1915

1915

The question

From 1915 the Ottoman government deported most of its Armenian subjects, and its officials, soldiers and irregulars killed very many of them, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum says. The Museum counts at least 664,000 dead and possibly 1.2 million. Turkey’s foreign ministry cites slightly less than 600,000 Anatolian Armenians dead over 1912 to 1922, and rejects the word genocide. This story follows the people who lived it, and the cables, courts and parliaments, and says who counted each number and who uses each word.

664,000 to 1.2 millionArmenians who died in 1915 and 1916, by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Turkey's foreign ministry says slightly less than 600,000

24 Apr 1915

24 April 1915

In Constantinople Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian community leaders and sent them east. The Museum counts 240. Bishop Krikoris Balakian, one of those taken, said 280 were arrested from 21 April. The U.S. ambassador cabled that over a hundred were held and that “their lives are probably not in danger”. Balakian told a Berlin court in 1921 that of his group of 190, taken to Changere, “only 16 escaped death”. Lepsius told it that of about 600 arrested, 15 survived.

May 1915

The roads

From May 1915, the Museum says, the government extended the deportations “regardless of distance from combat zones”, marching civilians to camps in the desert south. Lepsius told the Berlin court they were sent to Deir ez-Zor, Rakka and as far as Mosul. The government’s regulations capped Armenians at 10 percent in designated areas and settlements at 50 families, and local officials kept moving deportees until “human and natural forces devastated” them down to those levels. We could not open the text of the deportation law, the Tehcir law, so we do not describe its wording.

10 percentThe most the government's regulations allowed Armenians to be in designated areas, in some areas two percent, by the Museum's account

1915

Who gave the orders

The Museum names four men at the centre: interior minister Talaat, war minister Enver, Dr. Bahaeddin Sakir, field director of the Special Organization, and Dr. Mehmed Nazim, who planned the demographics. It says the party enforced its instructions through that Organization and local administrations. The 1919 Ottoman indictment charged the Organization with attacks in Erzurum province, citing a governor’s telegram of 15 July 1915, and put Sakir in command in the eastern provinces. Those are charges by a court that tried the leaders; Turkey says no such plan existed.

Jul 1915

Christine Terzibashian

She was 26 when she told a Berlin jury, in 1921, what happened to Erzurum in July 1915. Police told the well-off families to leave because the city lay “in direct line of military operations”. “We soon found out that this was a lie and that the Armenians were the only ones who were being evacuated.” About 500 families went in her group. About 500 teenage boys, she said, were separated from the column; one was her brother, who slipped away and was dressed as a girl. The others were tied together and pushed into a river.

Jul 1915

What she saw

At Malatya, Christine Terzibashian said, the men were taken ten metres from the women, so that “we could see with our own eyes”, and killed with axes. At dusk the gendarmes picked out the most beautiful women and girls and kept them. “A Turk came toward me and wanted to take me as his woman; because I would not consent, he took my son and killed him.” Of her family of 21, three survived. “I swear to you that the orders to deport the Armenians came from Constantinople.” The court was trying a killing and did not rule on that.

1915

The killing

In the Museum’s words, Ottoman authorities, with auxiliary troops and civilians, “committed most of the murders of 1915-16”. They murdered “the majority of Armenian men of fighting age, as well as thousands of women and children”. On the marches the violence included “rape, abduction of young women and girls, extortion, torture, and murder”. Tens of thousands of children were taken from their families and converted to Islam. Bishop Balakian told the Berlin court that on the road from Yozgat a police captain, Shukri, gave him the reason, as he recalled it.

24 May 1915

The warning

The Allied note of 24 May 1915, telegraphed to Washington, said the Kurdish and Turkish population had for a month been “massacring Armenians with the connivance and often assistance of Ottoman authorities”, and that “Inhabitants of about one hundred villages near Van were all murdered.” Britain, France and Russia said they would hold Ottoman ministers and agents “personally responsible”. In June the grand vizier told the U.S. ambassador he resented “attempted interference by foreign governments” with Turkey’s “sovereign rights” over “their Armenian subjects”.

10 Jul 1915

The ambassador’s cables

On 10 July Ambassador Morgenthau reported a “systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations”, with “frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre”, directed from Constantinople even “in districts where no military operations are likely to take place”. He passed on the U.S. consul at Harput, Leslie Davis: “There seems to be a systematic plan to crush the Armenian race.” On 16 July: “a campaign of race extermination is in progress”. On 3 September: “Destruction of Armenian race in Turkey is progressing rapidly.”

