Stefan Ihrig | |
---|---|
Occupation(s) | Professor, historian |
Spouse | Roni Malkai Ihrig |
Parent(s) | Johann and Beate Ihrig |
Academic background | |
Education | Queen Mary University (BA) Free University of Berlin (MA) University of Cambridge (PhD) |
Doctoral advisor | Richard J. Evans |
Academic work | |
Notable works | Justifying Genocide:Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (2016) |
Website | www |
Stefan Ihrig is an academic,author,and speaker. He is professor of history at the University of Haifa and director of the Haifa Center for German and European Studies. His research interests are European and Middle Eastern history,with a focus on media and political and social discourse. His 2014 and 2016 books dealing with German-Turkish history and entanglement have elicited critical praise. He is also an editor of the Journal of Holocaust Research published by the University of Haifa and has contributed articles for HuffPost , Tablet , Haaretz ,and History Today ,among other publications.
Ihrig is the son of Johann and Beate Ihrig. [1] He earned his bachelor's degree in law and politics at Queen Mary University,London. He received his master's degree in history,Turcology,and political science from the Free University of Berlin. He completed his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. [2] His doctoral thesis on German-Turkish relations in the 20th century was supervised by Sir Richard J. Evans. [3]
Before joining the University of Haifa,Ihrig was a Polonsky Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute,a lecturer at the University of Regensburg and the Free University of Berlin,and a researcher at the Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig. [2]
Ihrig's first individually-authored book,published in 2008,was Wer sind die Moldawier? Rumänismus versus Moldowanismus in Historiographie und Geschichtsschulbüchern der Republik Moldova ("Who are the Moldovans? Romanianism versus Moldovanism in Historiography and History Textbooks of the Republic of Moldova"). [4] Reviewer Matthew H. Ciscel states that the book is "broadly detailed and well-written" [5] and Dietmar Müller describes it as "an impressive study on historiography and history politics in the Republic of Moldova based on a wide range of sources". [6]
Ihrig's recent research has focused on the reception of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in Germany,and he has published two books on the subject: Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination (2014) and Justifying Genocide:Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (2016),both published by Harvard University Press. [7] [8] [9] According to Ihrig,there was a Nazi "fandom" of Atatürk,the founder of the Republic of Turkey, [7] and the Nazis admired the "postgenocidal paradise" of Atatürk's New Turkey and sought to emulate it. [8] Ihrig states that the Armenian genocide has been held hostage by the politics of Armenian genocide denial and Armenian genocide recognition,which has prevented the event from being integrated into twentieth-century world history. [10] Ihrig states that the Armenian genocide was the "double original sin" of the twentieth century, [11] explaining:
Putting the Armenian genocide in its rightful place in the history of the world and of Europe is not an easy task and must lead to a radical revision of the twentieth century. The Armenian genocide was a very important alarm that the world has not heeded. The world knew but it was the wrong people who drew the right conclusions: that you can get away with oppression, violence and mass murder with impunity. [12]
Ihrig is one of the editors of the Journal of Holocaust Research published by the University of Haifa. [13] He has also contributed articles for HuffPost , Tablet magazine , Haaretz , and History Today , among other publications. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]
Ihrig's 2014 book Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination earned an official commendation in the 2013 Fraenkel Prize Competition sponsored by the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide in London. [2] His 2016 work Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler won the 2017 Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies from the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research. [19]
Ihrig's wife, Roni Malkai Ihrig, is an attorney and CEO of the Israeli Public Forum for Youth Villages and Boarding Schools for Children at Risk. [20] [21]
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who is known for coining the term genocide and campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention. During the Second World War, he campaigned vigorously to raise international outrage against atrocities in Axis-occupied Europe. It was during this time that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policies against Jews and Poles.
Armin Theophil Wegner was a German soldier and medic in World War I, a prolific author, and a human rights activist. Stationed in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, Wegner was a witness to the Armenian genocide and the photographs he took documenting the plight of the Armenians today "comprises the core of witness images of the Genocide."
Honorary Aryan was an expression used in Nazi Germany with the purpose of according Aryan certificate to some Mischlinge who were not directly recognized as belonging to the Aryan race according to Nuremberg Laws standards, but therefore considered as part of it.
The Nazi Party of Germany adopted and developed several pseudoscientific racial classifications as part of its ideology (Nazism) in order to justify the genocide of groups of people which it deemed racially inferior. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race", and they considered black people, mixed-race people, Slavs, Roma, Jews and other ethnicities racially inferior "sub-humans", whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. These beliefs stemmed from a mixture of 19th-century anthropology, scientific racism, and anti-Semitism. The term "Aryan" belongs in general to the discourses of Volk.
