The Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide

This simply was destiny. In our research trips to Europe my wife, Leni, and I sought only to address the issues of anti-Semitism and the holocaust as it affected our own families. We toured synagogues, death camps and memorials in numerous countries attesting to the slaughter of six million Jews. But in 2009, the unexpected happened. We visited the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex in Yerevan and came face to face with the history of a million and a half Christian people who, primarily in 1915 perished in a Turkish genocide.  1  What is also chilling is that the Armenian genocide and the murder of six million Jews in Europe turned out to be in some ways linked. The Armenian genocide, as Vahakn Dadrian has pointed out, was the first genocide of the 20th century, As he also states, “The Armenian genocide’s relevance to the Holocaust derives from the fact that the concept of “crimes against humanity” in international law was first introduced publicly, explicitly, and formally by the World War I Allies --- namely Great Britain, France, and Russia. The occasion for this bold venture was the Ottoman Turkish authorities World War I genocide against Turkey’s Armenian population.” 2

 

Despite the condemnation and declaration that they would hold the Ottoman authorities responsible, the lesson of the genocide was soon forgotten – a fact not lost on Hitler. Before the 1939 invasion of Poland he told his Nazi commanders, “Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebensraum] which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” 3

 

Heinrich Vierbucher author of Armenia 1915, Dadrian, author of German Responsibility in the Armenian genocide, and other scholars have asserted that despite the outcry of some German officials, Germany was not just funding the Turkish war machine. Some of its military advisers actively helped to carry out the Armenian genocide. 4 At the very least, as Helen Fein has written, “The only government with any potential means of sanctioning Turkey to stop its killing was Germany, but German officials made no general attempt to forbid the extermination of the Armenians…“ 5  We do know that after the war, the key trio of new Turkish leaders, Talat Bey, Enver and Ahmed Djemal, who presided over the Armenian genocide, escaped to Germany in 1918 aboard a German ship.

 

The ashes of the brilliant, long forgotten, German poet, Theophil Wegner, buried at the Tsitsrnakaverd memorial, cried out to us. It was Wegner who in 1919, having gathered extensive documentary evidence of the Armenian genocide by the Turks, wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson. Sadly, America made outraged sounds but dealt no fury. Other war concerns and oil were viewed as more important. In 1933, foreseeing a new holocaust rising in Germany, Wegner published an open letter to Adolf Hitler protesting the state-organized boycott of the Jews. But plans for the holocaust would proceed as America, until 1944, virtually ignored the plight of the Jews. The U.S., as Fein has pointed out, even suppressed news of the holocaust. 6

 

Escaping to Italy, Wegner also foretold the rise of Stalinism in Russia, with its own genocides of social classes that Stalin viewed as “enemies“ of state. Among these were millions of peasants known as kulaks.

 

Wegner clearly understood the portents that signaled genocide, the most crucial for the Jews and Armenians, being their mutual lack of independent states as homelands. The six million Jews who died were dispersed throughout Europe, seeking a return to ancient Israel. The Armenians, having, undergone their own diaspora, still view their original homeland as an area that extended east from the Euphrates to eastern Anatolia, including Mt. Ararat, the refuge of Noah. Present-day Armenia represents only the small, eastern fringe of that region, absorbed centuries ago by the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Like the Jews, the Armenians were homeless and vulnerable; neither having another state eager to protect them.

 

Both the Nazi’s and the Turks justified the annihilation of their victims based on a theory of racial superiority. The Germans cited Aryan superiority; the Turks, Moslem pan-Turanianism. In both cases the targets were chosen because of xenophobic hatred of a different racial and religious group. Both aggressors launched the assaults by denying their victims civil and human rights.

 

Far from being inferior, however both the Jews and the Armenians boasted many brilliant intellectuals and furnished among the best teachers, doctors, scientists, financiers and sales people of the countries in which they lived. Yet, because of their visible success, Armenians, like Jews, were accused of being disloyal and clannish, of not only being parasites, but actively plotting against the state. Filling the role of scapegoats, the Armenians were thus as useful to the Turkish regime as the Jews were later to the Reich. As Vierbucher also noted, it was akin to the situation in Russia where pogroms were useful in distracting people from political and economic demands.

 

Quite possibly, the three Turks involved in the genocide of the Armenians were partly motivated by their fears of Armenian irredentism in Russia. For centuries Russia was the traditional enemy of Turkey. One of the major goals of Russia was to occupy and control the Straits of Bosporus in what is now Istanbul, and to revive the Christian-Byzantine Empire overthrown by the Turks in 1455. During WWI, Germany was arming Turkey to counter the deployment of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, a measure undertaken by Russia to protect the Ukraine. The Reich was also inciting the Moslem tribes against the Russians. In 1913, partly for this reason, Russia responded to an Armenian petition to guarantee Armenian civil rights in the Western part of Turkey. The Turks, however, viewed this as the first step towards making Turkey a Russian protectorate. Thus, although they signed a 1914 treaty with Russia granting those rights, as with similar treaties in the past, they completely failed to implement it.

 

The actual mechanics of the both the Jewish holocaust and Armenian genocide both involved organized state murder; the intention being not to subjugate the victim group, but its deliberate, premeditated elimination. Armenian genocide expert Dadrian introduced the term “utilitarian genocide,” to describe genocide motivated by the desire for land or wealth; something surely applicable to both genocides.  7  Nevertheless, adopting a Jewish child and making him a German was not an option in the holocaust, whereas some Turks did adopt Armenian children.  8 Hence, the German genocide was not only utilitarian but also what Dadrian termed “optimal,” i.e. aimed at total obliteration.

