The Destruction of the Armenian and Assyrian Christians

In 1915 the Ottoman Empire was at war with Russia, France and Britain (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, Supplement, doc. 1400 (10 July 1915)). On the nights of 24 and 25 April numerous Armenians were arrested in Constantinople, among them doctors, journalists, writers, clergy and members of parliament, and most were sent into the interior (Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien no. 38, pp. 59–60). The German embassy heard of about 500 arrests (Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien no. 38, pp. 59–60); the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, cabled of more than a hundred (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, Supplement, doc. 1395 (27 April 1915)). The Armenian Patriarch, Archbishop Zaven (Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien no. 34, p. 53), asked the Grand Vizier and the Minister of the Interior for the reason and was told that leading men were being removed from the capital as a precaution against disorder (Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien no. 38, pp. 59–60).

On 24 May the Allied governments declared that Armenians were being massacred “with the connivance and often assistance of Ottoman authorities”, spoke of crimes “against humanity and civilization”, and said they would hold the members of the Ottoman government personally responsible (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, Supplement, doc. 1398 (28 May 1915)). The Grand Vizier resented this as interference with his government’s rights over its own subjects (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, Supplement, doc. 1399 (18 June 1915)).

On 10 July Morgenthau reported a “systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations” by arrest, torture and deportation “from one end of the Empire to the other”, with rape, pillage and murder, directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, Supplement, doc. 1400 (10 July 1915)). He gave the cause as he understood it: Armenian volunteers had joined the Russian army and some had helped the Russians at Van, and vengeance was being taken on people most of whom were innocent (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, Supplement, doc. 1400 (10 July 1915)). In August he wrote of people “herded like cattle into the arid and hostile wastes of the interior” (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, Supplement, doc. 1406 (11 August 1915)), and in September that the “destruction of Armenian race in Turkey is progressing rapidly” (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, Supplement, doc. 1410 (3 September 1915)). The Minister of the Interior had told him that Protestant and Catholic Armenians would be exempted; Morgenthau reckoned them at a tenth of the whole, the rest belonging to the Armenian national (“Gregorian”) church (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, Supplement, doc. 1408 (18 August 1915)).

A German missionary sister who came through Deir ez-Zor, a town in the Syrian desert, in the summer of 1915 found its inn crowded with deported Armenians, most of them women and children, who had had no bread for days (Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians doc. 145, pp. 566–567). The British collection of testimony published in 1916 also reports on the Christians it calls Nestorians, Syrians or Assyrians: Turkish troops and Kurdish tribesmen held their villages around Urmia in Persia from January to May 1915 (Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians section IV, p. 99), and in June attacked Hakkari, where the house of the patriarch Mar Shimun at Qudshanis was plundered and burned and its people fled to Persia (Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians doc. 37, p. 169).

In December Pope Benedict XV told the cardinals that utter ruin hung over Armenia (Benedict XV, Allocution of 6 December 1915 paragraph 2), and the Patriarch told the German embassy that Armenians who had come from Anatolia were still being arrested and expelled from the capital (Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien no. 214, p. 206). Johannes Lepsius, who edited the German documents, writes that a law of 1 August 1916 abolished the Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople and removed its office to Jerusalem (Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien introduction, p. XLIII).

The International Association of Genocide Scholars holds that this was genocide against Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks (International Association of Genocide Scholars, Resolution (2007)). The United States House of Representatives has used the word, and it stands in the title of a motion laid before the German Bundestag (U.S. House of Representatives, H. Res. 296 (2019) preamble and resolution) (Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 18/8613 title and section I). The government of Turkey rejects it: it acknowledges the loss of many Armenian lives, describes the measures as a wartime relocation, and denies that there was a plan to destroy the Armenians (Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Events of 1915).