How the Armenian Genocide Shaped the Holocaust

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-à-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-à-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, Talaat 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 Talaat 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 10 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.)