18 May 1915

Turkey’s case

Turkey’s foreign ministry says the government ordered “the Armenian population residing in or near the war zone” relocated away from the advancing Russian army, took “a number of measures for safe transfer”, and also moved some Armenians away from the front who were “reported or suspected” of collaboration. Morgenthau cabled that Armenian volunteers, “many of them Russian subjects”, had joined the Russian army. The Museum says some bands did, that an armed group held Van until 18 May, and that Ottoman authorities had massacred populations seen as disloyal that spring. Morgenthau: “Most of the sufferers are innocent”.

Aug 1915

What Talaat said

In August 1915, Morgenthau wrote in 1918, the interior minister gave three grounds: Armenians “have enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks”, want “a separate state”, and “have openly encouraged our enemies”. “We have therefore come to the irrevocable decision that we shall make them powerless before this war is ended.” And: “We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else.” One day he asked for the Armenian policyholders of American insurers: “They are practically all dead now”. Morgenthau refused. A cable of 11 August reports the minister saying “no Armenians can remain friendly to Turkish Government after present treatment”.

Nov 1921

Talaat’s own account

Writing in exile, Talaat said the rumours of deportation and killing were “exceedingly exaggerated”, yet “we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces”. “The responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves.” He claimed Armenian bands armed by Russia killed “more than 300,000 Mohammedans”, a figure he does not source. He conceded the deportation “was not carried out lawfully everywhere”, and that punishing those who acted from belief “would have aroused great discontent among the people, who favored their acts”.

1922

Turkey’s losses

Turkey’s foreign ministry says “greater numbers of Turks died or were killed” in these years, and that “more than 2.5 million Anatolian Muslims also perished” over 1912 to 1922. It says a terror campaign by Armenian groups later “took the lives of 31 Turkish diplomats and their family members”. The ministry’s own paper limits its figure: the numbers “do not tell us the exact manner of death” of people caught in “an international war and an intercommunal struggle”. They count deaths of every cause across ten years of war, not killings under one policy against one group.

2.5 millionAnatolian Muslims who died over 1912 to 1922, in Turkey's foreign ministry's account; all causes

1915–1916

Who counted what

Before the war: Lepsius told the Berlin court 1,850,000, from the Armenian Patriarchate’s statistics; the Museum says about 1.5 million; Turkey’s foreign ministry says 1.05 to 1.5 million. The dead: the Museum, 664,000 to 1.2 million; Turkey, slightly less than 600,000 for 1912 to 1922, citing the demographer Justin McCarthy; the U.S. House and Senate, 1.5 million; the genocide scholars’ association, “over a million”. An Ottoman voice: the journalist Tatul Hakobyan writes that the interior minister Cemal admitted in an interview to 800,000. Talaat’s notebook of missing Armenians, published in Turkey, we did not read.

Under 600,000Armenian dead in Anatolia, 1912 to 1922, in Turkey's foreign ministry's account, citing the historian Justin McCarthy

5 Jul 1919

The Ottoman court

In 1919 an Ottoman court-martial in Constantinople found that massacres at Boghazlayan, Yozgat and Trebizond “were organized and perpetrated by the leaders” of the ruling party. The indictment said the massacre and destruction “were the result of the decision-making by the Central Committee”. On 5 July 1919 it sentenced Talaat, Enver, Djemal and Dr. Nazim to death, in absentia; it said the crimes could not be ascribed to “all members (i.e., the accused)”. Hakobyan writes that over twenty death sentences were passed in 63 cases and three carried out, including the hanging of Mehmet Kemal. The Museum calls these “aborted postwar trials”.

9 Nov 1921

Malta

Britain held Ottoman officials on Malta, “without trial” for about two years in some cases, a member of Parliament said in April 1921; one was “charged with complicity in atrocities”. Turkey’s foreign ministry says Malta tribunals tried them and “All of the accused were acquitted”, after the British Procurator General found it “improbable that the charges would be capable of proof”. Lord Curzon told the Lords in November 1921 that some were held “for participation in massacres”, and that Britain decided “to release the entire number of Turks for the sake of our men”: 118 for about thirty British held by the Ankara government. We found no record of a trial on Malta.

15 Mar 1921

Berlin, 1921

On 15 March 1921 Soghomon Tehlirian shot Talaat dead on a Berlin street. His defence told the jury he had survived the massacre of his family at Erzincan. Turkey’s foreign ministry says a secret network called Nemesis hunted Talaat down, and the prosecutor called it “a political assassination”. General Liman von Sanders called the deportation “a strategic military move” for which the government was “fully responsible”, blamed auxiliary police for the killings, and said he never saw an order signed by Talaat. The jury was asked about epilepsy and free will. It acquitted Tehlirian and the record gives no reasons. His lawyer said he told the court “My conscience is clear.”

