Lepsiushaus Remembers Its Namesake

As Dr. Rolf Hosfeld, director of the Lepsiushaus, recalled in his keynote speech to the conference, that report titled, “The Situation of the Armenian People in Turkey” and published secretly in Potsdam in 1916, made history, and not only in Germany. In Lepsius’s own country, the privately printed report was sent out in 20,000 copies to officials of the Protestant church, other selected personalities and the editors of the major press. The report was soon confiscated and banned by the German authorities — Germany being allied to the Young Turk government — and Lepsius had to flee to Holland, where he continued his campaign to inform world public opinion of what was happening in Turkey. In America, where the drama of the Armenians had been followed closely, Lepsius’s account was reported in the New York Tribune in July 1919. “That the most significant charge against such crimes committed by a state should indeed come from a German…,” Hosfeld noted, “must have surprised the reader of the New York Tribune.”

In fact, it is precisely this fact that led Hosfeld to characterize Lepsius as “a German exception,” the title of the conference. Not only did he openly criticize the policy of an ally of his nation in WWI, but he identified that Young Turk policy as part of “an internal political program” aiming at the “elimination of the Armenian element of the population” and rejected any notion that it had to do with military measures related to Turkey’s defense. Lepsius, as Hosfeld stressed, “saw his work from the onset as explicitly political” even back in the 1890s. And he had to pay a price for it. When his Protestant church superiors denied him free time for his pro-Armenian activities, he decided to resign and to work independently. Lepsius collab- orated with the German foreign office on a reform plan in 1913 to protect the Armenian minority, but the outbreak of war rendered it a dead letter. When news of the new massacres reached Germany, he left for Turkey, where he tried unsuc- cessfully to save the Armenians. What he did man- age to do with his documentation to inform German and world public opinion was, however, of historic importance. Lepsius was not and is not just a hero. As Hosfeld indicated in his speech and other con- ference speakers detailed, he was a creature of his time. Though firmly opposed to the Young Turks’ genocide policy on religious, political and humanitarian grounds, Lepsius “had diffi- culties in fully admitting a qualified co-respon- sibility of the German Empire on this first great European mass murder, even though he spoke in 1919 of genocide,” said Hosfeld.