ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the German extension of genocide to the Gypsies, restricting discussion of the Holocaust to German Jews and Gypsies, relating their murder to the selective extermination of the "unfit" in Germany in 1939. German Ambassador Count Wolf-Metternich arrived in Constantinople in December 1915, seeking a statement which would disassociate Germany from Turkish crimes in order to repudiate allegations abroad that Germany had instigated them. The extermination of the Jews, the Gypsies, and Armenians was instigated by ideological imperatives stemming from the "political formulas" adopted by the ruling elites of Germany and the Ottoman Empire to legitimate their domination. The majority of Armenians in 1914 inhabited western Asia, divided between Persia and the Russian and Ottoman Empires. The plan to transform the German people into a race of pure blood, first intent on selective population increase by encouraging eugenic breeding, was radically expanded at the start of World War II.
