ABSTRACT
Sir: I have the honor to report to the Embassy about one of the severest measures ever taken by a government and one of the greatest tragedies in all history.
American Consul Leslie Davis, writing to Henry Morgenthau, US Ambassador in Constantinople, June 30, 1915
■ INTRODUCTION The murder of over a million Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 presaged Adolf Hitler’s even more gargantuan assault on European Jews in the 1940s. However, for decades, the events were almost forgotten. War crimes trials – the first in history – were held after the Allied occupation of Turkey, but were abandoned in the face of Turkish resistance. In August 1939, as he prepared to invade western Poland, Hitler mused to his generals that Mongol leader “Genghis Khan had millions of women and men killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees in him only a great state builder.” And in noting his instructions to the Death’s Head killing units “to kill without mercy men, women and children of Polish race or language,” Hitler uttered some of the most resonant words in the history of genocide: “Who, after all, talks nowadays of the annihilation of the Armenians?” 1
Fortunately, Hitler’s rhetorical question could not sensibly be asked today – except in Turkey. Over the past four decades, a growing movement for consciousness-raising, apology, and restitution has entrenched the Armenian catastrophe as one of the three “classic” genocides of the twentieth century. It was not the century’s first genocide,
as is often alleged. The Congo “rubber terror” (Chapter 2) was ongoing as the century dawned, and the German destruction of the Herero (Chapter 3) preceded the Turkish assault on Armenians by over a decade. Yet in its scale, central coordination, and systematic implementation, the Armenian holocaust may perhaps be considered the first truly “modern” genocide.
