Scandinavia and the Armenian Genocide

Scandinavian sources make up a fairly rich reservoir of reports and eyewitness accounts of the Armenian Genocide and other aspects of CUP (Young Turk) attempts at group destruction. This essay aims at giving a brief, preliminary, and in no way exhaustive overview of such sources to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians: What were the backgrounds and experiences of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish witnesses in the Ottoman Empire? To what extent was the genocide known, and how was it viewed, in their respective neutral home countries? While studies of the Armenian Genocide and related issues based on Danish archival material have been published recently,1 few such studies have been based on Norwegian or Swedish archival material.2 The essay is thus mainly based on Danish sources; also, for the sake of brevity, it focuses on missionary rather than diplomatic and other sources. For further studies, I refer to the references as well as to Swedish and Norwegian archives in particular. There is a lot of work to be done.

Like elsewhere in the Western world, the 1890’s massacres, forced Islamization, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II had a significant impact on public opinion in Scandinavia. Some would defend the Sultan and deny or downplay the events, often by using anti-Armenian stereotypes. But condemnation of the massacres, whether based on notions of Christian solidarity or human rights, seems to have been more widespread. Papers and public figures raised awareness of the atrocities and their human and political implications, laying the foundation for the substantial missionary and relief work that would last through the Armenian Genocide and its immediate and long-term aftermath.

To name a few examples: Secular, Danish-Jewish intellectuals Georg Brandes and Age Meyer Benedictsen decried European indifference to the sufferings of Armenians and founded Danske Armeniervenner (Danish Friends of Armenians or DA). From the other end of the spectrum, Danish bishop and Minister of Cultural Affairs H. V. Styhr in 1897 denounced Abdulhamid’s “holy war of extermination.” Shortly after 1900, Ottoman intellectuals Pierre Anmeghian and Ali Nouri Bey (a Swedish convert and Ottoman ex-diplomat Gustaf Noring), friends united in opposition to Abdulhamid’s autocratic rule, set up base and published books in Denmark and Sweden.3 In Norway, the paper “Nordlands Avis,” published on Oct. 4, 1900, would sarcastically sum up the feelings of quite a few Scandinavians on what was seen as Western indifference to the sufferings of Armenians:

“Who, then, should help, and who would spend a dime on a people that cannot be profited from. We are far from the jubilant time of the 20s, when philhellenism forced the Turkish murderers to release the Greek from his bloodstained fingers....The Russian torments the Finn and the Turk murders the Armenian....No one complains except for the oppressed. The Holy Alliance is yet again in place between the mighty in Europe, the alliance that allows each to eat his people and where no one must disturb the other while he eats. The conscience in Europe is dead. Long live imperialism. Long live nationalism. Hurrah for greed, and woe to those who oppose the Stock Exchange Committee of the bourse.”

Some, especially women missionaries, went further. The most important Scandinavian missionary effort directed at aiding and proselytizing among Ottoman Armenians was in fact to a large degree coordinated between the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Women Missionary Workers (in Danish: Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere or KMA). Founded in Sweden in 1894, KMA branched out to Denmark in 1900 and Norway in 1902. Though run as independent, national NGOs, the branches widely shared values (like “women working for women”), goals, mission fields, educational facilities, etc., and they usually relied on cooperation with similar U.S. and German organizations. The first KMA orphanage, “Emaus,” was established 1903. It was run mainly by Danes, but the orphans were sponsored by individuals and groups from all of Scandinavia and Finland. A rather unique figure in this context is Danish teacher and relief worker Karen Jeppe, DA’s only “field worker,” who would witness the execution of the genocide in Urfa. Jeppe and DA were critical of the ideology of organizations like KMA, focused exclusively on aid and education to Armenians, and did not attempt to convert Ottoman Muslims or Christians.

