Historian Hilmar Kaiser to Present Lecture Sponsored by AMAA on Humanitarian Resistance to Genocide

The ban against Dr. Kaiser was eventually lifted, and the archives have officially been reopened. However, some collections of the Turkish Prime Minister’s Ottoman archives still remain closed.

Hilmar Kaiser has referred to himself as an “archive digger.”

A noted scholar at Yerevan State University for Armenian Studies, he completed his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, with his focus on Ottoman Social and Economic History, and Ottoman-German relations.

Regarded as a scholar of the Armenian Genocide, he has conducted research in more than 60 archives, including  the Turkish-Ottoman Archives in Istanbul.

Kaiser was born in Germany to a Protestant family who owned a bakery. One of the employees “was an elderly woman who had worked in hospitals in the Middle East, “was a part of the wider household. In other words, [Johannes] Lepsius and Armenians were known to me way before my 10th birthday,” he said in a short interview.

Living across from a multi-apartment house where most of the apartments were occupied by migrants from Greece and Turkey, he grew up with Middle Eastern food, and often wandered “into the kitchens of the friendly neighbors. It also meant that my familiarity with Muslims and to some extent Turks, became a given,” he recalled.