Armenian Genocide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Armenian Genocide

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Armenian Genocide

Background
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire · Armenian Question · Hamidian Massacres · Zeitun Resistance (1895) · 1896 Ottoman Bank Takeover · Yıldız Attempt · Adana Massacre · Young Turk Revolution
The Genocide
Armenian notables deported from the Ottoman capital · Tehcir Law · Armenian casualties of deportations · Ottoman Armenian casualties · Labour battalion
Major extermination centers: Bitlis · Deir ez-Zor · Diyarbakır · Erzurum · Kharput · Muş · Sivas · Trabzon
Resistance: Zeitun · Van · Musa Dagh · Urfa · Shabin-Karahisar · Armenian militia · Operation Nemesis
Foreign aid and relief: American Committee for Relief in the Near East · National Armenian Relief Committee
Responsible parties
Young Turks: Talat · Enver · Djemal · Behaeddin Shakir · Committee of Union and Progress · Teskilati Mahsusa · The Special Organization · Ottoman Army · Kurdish Irregulars · Reşit Bey · Cevdet Bey · Topal Osman
Trials
Courts-Martial · Malta Tribunals · Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian
Aftermath
Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire · Denial of the Genocide · Post-Genocide timeline
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The Armenian Genocide (Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանութիւն, Turkish: Ermeni Soykırımı), also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, the Great Calamity (Մեծ Եղեռն) - refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction (genocide) of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after the First World War. It was characterised by the use of massacres, and the use of deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of Armenian deaths generally held to have been between one and one-and-a-half million. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked during this period, including Assyrians and Greeks and some scholars consider the events to be part of the same policy of extermination ^[1].

The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, deprived of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, and rape and other sexual abuse were commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide.^[2]

The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, does not accept the word genocide as an accurate description of the events.^[3] In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide. To date, twenty-two countries have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most scholars^[4] and historians^[5] accept this view.^[6]^[7] The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.

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Prelude

Main article: Armenians in the Ottoman Empire

Life under Ottoman rule

In the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Muslim dhimmi system, Armenians, as Christians, were guaranteed limited freedoms (such as the right to worship), but were treated as second-class citizens. Christians and Jews were not considered equals to Muslims: testimony against Muslims by Christians and Jews was inadmissible in courts of law. They were forbidden to carry weapons or ride atop horses, their houses could not overlook those of Muslims, and their religious practices would have to defer to those of Muslims, in addition to various other legal limitations.^[8] Violation of these statutes could result in punishments ranging from the levying of fines to execution.

The majority of the Armenian population was concentrated in the east of the Ottoman Empire.

The three major European powers, Great Britain, France and Russia (known as the Great Powers), took issue with the Empire's treatment of its Christian minorities and increasingly pressured the Ottoman government (also known as the Sublime Porte) to extend equal rights to all its citizens. Beginning in 1839, the Ottoman government implemented the Tanzimat reforms to improve the situation of minorities, although these would prove largely ineffective. By the late 1870s, Greece, along with several countries of the Balkans, frustrated with conditions, had, often with the help of the Powers, broken free of Ottoman rule. Armenians, for the most part, remained dormant during these years, earning them the title of millet-i sadıka or the "loyal millet."^[9]

Reform implementation, 1860s-1880s

Main article: Armenian Question

In the mid-1860s to early 1870s, Armenians began to ask for better treatment from the Ottoman government. After amassing the signatures of peasants from eastern Anatolia, the Armenian Communal Council had petitioned to the Ottoman government to redress the issues that the peasants complained about: "the looting and murder in Armenian towns by [Muslim] Kurds and Circassians, improprieties during tax collection, criminal behavior by government officials and the refusal to accept Christians as witnesses in trial."^[10] The Ottoman government considered these grievances and promised to punish those responsible.

Following the violent suppression of Christians in the uprisings in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Serbia in 1875, the Great Powers invoked the 1856 Treaty of Paris by claiming that it gave them the right to intervene and protect the Ottoman Empire's Christian minorities.^[11] Under growing pressure, the government declared itself a constitutional monarchy (which was almost immediately dissolved) and entered into negotiations with the powers. At the same time, the Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople, Nerses II, forwarded Armenian complaints of widespread "forced land seizure...forced conversion of women and children, arson, protection extortion, rape, and murder" to the Powers.^[12]

After the conclusion of the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War, Armenians began to look more towards Tsarist Russia as the guarantors of their security. Nerses approached the Russian leadership during its negotiations with the Ottomans in San Stefano and in the eponymous treaty, convinced them to insert a clause, Article 16, that stipulated that Russian forces occupying the Armenian provinces would only withdraw with the full implementation of Ottoman reforms.^[13] Great Britain was troubled with Russia holding on to so much Ottoman territory and forced it to enter into new negotiations with the convening of the Congress of Berlin on June 13, 1878. Armenians also entered into these negotiations and stated that they sought autonomy, not independence from the Ottoman Empire.^[14] They partially succeeded as Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin contained the same text as Article 16 but removed any mention that Russian forces would remain in the provinces; instead, the Ottoman government was to periodically inform the Great Powers of the progress of the reforms.

The Hamidian Massacres, 1894-1896

Main article: Hamidian Massacres

In 1876, the Ottoman government was led by Sultan Abdul Hamid II. From the beginning of the reform period after the signing of the Berlin treaty, Hamid II attempted to stall their implementation and asserted that Armenians did not make up a majority in the provinces and that Armenian reports of abuses were largely exaggerated or false. In 1890, Hamid II created a paramilitary outfit known as the Hamidiye which was made up of Kurdish irregulars who were tasked to "deal with the Armenians as he wished."^[15] As Ottoman officials intentionally provoked rebellions (often as a result of over-taxation) in Armenian populated towns, such as the Sasun Resistance in 1894, these regiments were increasingly used to deal with the Armenians by way of oppression and massacre. Armenians successfully fought off the regiments and brought the excesses to the attention of the Great Powers in 1895 who subsequently condemned the Porte.^[16]

The Powers forced Hamid to sign a new reform package designed to curtail the powers of the Hamidiye in October 1895 but like the Berlin treaty, was never implemented. On October 1, 1895, 2,000 Armenians assembled in Constantinople to petition for the implementation of the reforms but Ottoman police units converged towards the rally and violently broke it up.^[17] Soon, massacres of Armenians broke out in Constantinople and then engulfed the rest of the Armenian populated provinces of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Harput, Sivas, Trebizond and Van. Estimates differ on how many Armenians were killed but European documentation of the violence, which became known as the Hamidian massacres, placed the figures from anywhere between 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians.^[18]

Although Hamid was never directly implicated for ordering the massacres, he was suspected for their tacit approval and for not acting to end them.^[19] Frustrated with European indifference to the massacres, Armenians from the Dashnaktsutiun political party seized the European managed Ottoman Bank on August 26, 1896. This incident brought further sympathy for Armenians in Europe and was lauded by the European and American press, which vilified Hamid and painted him as the "great assassin" and "bloody Sultan."^[20] While the Great Powers vowed to take action and enforce new reforms, these never came into fruition due to conflicting political and economical interests.

Dissolution of the Empire

See also: Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire‎

The Young Turk Revolution, 1908

Main article: Young Turk Revolution

On July 24, 1908, Armenians hopes for equality in the empire brightened once more when a coup de etat staged by officers in the Turkish Third Army based in Salonika, removed Hamid II from power and restored the country back to a constitutional monarchy. The officers were part of the Young Turk movement that wanted to reform administration of the decadent state of the Ottoman Empire and modernize it to European standards. The movement was an anti-Hamidian coalition made up of two distinct groups: the secular liberal constitutionalists and the nationalists; the former was more democratic and accepted Armenians into their wing whereas the latter was more intolerant in regard to Armenian related issues and their frequent requests for European assistance.^[21] In 1902, during a congress of the Young Turks held in Paris, the heads of the liberal wing, Sabahheddin Bey and Ahmed Riza, partially persuaded the nationalists to include in their objectives to ensure some rights to all the minorities of the empire.

