How the Armenian Genocide Shaped the Holocaust

Stefan Ihrig
HISTORY LESSON
Stefan Ihrig is the author of 

Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians 

from Bismarck to Hitler 

published by Harvard University Press. 

Nowhere was the debate over what was going on in Turkey to the Armenians 
more heated than Germany'and the conclusions drawn would change history.

One day in the winter of 1941, as he `walked through the streets of the 
Warsaw Ghetto,' Hermann Wygoda, `Ghetto smuggler,' tried to make sense 
of what was happening to him and the people around him: `I wondered 
whether God knew what was going on beneath Him on this troubled earth. 
The only analogy I could find in history was perhaps the pogrom of the 
Jews in Alexandria at the time of the Roman governor Flaccus ... or the 
massacre of the Armenians by the Turks during World War I.'

Wygoda was not the only one seeing this parallel. The German Social 
Democrats in exile reported continuously on the situation in Germany in 
their `Germany reports'. In February 1939 they warned, `At this moment 
in Germany the unstoppable extermination of a minority is taking place 
by way of the brutal means of murder, of torment to the degree of 
absurdity, of plunder, of assault, and of starvation. What happened to 
the Armenians during the [world war] in Turkey is now being 

committed against the Jews, [but] slower and more systemically.'
We could also mention the famous German-Jewish writer Franz Werfel who 
in 1932/1933 wrote his most well-known novel about the Armenian 
Genocide, his Forty Days of Musa Dagh, mainly to warn Germany about 
Hitler. The book was later extremely popular in the Nazi-imposed ghettos 
of Eastern Europe.

There seems to be something obvious connecting both great genocides of 
the 20th century. Yet, in its hundredth year, the Armenian Genocide is 
still a peripheral object in the violent history of the 20th century. 
Most of the new grand histories of World War I marginalize the topic, if 
they mention it at all. It seems as if the topic is an exclusively 
partisan affair of the Armenian diaspora and a few confused others (like 
me). But the Armenian Genocide is an integral part of the history of 
humanity's darkest century. There can be no doubt that it is an 
important part of the prehistory of the Holocaust, even if history books 
suggest that the two genocides were separated by a great distance in 
time and space.

Mainstream history writing has not only been reluctant to discuss the 
Armenian Genocide at all, but even more so to even think about the 
possible connections. The alleged and imagined controversy over 

the factuality of the Armenian Genocide'or more correctly the 

denials campaign sponsored by Turkey'have contributed to this 

impression of a great distance separating this genocide from 

the Holocaust.

Many problems surround the topic and Turkish denialism is but 

one of them. Claims to the uniqueness of the Holocaust and a 

lack of Nazi sources referring directly to the Armenians are others.

In fact the sentence attributed to Hitler, and the most famous Nazi 
quote on the matter, apparently epitomizes just that: `Who, after all, 
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' But this is 
something of a dead end, if not a distraction from the deeper 
connections between the two genocides. For one, it is not entirely clear 
whether he said it or not. Some sources of the meeting have it, others 
don't (which, however, does not have to signify that he did not say it). 
Also, it means something different than some understand it. It is more 
about the fact that nations at war can commit horrible atrocities and 
get away with it.

The relationship between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust 

is apparent in two periods of history. The first is the debate that 

raged in Germany regarding the slaughter of Armenians by its ally 

the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s. The debate came down in favour 

of genocide, and by the time the Nazis came to power, violence against

the Armenians had been understood and even outright justified, already 

for decades. The second period is when the Nazis were in power and 

looked to the post-ethnic cleansing Turkey as a role model.

Strangely enough, not only does Germany connect the two genocides 

in its own history very closely, it is also Germany that offers some 

historical clarity on the debate of whether it was a genocide or not.

