Trebizond (now Trabzon ) was a city in the Ottoman Empire where the Armenian genocide occurred. The method employed to kill was mainly by mass drowning, resulting in estimated deaths of 50,000 Armenians. [2] [3] The city was also an important location of subsequent trials held to prosecute those involved with the systematic massacre. Cemal Azmi, the governor of Trebizond during the genocide, was later assassinated as part of Operation Nemesis.
The city was the site of one of the key battles between the Ottoman and Russian armies during the Caucasus Campaign of World War I which resulted in the capture of Trebizond by the Russian Caucasus Army under command of Grand Duke Nicholas and Nikolai Yudenich in April 1916. The Russian Army retreated from the city and the rest of eastern and northeastern Anatolia with the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Eitan Belkind was a Nili member who infiltrated the Ottoman army as an official. He was assigned to the headquarters of Camal Pasha. He claimed to have witnessed the burning of 5,000 Armenians, [4] Lt. Hasan Maruf, of the Ottoman army, described how a population of a village were taken all together and then burned. [5] Also, the Commander of the Third Army, Vehib's 12-page affidavit, which was dated December 5, 1918, presented in the Trebizond trial series (March 29, 1919) included in the Key Indictment (published in Takvimi Vekayi, No. 3540, May 5, 1919), reported such a mass burning of the population of an entire village near Mus. S. S. McClure wrote in his work Obstacles to Peace (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917, pp. 400–1) that in Bitlis, Mus and Sassoun, "The shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in tile various camps was to burn them" and also that "Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at the remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after."
The Germans, Ottoman allies, also witnessed the way Armenians were burned according to the Israeli historian, Bat Ye'or, who writes: "The Germans, allies of the Turks in the First World War, ...saw how civil populations were shut up in churches and burned, or gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death, and reduced to ashes,..." [6]
During the Trebizond trial series, of the court martial (from the sittings between March 26 and May 17, 1919), the Trebizond Health Services Inspector Dr. Ziya Fuad wrote in a report that Dr. Saib, caused the death of children with the injection of morphine, the information was allegedly provided by two physicians (Drs. Ragib and Vehib), both Dr. Saib colleagues at Trebizond's Red Crescent hospital, where those atrocities were said to have been committed. [7]
Dr. Ziya Fuad, and Dr. Adnan, public health services director of Trebizond, submitted affidavits, reporting a cases, in which, two school buildings were used to organize children and then sent them on the mezzanine, to kill them with a toxic gas equipment. This case was presented during the Session 3, p.m., 1 April 1919, also published in the Constantinople (now Istanbul) newspaper Renaissance, 27 April 1919. [8] The Ottoman surgeon, Dr. Haydar Cemal wrote in Türkçe İstanbul , No. 45, 23 December 1918, also published in Renaissance, 26 December 1918, that "on the order of the Chief Sanitation Office of the IIIrd Army in January 1916, when the spread of typhus was an acute problem, innocent Armenians slated for deportation at Erzincan were inoculated with the blood of typhoid fever patients without rendering that blood 'inactive'." Jeremy Hugh Baron writes:
Individual doctors were directly involved in the massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and issued false certificates of death from natural causes. Nazim's brother-in-law Dr. Tevfik Rushdu, Inspector-General of Health Services, organized the disposal of Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over six months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938. [9]
The psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, writes in a parenthesis when introducing the crimes of Nazi doctors in his book Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, [10] "Perhaps Turkish doctors, in their participation in the genocide against the Armenians, come closest, as I shall later suggest)." and drowning. Oscar S. Heizer, the American consul at Trebizond, reports: "This plan did not suit Nail Bey.... Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea and thrown overboard." [11]
The Italian consul of Trebizond in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: "I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea." [12] Hoffman Philip, the American Charge at Constantinople chargé d'affaires, writes: "Boat loads sent from Zor down the river arrived at Ana, one thirty miles away, with three fifths of passengers missing." [13]
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Ottoman Armenian casualties refers to the number of deaths of Ottoman Armenians between 1914 and 1923, during which the Armenian genocide occurred. Most estimates of related Armenian deaths between 1915 and 1918 range from 600,000 to 1.2 million.
Vahakn Norair Dadrian was an Armenian-American sociologist and historian, born in Turkey, professor of sociology, historian, and an expert on the Armenian genocide.
Halide Edib Adıvar was a Turkish novelist, teacher, and a nationalist and feminist intellectual. She was best known for her novels criticizing the low social status of Turkish women and what she saw from her observation as the lack of interest of most women in changing their situation. She was a Pan-Turkist and several of her novels advocated for the Turanism movement.
Halil Kut was an Ottoman military commander and politician. He served in the Ottoman Army during World War I, notably taking part in the military campaigns against Russia in the Caucasus and the British in Mesopotamia.