Among the numerous factions of the Young Turks also included the political organization Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Originally a secret society made up of army officers based in Salonika, the CUP proliferated amongst military circles as more army mutinies took place throughout the empire. In 1908, elements of the Third Army and the Second Army Corps declared their opposition to the Sultan and threatened to march on the capital to depose him. Hamid, shaken by the wave of resentment, stepped down from power as Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Bulgarians and Turks alike rejoiced in his dethronement.^[22]

The Adana Massacre, 1909

Main article: Adana Massacre

An Armenian town left pillaged and destroyed after the massacres in Adana in 1909.

A countercoup took place on April 13, 1909. Some Ottoman military elements, joined by Islamic theological students, aimed to return control of the country to the Sultan and the rule of Islamic law. Riots and fighting broke out between the reactionary forces and CUP forces, until the CUP was able to put down the uprising and court-martial the opposition leaders.

While the movement initially targeted the nascent Young Turk government, it spilled over into pogroms against Armenians who were perceived as having supported the restoration of the constitution.^[23] When troops were called in, many accounts record that instead of trying to quell the violence they actually took part in pillaging Armenian enclaves in Adana province.^[24] 15,000 to 30,000 Armenians were killed in the course of the "Adana Massacre."^[25]^[26]

The Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917 period

Armenian houses in ruins.

In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. Minister of War Enver Pasha developed a plan to encircle and destroy the Russian Caucasus Army at Sarıkamış, to regain territories lost to Russia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Enver Pasha's forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and almost completely destroyed. Returning to Istanbul, Enver publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians living in the region actively siding with the Russians.^[27]

See also: Caucasus Campaign

Labor battalions, February 25

Further information: Labour battalions

On February 25, 1915, The War minister Enver Pasha sent an order to all military units that Armenians in the active Ottoman forces be demobilized and assigned to the unarmed Labour battalion (Turkish: amele taburlari). Enver Pasha explained this decision as "out of fear that they would collaborate with the Russians". As a tradition, the Ottoman Army drafted non-Muslim males only between the ages of 20 and 45 into the regular army. The younger (15-20) and older (45-60) non-Muslim soldiers had always been used as logistical support through the labor battalions. Before February, some of the Armenian recruits were utilized as laborers (hamals), though they too would ultimately be executed.^[28]

Transferring Armenian conscripts from active field (armed) to passive, unarmed logistic section was an important aspect of the subsequent genocide. As reported in "The Memoirs of Naim Bey", the extermination of the Armenians in these battalions was part of a premeditated strategy on behalf of the Committee of Union and Progress. Many of these Armenian recruits were executed by Turkish squads known as chetes.^[29]

Events at Van, April 1915

Further information: Van Resistance

Armenian troops holding a defense line against Turkish forces in the walled city of Van in May 1915

On April 19, 1915, Jevdet demanded that the city of Van furnish him 4,000 soldiers immediately under the pretexts of conscription. However, it was clear that his goals were to massacre the able-bodied men of Van so as there would be no defenders, as he had done in the villages under the pretexts of arms searches, which had turned into massacres. ^[30] The Armenians offered five hundred soldiers and to pay exemption money for the rest to buy time, however, Djevdet accused Armenians of "rebellion," and spoke of his determination to "crush" it at any cost. "If the rebels fire a single shot," he declared, "I shall kill every Christian man, woman, and" (pointing to his knee) "every child, up to here."

On April 20, 1915, the armed conflict of the Van Resistance began when an Armenian woman was harassed, and the two Armenian men that came to her aid were killed by Turkish soldiers. The Armenian defenders protecting 30,000 residents and 15,000 refugees in an area of roughly one square kilometer of the Armenian Quarter and suburb of Aigestan with 1,500 able bodied riflemen who were supplied with 300 rifles and 1,000 pistols and antique weapons. The conflict lasted until General Yudenich came to rescue them ^[31].

Arrest and deportation of Armenian notables, April 1915

Further information: Armenian notables deported from the Ottoman capital in 1915

Armenian intellectuals who were arrested and later executed en masse by Ottoman authorities on the night of April 24, 1915.

By 1914, Ottoman authorities had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a threat to the empire's security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:

In order to justify this enormous crime the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as] "the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Committee of Union and Progress leaders and will succeed in opening the straits (of the Dardanelles)."^[32]

On the night of April 24 1915, the Ottoman government rounded-up and imprisoned an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders.^[33] This date coincided with Allied troop landings at Gallipoli after unsuccessful Allied naval attempts to break through the Dardanelles to Constantinople in February and March 1915.

The Temporary Law of Deportation (the "Tehcir" law)

Further information: Tehcir Law

In May 1915, Mehmed Talat Pasha requested that the cabinet and Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha legalize a measure for relocation and settlement of Armenians to other places due to what Talat Pasha called "the Armenian riots and massacres, which had arisen in a number of places in the country." However, Talat Pasha was referring specifically to events in Van and extending the implementation to the regions in which alleged "riots and massacres" would affect the security of the war zone of the Caucasus Campaign. Later, the scope of the immigration was widened in order to include the Armenians in the other provinces. On 29 May 1915, the CUP Central Committee passed the Temporary Law of Deportation ("Tehcir Law"), giving the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it "sensed" as a threat to national security.^[34] The "Tehcir Law" brought some measures regarding the property of the deportees, but during September a new law was proposed. By means of the "Abandoned Properties" Law (Law Concerning Property, Dept's and Assets Left Behind Deported Persons, also referred as the "Temporary Law on Expropriation and Confiscation"), the Ottoman government took possession of all "abandoned" Armenian goods and properties. Ottoman parliamentary representative Ahmed Riza protested this legislation:

It is unlawful to designate the Armenian assets as "abandoned goods" for the Armenians, the proprietors, did not abandon their properties voluntarily; they were forcibly, compulsorily removed from their domiciles and exiled. Now the government through its efforts is selling their goods… If we are a constitutional regime functioning in accordance with constitutional law we can't do this. This is atrocious. Grab my arm, eject me from my village, then sell my goods and properties, such a thing can never be permissible. Neither the conscience of the Ottomans nor the law can allow it.^[35]

On 13 September 1915, the Ottoman parliament passed the "Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation", stating that all property, including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be confiscated by the authorities ^[36]

The deportation and extermination process

See also: Armenian casualties of deportations

Process and camps of deportation

The Armenians were driven east, with only what they could carry

With the implementation of Tehcir law, the confiscation of Armenian property and the slaughter of Armenians that ensued upon the law's enactment outraged much of the western world. While the Ottoman Empire's wartime allies offered little protest, a wealth of German and Austrian historical documents has since come to attest to the witnesses' horror at the killings and mass starvation of Armenians.^[37]^[38]^[39] In the United States, The New York Times reported almost daily on the mass murder of the Armenian people, describing the process as "systematic", "authorized" and "organized by the government." Theodore Roosevelt would later characterize this as "the greatest crime of the war."^[40]

The Armenians were marched out to the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor and the surrounding desert. A good deal of evidence suggests that the Ottoman government did not provide any facilities or supplies to sustain the Armenians during their deportation, nor when they arrived.^[41] By August 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people."^[42]

Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians not only allowed others to rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these activities themselves.^[41] Deprived of their belongings and marched into the desert, hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished.

Naturally, the death rate from starvation and sickness is very high and is increased by the brutal treatment of the authorities, whose bearing toward the exiles as they are being driven back and forth over the desert is not unlike that of slave drivers. With few exceptions no shelter of any kind is provided and the people coming from a cold climate are left under the scorching desert sun without food and water. Temporary relief can only be obtained by the few able to pay officials.^[41]

It is believed that 25 major concentration camps existed, under the command of Şükrü Kaya, one of the right hand-men of Talat Pasha.^[43] The majority of the camps were situated near Turkey's modern Iraqi and Syrian borders, and some were only temporary transit camps.^[43] Others, such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz, are said to have been used only temporarily, for mass graves; these sites were vacated by autumn 1915.^[43] Some authors also maintain that the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra's al-'Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days.^[43]

Though nearly all the camps, including the primary sites, were open air, the remainder of the mass killing in minor camps was not limited to direct killings, but also to mass burning,^[44] poisoning^[45] and drowning.^[46]

The Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa)

Main articles: Teskilati Mahsusa and Special Organization (Ottoman Empire)

The remains of Armenians massacred at Erzinjan.^[47]

While there was an official 'special organization' founded in December 1911 by the Ottoman government, a second organization that participated in what led to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community was founded by the lttihad ve Terraki.^[48] This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a special forces outfit, or the later Einsatzgruppen.^[49]

Of this photo, the United States ambassador wrote, "Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms--massacre, starvation, exhaustion--destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation."

