by Robert Fisk
We do not know how much Hitler learned of the Armenian Holocaust from his friend, but he was certainly aware of its details, referring to the genocide first in 1924 when he said that Armenians were the victims of cowardice. Then in August 1939 he asked his rhetorical and infamous question of his generals—in relation to Poles—“Who, after all, is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?” There have been repeated attempts—especially by Turkey—to pretend that Hitler never made such a remark but Dadrian has found five separate versions of the question, four of them identical; two were filed in German High Command archives. Furthermore, German historians have discovered that Hitler made an almost identical comment in a 1931 interview with a German newspaper editor, saying that “everywhere people are awaiting a new world order. We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy . . . remember the extermination of the Armenians.” And there came another fateful reference to the century’s first genocide when Hitler was demanding that the Jews of Hungary be deported; he ended a tirade to Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian regent, in 1943 with a remark about “the downfall of a people who were once so proud—the Persians, who now lead a pitiful existence as Armenians.”
Historical research into the identity of Germans who witnessed the destruction of the Armenians and their later role in Hitler’s war is continuing. Some Armenian slave labourers—male and female—spent their last months working to complete a section of the German-run Baghdad railway and were briefly protected by their German supervisors. But other German nationals watched the Armenians die— and did nothing.73 What was so chilling about Hitler’s question to his generals, however, was not just his comparison—the whole world knew the details of the Turkish destruction of its Armenian population—but his equally important knowledge that the perpetrators of these war crimes were rewarded with impunity.
In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Turkish courts martial were held to punish those responsible and Turkish parliamentarians confessed to crimes against humanity. A Turkish military tribunal, unprecedented in Ottoman history, produced government records that were used as evidence at the trial. One exchange over the telegraph had a Nazi ring to it. An official says of the Armenians: “They were dispatched to their ultimate destination.” A second voice asks: “Meaning what?” And the reply comes back: “Meaning massacred. Killed.” Three minor officials were hanged. The triumvirate itself—Jemal, Enver and Talaat— was sentenced to death in absentia.
But the Turkish courts lacked the political will to continue, and the Western allies, who had boldly promised a trial of the major Turkish war criminals—the Armenian mass killings were described as “crimes against humanity” in an Allied warning to the Ottoman government in May 1915—lacked the interest to compel them to do so. Indeed, what was to come—the systematic attempt, which continues to this day, to deny that the mass killings were ever perpetrated—is almost as frightening as the powerlessness of the Allies who should have prosecuted those who devised the Armenian genocide. Talaat Pasha, the former interior minister, was assassinated in Berlin by an Armenian whose family had died in the genocide. Soghomon Tehlirian’s trial and subsequent acquittal in 1921 meant that details of the Armenian Holocaust were widely known to the German public. Franz Werfel, the German-Jewish novelist, wrote a prophetic warning of the next Holocaust in his account of Armenian resistance to the Turkish killers, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. He lectured across Germany in 1933, only to be denounced by the Nazi newspaper Das Schwarze Korps as a propagandist of “alleged Turkish horrors perpetrated against the Armenians.” The same paper—and here was another disturbing link between the Armenian Holocaust and the Jewish Holocaust still to come—condemned “America’s Armenian Jews for promoting in the U.S.A. the sale of Werfel’s book.”
Already, the century’s first genocide was being “disappeared.” Winston Churchill continued to emphasise its reality. In 1933, the same year that Werfel toured Germany, Churchill wrote that
the Armenian people emerged from the Great War scattered, extirpated in many districts, and reduced through massacre, losses of war and enforced deportations adopted as an easy system of killing . . . the Armenians and their tribulations were well known throughout England and the United States . . . Their persecutors and tyrants had been laid low by war or revolution. The greatest nations in the hour of their victory were their friends, and would see them righted.
