Abstract
The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916 is linked to German history in a variety of ways. It is much more important to the course of German history than often acknowledged and needs to be perceived as an integral part of it. This importance stems not only from the alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire during World War I, but also from how political and public Germany perceived and decided to perceive the whole ‘Armenian question’ — the question as to how accommodate Armenian political aspirations within or outside of the Ottoman Empire — from the time of Imperial Germany up until the Third Reich. The Armenian genocide is important for German history because this was a genocide that was committed right under German noses — with German officers serving in all the key Ottoman armed services and German diplomats recording the genocide as it happened — 25 years before the Holocaust.
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Notes
Wolfgang Gust, ‘Die Verdrängung des Völkermords an den Armeniern–Ein Signal für die Shoah,’ in Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller (eds.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah (Zürich: Chronos, 2002), 463–480, here: 477;
Sabine Mangold-Will, Begrenzte Freundschaft–Deutschland und die Türkei, 1918–1933 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013), 500;
similarly: Hilmar Kaiser, ‘Denying the Armenian Genocide–The German connection,’ Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, 9 (1999), 37–53; here: 52;
Tessa Hofmann, ‘New Aspects of the Talât Pasha Court Case,’ Armenian Review, 4 (1989), 41–53, here: 49–50;
Annette Schaefgen, Schwieriges Erinnern–Der Völkermord an den Armeniern (Berlin: Metropol, 2006), 31.
For a brief survey of the Turkish positions see Fatma Müge Göcek, ‘Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on 1915,’ in Ronald Grigor Suny et al. (eds.), A Question of Genocide–Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42–52.
The limits of wartime censorship in Germany in relation to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire as well as the overall coverage of the topic at the time have so far not been conclusively researched. Except for one article we still have no proper analysis of the German media during World War I regarding the topic: Elizabeth Khorikian, ‘Die Behandlung des Völkermords an den Armeniern in der deutschen Presse und Literatur um 1915–1925,’ in Armenuhi Drost-Abgarjan and Hermann Goltz (eds.), Armenologie in Deutschland–Beiträge zum Ersten Deutschen ArmenologenTag (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2005), 159–173;
Dominik J. Schaller, ‘Die Rezeption des Völkermordes an den Armeniern in Deutschland, 1915–1945,’ in Kieser and Schaller, Der Völkermord, 517–555, here: 524–525;
see also: Friedrich Dahlhaus, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen auswärtiger Kultur- und Pressepolitik dargestellt am Beispiel der deutschtürkischen Beziehungen, 1914–1928 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990), 221–238;
Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien, 1914–1918: Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstücke (Potsdam: Tempel-Verlag, 1919).
Tessa Hoffmann (ed.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern vor Gericht: Der Prozeß Talaat Pascha (Göttingen: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, 1980 [1921]).
Cf. Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014.
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Ihrig, S. (2015). Justifying Genocide in Weimar Germany: The Armenian Genocide, German Nationalists and Assassinated Young Turks, 1919–1923. In: Rüger, J., Wachsmann, N. (eds) Rewriting German History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137347794_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137347794_12
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