First the leaders of the Armenians and the men in the labor battalions were killed.52 Then the rest were marched into the desert without supplies. Many died along the way, and many were killed. Armin T. Wegner, a German eyewitness, wrote to President Wilson:
“And so they drove the whole people – men, women, hoary elders, children, expectant mothers and dumb sucklings – into the Arabic desert, with no other object than to let them starve to death.”
“ . . .They drove the people, after depriving them of their leaders and spokesmen, out of the towns at all hours of the day and night, half-naked, straight out of their beds; plundered their houses, burned the villages, destroyed the churches or turned them into mosques, carried off the cattle, seized the vehicles, snatched the bread out of the mouths of their victims, tore the clothes from off their backs, the gold from their hair. Officials – military officers, soldiers, shepherds – vied with one another in their wild orgy of blood, dragging out of the schools delicate orphan girls to serve their bestial lusts, beat with cudgels dying women or women close on childbirth who could scarcely drag themselves along, until the women fell down on the road and died....
“Parties which on their departure from the homeland of High Armenia consisted of thousands, numbered on their arrival in the outskirts of Aleppo only a few hundred, while the fields were strewed with swollen, blackened corpses....”
“Even before the gates of Aleppo they were not allowed to rest... the shrunken parties were ceaselessly driven barefooted, hundreds of miles under the burning sun, through stony defiles, over pathless steppes, enfeebled by fever and other maladies, through semi-tropical marshes, into the wilderness of desolation. Here they died – slain by Kurds, robbed by gendarmes, shot, hanged, poisoned, frozen, parched with thirst, starved.”
“... I have seen maddened deportees eating as food their own clothes and shoes – women cooking the bodies of their new-born babes.”53
Like the German Holocaust, the genocide was self-destructive. Turkey deprived itself of a large portion of its professional and administrative class. Resources badly needed for war were diverted. Killing and removing Armenians resulted in a lack of support personnel that made the 1916 Russian invasion of Turkish Armenia easier. Count Metternich, a German official, noted that the Turkish government seemed almost bent on losing the war.54
The role of bystanders
In 1876 Turkey put down a Bulgarian revolt with indiscriminate massacres. In England there was a strong public reaction led by Gladstone, then in the Opposition. He said that the evidence of atrocities “makes the responsibility of silence.. .too great to be borne.”
An old servant of the Crown and State, I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more than perhaps any other people of Europe it depends, to require, and to insist, that our Government, which has been working in one direction, shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour and concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria; let the Turks carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying themselves off.55
However, Great Britain’s policymakers feared Czarist Russia and therefore courted Turkey.56 Realpolitik won out over moral or humane considerations. British (and world) indignation was not brought to bear on Turkey.
European nations also passively accepted the great massacres under Abdul Hamid. At the time of the massacres Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany visited Constantinople, publicly embracing the sultan. Massacres of Russian Armenians during the Russian revolution of 1905 also made killing Armenians more acceptable. The German atrocities in Belgium early in the war had a similar effect.
During the war Turkey was heavily dependent on Germany, which gave it tacit support in suppressing Armenian opposition. Count Ernst von Reventlow wrote in the Deutcher Tageszeitung:
If the Porte considers it necessary that Armenian insurrections and other goings on should be crushed by every means available, so as to exclude all possibility of their repetition, then that is no “murder” and “atrocity” but simply measures of a justifiable and necessary kind.57
Germany was the only nation in a position to exert influence on Turkey, but the German government never responded to invitations by the United States and other governments to cooperate in efforts to end the genocide. In the view of one Armenian writer:
It is clear that, whoever commanded the atrocities, the Germans never made a motion to countermand them, when they could have stopped it at the start by a single word.. .by entering the war, Turkey placed herself entirely in Germany’s power. She is dependent on Germany for munitions of war and leadership in battle, for the preservation of her existence at the present and for its continuance in the future, should Germany succeed in preserving it now. The German Government had but to pronounce the veto, and it would have been obeyed; and the central authorities at Berlin could have ensured its being obeyed through their local agents on the spot. For ever since 1895, Germany has been assiduously extending the network of her consular service over all the Asiatic provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In every administrative centre throughout those districts where massacres and deportations have occurred – in Anatolia, Cilicia, and Armenia proper – there is a German consul; and the prestige of these consuls is unbounded. They are the agents of a friendly power, the only power that offers Turkey her friendship with no moral conditions attached.58
The capacity of Germany to halt the genocide is probably overestimated here. Once an intense motivation to kill becomes dominant and gains expression in action, suppressing it is not easy. But Germany did not try.59
Ulrich Trumpener argues that German diplomats and