Later in 1914, the Ottoman government influenced the direction the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special organization.^[50] According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Many other releases followed; in Ankara a few months later, 49 criminals were released from its central prison.^{[citation needed]} Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees.^[51] Vehib, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those members of the special organization, the "butchers of the human species." ^[52]

Contemporaneous reports and reactions

Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire's own allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented numerous acts of state-sponsored massacres. Many foreign officials offered to intervene on behalf of the Armenians, including Pope Benedict XV, only to be turned away by Ottoman government officials who claimed they were "retaliating against a pro-Russian fifth column."^[53] On May 24, 1915, the Triple Entente warned the Ottoman Empire that "In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres."^[54]

The American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE, or "Near East Relief") was a charitable organization established to relieve the suffering of the peoples of the Near East.^[55] The organization was championed by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau's eyewitness accounts of the mass slaughter of Armenians galvanized much support for ACRNE.^[56]

The U.S. mission in the Ottoman Empire

The United States had several consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire, including locations in Edirne, Elazığ, Samsun, İzmir, Trabzon, Van, Constantinople, and another in the Syrian town of Aleppo. The United States was officially a neutral party until it joined the Allies in 1917. As the orders for deportations and massacres were enacted, many consular officials reported back to the ambassador on what they were witnessing. One such report came in September 1915 from the American consul in Kharput, Leslie Davis, who described his discovery of the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians dumped into several ravines near Lake Göeljuk, later referring to it as the "slaughterhouse province".^[57]

A telegram sent by Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. to the State Department on 16 July 1915 describes the massacres as a "campaign of race extermination."

The United States contributed a significant amount of aid to the Armenians during the Armenian Genocide. Shown here is a poster for the American Committee for Relief in the Near East vowing that "they [the Armenians] "shall not perish."

An article by the New York Times dated 15 December 1915 states that one million Armenians had been either deported or executed by the Ottoman government.

Workers of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East in Sivas.

Similar reports began to reach Morgenthau from Aleppo and Van, prompting him to raise the issue with Talaat and Enver in person. As he quoted to them the testimonies of the consulate officials, both justified the deportations as necessary to the conduct of the war, suggesting that the complicity of the Armenians of Van with the Russian forces that had overtaken the city justified the persecution of all ethnic Armenians. In his memoirs, Morgenthau later suggested that, "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact…"^[58] His son, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., would become involved in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust a quarter-century later. ^[59]

In addition to the consulates, there were also several Protestant missionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions, including Van and Kharput. Many missionaries vividly described the brutal methods used by Ottoman forces and documented numerous instances of atrocities committed against the Christian minority.^[60]

The events were reported daily in newspapers and literary journals around the world.^[61] Many Americans spoke out against the Genocide, including former president Theodore Roosevelt, rabbi Stephen Wise, William Jennings Bryan, and Alice Stone Blackwell. The American Near East Relief Committee helped donate over $110 million to the Armenians.^[62] In the United States and the United Kingdom, children were regularly reminded to clean their plates while eating and to "remember the starving Armenians".^[63]

Allied forces in the Middle East

On the Middle Eastern front, the British military engaged Ottoman forces in southern Syria and Mesopotamia. British diplomat Gertrude Bell filed the following report after hearing the account of a captured Ottoman soldier:

The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain in twelve hours… some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardianship of some hundred 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…^[64]

Reacting to numerous eyewitness accounts, British politician Viscount Bryce and historian Arnold J. Toynbee compiled statements from survivors and eyewitnesses from other countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, who similarly attested to the systematized massacring of innocent Armenians by Ottoman government forces. In 1916, they published The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. Although the book has since been criticized as British wartime propaganda to build up sentiment against the Central Powers, Bryce had submitted the work to scholars for verification prior to its publication. University of Oxford Regius Professor Gilbert Murray stated of the tome, "…the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question."^[65] Other professors, including Herbert Fisher of Sheffield University and former American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, affirmed the same conclusion.^[66]

Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative holocaust" and noted that "the clearance of race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be… There is no reason to 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."^[67]

The joint Austrian and German mission

As allies during the war, the Imperial German mission in the Ottoman Empire included both military and civilian components. Germany had brokered a deal with the Sublime Porte to commission the building of a railroad stretching from Berlin to the Middle East, called the Baghdad Railway.

Among the most famous persons to document the massacres was German military medic Armin T. Wegner. Wegner defied state censorship in taking hundreds of photographs of Armenians being deported and subsequently starving in northern Syrian camps.^[68]

German officers stationed in eastern Turkey disputed the government's assertion that Armenian revolts had broken out, suggesting that the areas were "quiet until the deportations began."^[69]

Germany's diplomatic mission was led by Ambassador Baron Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (and later Count Paul Wolff Metternich). Like Morgenthau, von Wangenheim received many disturbing messages from consul officials around the Ottoman Empire. From the province of Adana, Consul Eugene Buge reported that the CUP chief had sworn to kill and massacre any Armenians who survived the deportation marches.^[70] In June 1915, von Wangenheim sent a cable to Berlin reporting that Talat had admitted the deportations were not "being carried out because of 'military considerations alone.'" One month later, he came to the conclusion that there "no longer was doubt that the Porte was trying to exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish Empire."^[71]

When Wolff-Metternich succeeded von Wangenheim, he continued to dispatch similar cables: "The Committee [CUP] demands the extirpation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the government must yield…. A Committee representative is assigned to each of the provincial administrations…. Turkification means license to expel, to kill or destroy everything that is not Turkish."^[72]

German engineers and laborers involved in building the railway also witnessed Armenians being crammed into cattle cars and shipped along the railroad line. Franz Gunther, a representative for Deutsche Bank which was funding the construction of the Baghdad Railway, forwarded photographs to his directors and expressed his frustration at having to remain silent amid such "bestial cruelty".^[73] Major General Otto von Lossow, acting military attaché and head of the German Military Plenipotentiary in the Ottoman Empire, spoke to Ottoman intentions in a conference held in Batum in 1918:

The Turks have embarked upon the "total extermination of the Armenians in Transcaucasia… The aim of Turkish policy is, as I have reiterated, the taking of possession of Armenian districts and the extermination of the Armenians. Talaat's government wants to destroy all Armenians, not just in Turkey but also outside Turkey. On the basis of all the reports and news coming to me here in Tiflis there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks systematically are aiming at the extermination of the few hundred thousand Armenians whom they left alive until now.^[74]

Similarly, Major General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein noted that "The Turkish policy of causing starvation is an all too obvious proof… for the Turkish resolve to destroy the Armenians."^[75] Another notable figure in the German military camp was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who documented various massacres of Armenians. He sent fifteen reports regarding "deportations and mass killings" to Germany's chancellor in Berlin. His final report noted that fewer than 100,000 Armenians were left alive in the Ottoman Empire; the rest had been exterminated (German: ausgerottet).^[76] Scheubner-Richter also detailed the methods of the Ottoman government, noting its use of the Special Organization and other bureaucratized instruments of genocide.

