Photograph links Germans to 1915 Armenia genocide

[dipsydoodle]

The photograph – never published before – was apparently taken in the summer of 1915. Human skulls are scattered over the earth. They are all that remain of a handful of Armenians slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. Behind the skulls, posing for the camera, are three Turkish officers in tall, soft hats and a man, on the far right, who is dressed in Kurdish clothes. But the two other men are Germans, both dressed in the military flat caps, belts and tunics of the Kaiserreichsheer, the Imperial German Army. It is an atrocity snapshot – just like those pictures the Nazis took of their soldiers posing before Jewish Holocaust victims a quarter of a century later.

Did the Germans participate in the mass killing of Christian Armenians in 1915? This is not the first photograph of its kind; yet hitherto the Germans have been largely absolved of crimes against humanity during the first holocaust of the 20th century. German diplomats in Turkish provinces during the First World War recorded the forced deportations and mass killing of a million and a half Armenian civilians with both horror and denunciation of the Ottoman Turks, calling the Turkish militia-killers "scum". German parliamentarians condemned the slaughter in the Reichstag.

Indeed, a German army medical officer, Armin Wegner, risked his life to take harrowing photographs of dying and dead Armenians during the genocide. In 1933, Wegner pleaded with Hitler on behalf of German Jews, asking what would become of Germany if he continued his persecution. He was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo and is today recognised at the Yad Vashem Jewish Holocaust memorial in Israel; some of his ashes are buried at the Armenian Genocide Museum in the capital, Yerevan.

It is this same Armenian institution and its energetic director, Hayk Demoyan, which discovered this latest photograph. It was found with other pictures of Turks standing beside skulls, the photographs attached to a long-lost survivor's testimony. All appear to have been taken at a location identified as "Yerznka" – the town of Erzinjan, many of whose inhabitants were murdered on the road to Erzerum. Erzinjan was briefly captured by Russian General Nikolai Yudenich from the Turkish 3rd Army in June of 1916, and Armenians fighting on the Russian side were able to gather much photographic and documentary evidence of the genocide against their people the previous year. Russian newspapers – also archived at the Yerevan museum – printed graphic photographs of the killing fields. Then the Russians were forced to withdraw.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/photograph-links-germans-to-1915-armenia-genocide-8219537.html

[dballance]

1. Isn't it Sad we Tend to write off atrocities as acts of war?

In modern times (at least 1900 on) we still seem to be okay with atrocities and call them "acts of war." What bullshit we promote to make ourselves feel better.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. I don't understand why the German military would be involved with a Turkish internal controversy.

I don't doubt the two soldiers were German. I just don't understand why they were there.

[dipsydoodle]

3. Germany, Austro Hungarians and Ottomans

were allies during WW1.

[Igel]

4. It wasn't internal.

You have to understand the Ottomans. They had an empire that the Western powers had nibbled at over the centuries, finally imposing a lot of reforms in the 19th century (that the Turks now act as though were original with them). The Ottoman Empire had rotted largely from within, but couldn't admit this. The usual "the foreigners are undermining us" claptrap was rampant.

On the western and NW part of their "homeland" were Greeks that had been there since long before the first Turk set foot in Anatolia. On the NE and E border were Armenians, also there for centuries before the Turks arrived, and which formerly held a lot more territory. In the SE, and in a huge strip that reached the Black Sea, were the Kurds, who had been there since Xerxes' day or before. The Turks were clearly a majority only in the center and to the north. The Ottomans, whenever a population was annoying, would relocate them into another population that was also a problem. Voila--remove one problem and produce ethnic strife to keep a second problem occupied and weakened. The ethnic strife the strong central authority could keep repressed. Saddam used the same strategy; so did Ivan IV, the Golden Horde, and many others. Kill two birds with one stone, and enjoy the perks of having done so.

Now the Ottomans were at war with the Western powers again, and with Russia a long-time foe that had also reduced the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans, mostly down to their own "Turkish" territory, even if occupied by what amounted to indigenous populations, were concerned that it, too, could be dismembered. On the West, the Greeks were seen as a 5th column that would want to unite with the Greeks in Greece. On the East, the Orthodox Armenians were allied, out of religion or pragmatics, with the Russian enemy. The Persians weren't a problem because they were pitifully weak, and rather liked the Germans because the Persians hated the Brits and the Russians.

The Armenian uprising wasn't just an internal matter because it was part of Turkey's war effort. It was an internal matter because the Turks wanted to keep Turkey for the Turks, whatever its diversity and however much the Turks may have been the *last* immigrants to the area, but an external matter because it affected the Central Powers' war effort.

Later the Turks would go and ethnically cleanse millions of Greeks, not only from Asia Minor but also, as part of a land swap in Europe, from the part of Turkey just north of the Dardanelles. Then, having removed all the Armenians and Greeks as a thorn in their side, the Turks could turn their attention to the Kurds. The current "Kurd homeland" is much reduced from where the Kurds were a couple of hundred years ago.

(This all makes, of course, Erdogan's pontifications about how horrible Zionism is reek of rank hypocrisy. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are virtues when Turks do it against the Orthodox and non-Turks, and the truth must be sacrificed to nationalism.)

However, I suspect that the German participation in the ethnic cleansing didn't have ethnic cleansing and genocide as a goal. While the diplomats might rant against the genocide, the military would be much more flatfooted about the entire matter. There was a war on. If you have a front line, you'd better be damned sure that the territory you "control" as your own isn't bathed in partisan activities and an ethnic uprising. The first front in this situation can't be against the enemy across the trenches but against the enemy threatening your supply lines and hinterland. German military folk would be there as advisors and consultants and coordinators, but probably only be concerned about the Armenian genocide as a precursor to what was important--fighting the Russians and their allies.