The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  But the Armenian killing fields are spread wide over the Syrian desert. Eighty kilometres to the north, east of the village of Shedadi, lies another little Auschwitz, a cave into which Turkish troops drove thousands of Armenian men during the deportations. Boghos Dakessian and I found it quite easily in the middle of what is now a Syrian oilfield. Part of the cave has long since collapsed, but it was still possible to crawl into the mouth of the rock and worm our way with the aid of a cigarette lighter into its ominous interior. It stretched for over a kilometre underground. “They killed about five thousand of our people here,” Dakessian said with a statistician’s annoyance at such imprecision. “They stuffed them in the cave and then started a bonfire here at the mouth and filled the cave with smoke. They were asphyxiated. They all coughed till they died.”

  It took several seconds before the historical meaning of all this became apparent. Up here, in the cold, dry desert, the Turks turned this crack in the earth’s crust into the twentieth century’s first gas chamber. The principles of technological genocide began here in the Syrian desert, at the tiny mouth of this innocent cave, in a natural chamber in the rock.

  There are other parallels. Enver Pasha, the Turkish war minister,71 told Morgenthau that the Armenians were being sent to “new quarters,” just as the Nazis later claimed that the Jews of Europe were being sent east for “resettlement.” Armenian churches were burned like the synagogues of Nazi Europe. The Armenians died on what the Turks called “caravans” or “convoys,” just as the Jews of Europe were sent on “transports” to the death camps. In southern Turkey, the Turks did sometimes use railway cattle wagons to herd Armenian men to their mass graves. The Kurds played the same role of executioners for the Turks that Lithuanians and Ukrainians and Croatians would later assume for the Nazis. The Turks even formed a “Special Organisation”—Teshkilat-i Makhsusiye—to carry out exterminations, an Ottoman predecessor to Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, the German “Special Action Groups.”

  Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people’s persecution every bit as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway routes to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Dachau and the other Nazi camps. The Armenians in Sivas were driven to Malatya, from Malatya to Aleppo; or from Mush to Diyarbekir to Ras al-Ain or—via Mardin—to Mosul and Kirkuk. It is a flow chart of suffering, some of the “convoys” of humiliation and grief driven 150 kilometres south from Marash to Aleppo, then another 300 kilometres east to Deir es-Zour and then north—back in the direction of Turkey for another 150 kilometres up the Habur River and past the hill of Margada. Armenians were deported from the Black Sea coast and from European Turkey to the Syrian desert, some of them moved all the way south to Palestine.

  What was at once apparent about this ethnic atrocity was not just its scale— perhaps two hundred thousand Armenians had been slaughtered two decades earlier—but the systematic nature of the Holocaust. A policy of race murder had been devised in wartime by senior statesmen who controlled, as one historian phrased it, the “machinery of violence, both formal and informal.” Like the Jews of Europe, many Armenians were highly educated; they were lawyers, civil servants, businessmen, journalists. Unlike the Jewish Holocaust, however, the world knew of the Turkish genocide almost as soon as it began. Viscount James Bryce and the young Arnold Toynbee were commissioned to prepare a report for the British government in 1915, and their work, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916 —700 pages of eyewitness accounts of the massacres—was to become not only a formative history of the slaughter but the first serious attempt to deal with crimes against humanity. Much of the testimony came from American missionaries in Turkey—the “non-governmental organisations” of the era—and from Italian, Danish, Swedish, Greek, U.S. and German diplomats and records.72

  U.S. diplomats were among the first to record the Armenian Holocaust—and among the bravest eyewitnesses—and their accounts in State Department archives remain among the most unimpeachable testimonies of the Armenians’ fate. Leslie Davis, the thirty-eight-year-old former lawyer who was American consul in Harput, has left us a terrifying account of his own horseback journeys through the dead lands of Armenia. Around Lake Goeljuk and in the space of just twenty-four hours, he saw “the remains of not less than ten thousand Armenians.” He found corpses piled on rocks at the foot of cliffs, corpses in the water and in the sand, corpses filling up huge ravines; “nearly all the women lay flat on their backs and showed signs of barbarous mutilation by bayonets of the gendarmes . . .” On one of his excursions, Davis came across a dying Armenian woman. When she was offered bread, she “cried out that she wanted to die.” An Armenian college teacher called Donabed Lulejian who was rescued by Davis passed through a village littered with the bodies of men, women and children, and wrote an essay of pain and dignity—a “benediction,” in the words of the Armenian historian Peter Balakian:

  At least a handful of earth for these slain bodies, for these whitened bones! A handful of earth, at least, for these unclaimed dead . . .

  We dislike to fancy the bodies of our dear ones worm-ridden; their eyes, their lovely eyes, filled with worms; their cheeks, their kiss-deserving cheeks, mildewed; their pomegranate-like lips food for reptiles.

  But here they are in the mountains, unburied and forlorn, attacked by worms and scorpions, the eyes bare, the faces horrible amid a loathsome stench, like the odour of the slaughter-house . . .

