Linked Histories

The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust

Among the great atrocities of the modern era, the Armenian Genocide comes quickly to mind. It was not, historically, the first genocide of the 20th century, as is often stated. That unfortunate distinction belongs to the Herero and Nama of German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), against whom the German army carried out a clear campaign of annihilation between 1904 and 1908. Probably 60–80 percent of the Herero and 40–60 percent of the Nama died after they revolted against German colonial role. They died as a result of direct killings by the German army and German settlers; by being deliberately forced into the Omaheke Desert, where German officers knew they would die of thirst and starvation; and by the horrendous conditions in concentration camps, where the mortality rate was 45 percent according to official military statistics (and probably in fact higher).

Even more than the tragic fate of the Herero and Nama, the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust share many characteristics. They were not, to be sure, identical—no historical events ever are. But by looking at them comparatively, we can see some common features that may also help us identify warning signs for the future.

Some powerful voices exist in the scholarly and public realms that continue to argue that no event in history is comparable to the Nazi drive to annihilate Jews. But “uniqueness” is, at best, a theological argument, not a position subject to normal scholarly and political debate. Or it is a mundane point—all events are historically unique in the sense that they occur in a particular time and place and are not replicable.

Instead, the thrust of recent research and writing lies clearly in the comparative direction. Every reputable historian, political scientist, or sociologist recognizes the enormous atrocity that the Nazis committed against Jews. The result was the greatest tragedy in Jewish history; moreover, the complacency about Western moral and cultural superiority shattered amid the revelations that the drive to annihilate an entire population had occurred in the very heart of Europe was a product of Western civilization itself.

The Nazi genocide of the Jews had its particular features, to be sure, and they had everything to do with Germany’s highly developed bureaucratic and military culture, which enabled the Nazis, once they had seized the organs of the state, to implement policies in a highly systematic manner. The other important particularity was Germany’s great power status, which contributed to huge territorial ambitions in Europe, much grander than most other genocidal regimes of the 20th century. But “particular” is not quite the same thing as “unique.”

In both the late Ottoman Empire under the Young Turks and in Nazi Germany, Armenians and Jews were categorized as the consummate “other.” In both societies, long-standing prejudices, based on traditional religious differences, had existed for centuries. Yet Armenians were also known as the “most loyal millet” and Jewish life had indeed flourished in Germany. But around the turn into the 20th century, the prejudices against both groups hardened and turned uglier. For everyone adversely affected by the modern world, by the surge in commercial activity, education, social advancement, and mobility, Armenians and Jews became the target because both groups had, in fact, contributed to and benefited from these changes. At least some Armenians and some Jews became more prosperous over the course of the 19th century and moved easily among well-off and educated counterparts in France, Britain, and the Netherlands, even while most Armenians and Jews maintained more traditional and sometimes impoverished lives in eastern Anatolia and eastern Europe. The obvious well-being of some Armenians and Jews, their commercial, professional, and educational success in urban centers like Istanbul and Berlin, made them easy targets for those who resented their prosperity and social status.

German officials, businessmen, and intellectuals who were active in the Ottoman Empire sometimes contributed to the escalating prejudices against Armenians. Some defined Armenians and Turks in racial terms, despite the absurdity, at least by today’s standards, of turning ethnic or religious groups into races. Academics like Ernst Jackh strongly supported close ties between Germany and the Ottoman Empire, whether it was governed by the sultan or the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). They viewed the Turks in racial terms as the Prussians of the East, a disciplined, militaristic people that could successfully impose its ways on lesser populations. Among those lesser groups were the Armenians and Greeks, about whom many German officials had decidedly mixed attitudes, at best. For some Germans, Armenians were the brotherly Christians who suffered under Muslim Turkish oppression. But for many Germans committed to the relationship with Turkey, the Armenians were a troublesome group and worse. Their nationalist strivings threatened the integrity of the empire, and their commercial occupations made them the Jews of the Orient, not exactly a positive attribute in German eyes. The German archives are full of negative references to Greeks and Armenians, who are often characterized as even more adept merchants and money lenders than Jews. Baron Marschall von Biberstein, who served as German ambassador in Istanbul from the mid-1890’s to 1913, commented that “all Orientals are involved in intrigues. The Armenians and Greeks are masters of the trade.” As a result, there was little place for anti-Semitism in Turkey. “The economic activity, which elsewhere the Jews perform, namely the exploitation of the poorer, popular classes through usury and similar manipulations, is here performed exclusively by Armenians and Greeks. The Spanish Jews who settled here cannot make any headway against them.” German textile manufacturers and German efforts to control transport represented serious competition to some Armenians and Greeks, both of whom, according to one German company, instituted all sorts of intrigues against German interests.