Witnessing genocide: the view from Anatolia

When the empire joined World War I, some Scandinavians were willing and able to stay in Anatolia. Here, missionaries were in ideal positions to witness the execution of the genocide, rescue survivors from massacres, death marches, and forced assimilation,4 and gather survivor testimonies.5 Perhaps the best-known Scandinavian account of such events is the diaries of Maria Jacobsen, a Danish KMA missionary nurse posted in the region of Mamouret-ul-Aziz (Kharpert/Harput).(6) During World War I, she also wrote a series of letters to KMA’s Armenia Committee. Due to censorship, Westerners could usually not state outright what they witnessed.(7) Instead, they used code and euphemisms, like when Jacobsen wrote that “The gates of Heaven are wide open and many are entering,” and referred to the first plague of Egypt—the water of the river Nile turning into blood—to explain why missionaries could not go to Lake Goljuk, a large massacre site in 1915, as they used to in the summer.(8) At one point she did manage, with German help, to smuggle out uncensored letters in Danish describing in detail the horrible conditions for surviving Armenians in the Mezreh and Kharpert towns.(9)

Hansine Marcher, Danish KMA, worked directly for the German “Deutsche Hulfsbund” (DH) as leader of a girl school in Mezreh, and was used as a source for the Bryce-Toynbee report.(10) She wrote a book in 1919 that includes survivor testimonies and an account of the period from March 1916 when she left the empire with German missionary Klara Pfeiffer(11) via Diyarbekir, Urfa, Aleppo, and Constantinople. Here, Marcher describes how they passed through the area around Lake Goljuk, seeing countless skeletons, bones, skulls, and pieces of clothing from Armenian deportees—men, women and children—massacred there.(12) In Diyarbekir, the only Armenians she saw were children who were servants or slaves of local Turks, were given Turkish names, and forced to speak only Turkish. She also witnessed how the Armenian Apostolic cathedral had been turned into an auction room for stolen Armenian goods.(13) At a KMA meeting after her return, it was said about her that “perhaps none of our Sisters over there have suffered more from the systematic extermination of the [Armenian] people, as she has seen her whole school work destroyed and all of her pupils take leave, wailing and crying, to depart with the expellees.”(14)

A third Danish KMA missionary, Karen Marie Petersen, ran “Emaus” in Mezreh. She collected survivor testimonies from 1915 onward, and witnessed death marches and an area littered with the remains of Armenians.(15) The fourth Danish KMA missionary in the region, Jenny Jensen, ran the DH orphanage “Elim” in Mezreh. She left the empire in 1918 after the Ottoman authorities had requisitioned “Elim” to use as a military hospital, meaning that she had to rent five houses to shelter the 200 girls that were supposedly under German protection.(16) Jensen had severe difficulties in getting permission to leave the empire, which was made even harder as she tried to bring with her an orphan, Margarit Atamjan, the sole survivor of the genocide in her family.(17) In 1916, Marcher had similar problems as the Ottoman military authorities were unwilling to let persons from “the inner provinces” leave the country or even go to the capital.(18)

This was a general problem.(19) In a February 1919 report, Carl Ellis Wandel, a Danish diplomatic minister at Constantinople, describes the difficulties he had with assisting Danes:

“Of Danish missionaries and nurses in Asiatic Turkey there are now only two left [Jacobsen and Petersen]. During 1918 two left for Denmark [Jensen and Jeppe]. But it was only after considerable difficulties that the legation succeeded in getting them the necessary travel permits from the Turkish police as it seems like they had received orders from the military authorities not to visa the two Danish ladies’ passports until they had spent some months in Constantinople. It might also have played a certain role that both of the ladies came from Armenia where they had witnessed events that [the Ottoman authorities] did not want to be known in Europe.”(20)

Jacobsen and Petersen decided to stay to the end. They, and their organization, believed that if they left, the Armenians they protected would probably not survive. A further problem for those wanting to publicize the destruction of the Armenians was that monitoring was not confined to mail sent from the empire. At a March 1917 meeting, Professor Nyholm, chairman of the Danish Eastern Mission (Osterlandsmissionen or OM), advised Danish KMA’s Armenia Committee not to go public with pleas for funds to missionaries and Armenian survivors in the Kharpert region. This would direct attention to “our Sisters over there.” OM had learned that their journal was known and read by the Ottoman authorities, and they feared that public statements about events in the empire would make the continuation of missionary work difficult after the war.(21)

At an earlier stage, on Feb. 1, 1916, DH director Friedrich Schuchardt had likewise warned Danish KMA against going public with their knowledge of the genocide. Schuchardt had just returned from Constantinople, describing how he had tried in vain to gain access to Enver Pasha and other leading figures to speak on behalf of the Armenians, and how he was constantly monitored. He had talked to German senior officers who stated that “if the public knew even one tenth of what they knew of what had been going on it would generate general terror, but unfortunately it turned out over and over again that as soon as public protests were raised in Europe against the actions of the Turks, this only spurred them on to commit new atrocities and to seek even more to exterminate the whole of the miserable people.”(22)