Some Germans openly supported the Ottoman policy against the Armenians, as the German naval attaché in Constantinople said to U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau;

"I have lived in Turkey the larger part of my life," he told me, "and I know the Armenians. I also know that both Armenians and Turks cannot live together in this country. One of these races has got to go. And I don't blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians. I think that they are entirely justified. The weaker nation must succumb. The Armenians desire to dismember Turkey; they are against the Turks and the Germans in this war, and they therefore have no right to exist here."^[77]

In a genocide conference in 2001, professor Wolfgang Wipperman of the Free University of Berlin introduced documents evidencing that the German High Command was aware of the mass killings at the time but chose not to interfere or speak out.^[78]

Russian military

The Russian Empire's response to the bombardment of its Black Sea naval ports was primarily a land campaign through the Caucasus. Early victories against the Ottoman Empire from the winter of 1914 to the spring 1915 saw significant gains of territory, including relieving the Armenian bastion resisting in the city of Van in May 1915. The Russians also reported encountering the bodies of unarmed civilian Armenians in the areas they advanced through.^[79] In March 1916, the scenes they saw in the city of Erzerum led the Russians to retaliate against the Ottoman III^rd Army whom they held responsible for the massacres, destroying it in its entirety.^[80]

Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Turkish soldiers. Kharpert, Armenia, Ottoman Empire - April, 1915.

The Aftermath

Turkish court-martials

Main article: Turkish Court-Martials of 1919-20

Domestic court-martials were designed by Sultan Mehmed VI to punish members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in Turkish:"Ittihat Terakki" for involving the Empire in World War I. The court-martials blamed the members of CUP for pursuing a war that did not fit into the notion of Millet. The Armenian issue was used as a tool to punish the leaders of the CUP. Most of the documents generated in these courts were later moved to international trials. By January 1919, a report to Sultan Mehmed VI accused over 130 suspects, most of whom were high officials. The military court found that it was the will of the CUP to eliminate the Armenians physically, via its special organization. The 1919 pronouncement reads as follows:

The Court Martial taking into consideration the above-named crimes declares, unanimously, the culpability as principal factors of these crimes the fugitives Talat Pasha, former Grand Vizir, Enver Efendi, former War Minister, struck off the register of the Imperial Army, Cemal Efendi, former Navy Minister, struck off too from the Imperial Army, and Dr. Nazim Efendi, former Minister of Education, members of the General Council of the Union & Progress, representing the moral person of that party;… the Court Martial pronounces, in accordance with said stipulations of the Law the death penalty against Talat, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nazim.

—Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919-20

The term Three Pashas, which include Mehmed Talat Pasha and Ismail Enver, refers to the triumvirate who had fled the Empire at the end of World War I. At the trials in Istanbul in 1919 they were sentenced to death in absentia. The court-martials officially disbanded the CUP and confiscated its assets, and the assets of those found guilty. At least two of the three were later assassinated by Armenian vigilantes.

International trials

Main articles: Malta exiles and Malta Tribunals

Following the Mudros Armistice the preliminary Peace Conference in Paris established "The Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions" in January 1919, which was chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Lansing. Based on the commission's work, several articles were added to the Treaty of Sèvres, and the acting government of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Mehmed VI and Damat Adil Ferit Pasha, were summoned to trial. The Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) planned a trial to determine those responsible for the "barbarous and illegitimate methods of warfare… [including] offenses against the laws and customs of war and the principles of humanity".^[2] Article 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres required the Ottoman Empire "hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914."

Various Ottoman politicians, generals, and intellectuals were transfered to Malta, where they were held for some three years while searches were made of archives in Istanbul, London, Paris and Washington to investigate their actions.^[81] However, the Inter-allied tribunal attempt demanded by the Treaty of Sèvres never solidified and the detainees were eventually returned to Turkey in exchange for British citizens held by Kemalist Turkey.

Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian

See also: Operation Nemesis

Grand Vizier Talat Pasha who was assassinated by Soghomon Tehlirian for his crimes

The "Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian" was the trial of the assassin of former Grand Vizier Talat Pasha by Soghomon Tehlirian. The assassination took place in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin, Germany in broad daylight and in the presence of many witnesses on March 15, 1921. Talat's death was planned as part of "Operation Nemesis", the Armenian Revolutionary Federation codename for their covert operation in the 1920s to kill the planners of the Armenian Genocide.

The trial had an important influence on Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who campaigned in the League of Nations to ban what he called "barbarity" and "vandalism", and, in 1943, coined the word genocide.

Armenian deaths, 1914 to 1918

Main article: Ottoman Armenian casualties

Targets of movements from Ottoman Archives

While there is no consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide, there is general agreement among western scholars that over 500,000 Armenians perished between 1914 and 1918. Estimates vary between 300,000 (per the modern Turkish state) to 1,500,000 (per modern Armenia,^[82] Argentina,^[83] and other states). Encyclopædia Britannica references the research of Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the British Foreign Office, who estimated that 600,000 Armenians "died or were massacred during deportation" in the years 1915-1916 alone.^[84]

Influence of the Armenian Genocide on Adolf Hitler

Main article: Armenian quote

The Armenian Genocide is often speculated to have influenced Adolf Hitler (who led Nazi Germany, which was responsible for the Holocaust), owing to his various references to the Ottoman killings of Armenians.^[85] The extent of Hitler's knowledge of the Armenian Genocide is unclear, though he did refer to their destruction several times.^[86] The most notable quote attributed to Hitler on the Armenians is excerpted from an August 1939 military conference, prior to the invasion of Poland:

I have issued the command — and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebensraum] which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?^[87]

There are numerous accounts of Hitler speaking in regard to the Armenians, with at least two similar versions of the 1939 speech coming from the German High Command archives. In 1931, for example, two years prior to his ascension as Germany's leader, Hitler noted in an interview that "everywhere people are awaiting a new world order. We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy… remember the extermination of the Armenians."^[88] In 1943, during the height of his attempts to exterminate the Jews in Europe, Hitler demanded of Hungarian regent Admiral Miklós Horthy that he deport the Jews from the country: "Nations which did not get rid of the Jews perished. One of the most famous examples of this was the downfall of a people who were so proud — the Persians, who now lead a pitiful existence as Armenians."^[89]

The study of the Armenian Genocide

Hebrew University scholar Yehuda Bauer suggests of the Armenian Genocide, "This is the closest parallel to the Holocaust."^[90] He nonetheless distinguishes several key differences between the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, particularly in regard to motivation:

[T]he Nazis saw the Jews as the central problem of world history. Upon its solution depended the future of mankind. Unless International Jewry was defeated, human civilization would not survive. The attitude towards the Jews had in it important elements of pseudo-religion. There was no such motivation present in the Armenian case; Armenians were to be annihilated for power-political reasons, and in Turkey only…

The differences between the holocaust and the Armenian massacres are less important than the similarities--and even if the Armenian case is not seen as a holocaust in the extreme form which it took towards Jews, it is certainly the nearest thing to it.^[91]

Bauer has also suggested that the Armenian Genocide is best understood, not as having begun in 1915, but rather as "an ongoing genocide, from 1896, through 1908/9, through World War I and right up to 1923."^[92] Lucy Dawidowicz also alludes to these earlier massacres as at least as significant as WWI era events:

In 1897, when the Dreyfus Affair was tearing France apart, Bernard Lazare, a French Jew active in Dreyfus's defense, addressed a group of Jewish students in Paris on the subject of anti-Semitism. "For the Christian peoples," he remarked, "an Armenian solution" to their Jew-hatred was available. He was referring to the Turkish massacres of Armenians, which in their extent and horror most closely approximated the murder of European Jews. But, Lazare went on, "their sensibilities cannot allow them to envisage that." The once unthinkable "Armenian solution" became, in our time, the achievable "Final Solution," the Nazi code name for the annihilation of the European Jews.