 

The Turkish genocide was nevertheless more brutal, often involving savage torture and mutilation and conducted without the diabolic technology of the Germans. There was no sophisticated registration of the victim population and no building of ghettoes to isolate the Armenians. There were no trucks with gas, deadly “showers” with Cyclone B, and furnaces to incinerate the dead. There were no inhuman biological experiments a la Dr. Mengele.

 

Yet, the Germans, like the Turks, did at times engage in massive, bloody killing binges. In Kiev in 2009, we visited Babi Yar, a memorial to thousands of Jews but also gypsies and Soviet POW’s, who were bludgeoned, raped, battered and slaughtered in a massive Nazi killing spree. Searching for Leni’s ancestor’s, the large Lubarsky family, in the Odessa and Kiev archives, we were able to find the name of only one.

 

Differences between the two genocides include their organization, scope and methodology. The genocide of the Jews happened gradually over a period of six years and included all the European countries occupied or invaded by Germany. As confirmed by historical sources and interviews with family members, the German holocaust in occupied Bohemia proceeded in stages from 1939-45. Those who had intermarried with Christians, including my mother, were to be killed last. I recall my grandfather’s words, “If your mother had not been pregnant with you, you wouldn’t be here.” Jews and those of mixed race, as my uncle, Lada, explained, were normally gathered in ghettoes and sent by train to concentration camps to perform slave labor.

 

In Turkey, on the other hand, at least a million Armenians were killed in 1915 alone. Under Djemal’s oversight, many of those who survived the massacres were sent to concentration camps in Syria. Like the Jews, they worked as slave laborers while slowly being starved to death.

 

As we learned at the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial, the Armenian genocide also occurred in specific stages. First the intellectuals were rounded up and murdered. Then the able Armenian men were drafted and slaughtered. The remaining men were then rounded up and shot, while their defenseless women and children, driven out to the wilds of Anatolia, were subjected to robbery, rape, starvation, typhus, torture, kidnapping and murder by both Kurds and Turks.

 

In 1918, the eastern corner of Armenia became an independent, democratic republic for two years, but lost half of its land in a 1920 war with Turkey. The remainder was absorbed by the Soviet empire. In 1991, Armenia became independent, but remains poor and largely under Russian control. The Jews also received a promise of their own state in 1918, but did not receive it until 1948.

 

The justice given to each victim group was also different. For the Jews, an international tribunal was held at Nuremberg which condemned the German perpetrators of the holocaust even years after the event and oversaw their execution. As noted earlier, there was no widely publicized “Nuremberg’” for the Armenians, although in 1919, the three genocide perpetrators were convicted of war crimes in absentia and sentenced to death by an Istanbul court. It was left to the Armenians, however, to wreak justice on their own. The man who signed the orders for the elimination of the Armenians, Interior Minister Talat Bey, was killed in 1921 by an Armenian assassin in Germany. A member of an Armenian revolutionary group, the assassin was then completely acquitted by a German court. Talat’s colleague, Enver, was killed by two other Armenian assassins a year later in Tblisi.

 

Today there are few states which deny the Jewish holocaust actually happened. Yet to this day, any mention of the Armenian genocide on the arena of world politics has always been vehemently denied by Ankara. Moreover, for the most blatant political reasons, the NATO allies still fear to tread on the sensibilities of the Turks. Even the government of the United States has yet to condemn the Armenian genocide although many individual states have done so. In an attempt at rapprochement, new protocols between Armenia and Turkey were signed in the fall of 2009 under the aegis of Switzerland. They are still awaiting ratification. The U.S., Russia and other states are hoping the two sides can set aside “preconditions” and open their borders to each other. The Obama administration even threatened to “recognize” the 1915 holocaust by April 24, 2010, unless the protocols were approved by Turkey. But it did not do so. Many Armenians, having received no apology from the Turks for the 1915 genocide, were and are opposed to the protocols. Nor are they willing to codify state boundaries they believe should be extended.

 

As the experience of Jews, Armenians and other victim groups clearly prove, whenever the world refuses to remember, whenever it turns its back on the victims and whenever it denies the victims justice, it fuels and fires further genocides. Unfortunately, economic interests and the fear of antagonizing allies have often trumped the necessity of upholding moral law.

 

The frequently quoted Pastor Martin Neimoller (1892–1984) about the rise of the Nazis is once more very apropos:

 

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a communist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out —because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew; then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.  

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1. The figure of a million and a half between 1915 and 1923 is furnished by the Armenian National Institute, http://www.armenian-genocide.org/

2. Vahakn Dadrian, “The Historical and Legal Interconnections Between the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust,” Yale Journal of International Law 23, no. 2 (Summer 19989), pp. 504 (Introduction).

3. Marjorie Housepian, “The Unremembered Genocide,” Commentary, XLII (Sept. 1966), pp. 55-61.

4. Ibid

5. Fein, p. 16

6. Fein, p. 194.

7. Vahakn Dadrian, „Typology of Genocide,“ International Review of Modern Sociology, 5:20`B212 E.Notes.com. http://www.enotes.com/genocide-encyclopedia/utilitarian-genocide

8. We are indebted for this insight to Dr. Stepan Grigoryan who commented on this Article.