There were executions into mass graves, and death marches of men, women and children across the Syrian desert to concentration camps with many dying along the way of exhaustion, exposure and starvation. Much of this was quite well documented at the time by Western diplomats, missionaries and others, creating widespread wartime outrage against the Turks in the West.
Although its ally, Germany, was silent at the time, in later years documents have surfaced from ranking German diplomats and military officers expressing horror at what was going on. Some historians, however, while acknowledging the widespread deaths, say what happened does not technically fit the definition of genocide largely because they do not feel there is evidence that it was well-planned in advance.
The American ambassador, Henry Morganthau Sr. Following the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in , the Three Pashas fled to Germany, where they were given protection. But the Armenian underground formed a group called Operation Nemesis to hunt them down. On March 15, , one of the pashas was shot dead on a street in Berlin in broad daylight in front of witnesses.
The gunman pled temporary insanity brought on by the mass killings and a jury took only a little over an hour to acquit him. Congressional panel voted to recognize the genocide. On October 29, , the U. House of Representatives passed a resolution that recognized the Armenian genocide.
And on April 24, , President Biden issued a statement, saying, "The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began years ago today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Genocide is a term used to describe violence against members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group with the intent to destroy the entire group.
The word came into general usage only after World War II, when the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazi During the Rwandan genocide of , members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as , people, mostly of the Tutsi minority. Started by Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the In April , the government of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia.
Over the next several years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, perpetrated atrocious crimes against Bosniak Bosnian Gold from the American River! The campaign began with a failed naval attack by British and His murder catapulted into a war across Europe that lasted until For four years, from to , World War I raged across Europe's western and eastern fronts, after growing tensions and then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ignited the war.
Trench warfare and the early use of tanks, submarines and airplanes meant the The Treaty of Versailles held Germany responsible for starting the war and imposed harsh penalties in Mass atrocities and genocide are often perpetrated within the context of war.
The destruction of the Armenians was closely linked to the events of World War I. Fearing that invading enemy troops would induce Armenians to join them, in spring the Ottoman government began the deportation of the Armenian population from its northeastern border regions. In the months that followed, the Ottomans expanded deportations from almost all provinces regardless of distance from combat zones. The victims of the Armenian genocide include people killed in local massacres that began in spring ; others who died during deportations, under conditions of starvation, dehydration, exposure, and disease; and Armenians who died in or en route to the desert regions of the southern Empire [today: northern and eastern Syria, northern Saudi Arabia, and Iraq].
In addition, tens of thousands of Armenian children were forcibly removed from their families and converted to Islam. The Armenian genocide cast a long shadow into the Holocaust era. Ambassador Morgenthau's son, Henry Morgenthau Jr. In part due to his memories of the Armenian genocide, Morgenthau Jr. Perhaps most hauntingly, a novel about Armenian self-defense Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was secretly passed from hand-to-hand among Jews imprisoned in ghettos during the Holocaust, who saw in it an inspirational analogy to their plight and a call to resistance.
Adalian, Rouben, ed. The Armenian Genocide in U. Archives, — The government had made no provisions for the feeding of the deported population. Starvation took an enormous toll much as exhaustion felled the elderly, the weaker and the infirm. Deportees were denied food and water in a deliberate effort to hasten death.
The survivors who reached northern Syria were collected at a number of concentration camps whence they were sent further south to die under the scorching sun of the desert. Through methodically organized deportation, systematic massacre, deliberate starvation and dehydration, and continuous brutalization, the Ottoman government reduced its Armenian population to a frightened mass of famished individuals whose families and communities had been destroyed in a single stroke.
Resistance to the deportations was infrequent. Only in one instance did the entire population of an Armenian settlement manage to evade death. The mountaineers of Musa Dagh defended themselves in the heights above their villages until French naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean detected them and transported them to safety.
The inhabitants of the city of Van in eastern Armenia defended themselves until relieved by advancing Russian forces. They abandoned the city in May , a month after the siege was lifted, when the Russian Army withdrew.
The fleeing population was hunted down mercilessly by Turkish irregular forces. Inland towns that resisted, such as Urfa Edessa , were reduced to rubble by artillery. The survival of the Armenians in large part is credited not to acts of resistance, but to the humanitarian intervention led by American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau.
Although the Allied Powers expressly warned the Ottoman government about its policy of genocide, ultimately it was through Morgenthau's efforts that the plight of the Armenians was publicized in the United States. The U. Congress authorized the formation of a relief committee which raised funds to feed "the starving Armenians.
After the war, it headed a large-scale effort to rehabilitate the survivors who were mostly left to their own devices in their places of deportation.
By setting up refugee camps, orphanages, medical clinics and educational facilities, Near East Relief rescued the surviving Armenian population.
In the post-war period nearly four hundred of the key CUP officials implicated in the atrocities committed against the Armenians were arrested. A number of domestic military tribunals were convened which brought charges ranging from the unconstitutional seizure of power and subversion of the legal government, the conduct of a war of aggression, and conspiring the liquidation of the Armenian population, to more explicit capital crimes, including massacre.
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