Lurking behind such sentiments was also the notion that Armenians were “a problem” because Germany prized, above all else, stability so that it could exercise predominant influence in the Ottoman Empire. That meant support for an iron-fisted state, even when it committed atrocities. As a result, official Germans were willing to countenance the Young Turk deportations and massacres of Armenians.

At home, many Germans began to see Jews as a problem. Their success in German society became a source of resentment, and by the turn into the 20th century, conservative-minded people in all the major institutions—business, academia, Catholic and Protestant churches, officer corps, state bureaucracy—claimed that Jewish influence had become too great, even though Jews represented only three-quarters of one percent of the population. After World War I and the Russian Revolution, Adolf Hitler proved uniquely adept at propagating the myth of “Judaeo-Bolshevism,” an identification of Jews with communism and the Soviet Union even while he railed against supposed Jewish domination of the financial markets. In Nazi eyes, Jews constituted an existential threat to German life, and the attack on the Soviet Union was designed to eliminate that threat once and for all. As the historian Saul Friedlander has written, the Nazis adopted a “redemptive anti-Semitism,” the belief that German life could flourish only through the destruction of Jews.

But the move from prejudice, discrimination, and persecution to genocide is a huge step. It does not happen naturally or inevitably. Many governments and societies discriminate against but do not kill populations in their midst. For both the late Ottoman Empire under the Young Turks and Germany under the Nazis, war provided all the essential conditions that led them to escalate their hostilities against, respectively, Armenians and Jews to mass killings. In wartime, both states could impose emergency conditions that gave officials the freedom to act in ways they would not dare venture in peacetime. The upheavals of war also heightened the sense of insecurity, leading to calls for swift and forceful actions to remove those who were seen as dangers to the national cause or to the creation of the new society. At the same time, wars opened up vistas of pleasure in the future and presented great opportunities for vast restructurings of societies and populations. Wars by definition are also violent acts; they create cultures of violence and killing.

For the Young Turks, World War I followed quickly on the humiliating defeats of the Balkan Wars and the loss of so much Ottoman territory and population. Their German ally promised them the restoration (and more) of their losses, but the Young Turks began thinking in even more grandiose terms, of extending the territory into Central Asia, of reconstructing the empire internally to guarantee the unquestioned predominance of Turks. Armenians sat in the middle of this grand vision, their ancestral settlement in eastern Anatolia threatening (in Young Turk eyes) a contiguous empire through the Caucasus and beyond. The Nazis also had grandiose ambitions, a German imperium from the Atlantic to the Urals and beyond. The Jews (in Nazi eyes) were the great threat to this vision, their lack of a state, their diasporic presence all over the continent a sign of the grave danger they presented to the Nazi vision.

The fortunes of war decisively shaped the timing and implementation of the genocides. In both instances, among both Young Turks and Nazis, we can see at work the “euphoria of victory” (a term coined by the historian of the Holocaust Christopher Browning) and the fear of defeat. The disastrous defeat of Ottoman forces by the Russians at Sarikamesh early in 1915 inspired a crisis atmosphere among the Ottoman elite, which was only heightened by the British and Commonwealth approach to Istanbul at the Dardanelles. But there, the Ottoman army held off the most powerful navy in the world, touching off a sense of euphoria. It is no accident that the CUP launched the genocide of the Armenians at precisely this moment marked by both great insecurity and euphoria. Now the Young Turks felt they could and should eliminate the Armenian population they viewed as the greatest internal threat and take a major step toward creating the new empire they envisaged.

The Nazis launched the Holocaust at a similar moment. Within weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, German officers were talking about the war lasting just 14 or 21 more days—to us today an astounding, barely comprehensible miscalculation. But the German army was used to the rapid movement of its forces and quick victory. In this context, some Nazis, like the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, intensified the killing of Jews that had already begun with the entry of German forces into the Soviet Union. For Himmler and others, eliminating Jews was the expression of their euphoria and the belief that now, finally, the Nazis could accomplish what they really wanted to do, kill Jews. But by late August the invasion was slowing down and in October the Soviets held off the Germans before Moscow. Other Nazis, including, most probably, Hitler, now turned on the Jews in fury. Hitler sought to make good on his comments to the Reichstag in January 1939, when he proclaimed, in a bone-chilling fantasy, that if the Jews should start another world war, the result would be not the defeat of Germany but the destruction of the Jews. As in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, the euphoria of victory and the dread fear of defeat ran together, leading each regime to opt for the mass displacement and killing of the population it had defined as its greatest threat.