Wandel had already in January 1915 reported on how he was pressured to make the Danish press be more favorable to the empire:

“In the course of a conversation I had yesterday with the acting Turkish Foreign Minister, Grand Vizier Prince Said Halim, His Highness complained about the unfriendliness that is being expressed in the Danish press toward the government here. ‘Clippings from Danish papers are being sent to me,’ said the Grand Vizier, ‘wherefrom it appears that many unpleasant things are being said about us by you [Denmark].’ I answered that I had not noticed anything like that, and that I found the tone in the Danish papers that I read so neutral and impartial that I could not even find in these any expression of either antipathy against or excessive sympathy for any of the warring parties. There could not be said to be any ill will against Turkey in Denmark. I have not been able to find out from where the clippings that His Highness mentions originate.”(23)

Thus, even returning Westerners could not speak freely, like some Scandinavian and U.S. missionaries coming from the empire to or via Denmark who reported directly to KMA’s Armenia Committee in Copenhagen. The minutes of the oral report of Norwegian KMA missionary Thora von Wedel-Jarlsberg, dated Oct. 16, 1915, describe how Armenians from Erzinjan or further to the north were massacred—shot or thrown from the mountains into the river—by Turks and Kurds in the nearby Euphrates Valley. Six orphan boys that Wedel-Jarlsberg and her German colleague Eva Elvers tried to protect were taken by Turkish soldiers and shot. After the missionaries had been forced out of Erzinjan by the authorities and were on their way to Constantinople, they witnessed daily what Wedel-Jarlsberg describes as “new horrors” and “one group after the other led from the villages to be killed.”(24)

Similarly, on Dec. 7, 1915, Swedish KMA missionary Alma Johansson related the experiences of herself and Norwegian KMA colleague Bodil Biorn a report published in a confidential seven-page booklet that was distributed among Danish KMA members. The booklet explicitly mentions the mass killings of Armenians they witnessed in Mush and the Kharpert region where they stayed with the Danish missionaries after having been expelled from Mush, killings that were part of the “complete extermination” of the Armenians. The fear of endangering missionaries, surviving Armenians, and what was envisioned as the continued work after the war was so great that even in a confidential booklet only the initials of the missionaries’ first names were used.(25)

But the Scandinavian public did receive information on the fate of the Armenians, from press reports and comments from the late summer and fall of 1915. For instance, on Oct. 9, 1915, the Danish daily “Kristeligt Dagblad” (Christian Daily) decried the indifference of neutral countries like Denmark to the ongoing extermination:

“If one wants a typical expression of this state of things, one should read the editorial remarks the main organ of the government in Denmark [the liberal daily ‘Politiken’] yesterday attached to the reports on the Armenian massacres. The paper does call the Turks’ ‘extermination policy’ (‘policy’ is sublime in this context) a ‘heartlessness and a cruelty which is unique in the history of the world’—it emphasizes that compared to the number of 800.000 murdered Armenians, ‘the other horrors of the World War pale in comparison.’ But shortly after, the paper makes light of the horror by stating that ‘the impression left, though, is still less deep, less lasting’ than when Gladstone revealed the massacres during the reign of Abdul Hamid. Because, says Politiken, ‘the scale has been unsettled, the concepts are confused’—‘the war brutalizes imperceptibly but surely.’ And to emphasize this conclusion the article ends with the following lines: ‘We are moved and upset for a moment until the process of brutalization continues.’ By such expressions ‘the best paper’ airs its indignation! This is what a Danish paper offers its readers! If Politiken had written something along the lines of this: ‘Do not mind, you, who are responsible for the extermination of the Armenian people—we forget quickly’—then it would in fact be said in few words what the article’s many words say in reality.”

Incidentally, Danes also had direct access to an account of the rationale behind the CUP’s xenophobic ideology by Djevad Bey, the Ottoman diplomatic minister in Copenhagen and a career diplomat closely connected to the CUP. In a February 1916 interview in “Politiken,” he stated among other things that “[w]e have now introduced the Turkish language in Turkey. This is the first result of a national awakening: Turkey for the Turks.”26 Egan, the U.S. diplomatic minister in Copenhagen, would write about Djevad and his successor in Denmark that “[t]he Turkish Ministers were more French than German in their sympathies, but to them the Armenians were deadly parasites. They looked on them as the Russian Junker looked on the lower class of Jews.”(27)