But the Armenians would be betrayed. The archives tell a bitter story of weakness and impotence and false promises. Here, for example, is Clause 1d of the Treaty of Sèvres between the Allied and Ottoman governments of 10 August 1920:
Turkey recognised Armenia as an independent state, and consented to accept President [Woodrow] Wilson’s arbitration with regard to the boundary between the two states.
And here is Article 64 of the same treaty:
If within one year . . . the Kurdish peoples shall address themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as to show the majority of the population of these areas desires independence from Turkey, and if the Council . . . recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation and to renounce all rights and title over these areas.
Wilson’s Fourteen Points were the United States’ first attempt at a “new world order” and included honourable demands. Point Five insisted upon:
a free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims . . . the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.
And Point Twelve clearly referred to the Armenians and the Kurds:
The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development . . .
Wilson did subsequently award the Armenian republic large areas of modern-day Turkey—including the provinces of Erzerum and Van—but the Turks and the Bolsheviks together destroyed it before the end of December 1920. Unlike a later president, however, Wilson was in no position to send a “desert storm” and drive out these armies and prevent yet another massacre of Armenians. The Kurds, who had been among the cruellest perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, were equally doomed. Enthusiasm for a British-protected Kurdish state that would act as a buffer between Turkey, Iran and Iraq was extinguished when Britain decided to win over Arab opinion in Iraq by including Kurdish areas in the state and when it became obvious that the emerging Soviet Union might benefit from the creation of a puppet Kurdish state.
American isolationism meant that the Armenians were to be abandoned. The Turks attacked a French army in Cilicia, drove them out of Marash and massacred another fifty thousand Armenians who believed they were living under French protection. A further massacre occurred in Yerevan. Of the Treaty of Lausanne, which registered the final peace between Turkey and the Great Powers, Churchill was to write: “history will search in vain for the word ‘Armenia.’”
Yet it is important to remember that the one country which—in the immediate aftermath of my father’s war—chose a truly democratic alternative to the Middle East was the United States of America. I am not just referring to the Fourteen Points, in themselves a powerful argument for democratic development. In a speech to Congress, Wilson stated that “people and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game.” U.S. diplomats and missionaries spread across the old Ottoman empire argued eloquently that the Arabs of the empire should be set up—without Turkey—as one “modern Arab nation,” as they called it, to develop and progress in the world. Another powerful argument came from the King-Crane commission, set up under Wilson, which sailed to the Middle East to actually ask the peoples of the region what they wanted.
It was not Wilson’s fault that illness and an increasingly i
solationist American public caused a withdrawal from world affairs by the United States. In retrospect, however, that withdrawal—at a time when America was non-partisan in the Middle East—was one of the great tragedies of our time. We Europeans took over the area. And we failed. When the United States re-entered the region a quarter of a century later, it did so for oil and, shortly thereafter, as an almost unquestioning supporter and funder of Israel.
Lord Bryce, whose report on the Armenian genocide had done so much to enlighten public opinion, lamented in a lecture tour of the United States in 1922 that Allied failure to enforce the disarmament of the Turkish army had led the Turks to recover “their old arrogance.” And in a most enigmatic phrase, he suggested there was more than war-weariness behind the Allied refusal to provide restitution to the Armenians. “Why the Turkish Government, which had in 1915 massacred a million of its Christian subjects . . . why after these crimes that Government should have been treated by the Allies with such extraordinary lenity— these are mysteries the explanation whereof is probably known to some of you as it is to me,” he said. “But the secret is one which, as Herodotus says of some of those tales which he heard from the priests in Egypt, is too sacred for me to mention.” The Armenians, Bryce said, had suffered more than any other peoples in the 1914–18 war and had been “most cruelly abandoned.”