—Lucy Dawidowicz, ^[93]

Law professor Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" in 1943, has stated that he did so with the fate of the Armenians in mind, explaining that "it happened so many times… First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action." ^[94] Several international organizations have conducted studies of the events, each in turn determining that the term "genocide" aptly describes "the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916."^[95] Among the organizations affirming this conclusion are the International Center for Transitional Justice, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the United Nations' Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.^[96]^[95]

In 2002, the International Center for Transitional Justice was asked by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission to provide a report on the applicability of the Genocide Convention to the controversy. The ICTJ ruled that it was a genocide, and further that the Republic of Turkey was not liable for the event. The ICTJ report can be viewed at the Groong website. In 2005 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, in a letter ^[97] addressed to the Prime Minister of Turkey, affirmed that scholarly evidence revealed the "Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches" and condemned Turkish attempts to deny its factual and moral reality. In 2007, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity produced a letter signed by 53 Nobel Laureates re-affirming the Genocide Scholars' conclusion that the 1915 killings of Armenians constituted genocide.^[98]^[99]

While some consider denial to be a form of hate speech or politically-minded historical revisionism, several western academics have expressed doubts as to the genocidal character of the events.^[100]^[101]^[102] The most important counterpoint may be that of British scholar Bernard Lewis. While he had once written of "the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished",^[103] he later came to believe that the term "genocide" was distinctly inaccurate, because the "tremendous massacres"^[104] were not "a deliberate preconceived decision of the Turkish government."^[105] This opinion has been joined by Guenter Lewy.^[106]

Academic views within the Republic of Turkey are often at odds with international consensus: this may partly stem from the fact that to acknowledge the Armenian genocide in Turkey carries with it a risk of criminal prosecution. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk faced harassment and criminal prosecution for stating that "a million Armenians were killed in these lands",^[107]^[108] and ethnic Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink was prosecuted three times for "denigrating Turkishness" for his having criticized the Turkish state's denial of the Armenian Genocide.^[109] In 2007, Dink was murdered by a Turkish nationalist.^[110] Later, photographs of the assassin being honored as a hero while in police custody, posing in front of the Turkish flag with grinning policemen,^[111] gave the academic community still more pause in regard to engaging the Armenian issue.^[112]

Egyptian-born scholar Bat Ye'or has suggested, "The genocide of the Armenians was a jihad."^[113] Ye'or contends that the Islamic concepts of dhimmitude and jihad were among the "principles and values" that led to the Armenian Genocide.^[114] This perspective is challenged by Fà'iz el-Ghusein, a Bedouin Arab witness of the Armenian persecution, whose 1918 treatise on the events aimed "to refute beforehand inventions and slanders against the Faith of Islam and against Moslems generally... [W]hat the Armenians have suffered is to be attributed to the Committee of Union and Progress, who deal with the empire as they please; it has been due to their nationalist fanaticism and their jealousy of the Armenians, and to these alone; the Faith of Islam is guiltless of their deeds."^[115]

Noam Chomsky has suggested that, rather than the Armenian Genocide having been relegated to the periphery of public awareness, "more people are aware of the Armenian genocide during the First World War than are aware of the Indonesian genocide in 1965".^[116] University of Minnesota Professor Eric D. Weitz has recently placed the Armenian Genocide in the broader context of several twentieth-century genocides in Europe and Asia.^[117]

The Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide

Main article: Denial of the Armenian Genocide

The Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of Armenians during the "relocation" or "deportation" cannot aptly be deemed "genocide," a charge that has been contested with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs."^[118]^[119]^[120] Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or anachronistic grounds (the word "genocide" was not coined until 1943).

Turkish World War I casualty figures are often cited to mitigate the effect of the number of Armenian dead.^[121] The website of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey currently features a section entitled Archive Documents about the Atrocities and Genocide Inflicted upon Turks by Armenians, suggesting that the Turks of Anatolia experienced a genocide at the hands of the Armenians.

Turkish governmental sources have asserted that the historically-demonstrated "tolerance of Turkish people"^[122] itself renders the Armenian Genocide an impossibility. One military document leverages 11th century history to disprove the Armenian Genocide: "It was the Seljuk Turks who saved the Armenians that came under the Turkish domination in 1071 from the Byzantine persecution and granted them the right to live as a man should."^[122] A Der Spiegel article addressed this modern Turkish conception of history thus:

"Would you admit to the crimes of your grandfathers, if these crimes didn't really happen?" asked ambassador Öymen. But the problem lies precisely in this question, says Hrant Dink, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Istanbul-based Armenian weekly Agos. Turkey's bureaucratic elite have never really shed themselves of the Ottoman tradition — in the perpetrators, they see their fathers, whose honor they seek to defend.

This tradition instils a sense of identity in Turkish nationalists — both from the left and the right, and it is passed on from generation to generation through the school system. This tradition also requires an antipole against which it could define itself. Since the times of the Ottoman Empire, religious minorities have been pushed into this role.^[123]

Public prosecutors have utilized Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibiting "insulting Turkishness" to silence a number of prominent Turkish intellectuals who spoke of atrocities endured by Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.^[124] Turkish state officials say that no one is currently incarcerated for expressing their ideas, and that the law may soon be amended.^[125] The modern Turkish government continues to protest the formal recognition of the genocide by other countries.

Open University of Israel scholar Yair Auron, in his The Banality of Denial, has addressed the various means employed by the Turkish government to obscure the reality of the Armenian Genocide:

Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, denial of this genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has continued from 1915 to present… Out of political expediency, other governments, including that of the United States and Israel, have aided and abetted Turkey in its rewriting of history.

In the 1960s, efforts were made to influence journalists, teachers, and public officials by telling "the other side of the story." Foreign scholars were encouraged to revise the record of the Genocide, presenting an account largely blaming the Armenians or, in another version, wartime conditions… The Turkish government has also attempted to exclude any mention of the Genocide in textbooks and to prevent its inclusion in Holocaust and human rights curricula.

The Turkish government has attempted to disrupt academic conferences and public discussions of the genocide, notably a conference in Tel Aviv in 1982, with demands backed up with threats to the safety of Jews in Turkey…

Since the 1980s, the Turkish government has supported the establishment of "institutes" affiliated with respected universities, whose apparent purpose is to further research on Turkish history and culture, but which also tend to act in ways that further denial. The volume and extent of these activities have been described by one scholar as "an industry of denial" and by another as "an industry of denialism."^[126]

Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

Main article: Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

As a response to the continuing denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish State, many activists among Armenian Diaspora communities have pushed for formal recognition of the Armenian genocide from various governments around the world. Twenty-two countries and 40 U.S. states have adopted formal resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide as a bona fide historical event.

Commemoration

The memorial at Tsitsernakaberd

Catholicos Karekin II and Archbishop Rowan Williams at the Armenian Genocide monument in Yerevan.

Main article: Tsitsernakaberd

In 1965, the 50th anniversary of the genocide, a 24-hour mass protest was initiated in Yerevan demanding recognition of the Armenian Genocide by Soviet authorities. The memorial was completed two years later, at Tsitsernakaberd above the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan. The 44 meter stele symbolizes the national rebirth of Armenians. 12 slabs are positioned in a circle, representing 12 lost provinces in present day Turkey. At the center of the circle there is an eternal flame.

Each April 24th, hundreds of thousands of people walk to the genocide monument and lay flowers around the eternal flame.

Art

The earliest example of the Armenian genocide on art was a medal issued in St. Petersburg, signifying Russian sympathy for Armenian suffering. It was struck in 1915, as the massacres and deportations were still raging. Since then, dozens of medals in different countries have been commissioned to commemorate the event.^[127]

Armenian-Russian "Hour of Trial" Medal, issued in 1915

Several eyewitness accounts of the events were published, notably those of Swedish missionary Alma Johansson and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. German medic Armin Wegner wrote several books about the events he witnessed while stationed in the Ottoman Empire. Years later, having returned to Germany, Wegner was imprisoned for opposing Nazism,^[128] and his books were subjected to Nazi book burnings.^[129] Probably the best known literary work on the Armenian Genocide is Franz Werfel's 1933 The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It was a bestseller that became particularly popular among the youth of the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi era.^[130]

Kurt Vonnegut's 1988 novel Bluebeard features the Armenian Genocide as an underlying theme. Other novels incorporating the Armenian Genocide include Louis de Berniéres' Birds without Wings, Edgar Hilsenrath's German-language The Fairytale of the Last Thought, and Polish Stefan Żeromski's 1925 The Spring to Come. A story in Edward Saint-Ivan's 2006 anthology "The Black Knight's God" includes a fictional survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

The first film about the Armenian Genocide appeared in 1919, a Hollywood production entitled Ravished Armenia. It resonated with acclaimed director Atom Egoyan, influencing his 2002 Ararat. There are also references in Elia Kazan's America, America or Henri Verneuil's Mayrig. At the Berlin Film Festival of 2007 Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani presented another film about the events, based on Antonia Arslan's book, La Masseria Delle Allodole (The Farm of the Larks).^[131] Richard Kalinoski's play, Beast on the Moon, is about two Armenian Genocide survivors. The works of Arshile Gorky, an Armenian expatriate whose mother starved to death in the genocide, were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period.^[132] Gorky was a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism.

