swiss court sentenced Frankfurter to eighteen years in the penitentiary.Footnote 100 The Swiss judges missed the chance to establish a warning sign in 1936, as the trial in 1921 had done, yet nobody could really imagine what the future would hold: the pogrom of November 1938, the occupation of half of Europe by Nazi Germany, mass deportations, and mass extermination of European Jewry.
Yet, the Ottoman case provided the only imaginable reference for the evolving brutalities of the Nazis. More and more people associated the situation of the oppressed Jews with the fate of the Armenians. The German-speaking Jüdische Revue (Jewish Review) in Prague published an open letter to a communist member of the British parliament in 1936, who had argued in a public speech against a mass immigration of Jews into Arab Palestine. The author of the letter explicitly drew a parallel between the “unfortunate Armenians” massacred by the Turks and the Jews under the Nazis, who both were seeking a refuge.Footnote 101 Another German-Jewish journal edited in Paris by Siegfried Thalheimer, the former editor-in-chief of the Düsseldorfer Lokalzeitung (1928–1933), criticized the registration of Jewish property in Nazi Germany in April 1938, citing a Dutch newspaper article by an expert for international law, and blamed the international powers that had previously promoted the protection of other oppressed minorities such as the Armenians and the Greeks for their indifference toward the ill treatment.Footnote 102
In its editorial titled Die Schmach. Der Massenwahn als Kampfmittel on the November 1938 pogrom, the weekly paper of the social democrats in exile, the Neue Vorwärts in Paris, came to this striking conclusion: “The leading men of the system have decided upon the extermination of the remaining Jews in Germany.” The editorial stated that no one abroad would dare to imagine what really happened to the Jews in Germany, because a truthful imagination would be too painful. Not even the German Jews would be capable of thinking their future fate through, since they didn't want to die, but to live. There was no help in sight, exactly the same situation, the journal underlined, as with the unfortunate Armenians, whom nobody had saved when they were literally annihilated. Most people would prefer to see the latest atrocities as just a temporary phenomenon, since most of the 600,000 German Jews survived the pogrom and nobody slaughtered them in masses, as the Turks did with the Armenians; just a few were beaten to death here and there. By contrast, Nazi Germany would deprive the Jews piece by piece of the basics of their very existence. Moreover, the journal wrote, the Jews would be given the cord to hang themselves to spare the Nazi state a big mess with all the slaughtered bodies.Footnote 103 Just a few months later, the February 1939 report of the social democrats in exile, also published in Paris, started its chapter on the persecution of the Jews with the unsettling comment that in Germany the extermination of a minority was progressing through the means of murder, punishment, robbery, and starvation. What happened to the Armenians during the war in Turkey, the report underlined, the Third Reich would now exercise against the Jews, just more slowly and more carefully planned.Footnote 104
With the invasion of Poland, emigration as the preferred way to get rid of the Jews no longer seemed feasible to the Nazi government, as European borders were all closed due to the war. Hence, hundreds of thousands of impoverished Jews remained in the German Reich, and millions of Jews found themselves trapped in the newly occupied territories of Poland. Richard Lichtheim, the Berlin-born representative of the Jewish Agency of Palestine in Switzerland, warned Zionist functionaries in October 1939 in a letter, writing, “We shall have to face the fact that under German rule 2,000,000 Jews will be annihilated in not less a cruel way, perhaps even more cruel, than 1,000,000 Armenians who have been destroyed by the Turks during the last war.”Footnote 105
