The Holocaust Was Not the First Genocide of the 20th Century
Though the Holocaust haunts our memories, let us not forget mass murder in the 20th century was not new to Europe. And before there was the Holocaust, there was the Armenian Genocide.
Robert E. Lee was once quoted that “it is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” Without a doubt, war is awful. Perhaps what is most surprising though, is that during times of war, the most atrocious and heinous acts befall citizens. Especially citizens caught in the path of a rising or falling empirical power.
Surely when one thinks of the worst part of World War II, the Holocaust and its role in the killing of six million European Jews and at least another five million prisoners of war comes to mind. These atrocities began at the hands of a rising Nazi Germany.
Though the Holocaust haunts our memories, let us not forget mass murder in the 20th century was not new to Europe. And before there was the Holocaust and before there was World War II, there was World War I, and the Armenian Genocide.
A Withering Empire Turns Extreme
In the years leading up to the Great War, Armenians had established themselves throughout eastern Anatolia within a crumbling Ottoman Empire. Their time there was not always a time of peace. The Armenians had experienced large-scale massacres during the 1890s and again in 1909.
In 1912, the Balkan Wars broke out. As the Ottoman Empire continued to wither and destabilize as a result of Christianity-fueled revolutions, territories that the Ottomans had long ruled were lost. By the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a faction within the Young Turk Revolution born within the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey worried over the future of eastern Anatolia.
Easter Anatolia was viewed as the heartland of the Turkish nation, and having lost territory as a result of the Balkan Wars, the CUP feared Armenians would seek to break free from the empire.
As the chaos of World War I began, Ottoman desperation set in at the thought of losing its Arab territories. Fearful that the Christian Armenian population would seek to align with Russia - which at the time was the primary enemy of the Ottoman Turks - the CUP initiated the first genocide of the 20th century.
A Common Enemy Is Created
Secret government orders were issued as rabid nationalism set in. Hoping to forestall any thought of Armenian independence, a definitive solution to the Armenian Question had a vicious and horrific answer.
On April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities would arrest and deport hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders Constantinople. Some were thrown to their deaths in deep holesArmenian women, children, and elderly were rounded up - historians estimate between 800,000 and 1.2 million - and sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert.
Throughout the march, the deported Armenians were starved, deprived of water and consistently robbed, beaten, raped, or killed. Many would die along the way as a result of starvation, exhaustion, or disease.
It was commonplace along the march for convoys to stop. Escorts would demand ransom from the Armenian prisoners - those unwilling to pay were murdered on the spot. Coming across numerous Armenian corpses alongside a deportation route became all too common.
Upper Mesopotamia Littered With Deportees
For those who reached the Syrian Desert, they were quickly divided up further and sent to various concentration camps. The first arriving survivors were imprisoned just east of Aleppo. By 1915, they would be redirected along the Euphrates to Mosul.
Survivors would only stay in camps for a few weeks at a time before being uprooted and moved to a new camp. Concentration camps littered Syria and the Upper Mesopotamia region. Along the route of reassignment, children were sold to Turks, Arabs, or Jews who were without child. For many, survival meant conversion to Islam and abandoning their Armenian culture.
In late 1917 and early 1918, British soldiers advanced northwards. Here they would liberate some 150,000 Armenians who had been working in extreme conditions for the Ottoman military.
Shortly thereafter, the surviving Armenians would coordinate an effort to reclaim their kidnapped women and children. They established an orphanage in Alexandropol and held 25,000 orphans - the largest number of orphans in the world. By 1920, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople would report care for 100,000 orphans. In 1920 the unratified Treaty of Sevres awarded Armenia a section of eastern Anatolia.
A Heinous Mission is Accomplished
The CUP had set out on deporting and exterminating the Armenians to create a single ethno-national Turkish state. Ottoman records are said to indicate that the government aimed to reduce to the Armenian population to under five percent in the deportation areas and less than ten percent in the destination areas.
More than two millennia of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia were destroyed as a result of the genocide. Though the numbers are not wholly reliable, many historians accept one million Armenians were killed. No one is sure the just how many converted to Islam and became members of Muslim culture.
In 1923, the a Turkish national movement was passed granting immunity to CUP war criminals. The previous Treaty of Sevres was annulled and replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne. It drew Turkey’s borders as we know them today as well as allowed for the expulsion of the Greek population.
Some view the international community’s acceptance of the Treaty of Lausanne as a form of sanction of the Armenian Genocide. The ethnic cleansing of Anatolia through genocide of the Armenians and Assyrians and expulsion of the Greeks resulted in the long desired single ethno-national state of Turkey.
International Impacts of the Armenian Genocide
A handful of historians note that a growing radical political party in Germany envied the new Turkey as a post-genocidical paradise. Though no direct causality has been proven, it is not hard to draw parallels between the Armenian Genocide and its goals with that of the Nazi Holocaust.
Interestingly, it would take decades for the international community to speak up regarding the Ottoman actions against the Armenians (31 countries today recognize the genocide). The silence was driven by a desire to preserve relations with Turkey.
Controversially, the Turkish government today maintains the mass deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action to combat an existential threat to their empire.