  There are women with breasts uncovered and limbs bare. A handful of earth to shield their honour! . . . Give, God, the handful of earth requested of Thee.

  Germans, too, bore witness to the massacres because officers of the Kaiser’s army had been seconded to Turkey to help reorganise the Ottoman military. Armin Wegner, a German nurse and a second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, disobeyed orders by taking hundreds of photographs of Armenian victims in the camps at Ras al-Ain, Rakka, Aleppo and Deir es-Zour. Today these fearful pictures of the dead and dying comprise the core of witness images. The Germans were also involved in building Turkey’s railway system and saw with their own eyes the first use of cattle trucks for human deportation, men packed ninety to a wagon—the same average the Germans achieved in their transports to the Nazi death camps—on the Anatolian and Baghdad railways. Franz Gunther, a Deutsche Bank representative in Constantinople—the bank was financing the Turkish railway projects—sent a photograph of a deportation train to one of his directors as an example of the Ottoman government’s “bestial cruelty.”

  Across the world—and especially in the United States—newspapers gave immense prominence to the genocide. From the start, The New York Times distinguished itself with near daily coverage of the slaughter, rape, dispossession and extermination of the Armenians. Its first reports appeared in the paper in November 1914. “Erzerum fanatics slay Christians,” ran a headline on 29 November. Ambassador Morgenthau’s representations to the Turkish government were published on 28 April 1915, under the words “Appeal to Turkey to stop massacres.” By 4 October, The New York Times was headlining “Tell of Horrors done in Armenia” above a long dispatch containing details of atrocities, of torture, deportations and child-killing. On 7 October the paper’s headline ran “800,000 Armenians counted destroyed . . . 10,000 drowned at once.” Morgenthau’s memoranda and Bryce’s speeches to the House of Lords were given huge coverage. The Nation carried a series of powerful editorials, calling upon Berlin—the United States still being a neutral in the war—to stop the killings by its Turkish ally. Narratives of the mass murders were still being published in The New York Times in June 1919, almost eight months after the war ended; “Armenian girls tell of massacres,” read the paper’s headline on 1 June. Even in the Canadian city of Halifax, the local paper carried almost weekly reports on the genocide. A volume containing dispatches on the destruction of the Armenians which appeared in the Halifax Herald runs to 352 pages.

  Rarely have ethnic cleansing and genocidal killings been given publicity on this sc
ale. British diplomats across the Middle East were themselves receiving first-hand accounts of the massacres. In the former Ottoman city of Basra, Gertrude Bell, who would later be Britain’s “Oriental Secretary” in Baghdad, was filing an intelligence report on the outrages received from a captured Turkish soldier.

  The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain in twelve hours . . . some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardian-ship of some hundreds of 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 . . . The Turkish officers of the battalion were horrified by the sights they saw, and the regimental chaplain (a Muslim divine) on coming across a number of bodies prayed that the divine punishment of these crimes should be averted from Muslims, and by way of expiation, himself worked at digging three graves . . . No man can ever think of a woman’s body except as a matter of horror, instead of attraction, after Ras al-Ain.

  Even after the United States entered the war, its diplomats continued to compile reports on the atrocities. J. B. Jackson, formerly the American consul in Aleppo, wrote in July 1915 of a group of more than 1,000 women and children from Harput who were handed over to Kurds:

  who rode among them, selecting the best-looking women, girls and children . . . Before carrying off those finally selected and subdued, they stripped most of the remaining women of their clothes, thereby forcing them to continue the rest of their journey in a nude condition. I was told by eyewitnesses to this outrage that over 300 women arrived at Ras alAin . . . entirely naked, their hair flowing in the air like wild beasts, and after traveling six days afoot in the burning sun . . . some of them personally came to the Consulate (in Aleppo) and exhibited their bodies to me, burned to the color of a green olive, the skin peeling off in great blotches, and many of them carrying gashes on the head and wounds on the body . . .

  The Armenian Holocaust was recorded, too, in countless private letters and diaries—some of them still unpublished—written by Europeans who found themselves in Ottoman northern Syria and southern Turkey. Here, for example, is an extract from a long account written by Cyril Barter, a British businessman who was sent out of Iraq to Aleppo under Turkish guard in 1915:

  I may tell you that two days south of Deir [es-Zour] we met the first fringe of Armenian refugees, and for the next three months I was seeing them continually. To attempt to describe their plight would be impossible. In a few words, there were no men of between sixteen and sixty among them, they had all been massacred on leaving their homes, and these, the remainder, old men, women and children were dying like flies from starvation and disease, having been on the road from their villages to this, the bare desert, with no means of subsistence, for anything from three to six months . . . It was a nightmare to me for a long time afterwards.