Just a few weeks after Nazi Germany started the war, Hitler and Himmler decided to deport the entire Jewry from the German Reich to occupied Poland. Although Himmler had stopped the first forced transfers from Bohemia, Upper Silesia, and Austria in early November 1939 due to technical obstacles, they resumed at the beginning of 1940.Footnote 106 The Jewish Central Information Office, founded in Amsterdam by the emigrated German literature professor Alfred Wiener, published a circular about the first deportations of Jews from original German soil (from Stettin and other towns in Pomerania) that referred to the Armenian atrocities as the handwriting on the wall: “During the night of February 12 and 13, the Nazi authorities kidnapped all Jews from Stettin, not just males in their prime years, as they did with the Jewish communities in Austria and Bohemia, but also women, the elderly, and children. Up to now, nobody knows anything about their whereabouts; they were robbed of everything except the clothes they wore. At the time that the Armenians were deprived of their homes and thousands and thousands lost their lives on this horror trek, one of the German consuls talked about a peregrination into the void [eine Wanderung ins Nichts], according to Johannes Lepsius in his collection of diplomatic documents Germany and Armenia, 1914–1918.”Footnote 107 The circular continued, “Don't we feel teleported to our current time, when we read Lepsius's report about the deportations? Frequently, the expulsions were announced just days or even hours in advance. The expellees had to leave all belongings behind, homes, fields, live stock, household utensils, and tools. With the deportation, all of the Armenian people's assets were expropriated. In some cases the emigrants were allowed to use carriages or animals for transport, but on the way the accompanying gendarmes would take those away as well as money, jewelry, and everything else that they still possessed. Men were separated from women and children, led away, and killed; younger women and girls, also children, were sold to Turkish harems and Kurdish villages or abducted. After months of wanderings, only bunches of ragged, starved, pauperized human beings, often just elderly men or women, and children, arrived at the destination of the deportation: the edges of the Arabic deserts.” In stark contrast to today, as the report of the Jewish Central Information Office in February 1940 emphasized, during World War I, “the German authorities fought against the deportations and concentration camps.”Footnote 108
Even the aftermath of the upcoming mass murder, which was later named the Holocaust, had already been projected during this war through the lens of the Armenian fate. When German Jews in Shanghai, who had luckily escaped the Nazi persecution, browsed the journal Die Tribüne, published in the Chinese port city, they would find a story Kindertragödie (Children's Tragedy) by Alphons (D. R.) in 1940 about the life of ten Armenian orphans in a small Romanian town. The story began with a remark that 10,000 Armenians had been slaughtered in Erzerum and thousands of children had lost their parents on orders of Talaat Pasha. In the story, a small Armenian community in Suczawa received these young boys via the recommendation of the Armenian patriarch in Constantinople. The children, all younger than seven years old, had experienced unbelievable horrors, as they had watched how ferocious Turks slaughtered their fathers, mothers, and siblings. All of the children were traumatized. Later, as the story went, one of the boys, now a father of his own children, could no longer stand the horrific memories of the murder of his relatives and committed suicide.Footnote 109 This story is one of the first works about the trauma of survivors, especially children as victims of genocides.
The story about the Armenian orphans, although printed in China, did not fail to mention The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.Footnote 110 Just as the main character of Werfel's novel Bagradian, who was socialized in France, but was of Armenian origin, searched for his own identity, so, too, did many of the persecuted German Jews after 1933.Footnote 111 For the Jews during World War II, the Armenian resisters against the Turks at Musa Dagh served as role models rather than the traditional role models, the ancient Jewish resisters against the Romans, who had committed collective suicide while under siege at Masada. Yaïr Auron explained why: because the Armenian fight stood for a promising battle and a rescue. Whether in the ghettos of Bialystok, Sosnowitz, or Kowno, the Werfel book was studied in the Yiddish, Polish, or German editions lent from one inmate to another.Footnote 112 It must have been the part of Bagradian's speech to his Armenian followers, when he exclaimed, “Defense rather than doom,” that served as a motivating example for the ghetto inmates’ resistance.Footnote 113
Conclusion
Knowledge about the systematic mass murder of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire seems to have been surprisingly easily and quickly spread in Germany after the end of World War I. Many readers of newspapers, interested intellectuals, and owners of encyclopedias must have been aware of the Armenians’ horrendous fate. Even a special term, the “Armenian atrocities,” was coined and frequently used.