Bahaeddin Shakir or Bahaddin Şakir was a physician, Turkish nationalist politician, and one of the architects of the Armenian genocide. Though he was not a minister or deputy in the government, he held powerful sway in the Central Committee of the Committee of Union and Progress and was the director of the Şûrâ-yı Ümmet, a magazine that supported the party. He was one of the three important names of the "Doctors Group" in the CUP ; He was a part of the pan-Turkist/Turanist wing of Union and Progress.
The Malta exiles were the purges of Ottoman intellectuals by the Allied forces. The exile to Malta occurred between March 1919 and October 1920 of politicians, high ranking soldiers (mainly), administrators and intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire after the armistice of Mudros during the Occupation of Istanbul by the Allied forces. The Malta exiles became inmates in a British prison where various Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) officials were held in the hopes that trials will be held at the Malta Tribunals at a future date.
The Istanbul trials of 1919–1920 were courts-martial of the Ottoman Empire that occurred soon after the Armistice of Mudros, in the aftermath of World War I.
Wehib Pasha also known as Vehip Pasha, Mehmed Wehib Pasha, Mehmet Vehip Pasha, was a general in the Ottoman Army. He fought in the Balkan Wars and in several theatres of World War I. In his later years, Vehib Pasha volunteered to serve as a military advisor to the Ethiopian Army against Fascist Italy during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. He served as the chief of staff to Nasibu Zeamanuel, the Ethiopian Commander-in-Chief on the southern front.
Hacı Topal Osman Ağa also known as Osman the Lame, was a Turkish officer, a militia leader of the National Forces, a volunteer regiment commander of the Turkish army during the Turkish War of Independence who eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and was a perpetrator of the Armenian and Pontic genocides.
After World War I, the effort to prosecute Ottoman war criminals was taken up by the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and ultimately included in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman government organized a series of courts martial in 1919–1920 to prosecute war criminals, but these failed on account of political pressure. The main effort by the Allied administration that occupied Constantinople fell short of establishing an international tribunal in Malta to try the so-called Malta exiles, Ottoman war criminals held as POWs by the British forces in Malta. In the end, no tribunals were held in Malta.
The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, containing the Talat Pasha telegrams, is a book published by historian and journalist Aram Andonian in 1919. Originally redacted in Armenian, it was popularized worldwide through the English edition published by Hodder & Stoughton of London. It includes several documents (telegrams) that constitute evidence that the Armenian genocide was formally implemented as Ottoman Empire policy.
Edward J. Erickson is a retired regular U.S. Army officer at the Marine Corps University who has written widely on the Ottoman Army during World War I. He is an associate of International Research Associates, Seattle, Washington and as of July 2016 was also listed as an advisory board member of the Ankara-based, Turkish government aligned think-tank, Avrasya Incelemeleri Merkezi (AVIM), which goes by the English name Center for Eurasian Studies.
Selanikli Mehmed Nâzım Bey also known as Doktor Nazım was a Turkish physician, politician, and revolutionary. Nazım Bey was a founding member of the Committee of Union and Progress, and served on its central committee for over ten years. He played a significant role in the Armenian genocide and the expulsion of Greeks in Western Anatolia. He was convicted for allegedly conspiring to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in İzmir and was hanged in Ankara on 26 August 1926. He also served as the chairman of the Turkish sports club Fenerbahçe S.K. between 1916 and 1918.
Cemal Azmi, also spelled Jemal Azmi, was an Ottoman politician and governor of the Trebizond Vilayet (province) during World War I and the final years of the Ottoman Empire. He was one of the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and was mainly responsible for the liquidation of Armenians in Trebizond Vilayet. He was known as the "butcher of Trebizond".
Oscar S. Heizer was an American diplomat who served in various posts as Consul General in the Ottoman Empire. Heizer, who was the Consul General in Trebizond during World War I, witnessed the Armenian genocide and often risked his own life to save the lives of Armenians.
Hasan FehmiAtaç was a Turkish politician and a member of both the Grand National Assembly of the Republic of Turkey and the earlier Chamber of Deputies of the Ottoman Empire. As a member of both parliaments, Hasan Fehmi was a deputy representing Gümüşhane, the place of his birth.
During the Armenian genocide, which occurred in the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of the CUP, Armenian women in the Ottoman Empire were targets of a systematic campaign of genocidal rape, and other acts of violence against women described by scholars as "instruments of genocide" including kidnapping, forced prostitution, sexual mutilation and forced marriage into the perpetrator group.
Hafız Mehmet was a Turkish politician and the Minister of Justice for the Republic of Turkey. While serving as a deputy in Trabzon, he was a witness to the Armenian genocide. His testimony of the event is considered by genocide scholar Vahakn Dadrian as one of the "rarest corroborations of the fact of the complicity of governmental officials in the organization of the mass murder of Armenians". He was sentenced to death after the Izmir trials of 1926, charged with attempting to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Bibliography of the Armenian genocide is a list of books about the Armenian genocide:
Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide is a 2015 book by Vicken Cheterian and published by Hurst that aims to be a "political history of the genocide since [1915] and the consequences of denialism". The book was praised for its comprehensiveness and accessibility to a wide audience.