The view from Constantinople

In the Ottoman capital, Wandel was kept informed of the destruction of the Armenians by other diplomats; members of the Ottoman establishment;(28) Western eyewitnesses;(29) and Ottoman Christian circles. He also witnessed local persecutions of Armenians, as stated in a September 1915 report: “Even here in Constantinople Armenians are kidnapped and sent to Asia, and it is not possible to get information of their whereabouts.”(30) That same month, whatever doubt he had concerning the ultimate goal of the CUP had disappeared, as can be seen in his detailed report on “the cruel intent of the Turks, to exterminate the Armenian people.”(31) His Swedish colleague, Anckarsvard, expressed a similar view in a July 6, 1915 report:

“The persecutions of the Armenians have taken on appalling proportions, and everything points toward the idea that the Young Turks have wanted to take advantage of the opportunity where, for various reasons, no effective pressure from the outside needs to be feared to once and for all terminate the Armenian question. The method is simple enough and consists of the extermination of the Armenian nation.”(32)

Another Swedish diplomat, military attaché Einar af Wirsen, recalled in his 1942 memoires a conversation he had with Talat Pasha in October 1915, during which the CUP leader had commented on a report that 800,000 Armenians had been killed, saying, “I assure you, this is not true, it was only 600.000.”(33)

Wandel also received reports from eyewitnesses (kept anonymous in his reports) of the continuation of the genocide in 1916 through massacre, disease, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians. “A Hungarian gentleman” reported that he had travelled through large stretches covered with Armenian bodies, estimating that more than 300,000 Armenians had been killed in Mesopotamia. And a German priest who had just arrived in Constantinople from Damascus had witnessed “incredible horrors,” stating that a large part of the deported Armenians died of starvation as they were sent to areas where no food was available and left to their own fate.(34)

Many Scandinavian figures and accounts deserving mention have been left out of this brief overview. But it should be clear that the Armenian genocide was widely reported and condemned in Scandinavia as the event unfolded. To conceptualize the destruction, Swedish politician Hjalmar Branting (1917) and Danish scholar Age Meyer Benedictsen (1925) would even use the term “folkmord/folkemord” (“the murder of a people”), a term used today to denote or translate the later term “genocide.”(35)

EndNotes

1) Matthias Bjornlund, “‘When the Cannons Talk, the Diplomats Must Be Silent’: A Danish Diplomat in Constantinople during the Armenian Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, vol. 1, no. 2, fall 2006; idem, “The 1914 Cleansing of Aegean Greeks as a Case of Violent Turkification,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 10, no. 1, 2008; idem, “‘A fate worse than dying’: sexual violence during the Armenian genocide,” in Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming; idem, “Karen Jeppe, Aage Meyer Benedictsen, and the Ottoman Armenians: National survival in imperial and colonial settings,” Haigazian Armenological Review, forthcoming; idem, “Before the Armenian Genocide: Danish Missionary and Rescue Operations in the Ottoman Empire, 1900–1914,” Haigazian Armenological Review, vol. 26, 2006. For a brief background, see www.ermenisoykirimi.net/ (Turkish and Danish).

2) For a partial exception, see Bertil Bengtsson, Svardets Ar: Om Folkmordet pa de kristne I Turkiet 1894–1922 (Sodertalje: Syrianska Riksforbundet 2004) on the Christian genocides. See also Alma Johansson, Ett folk i landsflykt: Ett ar ur armeniernas historia (Stockholm: KMA 1930); www.statsarkivet.no/webfelles/armenia/english.html.

3) Pierre Anmeghian, Visions Scandinaves (Copenhagen: Hoost & Soon, 1903); Ali Nouri Bey, Abdul-Hamid i Karikatur: Interioorer fra Yildiz-Kiosk (Copenhagen: V. Pio’s Boghandel, 1903). The former is a collection of poems in French, many dedicated to Scandinavians with an interest in the “Armenian cause” and critical of Abdulhamid’s rule, e.g., Norwegian Bjoornstjerne Bjoornson. The latter is a collection of caricature and verse ridiculing Abdulhamid and condemning, e.g., the Armenian massacres.

4) e.g., protocol of Armenian women and children taken in at “Emaus” during the genocide: KMA, 10.360, pk. 112, “Protokol over Plejeboorn i Bornehjemmet ‘Emaus’ i Mezreh. 1909–17.”

5) e.g., Bjornlund, “A fate...”

