The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children.
İsmail Necdet Kent was a Turkish diplomat, who claimed to have risked his life to save Jews during World War II. While vice-consul in Marseilles, France between 1941 and 1944, he allegedly gave documents of citizenship to dozens of Turkish Jews living in France who did not have proper identity papers, to save them from deportation to the Nazi gas chambers. These claims, first published in an appendix to Stanford J. Shaw's book Turkey and the Holocaust (1993), have not been independently verified; no survivors or their descendants have confirmed the account. Marc David Baer and other historians have documented several inconsistencies in Kent's story; Baer concludes that it is "manufactured" and Uğur Ümit Üngör calls it a "complete fabrication".
Namık Kemal Yolga (1914–2001) was a Turkish diplomat and statesman. During World War II, Yolga was the Vice-Consul at the Turkish Embassy in Paris, France. He claimed to have saved the lives of Turkish Jews from the Nazis but this has been challenged due to lack of evidence. In fact, evidence suggests that Yolga was actually instrumental in stripping France-born Turkish Jews of citizenship, which could have saved them from the Holocaust. He has been given a national award by the Turkish government and a Jewish foundation in Turkey.
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
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.
Mehmed Reshid was an Ottoman physician, official of the Committee of Union and Progress, and governor of the Diyarbekir Vilayet (province) of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He is known for organizing the 1915 genocide of the Armenian and Assyrian communities of Diyarbekir, in which between 144,000 and 157,000 Armenians, Assyrians, and other Christians were killed. During the Allied occupation of Istanbul, Reshid was arrested and his roles in the massacres were exposed. He later escaped from prison, but committed suicide after being cornered by local authorities.
Stanford Jay Shaw was an American historian, best known for his works on the late Ottoman Empire, Turkish Jews, and the early Turkish Republic. Shaw's works have been criticized for their lack of factual accuracy as well as denial of the Armenian genocide, and other pro-Turkish bias.
Behiç Erkin was a Turkish career officer, Armenian genocide perpetrator, first director (1920–1926) of the Turkish State Railways, nationalized under his auspices, statesman and diplomat of the Turkish Republic. He was Minister of Public Works, 1926–1928, and deputy for three terms; and an ambassador. He served as Turkey's ambassador to Budapest between 1928–1939, and to Paris and Vichy between August 1939-August 1943.
Trebizond 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. 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.
Uğur Ümit Üngör is a Dutch–Turkish academic, historian, sociologist, and professor of Genocide studies, specializing as a scholar and researcher of Holocaust studies and studies on mass violence. He served as Professor of History at the Utrecht University and Professor of Sociology at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
The late Ottoman genocides is a historiographical theory which sees the concurrent Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides that occurred during the 1910s–1920s as parts of a single event rather than separate events, which were initiated by the Young Turks. Although some sources, including The Thirty-Year Genocide (2019) written by the historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi, characterize this event as a genocide of Christians, others such as those written by the historians Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer contend that such an approach "ignores the Young Turks' massive violence against non-Christians", in particular against Muslim Kurds.
The Deportations of Kurds by Turkey refers to the population transfer of hundreds of thousands of Kurds from Turkish Kurdistan that was perpetuated by the Ottoman Empire and its successor Turkey in order to Turkify the region. Most of the Kurds who were deported were forced to leave their autochthonous lands, but the deportations also included the forced sedentarization of Kurdish tribes. Turkish historian İsmail Beşikçi emphasized the influence of fascism on these policies, and Italian historian Giulio Sappeli argued: "The ideals of Kemal Atatürk meant that war against the Kurds was always seen as an historical mission aimed at affirming the superiority of being Turkish." Occurring just after the Armenian genocide, many Kurds believed that they would share the same fate as the Armenians. Historians Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer state that this event "not only serves as a reminder of the unsettling fact that victims could become perpetrators, but also that perpetrators [as some Kurds were during the Armenian Genocide] could turn victims".
Aziz Feyzi Pirinççizâde was a Turkish politician of Kurdish origin and a leading member of the influential Ottoman Kurdish Pirinççizâde family from Diyarbekir. He took a leading role in the Armenian genocide in the Diyarbekir vilayet during World War I, and he was later accused of taking part in the Sheikh Said rebellion, although he wasn't sentenced for either. Later he served as a Member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and a Minister of Public Works in the Turkish Government. He was also awarded the Turkish Medal of Independence.
Bibliography of the Armenian genocide is a list of books about the Armenian genocide:
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 International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide was the first major conference in the field of genocide studies, held in Tel Aviv on 20–24 June 1982. It was organized by Israel Charny, Elie Wiesel, Shamai Davidson, and their Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, founded in 1979. The conference's objective was to further the understanding and prevention of all genocides; it marked the shift from viewing genocide as an irrational phenomenon to one that could be studied and understood.
Prior to joining the Allied Powers late in the war, Turkey was officially neutral in World War II. Despite its neutrality, Turkey maintained strong diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany during the period of the Holocaust. During the war, Turkey denaturalized 3,000 to 5,000 Jews living abroad; between 2,200 and 2,500 Turkish Jews were deported to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor; and several hundred interned in Nazi concentration camps. When Nazi Germany encouraged neutral countries to repatriate their Jewish citizens, Turkish diplomats received instructions to avoid repatriating Jews even if they could prove their Turkish nationality. Turkey was also the only neutral country to implement anti-Jewish laws during the war. Between 1940 and 1944, around 13,000 Jews passed through Turkey from Europe to Mandatory Palestine. According to the research of historian Rıfat Bali, more Turkish Jews suffered as a result of discriminatory policies during the war than were saved by Turkey. Since the war, Turkey and parts of the Turkish Jewish community have promoted exaggerated claims of rescuing Jews, using this myth to promote Armenian genocide denial.
The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 is a book by Uğur Ümit Üngör, published by Oxford University Press in 2011. The book focuses on population politics in the transition between the late Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, especially in the Diyarbekir region.
On 24 May 1915, on the initiative of Russia, the Triple Entente—Russia, France, and the United Kingdom—issued a declaration condemning the ongoing Armenian genocide carried out in the Ottoman Empire and threatening to hold the perpetrators accountable. This was the first use of the phrase "crimes against humanity" in international diplomacy, which later became a category of international criminal law after World War II.
In 1915, a systematic anti-Christian genocide was committed in Diyarbekir vilayet, claiming the lives of most Armenians, Syriac Christians, Greek Orthodox, and Greek Catholics living there. The genocide was ordered by governor Mehmed Reshid, partly with the backing of the CUP Central Committee.