1921

The Andonian telegrams

In Berlin Lepsius testified to a document signed by Talaat: “The destination of the deportation is annihilation.” Balakian said a vice-governor showed him a telegram signed “Talaat” asking how many Armenians were killed and alive, and explained it: “Why are you waiting? Kill them all.” The defence offered five telegrams from Aleppo, said to have been obtained by Aram Andonian, then withdrew the motion after the prosecutor said the jury need only decide what Tehlirian believed. Turkey’s side lists a book titled “The Talât Pasha Telegrams: Historical Fact or Armenian Fiction”. An Armenian paper reports Taner Akçam answering its arguments. We read neither.

9 Dec 1948

A word for it

Raphael Lemkin, who coined “genocide” in 1944, wrote that he read the Ottoman detainees on Malta, some 150 by his count, were to be freed: “A nation was killed and the guilty persons were set free.” Tehlirian’s trial, he wrote, “became, in actuality, a trial of the Turkish perpetrators”. He put the dead at “more than 1.2 million”. The U.S. House says he “invoked the Armenian case as a definitive example of genocide in the 20th century”. In 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, which the Museum credits in part to his efforts.

2003

What the Convention covers

The 1948 Convention defines genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. It does not reach back: a 2003 memorandum by independent counsel, drafted for a Turkish-Armenian reconciliation commission, found no claim from 1915 “could successfully be made” under it. On the facts it found intent “contested”, yet judged that “at least some of the perpetrators” knew their actions “would be the destruction, in whole or in part, of the Armenians of eastern Anatolia” or acted for it, and so “possessed the requisite genocidal intent”. Calling it genocide was, it said, justified.

29 Oct 2019

Washington

On 29 October 2019 the House voted 405 to 11, with three present, for H. Res. 296, which speaks of “the killing of 1.5 million Armenians”. The Senate agreed to S. Res. 150 on 12 December. In 1981 President Reagan had mentioned “the genocide of the Armenians” in a Holocaust proclamation. On 24 April 2021 President Biden said Armenians “perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today”. These are statements of two chambers and two presidents, not findings of a court. H. Res. 296 also quotes a remark attributed to Hitler in 1939; Turkey’s ministry calls that quote “fraudulent”. We do not rely on it.

405 to 11U.S. House vote on H. Res. 296, 29 October 2019, with 3 present

2 Jun 2016

Scholars, a church, a parliament

The Association of Genocide Scholars voted unanimously in 1997 that “the mass murder of over a million Armenians in Turkey in 1915 is a case of genocide” under the Convention. In 2005 it told Erdoğan that 126 Holocaust scholars had called it an “incontestable fact” in the New York Times in 2000. Pope Francis said in 2015 that the first of the last century’s great tragedies is “widely considered” the first genocide of the twentieth century. Germany’s Bundestag called it genocide on 2 June 2016, with one vote against and one abstention, and said the German Empire shares the guilt. The Museum says “most scholars agree”. We did not read other countries’ parliaments.

23 Apr 2014

Turkey’s position, in its own words

“Turkey does not deny the suffering of Armenians”, the ministry writes, but “no authentic evidence exists” of a plan, and calling it genocide is “factually problematic, morally unsound and legally unfounded”. Parliaments “should not take the place of courts”. It proposes a joint commission of historians; the genocide scholars replied in 2005 that scholars who advise the Turkish government “are not impartial”. In 2014 Prime Minister Erdoğan called 1915 “our shared pain” and sent condolences to the “grandchildren” of Armenians who died. In 2021 the ministry called Biden’s statement “a vulgar distortion of history”.

2021

What the record shows, and where it stops

The record shows the Ottoman government deported most of its Armenians in 1915 and its agents killed very many: the 1919 Ottoman court, Morgenthau’s cables, Lepsius and the survivors say so, and the Museum says “most scholars agree” it fits the definition of genocide. The U.S. House and Senate, President Biden, the Holy See, the Bundestag and the genocide scholars use the word. Turkey’s state denies a plan, and says Istanbul’s Armenians stayed; the Museum says the big cities were spared “to hide their crimes from foreigners”. We did not read Ottoman state archives, the Tehcir law, Talaat’s notebook, Akçam’s book or the German record.