6) Maria Jacobsen, Maria Jacobsens Diary 1907–1919, Kharput–Turkey (Antelias, Lebanon: Armenian Catholicosate, 1979 (Armenian and Danish)); idem, Diaries of a Danish Missionary–Harpoot, 1907–1919, ed. by Ara Sarafian (Princeton, N.J.: Gomidas Institute Books, 2001 (English)).

7) e.g., KMA, 10.360, “1912–1921,” intro. to 1915 meetings; ibid., March 3, 1916.

8) KMA, 10.360, pk. 15, “Armeniermissionen, korrespondance til og fra Frk. Marie [sic] Jacobsen (1912-1919),” 1915–16,” Jacobsen to Collet, July 8, 1916.

9) KMA, 10.360, pk. 13, “1917,” especially Jacobsen to Blæædel, Feb. 11, 1917.

10) James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916, uncensored ed., ed. and intr. by Ara Sarafian (Princeton, N.J.: Gomidas Institute, 2000 (1916)), p. 289.

11) Re. Pfeiffer: Wolfgang Gust, ed., Der Volkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16: Dokumente aus dem Politischen Archiv des deutschen Auswartigen Amts, (zu Klampen, 2005), pp. 34, 466–68.

12) Hansine Marcher, Oplevelser Derovrefra, (Copenhagen: KMA, 1919), pp. 10–12.

13) Ibid., pp. 16–17.

14) KMA, 10.360, “1912-1921,” June 15, 1916.

15) Elise Bockelund, En Tjenergerning Blandt Martyrfolket–Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere 1900–1930 (KMA, 1932), p. 47.

16) KMA, 10.360, pk. 42, “1912–1921,” March 1, 1917.

17) Margarit was later brought to Denmark by Jeppe.

18) UM, 2-0355, Kopibog 1914–1921, 1916 03 06–1919 09 22, Wandel to Scavenius, April 17, 1916. No. 158. “Danske Rejsende i Tyrkiet. Ges. Nr. 151 af 13. April 1916.”

19) e.g., Hilmar Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor—Death, Survival, and Humanitarian Resistance in Aleppo, 1915-1917 (Princeton & London: Gomidas, 2002), p. 36.

20) UM, 2-0355, “Konstantinopel/Istanbul, diplomatisk reprææsentation. 1914–1922. Noter og indberetninger om den politiske udvikling,” “Verdenskrigen. Indberetninger og avisudklip, juni 1914-marts 1919,” Feb. 17, 1919, pp. 2–3.

21) KMA, 10.360, pk. 42, “1912–1921,” March 1, 1917.

22) KMA, 10.360, “1912–1921,” Feb. 1, 1916. Underlining in original text. On Schuchardt in Constantinople, see also Kaiser, 2002, pp. 31–37.

23) UM, 2-0355, Konstantinopel/Istanbul, diplomatisk reprææsentation, Kopibog 1914–1921, 1914 06 4-1916 03 06, no. IV, Jan. 5, 1915.

24) KMA, 10.360, pk. 42, “1912-1921,” Oct. 16, 1915.

25) Fra Armenien, KMA, no date (1916).

26) UM, 4. F. 2, “Tyrkiet: Gesandtskabet her.” Oprettelse, 1916. Djevad Bey, 22/2-15/12 1916. Extrakt-Afskrift af Privatbrev Nr. 24 fra Ministerresident C. E. Wandel til Udenrigsminister Scavenius. Konstantinopel, 5/11 1915.

27) Maurice Francis Egan, Ten Years near the German Frontier: A Retrospect and a Warning (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1919), p. 312.

28) UM, 139. D. 1., “Tyrkiet-Indre Forhold,” Pk. Jan. 2, 1917–Jan. 1, 1919, nr. IV, 6/1 1917; nr. CXVII, 28/7 1917.

29) e.g., information on the genocide in Kharpert in letters written by Danish missionaries, and delivered by a German physician: UM, 139. N. 1., “Armenien,” [unnumbered], April 10, 1917.

30) UM, 139. D. 1., “Tyrkiet-Indre Forhold,” Pk. 1, until Dec. 31, 1916, nr. CXIII, 4/9 1915.

31) Ibid.

32) Quoted in Bengtsson, 2004, p. 118.#

33) Ibid., p. 80.#

34) UM, 139. N. 1., no. LIV, March 10, 1916.#

35) Bengtsson, 2004, p. 124; Age Meyer Benedictsen, Armenien–Et Folks Liv og Kamp Gennem To Aartusinder, (Copenhagen: De Danske Armeniervenner, 1925), p. 242.