What was the secret of which Bryce claimed privileged knowledge? Was this a mere rhetorical flourish to explain the Allies’ postwar irresolution? Or did he think that Britain and France wanted Turkey as an ally in the face of the newly created Bolshevik state that might soon threaten the oilfields of the Middle East? In Transcaucasia, British troops initially opposed the Bolsheviks—“smelling the oil of Baku,” as one observer of the time put it—and for a short time preserved the independence of Georgia, Azerbaijan and a truncated Armenian state. But when Britain withdrew its troops in 1920, the three nations fell to the Soviet Union. In Turkestan, where we were interested in preventing Germany from gaining access to cotton supplies, British forces actually fought the Russians with the assistance of Enver Pasha’s Turkish supporters, an odd exchange of alliances, since Tsarist Russia had been an ally of Britain until the 1917 Revolution.
In just one corner of their former Turkish homeland, the Armenians clung on; in the province of Alexandretta and the now broken fortress of Musa Dagh, 20 kilometres west of Antioch, whose people had withstood the siege about which Werfel wrote his novel. Alexandretta fell under French colonial rule in the far north of Syria and so, in 1918, many thousands of Armenians returned to their gutted homes. But to understand this largely forgotten betrayal, the reader must travel to Aanjar, a small town of sorrow that blushes roses around its homes. From the roadside, smothering the front doors, all the way up Father Ashod Karakashian’s garden, there is a stream of pink and crimson to mock the suffering of the Armenians who built this town on the malarial marshes of eastern Lebanon in 1939. They are proud people, holders now of Lebanese passports, but holders, too, of one of the darkest secrets of the Armenian past: for they were “cleansed” from their homeland twice in a century, first in 1915, then in 1939. If they blame the Turks for both evictions, they blame the French as well. And Hitler. Mostly they blame the French.
Father Karakashian’s sister Viktoria was just ten in 1939, but she remembers her family’s second disaster, a miniature genocide compared to the one in 1915, but nonetheless terrible. “The French army escorted us all the way,” she said. “But we were dying. My brother Varoujan was only a year or two old, but I saw him die in my mother’s lap in the truck. Like many of us, he had malaria. The French didn’t seem to know what to do with us. They took us first for forty days to Abassid in Syria. Then they put us on ships for seven days. We landed at Tripoli [in northern Lebanon] and the French put us on a cattle train to Rayak. From Rayak, they brought us to Aanjar and here we remained.”
Like most of the Armenians of Aanjar, Father Karakashian and his sister were born in Musa Dagh, the Armenian fortress town which is now in south-eastern Turkey and which held out for forty days against overwhelming odds during the genocide. Rescued by French and British warships, the Armenians of Musa Dagh were cared for in Egypt, then sent back to their home town with the French army after the 1914–18 war. And there they lived, in part of the French Mandate of Syria, until 1939, when the French government—in a desperate attempt to persuade Turkey to join the Allies against Hitler—“gave” Musa Dagh and the large city of Alexandretta back to the Turks.
The Karakashian children were born after the 1915 Holocaust, but many of their neighbours have no parents or grandparents. Even when they arrived in Aanjar—which was then in the French Mandate of “Greater Lebanon”—they continued to suffer. “There were plagues of mosquitoes and this place was a wilderness,” Father Karakashian says. “The French gave each man twenty-five Lebanese pounds to break the rocks and build homes for themselves. But many people caught malaria and died.” In the first two years of their ordeal—in 1940, when most of Europe was at war—the Armenians of Aanjar lost a thousand men and women to malaria. Their crumbling gravestones still lie to the north of the town.
The walls of Saint Paul’s church in Aanjar are covered with photographs of the Armenian tragedy. One—taken in 1915—shows the survivors of the Musa Dagh siege climbing desperately onto the deck of an Allied warship. Another shows French officers welcoming Armenian dignitaries back to Alexandretta, along with several men of the French army’s “Armenian Brigade.” In the 1930s, they built a memorial to the siege—it has since been destroyed by the Turks—and when they were forced to leave yet again before the Second World War, the Armenians took their dead, Serb-style, with them. The corpses of eighteen of the “martyrs” of the 1915 battle—whose bodies had been left untouched by the Turks until the French came with the Armenians in 1918—were stuffed on to trucks in 1939 together with the refugees, and brought to Aanjar along with the living. They rest now in a marble sarcophagus next to Saint Paul’s church. “In eternal memory,” it says in Armenian on the marble.