The Greek genocide, which included the Pontic genocide, was the systematic killing of the Christian Ottoman Greek population of Anatolia which was carried out mainly during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1922) on the basis of their religion and ethnicity. It was perpetrated by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Three Pashas and by the Government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. Several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece. Some, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, and/or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
Armenian genocide denial is the claim that the Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), did not commit genocide against its Armenian citizens during World War I—a crime documented in a large body of evidence and affirmed by the vast majority of scholars. The perpetrators denied the genocide as they carried it out, claiming that Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were resettled for military reasons, not exterminated. In the genocide's aftermath, incriminating documents were systematically destroyed, and denial has been the policy of every government of the Republic of Turkey, as of 2023, and later adopted by the Republic of Azerbaijan, as of 1991.
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was a German newspaper that appeared between 1861 and 1945.
Impunity is the ability to act with exemption from punishments, losses, or other negative consequences. In the international law of human rights, impunity is failure to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice and, as such, itself constitutes a denial of the victims' right to justice and redress. Impunity is especially common in countries which lack the tradition of rule of law, or suffer from pervasive corruption, or contain entrenched systems of patronage, or where the judiciary is weak or members of the security forces are protected by special jurisdictions or immunities. Impunity is sometimes considered a form of denialism of historical crimes.
Friedrich (Fritz) Bronsart von Schellendorf was a German officer and politician. He was the chief of Staff of the Ottoman Army and was one of the many German military advisors assigned to the Ottoman Empire. He replaced Otto Liman von Sanders who was assigned to the Aegean region following disagreements with Enver Pasha. He was instrumental drafting initial war plans for the Ottoman Army. Many historians consider Bronsart von Schellendorf to have been complicit in the Armenian genocide. Archives show that he issued orders to deport Armenians.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a 1933 novel by the Austrian-Jewish author Franz Werfel. Based on the events at Musa Dagh in 1915 during the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the book played a role in organizing the Jewish resistance under Nazi rule. It was passed from hand to hand in Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, and it became an example and a symbol for the Jewish underground throughout Europe. The Holocaust scholars Samuel Totten, Paul Bartrop and Steven L. Jacobs underline the importance of the book for many of the ghettos' Jews: "The book was read by many Jews during World War II and was viewed as an allegory of their own situation in the Nazi-established ghettos, and what they might do about it."
Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide is a 2018 academic book by Hans-Lukas Kieser, published by Princeton University Press. It is a biography of Talaat Pasha. As of 2018 there had been no recent biographies of Talaat, nor of Enver Pasha, in western European languages. The book discusses the author's thesis that Talaat was co-Father of the Nation to modern Turkey along with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as well as Talaat's rule and significance.
At the conclusion of his Obersalzberg Speech on 22 August 1939, a week before the German invasion of Poland, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler reportedly said "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?".
Genocide justification is the claim that a genocide is morally excusable/defensible, necessary, and/or sanctioned by law. Genocide justification differs from genocide denial, which is the attempt to reject the occurrence of genocide. Perpetrators often claim that genocide victims presented a serious threat, justifying their actions by stating it was legitimate self-defense of a nation or state. According to modern international criminal law, there can be no excuse for genocide. Genocide is often camouflaged as military activity against combatants, and the distinction between denial and justification is often blurred.
Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler is a 2016 book by Stefan Ihrig which explores how violence against the Ottoman Armenians, from the Hamidian massacres to the Armenian genocide, influenced German views and led to the acceptance of genocide as a legitimate "solution" to "problems posed by an unwelcome minority". It discusses how the topic was debated in Germany after World War I and the influence of these debates and perceptions of history on the Holocaust.
The Haifa Center for German and European Studies (HCGES) is a joint project of the University of Haifa and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The Center was founded in 2007 and opened in June 2008 by the Federal Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier. It is part of the [ Research Authority of the University of Haifa cooperating with the faculties of humanities, social sciences and law. The founding idea of the Center is to provide students, research, academics and the general public with information about modern Germany and Europe. Therefore the Center is holding public events as well as academic conferences and workshops. It also conducts its own interdisciplinary research with a focus on social, political, legal, economic and cultural developments in Germany and Europe after 1945. The HCGES is part of the global network of DAAD Centers for German and European Studies.
The relationship between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust has been discussed by scholars. The majority of scholars believe that there is a direct causal relationship between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, however, some of them do not believe that there is a direct causal relationship between the two genocides.
The terminology of the Armenian genocide is different in English, Turkish, and Armenian languages and has led to political controversies around the issue of Armenian genocide denial and Armenian genocide recognition. Although the majority of historians writing in English use the word "genocide", other terms exist.
During World War I, Imperial Germany was a military ally of the Ottoman Empire, which perpetrated the Armenian genocide. Many Germans present in eastern and southern Anatolia witnessed the genocide, but censorship and self-censorship hampered these reports, while German newspapers reported Turkish denial of the massacres. About 800 Imperial German Army officers and 25.000 German soldiers were an integral part of the Turkish army and belonged to its command and general staff. It is known that individual German military advisors signed some of the orders that led to deportations of Armenians.
On 15 March 1921, Armenian student Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Talaat Pasha—former grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire and the main architect of the Armenian genocide—in Berlin. At his trial, Tehlirian argued, "I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer"; the jury acquitted him.