It has been claimed that interwar Germany did not `come to terms' with the
Armenian Genocide and that this somehow made the Holocaust possible. 
However, the opposite is true: Germany not only came to terms with it, 
but probably had the greatest genocide debate up to that point in human 
history. It was rather that the outcome of this genocide debate was 
particularly problematic: it had ended in justifications of genocide 

and even with calls for the expulsion of Jews from Germany. And 

despite a drawn-out debate there had been a marked failure to produce 

a deeper religious, humanist, or philosophical analysis, appreciation, and 
condemnation of what genocide meant. While most of the political 
spectrum had found solace in the fact that this had been an `Asian 
thing,' only the political extremes on both ends of the spectrum, 
radical Socialists, and Nazis realized that this was potentially also a 
`European thing.'

To understand all this one has to take a look at Germany's very own 
Armenian history. Germany was not only an ally of the Ottoman Empire 
during World War I'at the time the genocide was committed'but had been a 
quasi-ally as early as the 1890s. And already since Bismarck's times it 
had often acted as the Ottomans' European shield when it came to the 
Armenians. In the 1890s when tens of thousands of Armenians were killed 
in the Hamidian massacres (1894-1896), this was also a `problem' for 
Germany, but also an opportunity to further ingratiate itself with the 
Ottomans (economic concessions were the immediate results). But 

it was problematic mainly vis-Ã-vis its own public at home. Pro-Armenian 

activists and papers were raising awareness of what had happened in the 
Ottoman Empire and the pro-Ottoman elites were disquieted; the result 
was a propaganda war between both sides waged in the German newspapers. 
The pro-Ottoman (and anti-Armenian) side seemed to be winning, but the 
massacres simply did not come to an end. During the last massacres (in 
1896) a series of essays reporting on the atrocities of the last years 
was published in Germany and for a moment pro-Armenian sentiment seemed 
to have carried the day.

But then, merely two years later, the German Emperor Wilhelm II 
travelled to Istanbul. This obvious show of friendship with the `bloody' 
sultan necessitated a revisiting of the Armenian massacres in Germany 
and produced discourses that not only justified the violence against the 
Armenians but also the German government's silence and continued support 
for the Ottomans. The preeminent German liberal thinker, imperialist, 
and Protestant pastor Friedrich Naumann even went one step further and 
argued for an ethic-free German foreign policy, devoted solely to 
national self-interest. This was a dynamic that would play out two more 
times in German history, during the genocide as well as after World War 
I in a great German genocide debate (1919-1923).

During World War I Germany, now officially an ally of the Ottomans, 
again acted as a shield for violent Ottoman policies vis-Ã-vis the Armenians. However, now this violence reached unprecedented, genocidal 
heights. While official Germany continued to back their Ottoman ally and 
even continued to spew violent anti-Armenian propaganda and 
justifications for whatever was actually happening to the Armenians, 
behind closed doors Germany started to become anxious. Official Germany 
now feared that what was happening in Anatolia and Mesopotamia would be 
used against Germany after the war. And so already in the summer of 1919 
the German Foreign Office published a collection of documents from its 
internal correspondence on the Armenian Genocide. It was meant to show 
the world that Germany was innocent of the charge of co-conspiracy in 
the murder of the Armenians, but it inadvertently kick-started a 
genocide debate in Germany that would continue for almost four years.

The publication of this documental record of the Armenian Genocide, with 
all its gory details, provoked an outcry and condemnations in the 
liberal and left press in Germany, including attacks on Germany's 
wartime leaders. At this point large sections of the press already 
acknowledged what we, today, would term `genocide' and what they 

called `annihilation of a nation' or `murder of the Armenian people.' 

But then followed a long year of backlash in which nationalist and formerly 
pro-Ottoman papers minimized what had happened, focused on the alleged 
Armenian wartime stab in the back, and justified what the Young Turk 
leadership had done as `military necessities.'

The debate could have ended here, but then, in March 1921, Talt Pasha, 
former Ottoman Grand Vizier and Minister of the Interior as well as the 
widely perceived author of the genocide, was assassinated in a crowded 
Berlin shopping street. Three months later the assassin stood trial in 
Berlin and was acquitted by a jury ` the trial had been completely 
turned around and focused rather on the Armenian Genocide and Talt 
Pasha's role in it than on the actual assassination.