But memory has been softened for the people of Aanjar. “In the first ten years after leaving Alexandretta, the people—there were six thousand deportees who came here—wanted to go back,” Father Karakashian said. “Then after the Second World War, a lot of our people emigrated to South America. Now we don’t want to return. But I went back last year for a holiday. Yes, there is a tiny Armenian community left in our former bit of Turkey around Musa Dagh, thirty families, and they’ve just renovated the Armenian church. The Turks there are polite to us. I think they know what happened and they respect us because they know they are on our land.”
The shame of France’s surrender of the sanjak (provincial district) of Alexandretta—including Musa Dagh—is one of the largely untold stories of the Second World War. Fearing that Turkey would join the German Axis as it had in the 1914–18 war, France agreed to a referendum in Alexandretta so that the Armenian and Turkish inhabitants could choose their nationality. The Turks trucked tens of thousands of people into the sanjak for the referendum, and naturally the “people” voted to be part of Turkey. “The French government made the decision to give the place to Turkey and of course the Armenians realised they couldn’t live there any more and requested from the French government that they be taken away and given new homes,” the priest says. “They wanted to be rid of the Turks. So they left. The French made an agreement in their own interests. I blame the French.” So the sanjak of Alexandretta became the Turkish province of Hatay, and the city of Alexandretta became Iskenderun. And the final irony was that Turkey did join the Allied side against Hitler—but only in the last days of the European conflict, when Hitler was about to commit suicide in his Berlin bunker and the Reich was in ashes. The sacrifice of Alexandretta was for nothing.
Nor have its ghosts departed. In 1998, the Turkish prime minister Mesut Yılmaz launched a warning against the Syrians who were assisting the communist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas operating acr
oss the border. He chose a ceremony to mark the French handover of Alexandretta to announce that “those who have their eyes fixed on Turkish territory are suffering from blindness—not even a square centimetre of this country will be taken from it.” Yet Alexandretta had been Armenian. So much for the Treaty of Sèvres.
The world is full of bigger and smaller genocides, some of which we know of from massive testimony and others to which we have blinded ourselves as surely as the Armenian refugee children lost their sight in the vile baths of the refugee homes to which they were taken in 1916. Mark Levene has written extensively about one of the lesser-known genocides—hands up, readers of this book, if you already know of it—when in 1933 the army of the nascent Iraqi state launched an exterminatory attack on members of the Assyrian community. Near the city of Dahuk, the soldiers massacred the entire population of a village called Summayl. The few surviving women were later gang-raped, and Kurds, who formed the predominant ethnic group in the region, joined in the mass killings—in some cases, no doubt, the very same Kurds who had looted and slaughtered the Armenians just across the Turkish border eighteen years earlier. This all happened in British-run Iraq and the local administrative inspector, a Colonel R. S. Stafford, reported to London that Iraqi officers had decided upon the killings with a view to the Assyrians being “as far as possible . . . exterminated.” These Assyrians had been driven from Turkey after genocidal attacks on their villages, had sought sanctuary in Persia, and were then taken by the British to live near Mosul in what would be the new Iraqi state.
Levene has traced this pattern of confrontation with the Iraqi state all the way from 1933 to the Assyrian killings in Saddam’s Anfal campaign of 1988. But even after the initial massacres, the British stifled an inquiry at the League of Nations by suggesting that it could lead to the collapse of King Feisal’s regime, and promptly offered their bombs to the new Iraqi air force for their anti-Assyrian campaign— after the initial killings. The British also warned that a public inquiry might incite “an outbreak of xenophobia directed at foreigners”—something they only succeeded in doing seventy years later.
