The German journalist, genocide researcher, author, and valued friend Wolfgang Gust died peacefully on June 9, surrounded by his family at his home in Hamburg. He was 91. He embodied a rare combination of intellectual curiosity and rigor with a compassionate commitment to historical truth and justice. With the fruits of decades-long research conducted together with his wife Sigrid, he educated specialists as well as the general public and contributed decisively to the 2016 recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the German Bundestag (Parliament).
He was born on April 9, 1935, in Hanover, just two years after Hitler’s seizure of power and grew up during the traumatic period of World War II, his city ravaged by extensive bombardments. On completion of his secondary education, Wolfgang, who was an exceptional athlete, decided against a career in professional sports, and entered university. He studied Business Administration in Bonn and Hamburg, then Romance Languages and Culture (Romanistik) in Freiburg and Toulouse (France).
In 1965, he joined the Paris office of Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine, first at the Economics Desk then, in 1970, as Chief Correspondent in Paris, and in 1977, Foreign News Editor in Hamburg. Beginning in 1980 he was director of the Spiegel Book department for its duration, and in 1993 entered early retirement to pursue activity as an independent journalist, researcher, and author.
In Gust’s own account, he happened upon the story of the Armenian Genocide by pure chance. While in France in the late 1980s, he read Le ciel était noir sur l’Euphrat by Jacques der Alexanian (1988), a book about the horrors of persecution something he had encountered in Holocaust literature but here, for the first time, it was about an Armenian. When he searched for secondary source material on the genocide, he found some post-1918 German works, but almost nothing published after 1945.
On the basis of what material he did find, he authored a series of three articles in Der Spiegel in 1992 that dealt with the Karabakh (Artsakh) conflict and Armenian Genocide. In the following year he published Der Völkermord an den Armeniern. Die Tragödie des ältesten Christenvolks der Welt (The Armenian Genocide: The Tragedy of the Oldest Christian People in the World). With this first book he sought to use his journalistic skills to introduce a broad readership to the results of available studies in modern European languages.
Work on primary sources came later; together with his wife, Sigrid, he spent years copying the original German diplomatic correspondence from government archives during the genocide. Titled Der Völkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16. Dokumente aus dem politischen Archiv des deutschen Auswärtigen Amts (The Armenian Genocide 1915/1916. Documents from the Political Archive of the German Foreign Office), it would appear later in Turkish (2012) and English (2014). This voluminous work required meticulous, time-consuming work, including deciphering handwritten Imperial-era cursive script (Süttelin), a task that his dedicated wife accomplished until serious illness forced her to pause. With a website www.armenocide.net, the Gusts made this rich primary source material available to researchers as well as the general public.