  Barter would later submit a report to the Bryce Commission—which originally printed it anonymously—in which he recorded how carts would be taken through Aleppo for newly dead Armenians, the bodies “thrown into them as one would throw a sack of coal.” Barter, too, would be a witness to the railway deportations, describing how Turks would drive Armenians from their places of refuge and “hustle them down to the railway station, pack them into the trucks like cattle and forward them to Damascus and different towns in the Hidjaz.”

  A British prisoner of war in Turkey, Lieutenant E. H. Jones, was to recall the fate of the Armenians of Yozgat, where he himself was held in a POW camp. “The butchery had taken place in a valley some dozen miles outside the town,” he wrote. “Amongst our sentries were men who had slain men, women, and children till their arms were too tired to strike. They boasted of it amongst themselves. And yet, in many ways, they were pleasant enough fellows.” As late as 1923, an Irish schoolboy, John de Courcy Ireland, the future nautical writer and historian, would visit Castel Gandolfo outside Rome, where he would see Armenian refugee children, “dark, fascinating to look at but very quiet in spite of the disorder in which they swarmed.”

  As the survivors of the Armenian Holocaust have died, so their children have taken up their story. A number of Armenians not only escaped death in the 1915 deportations but were confronted by a second massacre in the Greek-held Turkish city of Smyrna—now Izmir—in 1922. “My father, Sarkis, not only survived the Syrian desert but barely made it out of Smyrna alive,” his daughter Ellen Sarkisian Chesnut wrote to me.

  . . . he and two friends came to Smyrna just when Attaturk [ sic] and his men had taken it over. Arrested and taken to an abandoned railway yard with several hundred Greeks and Armenians, they were subjected to rounds and rounds of machine gun fire. He survived the onslaught because he fainted. Later he was not so lucky when with fixed bayonets the Turkish soldiers repeatedly stabbed the dead and dying. Wounded badly on his forehead and leg, he nevertheless got up and made for the quay.

  Ahead of him he saw two young girls trembling with fright and dazed by what they had seen. He could not leave them there. He grabbed ahold of their hands and the three of them ran for their lives. What they saw on the quay would stay with my father for the rest of his days. Tens of thousands of people crammed together in terror, with the flames of the dying city drawing ever closer. And yet . . . there was no help forthcoming from the British, French and American warships. But, in the distance, my dad saw that another ship was taking people on board. The three of them would have to jump into the water and swim for it. They did and were rescued by Italian sailors.

  The first writer to call the Armenian genocide a holocaust was Winston Churchill, including in a list of Turkish wartime atrocities the “massacring [of] uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians, men, women and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust . . . beyond human redress.” For Churchill:

  the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be . . . There is no reasonable 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, cherishing national ambitions that could be satisfied only at the expense of Turkey, and planted geographically between Turkish and Caucasian Moslems.

  Acknowledging that British and American interest in the “infamous” massacre of the Armenians “was lighted by the lamps of religion, philanthropy and politics,” Churchill said that the atrocities “stirred the ire of simple and chivalrous men and women spread widely about the English-speaking world.”

  But there were other, less chivalrous men whose interest in the Armenian Holocaust—gleaned at first hand—would prove to be a useful experience in a new and brutal Europe. Franz von Papen, for example, was chief of staff of the Fourth Turkish Army during the 1914–18 war and served as Hitler’s vice chancellor in 1933. During the Second World War, he was the Third Reich’s ambassador to Turkey. Another German who knew the intimate details of the Armenian genocide was Lieutenant General Hans von Seeckt, who was chief of the Ottoman General Staff in 1917. He laid the groundwork for the Wehrmacht in the 1920s and was honoured by Hitler with a state funeral on his death in 1936. Much more sinister was the identity of a young German called Rudolf Hoess, who joined the German forces in Turkey as a teenager. In 1940 he was appointed commandant of Auschwitz, and he became deputy inspector of all Nazi concentration camps at SS headquarters in 1944.

  In a work of remarkable scholarship, the Armenian historian Vahakn Dadrian identified Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter as one of the most effective Nazi mentors. Scheubner-Richter was German vice-consul in Erzerum and witnessed Turkish massacres of Armenians in Bitlis province, writing a long report on the killings for the German chancellor. In all, he submitted to Berlin fifteen reports on the deportations and mass killi
ngs, stating in his last message that with the exception of a few hundred thousand survivors, the Armenians of Turkey had been exterminated (ausgerottet). He described the methods by which the Turks concealed their plans for the genocide, the techniques used to entrap Armenians, the use of criminal gangs, and even made a reference to the Armenians as “these ‘Jews of the Orient’ who are wily businessmen.” Scheubner-Richter met Hitler only five years later and would become one of his closest advisers, running a series of racist editorials in a Munich newspaper which called for a “ruthless and relentless” campaign against Jews so that Germany should be “cleansed.” When Hitler staged his attempted coup against the Bavarian government, Scheubner-Richter linked arms with Hitler as they marched through the streets and was shot in the heart and killed instantly by a police bullet.