The Armenian Genocide memorial in Montreal, Canada.

In 1975 famous French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour recorded the song "Ils sont tombés" ("They Fell"), dedicated to the memory of Armenian Genocide victims.^[133]

American composer and singer Daniel Decker has achieved critical acclaim for his collaborations with Armenian composer Ara Gevorgyan. The song "Adana", named for the province of a 1909 pogrom of the Armenian people, tells the story of the Armenian Genocide. "Adana" has been translated into 17 languages and recorded by singers around the world.^[134]

The band System of a Down, composed of four descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors, has promoted awareness of the Armenian Genocide, through its lyrics and concerts.^[135]

In late 2003, Diamanda Galás released the album "Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead," an 80-minute memorial tribute to the Armenian, Greek, Assyrian and Hellenic victims of the genocide in Turkey. "The performance is an angry meditation on genocide and the politically cooperative denial of it, in particular the Turkish and American denial of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides from 1914 to 1923".^[136]

Documentary films

1975 - The Forgotten Genocide (dir. J. Michael Hagopian)
1983 - Assignment Berlin (dir. Hrayr Toukhanian)
1988 - Tillbaka till Ararat (Back to Ararat, dir. Jim Downing, Göran Gunér)
1988 - An Armenian Journey (dir. Theodore Bogosian)
1990 - General Andranik (dir. Levon Mkrtchyan)
2000 - I Will Not Be Sad in This World (dir. Karina Epperlein)
2003 - Germany and the Secret Genocide (dir. J. Michael Hagopian)
2003 - Voices From the Lake: A Film About the Secret Genocide (dir. J. Michael Hagopian)
2003 - Desecration (dir. Hrair "Hawk" Khatcherian)
2003 - The Armenian Genocide: A Look Through Our Eyes (dir. Vatche Arabian)
2005 - Hovhannes Shiraz (dir. Levon Mkrtchyan)
2006 - The Armenian Genocide (dir. Andrew Goldberg)
2006 - Armenian Revolt (dir. Marty Callaghan)
2006 - Screamers (dir. Carla Garapedian)