While the use of this term ceased after World War II, this didn't happen overnight. In 1953, the West German Bertelsmann Lexikon in four volumes did not mention Armenians at all, yet it contained an entry on Talaat Pasha, in which the story of the Turks suppressing an Armenian uprising surfaced and the editors still exploited the common term Armenische Greuel.Footnote 114 The Lexikon der Büchergilde, which was published in twenty volumes in 1974 for several hundred thousand book-club members, just offered a brief mention of a bloody persecution of the Armenians.Footnote 115 By contrast, in East Germany, the three-volume Meyers Lexikon of 1967 talked openly about the murder of hundreds of thousands of people via pogroms during the Armenier Greuel of 1895–96 and 1915–1916.Footnote 116 After the reunification of Germany, the Meyers new lexicon of 1994 in ten volumes discussed the Ottoman massacres in 1895 and 1909, as well as the deportation and murder of 1915–16 that led to the destruction of most of the Armenian people, and even reintroduced the term “the Armenian atrocities.”Footnote 117
The resurfacing of the term after 1989 may have had much to do with changing memory politics as an effect of the unification, the merging of east and west Meyer Lexikon publisher perspectives, and the evolving research on the Armenian genocide, which brought the issue back into the public mind of the Germans.Footnote 118 The German historical master narratives of the following two decades still neglected the subject in its entirety, however; that is strange, considering the mass murder of the Armenians had been tied so firmly to the question of the involvement and guilt of the German emperor and his government for so long.Footnote 119
Many of the main arguments of recent research controversies about the Armenian atrocities can be traced within the public debates of the first decades after World War I. The discussion about the persecution and murder of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire and the role of the Germans had started even before the war in Germany, yet it found itself revitalized after the end of the war censorship in 1918 and heated up by the Tehlirian trial in 1921. Discussions about the murder as well as about the compensation of the Armenians by creating an independent state for them suddenly stopped on the diplomatic floor with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The future territories of an Armenian state, which had been recognized by the League of Nations, were now occupied by both Turkey and the Soviet Union, according to an agreement foreshadowing the one in which Hitler and Stalin would divide the Polish state in fall 1939. This international diplomatic silence about the Armenian question in the 1920s may have triggered Hitler's assumption that no one would speak any more of the destruction of the Armenians when he planned to conquer and destroy Poland as a state and a nation.Footnote 120
For the German public, as in other countries, the discussion about the mass murder never ceased. Although the first of Lepsius's publications and the press mainly dealt with the question of Turkey's guilt and Germany's possible involvement after the war, the Tehlirian trial in Berlin shifted the focus onto the fate of the persecuted Armenians and their possible future in an independent state. During the 1920s, newspapers, journals, magazines, and books nourished an ongoing, yet often controversial and emotional debate about juridical, political, religious, and ethical aspects and implications of the Ottoman mass murder. The horror of the annihilation of the Armenians found its entry into poems, memoirs, and theater plays.
Such are the reasons that the fate of the Armenians constituted a firm element of the cultural memory in 1933 in Germany and in other countries, and the term “Armenian atrocities” as used in German encyclopedias and other media did not need any further explanation or dating. Although the doom of the Armenians would serve repeatedly as a warning sign when the Jews in Germany began to be persecuted, there probably was no longer any place for a public discussion in Nazi Germany about the mass murder of the Armenians (a claim that might need further investigation). In diaries written in Germany and in publications printed in exile, German Jews, however, frequently referred to the Armenier Greuel as the obvious historical parallel. Moreover, after the Nazi occupation of Poland and the start of mass deportations from the Third Reich, some sharp-eyed German Jews understood the developments as a serious threat and used the Armenian example to alert European Jewry. Soon, the borrowed metaphor of the “peregrination into the void” would become a gruesome reality for the German Jews.
The mass murder of the Armenian people has long been overshadowed by the Nazi extermination of the European Jews. In 1930, Heinrich Vierbücher could still write about the singularity of the murder of the Armenians: “Annihilation of an entire nation with the conscious slaughter of women and children—to this progress the past was not ‘ripe’ [. . .]. After all intents to comprehend, using all available explanations such as the lust for murder, ravenousness, religious hatred, imperiousness, and ignorance, there is still so much left that is inconceivable, that the tragedy of 1915 seems to us to have been the bloodiest and most atrocious mystery in history.”Footnote 121
After 1945, such a description would increasingly be read as a text about the Nazi annihilation of the Jews. Recent memories slowly began to eclipse the now three-decades-old history of the destruction of the Armenians, and the “industrial enterprise” Auschwitz would eventually replace the Kemach Gorge as the symbol for an “unprecedented” horrific and systematic slaughter of a people by a people.