Not only shocked by the outcome of the trial but also by all the 
evidence and testimony produced in the Berlin court, the German press 
again focused on the Armenian Genocide in depth. Discussing the trial, 
the German papers reproduced a horrifying liturgy of genocidal 
suffering. Now the whole German press landscape, including the 

formerly denialist papers, came to accept the charge of `genocide' 

against the Young Turk leadership. Again, the debate did not come 

to an end here, another backlash followed. Nationalist papers again 

offered justifications, but now for what even they understood as 

genocide. And this after the German genocide debate had already 

gone on since 1919 and after it had included all the ingredients needed 

for a true genocide debate: detailed elaborations on the scope, intent 

for, and ramifications of this `murder of a people.' And it was on this note that 
the debate simmered for another two years until the Treaty of Lausanne 
was signed (establishing modern Turkey).

All this would perhaps not be that important, had Germany not been 
merely ten years before Hitler's rise to power: A genocide debate had 
not only taken place, but had ended in justifications for genocide. Even 
then, the true saliency of the topic lay in the racial and national view 
of the Armenians held by many of the German commentators: they were 

seen as the (true) `Jews of the Orient,' either as equivalent to the Jews of 
Europe or even `worse.' This German anti-Armenianism was as old as 
Germany's tradition of excusing violence against the Armenians 
(especially since the 1890s) and was a carbon copy of modern, racial Anti-Semitism. In this logic, it had been no surprise that in 1922, when 
another two Young Turks were assassinated in Berlin, the nationalist 
press connected the Armenian assassins to the German Jewish question. 
Consciously confusing the two categories, the (hyper-)nationalist press 
called for an `ethnic surgeon' to cut out what was eating away at 
Germany's flesh.

So, who was still talking about the Armenians in the Third Reich? Surprisingly, almost nobody. The Nazis were remarkably silent on the 
topic, but were very vocal on what had followed the Armenian Genocide. 
The rise of the New Turkey and all the accomplishments of Mustafa Kemal 
Atatürk were important ingredients in the Nazi political imagination. In 
the German interwar and Nazi discourses on the New Turkey, one finds a 
chilling propagation of what a post-genocidal country, one cleansed of 
its minorities, could achieve: To the Nazis, the New Turkey was 
something of a post-genocidal wonderland, something that Germany 

would have to emulate. The Nazis were discussing the Turkish model 

already in the early 1920s. A German-Jewish newspaper reader and critic 

of Anti-Semitism, Siegfried Lichtenstaedter, understood the `Turkish 
lessons' formulated in Nazi articles (in 1923 and 1924) to mean that the 
Jews of Germany and Austria should be, and had to be, killed and their 
property given to `Aryans.' He wrote this in his 1926 book Anti-Semitica.

In the end it does not matter how important we find the possible 
influences exerted from the Armenian Genocide on the Nazis'they surely 
did not need to learn their murderous business from others. What they 
did learn was that there were many people, even in an open pluralistic 
society who would ignore, rationalize, or even outright justify genocidal violence. Even the Churches did not significantly intervene 
for fellow Christians. To paraphrase the impression of a Jewish reader 
of Werfel's book in the ghettos during World War II: If nobody would 
save Christians, who would intervene for the Jews? And if German 
nationalists could find it in themselves to justify the genocide of 
Christians and were not met with much opposition in the German public, 
who would speak out for the Jews?

There are no easy and automatic casual connections from one 

genocide to the next, but the Armenian Genocide and its close 

proximity to the Holocaust illustrate the importance and the pitfalls 

of how we come to terms with the past. They also illustrate that we 

are far from done with struggling to understand the tragic 20th century. 

This is why the Armenian Genocide finally needs to take its place, 

and be allowed to take its place, in the bloody history of the 

20th century, not only generally in world history, but specifically 

in European and German history.
Stefan Ihrig is the author of Justifying Genocide: Germany and the 
Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler published by Harvard University Press.