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References

^ Schaller, Dominik J. and Zimmerer, Jürgen (2008) 'Late Ottoman genocides: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies - introduction', Journal of Genocide Research, 10:1, 7 - 14
^ ^a ^b Rummel R. J. "The Holocaust in Comparative and Historical Perspective". The Journal of Social Issues. Volume 3, no.2. April 1, 1998. Retrieved April 30, 2007.
^ BBC News Europe. "Q&A: Armenian 'genocide'", BBC News, 2006-10-12. Retrieved on 2006-12-29.
^ Letter from the International Association of Genocide Scholars to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, June 13, 2005
^ Kamiya, Gary. Genocide: An inconvenient truth salon.com. October 16, 2007.
^ Jaschik, Scott. Genocide Deniers. History News Network. October 10, 2007.
^ Kifner, John. Armenian Genocide of 1915: An Overview. The New York Times.
^ Akcam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006 p. 24 ISBN 0-8050-7932-7
^ Dadrian, Vahakn N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995 p. 192 ISBN 1-5718-1666-6
^ Akcam. A Shameful Act. p. 36
^ Akcam. A Shameful Act. pp. 35ff
^ Akcam. A Shameful Act. p. 37
^ Article 16 stated that "As the evacuation of the Russian troops of the territory they occupy in Armenia ...might give rise to conflicts and complications detrimental to the maintenance of good relations between the two countries, the Sublime Porte engaged to carry into effect, without further delay, the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by Armenians and to guarantee their security from Kurds and Circassians."
^ Akcam. A Shameful Act. p. 38
^ Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. New York: Perennial, 2003. p. 40 ISBN 0-0601-9840-0
^ Akcam. A Shameful Act. pp. 40-42
^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris. pp. 57-58
^ The German Foreign Ministry operative, Ernst Jackh, estimated that 200,000 Armenians were killed and a further 50,000 expelled from the provinces during the Hamidian unrest. French diplomats placed the figures to 250,000 killed. The German pastor Johannes Lepsius was more meticulous in his calculations, counting the deaths of 88,000 Armenians and the destruction of 2,500 villages, 645 churches and monasteries, and the plundering of hundreds of churches, of which 328 were converted into mosques.
^ Akcam. A Shameful Act. p. 42
^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris. p. 35, 115
^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris. pp. 140-141
^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris. pp. 143-144
^ Akcam. A Shameful Act. pp. 68-69
^ "DAYS OF HORROR DESCRIBED; American Missionary an Eyewitness of Murder and Rapine.", The New York Times, April 28, 1909.
^ Akcam. A Shameful Act. p. 69
^ "30,000 KILLED IN MASSACRES", The New York Times, April 25, 1909.
^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris, p. 200
^ Toynbee, Arnold. Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915. pp. 181–2
^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris, p. 178
^ Morgenthau, Henry. Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918.
^ Hinterhoff, Eugene. Persia: The Stepping Stone To India. Marshall Cavendish Illustrated Encyclopedia of World War I, vol iv, pp.1153-1157.
^ Dadrian., History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 220
^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris, pp. 211–2
^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris, pp. 186–8
^ Y. Bayur. Turk Inkilabz. vol. III, part 3 op. cit. in Dadrian. History of the Armenian Genocide
^ Vahakn N. Dadrian (2003) "The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus" Berghahn Books page. 224.
^ Fisk. Great War for Civilisation, pp. 329–31
^ Fromkin. A Peace to End All Peace, pp. 212–3
^ http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/chapters/ch2_voices2.html
^ The hidden holocaust Ruth Rosen in The San Fransisco Chronicles December 15, 2003.
^ ^a ^b ^c "EXILED ARMENIANS STARVE IN THE DESERT; Turks Drive Them Like Slaves, American Committee Hears ;- Treatment Raises Death Rate.", New York Times, August 8, 1916. Retrieved on 2007-09-16.
^ "ARMENIANS ARE SENT TO PERISH IN DESERT; Turks Accused of Plan to Exterminate Whole Population People of Karahissar Massacred.", New York Times, August 18, 1915. Retrieved on 2007-09-16.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d (French) Kotek, Joël and Pierre Rigoulot. Le Siècle des camps: Détention, concentration, extermination: cent ans de mal radica. JC Lattes, 2000 ISBN 2-7096-1884-2
^ Eitan Belkind was a Nili member, who infiltrated the Ottoman army as an official. He was assigned to the headquarters of Camal Pasha. He claims to have witnessed the burning of 5,000 Armenians, quoted in Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide. New Brunswick, N.J., 2000, pp. 181, 183. Lt. Hasan Maruf, of the Ottoman army, describes how a population of a village were taken all together, and then burned. See, British Foreign Office 371/2781/264888, Appendices B., p. 6). Also, the Commander of the Third Army, Vehib's 12 pages affidavit, which was dated December 5, 1918, presented in the Trabzon trial series (March 29, 1919) included in the Key Indictment(published in Takvimi Vekayi, No. 3540, May 5, 1919), report such a mass burning of the population of an entire village near Mus. S. S. McClure write in his work, Obstacles to Peace, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917. pp. 400–1, that in Bitlis, Mus and Sassoun, The shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in tile various camps was to burn them. And also that, Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at the remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after. The Germans, Ottoman allies, also witnessed the way Armenians were burned according to the Israeli historian, Bat Ye'or, who writes: The Germans, allies of the Turks in the First World War, …saw how civil populations were shut up in churches and burned, or gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death, and reduced to ashes,… (See: B. Ye'or, The Dhimmi. The Jews and Christians under Islam, Trans. from the French by D. Maisel P. Fenton and D. Liftman, Cranbury, N.J.: Frairleigh Dickinson University, 1985. p. 95)
^ During the Trabzon trial series, of the Martial court (from the sittings between March 26 and Mat 17, 1919), the Trabzons Health Services Inspector Dr. Ziya Fuad wrote in a report that Dr. Saib, caused the death of children with the injection of morphine, the information was allegedly provided by two physicians (Drs. Ragib and Vehib), both Dr. Saib colleagues at Trabzons Red Crescent hospital, where those atrocities were said to have been committed. (See: Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series, Genocide Study Project, H. F. Guggenheim Foundation, published in The Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 1997). Dr. Ziya Fuad, and Dr. Adnan, public health services director of Trabzon, submitted affidavits, reporting a cases, in which, two school buildings were used to organize children and then sent them on the mezzanine, to kill them with a toxic gas equipment. This case was presented during the Session 3, p.m., 1 April 1919, also published in the Constantinople newspaper Renaissance, 27 April 1919 (for more information, see: Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, in The Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 2 (1986): 169–192). The Ottoman surgeon, Dr. Haydar Cemal wrote in Türkce Istanbul, No. 45, 23 December 1918, also published in Renaissance, 26 December 1918, that on the order of the Chief Sanitation Office of the IIIrd Army in January 1916, when the spread of typhus was an acute problem, innocent Armenians slated for deportation at Erzican were inoculated with the blood of typhoid fever patients without rendering that blood 'inactive'. Jeremy Hugh Baron writes : Individual doctors were directly involved in the massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and issued false certificates of death from natural causes. Nazim's brother-in-law Dr. Tevfik Rushdu, Inspector-General of Health Services, organized the disposal of Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over six months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938. (See: Jeremy Hugh Baron, Genocidal Doctors, publish in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, November, 1999, 92, pp. 590–3). The psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, writes in a parenthesis when introducing the crimes of NAZI doctors in his book Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, (1986) p. xii: (Perhaps Turkish doctors, in their participation in the genocide against the Armenians, come closest, as I shall later suggest). and drowning.
^ Oscar S. Heizer, the American consul at Trabzon, reports: This plan did not suit Nail Bey…. Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea and thrown overboard. (See: U.S. National Archives. R.G. 59. 867. 4016/411. April 11, 1919 report.) The Italian consul of Trabzon in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea. (See: Toronto Globe, August 26, 1915) Hoffman Philip, the American Charge at Constantinople chargé d'affairs, writes: Boat loads sent from Zor down the river arrived at Ana, one thirty miles away, with three fifths of passengers missing. (Cipher telegram, July 12, 1916. U.S. National Archives, R.G. 59.867.48/356.) The Trabzon trials reported Armenians having been drown in the Black Sea. (Takvimi Vekdyi, No. 3616, August 6, 1919, p. 2.)
^ http://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/comment/morgenthau/Morgen27.htm
^ FACT SHEET: ARMENIAN GENOCIDE. Knights of Vartan Armenian Research Center, The University of Michigan-Dearborn.
^ Guenter Lewy (Fall 2005). "Revisiting the Armenian Genocide". Middle East Quarterly.
^ Vahakn N. Dadrian (November 1991). "The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal". International Journal of Middle East Studies 23: 549–76 (560).
^ R. J. Rummel. Genocide never again (book 5). Llumina Press.
^ Guenter Lewy (Fall 2005). "Revisiting the Armenian Genocide". Middle East Quarterly.
^ Ferguson. War of the World p. 177
^ 1915 declaration
- Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution 106th Congress,,2nd Session, House of Representatives
- Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution (Introduced in House of Representatives) 109th Congress, 1st Session, H.RES.316, June 14, 2005. 15 September 2005 House Committee/Subcommittee:International Relations actions. Status: Ordered to be Reported by the Yeas and Nays: 40 - 7.
- "Crimes Against Humanity", 23 British Yearbook of International Law (1946) p. 181
- William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 16–7
- Original source of the telegram sent by the Department of State, Washington containing the French, British and Russian joint declaration
^ SIXTY-SIXTH CONGRESS. SESS. I. CH. 32. 1919 August 6, 1919. [S. 180.] [Public No. 25] District of Columbia, Near East Relief incorporated.
^ New York Times Dispatch. WOULD SEND HERE 550,000 ARMENIANS; Morgenthau Urges Scheme to Save Them From Turks. The New York Times, September 13, 1915.
^ Balakian. Burning Tigris, pp. 244–5, 314
^ In his memoirs, Morgenthau noted "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact…. I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."
^ Penkower, Monty Noam. "Jewish Organizations and the Creation of the U.S. War Refugee Board." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 1980 (450): 122-139. ISSN 0002-7162 Fulltext in Jstor
^ See, for example, James L. Barton, Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915-1917. Gomidas Institute, 1998 ISBN 1-8846-3004-9
^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris, pp. 282–5
^ The Armenian Genocide. Prod. by Goldberg, Andrew. Two Cats Productions. DVD, 2006
^ Macmillan, Margaret and Richard Holbrooke. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2001 p. 378 ISBN 0-3757-6052-0
^ Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East. London: Alfred Knopf, 2005. p. 327 ISBN 1-84115-007-X
^ Dadrian. History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 228
^ Dadrian. History of the Armenian Genocide, pp. 228–9
^ Churchill, Winston. The World Crisis, 1911-1918. London: Free Press, 2005. p. 157
^ Fisk. Great War for Civilisation, p. 326
^ Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. New York: Owl, 1989 p. 212 ISBN 0-8050-6884-8
^ Balakian. Burning Tigris, p. 186
^ Fromkin. A Peace to End All Peace, p. 213
^ Auswärtiges Amt, West German Foreign Office Archives, K170, no. 4674, folio 63, op. cit. in Burning Tigris, p. 186
^ Ibid, p. 326
^ Dadrian. History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 349
^ Dadrian. History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 350
^ Fisk. Great War for Civilisation, pp. 329–30
^ "Ambassador Henry Morgenthau's Story" by Henry Morgenthau, in Harold B Library, Brigham Young University, Retrieved 29 June 2007
^ Fisk. Great War for Civilisation, p. 331
^ MASSACRE BY TURKS IN CAUCASUS TOWNS; Armenians Led Out Into the Streets and Shot or Drowned -- Old Friends Not Spared.
^ New York Times Dispatch. Russians Slaughter Turkish III^rd Army: Give No Quarter to Men Held Responsible for the Massacre of Armenians. The New York Times, March 6, 1916.
^ Türkei By Klaus-Detlev. Grothusen
^ French in Armenia 'genocide' row, BBC News, 12 October 2006
^ Turkey protests Harper's marking of genocide, by Allan Woods, The Ottawa Citizen, May 06, 2006
^ Encyclopædia Britannica: Death toll of the Armenian Massacres
^ Sumner, Colin (2003). The Blackwell Companion to Criminology. Blackwell Publishing, 74. ISBN 0631220925.
^ Fisk. Great War for Civilisation, p. 330
^ Lochner, Louis P.What About Germany? Dodd, Mead & Company, 1942 pp. 11–2.
^ Fisk. Great War for Civilisation, p. 330.
^ Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1985 p. 556 ISBN 0-8050-0348-7.
^ Yehuda Bauer, The Place of the Holocaust in Contemporary History, via Holocaust: Religious & Philosophical Implications
^ Yehuda Bauer, The Place of the Holocaust in Contemporary History, via Holocaust: Religious & Philosophical Implications
^ Bauer, Yehuda. Can Genocides be Prevented?, [1]
^ Dawidowicz, Lucy S. (1981). The Holocaust and the Historians. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-40566-8.
^ Stanley, Alessandra (April 17, 2006). A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate. The New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-06-30.
^ ^a ^b Turkey Recalls Envoys Over Armenian Genocide. International Center for Transitional Justice (May 8, 2006). Retrieved on 2007-06-30.
^ Armeniapedia: International Center for Transitional Justice
^ Letter to Prime Minister Erdogan. Genocide Watch (June 13, 2005). Retrieved on June 30, 2007.
^ Danielyan, Emil (April 10, 2007). Nobel Laureates Call For Armenian-Turkish Reconciliation. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Retrieved on June 30, 2007.
^ Phillips, David L. (April 9, 2007). Nobel Laureates Call For Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation. The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Retrieved on June 30, 2007.
^ Gilles Veinstein, "Trois questions sur un massacre", L'Histoire, no. 187 (April 1995), pp. 40–1.
^ Jeremy Salt, "The Narrative Gap in Ottoman Armenian History, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 39, No 1, January 2003 pp 19-36
^ Erickons, E.J., 2006. Armenian Massacres: New Records Undercut Old Blame. The Middle East Quarterly. Summer 2006, Vol.13, No.3.
^ Bostom, Andrew. "Dhimmitude and The Doyen", New English Review, November 10, 2006. Retrieved April 26, 2007.
^ Statement of Professor Bernard Lewis, Princeton University, "Distinguishing Armenian Case from Holocaust", Assembly of Turkish American Associations, April 14, 2002 (PDF)
^ Getler, Michael. "Documenting and Debating a 'Genocide'", The Ombudsman Column, PBS, April 21, 2006. Retrieved October 9, 2006.
^ Lewy, Guenter. The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide
^ Nouritza Matossian. "They say 'incident'. To me it's genocide", The Observer, 2005-02-27. Retrieved on 2007-02-24.
^ BBC News — "Author's trial set to test Turkey" — 14 December 2005
^ IPI Deplores Callous Murder of Journalist in Istanbul. International Press Institute (January 22, 2007). Retrieved on 2007-09-16.
^ Turkey: Outspoken Turkish-Armenian Journalist Murdered. Human Rights Watch (January 20, 2007). Retrieved on 2007-09-16.
^ Samast'a jandarma karakolunda kahraman muamelesi, Radikal, 2007-02-02
^ IPI Deplores Callous Murder of Journalist in Istanbul. International Press Institute (2007-01-22).
^ [2]
^ Ye'or, Bat. Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 374.
^ El-Ghusein, Fà'iz. Martyred Armenia. 1918, page 49.
^ Chomsky, Noam. Language and Politics. 1988, page 625.
^ Eric D. Weitz, "An Armenian Prelude," A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1-7.
^ [3]
^ [4]
^ [5]
^ [6]
^ ^a ^b [7]
^ [8]
^ Obituary: Ayse Nur Zarakolu by Felix Corley, Independent, February 14, 2002.
^ President of Turkey defends rights record International Herald Tribune, October 03, 2007.
^ Auron, Yair. The Banality of Denial, p. 47
^ Sarkisyan, Henry (1975). Works of the State History History Museum of Armenia, Vol. IV:Armenian Theme in Russian Medallic Art.. Yerevan: Hayastan, 136.
^ http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/8/3/395
^ Aktion Patenschaften für verbrannte Bücher e.V.: Autorenseite Wegners
^ Auron, Yair. The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide. 2000, page 302-4.
^ Wolfgang Höbel and Alexander Smoltczyk. Armenian Genocide at the Berlin Film Festival: "The Lark Farm" Wakens Turkish Ghosts. Spiegel Online. Retrieved on 2007-09-06.
^ Arshile Gorky and the Armenian genocide
^ Mari Terzian. The status of Armenian communities living in the United States. Azad-Hye. Retrieved on 2007-09-06.
^ Gospel Artist Given Standing Ovation By Armenian Government Officials. ANS. Retrieved on 2007-09-06.
^ Line Abrahamian. Talking With Turks and Armenians About the Genocide. Reader's Digest Canada. Retrieved on 2007-04-23.
^ Defixiones: Orders from the Dead by Diamanda Galas. The San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.