The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust were the result of state policies. The CUP government and the Third Reich initiated, organized, and implemented the massacres. But both events, like virtually every other genocide in the 20th century, also involved mass participation. The literal reshaping of the population, the systematic violence against Armenians and Jews, could not simply be decreed and could not happen over night. It had to be created by the hard work of thousands and thousands of people, those who actually carried out, by gunpoint, the deportations; kept trains moving (of Armenian as well as Jewish deportees); guarded victims in makeshift gathering points or concentration camps; pulled the triggers, raised the swords, or threw in the gas; and moved into the farms, homes, and apartments, seized the furnishings and the businesses, of those who were eliminated. In this way, the larger society became complicit in the act of genocide, and that is why in both instances, the post-genocidal society remains haunted by the past.

But herein lies one of the very great differences between these events. After World War II, Germany assumed legal, moral, and economic obligations to the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and now, finally, to other victims of Nazi crimes. None of this happened easily or without resentment. The payments to survivors were always insufficient and, ultimately, nothing could really recompense Jews for the loss of loved ones. But starting with the 1952 reparations agreement between Germany and Israel, Germany has assumed its obligations. With extensive school curricula about the Nazi period and the Holocaust, memorials, monuments, and museums all over the country and not just in Berlin, Germany has become a model for how a country comes to terms with and moves beyond the commission of atrocities in the name of its people. In stark contrast, the present-day Turkish state is a model for denying the past and refusing to recognize any of the injustices perpetrated by its predecessor.

Finally, the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust are linked by one other feature, one that gives us hope for the future: by the humanitarians who protested the atrocities unfolding before their eyes and who sought to protect their neighbors. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s report and analysis of the trial of SS bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for transporting Jews to the extermination camps, Arendt wrote that even if only one or two Germans refused to follow Nazi orders to kill Jews, that suffices to show us that no murderous and dictatorial regime can ever win complete compliance of its population. Some people, however few in number, will find their moral core and protest or protect their endangered neighbors, at great risk to themselves. We know that there were such Germans, Poles, and others in occupied Europe. And now, from the research of Taner Akcam, Richard Hovannisian, and others, we also know that there were such Turks who tried to protect Armenians. Those are the people from whom we take sustenance, upon whom we can envisage a more humane future despite the enormous tragedies that befell both Armenians and Jews.

Armin Wegner and Raphael Lemkin were two such individuals. The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust are linked through their biographies. Wegner was a medic in the German army during World War I, posted to the Ottoman Empire. He was outraged at the atrocities committed against Armenians. The photographic record we have of the Armenian Genocide is to a very great extent a result of the pictures he secretly shot and smuggled out of Anatolia and the Middle East. Twenty years later, he protested, in a letter to Adolf Hitler no less, the rapidly escalating persecution of Jews, an act for which he was interned for a time in a concentration camp. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, coined the word “genocide.” As a young man he had been deeply affected by the atrocities committed against Armenians. He was in Germany as a law student in 1921 when Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Talat Pasha, the main architect of the Armenian Genocide. Tehlirian was put on trial but acquitted by a German court. Through these events, Lemkin sought to learn more about what had happened to Armenians and began his intellectual and political quest that culminated, in 1944, in his invention of the word “genocide” and, in 1948, in the adoption by the United Nations of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Lemkin’s valiant project was driven by his deep revulsion against the atrocities committed against both Armenians and Jews. Although he had suffered very personally from the Holocaust—he learned after the war that 49 members of his family had been killed by the Nazis—his humanitarian sensibility extended far beyond the tragic fate of his own people and included, especially, Armenians as well. And he hoped that by inventing and defining a new word, he could better convey the enormity of the crimes and, hopefully, forestall their repetition against other peoples.

The humanitarianism of Wegner and Lemkin and the many individuals, their names often unknown to us, who tried to protect Armenians or Jews show us another way that the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust are linked events—and enable us to have hope for the future despite the tragedies of the past.