Bibliography

Akçam, Taner, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, Zed Books, 2004
Akçam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Metropolitan Books, 2006
Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. New York: Perennial, 2003
Bartov, Omer, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity, Oxford Univ. Press, 2000
Dadrian, Vahakn, N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus Berghahn Books, 1995
Dündar, Fuat, Ittihat ve Terakki'nin Müslümanlari Iskan Politikasi (1913-18), Iletisim, 2001
Fisk, Robert, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East London: Alfred Knopf, 2005
Gaunt, David. Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006. ISBN 1-59333-301-3.
Gust, Wolfgang, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, Zu Klampen, 2005
Lepsius, Johannes. Deutschland und Armenien 1914–1918, Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstücke. Donat & Temmen Verlag, 1986
Melson, Robert, Revolution and Genocide. On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, The University of Chicago Press, 1996
Power, Samantha. "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide. Harper, 2003
Wallimann, Isidor (ed.): Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, Syracuse Univ. Press, 2000
Graber, G.S. Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide 1915. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996
The Armenian Genocide: A Bibliography. University of Michigan, Dearborn: Armenian Research Center. Retrieved on January 27, 2008.

The Armenian Genocide: A Supplemental Bibliography, 1993-1996. University of Michigan, Dearborn: Armenian Research Center. Retrieved on January 27, 2008.

Walker, Christopher J. Armenia: The Survival of a Nation, Revised Second Edition. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1990. 476 pp.

External links

Armenian Genocide on the Armeniapedia.org website (Wegner photos)
Armenian National Institute (photos)
The Armenian Genocide, at www.theforgotten.org, has videos of interviews with survivors
Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, at University of Minnesota
Armenian Genocide Resolution resources for teachers
'A Reign of Terror' - CUP Rule in Diyarbekir Province, 1913-1923 [9]

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Prelude: Causes Sarajevo assassination July Ultimatum Theatres: Western Front Eastern Front Italian Front Middle Eastern Theatre Balkan Theatre Atlantic Theatre African Theatre Pacific Theatre General timeline: WW I timeline See also: Female roles Literature Total war Veterans	1914: Battle of Liège Battle of Tannenberg Invasion of Serbia First Battle of the Marne First Battle of Arras Battle of Sarikamis 1915: Mesopotamian Campaign Battle of Gallipoli Italian Campaign Conquest of Serbia 1916: Battle of Verdun Battle of the Somme Battle of Jutland Brusilov Offensive Conquest of Romania Great Arab Revolt 1917: Second Battle of Arras (Vimy Ridge) Battle of Passchendaele Capture of Baghdad Conquest of Palestine 1918: Spring Offensive Hundred Days Offensive Meuse-Argonne Offensive Armistice with Germany Armistice with Ottoman Empire	Military engagements Naval warfare Air warfare Cryptography People Poison gas Railways Technology Trench warfare Civilian impact and atrocities: Armenian Genocide Assyrian Genocide Pontic Greek Genocide Aftermath: Aftermath Casualties League of Nations Paris Peace Conference Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire Spanish flu Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Treaty of Lausanne Treaty of Neuilly Treaty of St. Germain Treaty of Sèvres Treaty of Trianon Treaty of Versailles	Entente Powers Russian Empire French Empire » France » Vietnam British Empire » United Kingdom » Australia » Canada » India » New Zealand » Newfoundland » South Africa Italy Romania United States Serbia Portugal China Japan Belgium Montenegro Greece Armenia more… Central Powers German Empire Austria-Hungary Ottoman Empire Bulgaria	Contemporaneous conflicts: Mexican Revolution (1910-20) First Balkan War (1912-13) Second Balkan War (1913) Maritz Rebellion (1914-15) Easter Rising (1916) Russian Revolution (1917) Russian Civil War (1917-21) Finnish Civil War (1918) North Russia Campaign (1918-19) Wielkopolska Uprising (1918-19) Estonian War of Independence (1918-1920) Latvian War of Independence (1918-1920) Polish-Soviet War (1919-21) Polish-Lithuanian War (1920) Irish War of Independence also known as the Anglo-Irish War (1919-21) Turkish War of Independence including the Greco-Turkish War (1919-23) Irish Civil War (1922-23) More information on World War I: World War I from Wiktionary WWI Textbooks from Wikibooks WWI Quotations from Wikiquote WWI Source texts from Wikisource WWI Images & media from Commons WWI News stories from Wikinews

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