Justifying Genocide

Germany and the Armenians from Bismark to Hitler

Stefan Ihrig

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674915176
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia tedesca

The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that the Armenians were restless under Ottoman rule, they were a problem for Germany too. From the 1890s onward Germany became accustomed to excusing violence against Armenians, even accepting it as a foreign policy necessity. For many Germans, the Armenians represented an explicitly racial problem and despite the Armenians' Christianity, Germans portrayed them as the "Jews of the Orient."As Stefan Ihrig reveals in this first comprehensive study of the subject, many Germans before World War I sympathized with the Ottomans' longstanding repression of the Armenians and would go on to defend vigorously the Turks' wartime program of extermination. After the war, in what Ihrig terms the "great genocide debate, " German nationalists first denied and then justified genocide in sweeping terms. The Nazis too came to see genocide as justifiable: in their version of history, the Armenian Genocide had made possible the astonishing rise of the New Turkey.Ihrig is careful to note that this connection does not imply the Armenian Genocide somehow caused the Holocaust, nor does it make Germans any less culpable. But no history of the twentieth century should ignore the deep, direct, and disturbing connections between these two crimes.

PART I

Armenian Blood Money

CHAPTER 1

Beginnings under Bismarck

The year 1878 was a watershed year for the Ottomans and for German-Ottoman relations. It was also a seminal year for the Ottoman Armenians. It began with what appeared, for a moment, as an imminent catastrophe for the Ottomans, of epic and almost terminal proportions.

From Tsargrad to Berlin

Early 1878: The Russian army was just about to enter Constantinople, at the climax of the Russo-Turkish War that had started the year before. Count Richard von Pfeil, a Prussian soldier in the service of the Russian army, later wrote a popular book about the campaign. It would reach its fourth edition in Germany within a year and was rapidly translated into English. Pfeil wrote there,

After waiting for hours … we began our advance and soon, on reaching a height, we saw Constantinople with its numberless minarets and its golden cupolas and half-moons glittering in the bright sunshine before us. The impression which this made upon the troops was indescribable, and can only be explained by the tradition which has always been handed down among the Russian people that one day “Tsargrad” will belong to the Russian Empire, and that Russian worship will be celebrated in Hagia Sophia. All crossed themselves, some of them fell upon their knees, and others embraced and kissed their comrades, so that one was reminded of the history of the crusades when the pilgrims for the first time came in sight of Jerusalem.¹

It was not to be. British warships made a show of force along the shore, menaced the Russians, and thus stopped the Russian advance on Constantinople. As a result, Russia and the Ottoman Empire negotiated the Treaty of San Stefano on the outskirts of not-to-be Tsargrad. This treaty was supposed to create a Greater Bulgaria stretching from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, as well as to grant territorial gains to Montenegro, and full independence to Montenegro, Serbia, and the Romanian Principalities. But even this was not to be. The Great Powers were alarmed by the expansion of Bulgaria, viewed as a Russian proxy, and thus by the expansion of Russia at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. Calls for compensation started being made by other powers, great and small. This was more than just a way to cheaply gain territory (that is, without actually fighting for it); it was also an expression of fear for the balance of power and a means to reestablish it. In order to prevent a great European war over the Ottoman spoils, a congress was convened at Berlin in the summer of 1878. This must have seemed an acceptably friendly setting for Russia: it had had the kaiser’s blessing in its war against the Ottomans, during which the German embassy had represented Russian subjects in the Ottoman Empire; and when the Russians had reached Constantinople, they had even been greeted by German congratulations and medals.² And even though Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s “Iron Chancellor,” was to say later that he felt like a Russian delegate at the congress, the 1877–1878 episode still resulted in heightened suspicions and frustrations among all the powers.

• • •

It was not a good start for the young Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II, who had come to power only two years before, in 1876.³ The year 1876 had seen one sultan deposed by a military coup (Abdul Aziz), and another leave the throne after merely three months due to severe mental health problems (Murad V). In every aspect, these were not good times to be the Ottoman sultan. Abdul Hamid II found himself in a position of little real power. His grand vizier, Midhat Pasha, and his entourage actually wielded all the power and expected the inexperienced, thirty-three-year-old sultan to acquiesce in their decisions, tactics, and goals. The rule of the Ottomans was threatened by nationalist revolts, and the European powers, especially Russia, were eager to cut themselves a slice of the Ottoman cake. The empire had lost Greece in the 1820s, and the loss of Serbia, Montenegro, Walachia, and Moldova was all but official by the 1870s. The old system of alliances had shifted and both empire and sultan saw themselves left alone, with no reliable ally, facing the ever-growing Russian threat as well as that of Christian nationalists everywhere—especially in the Balkans, but, as we shall see, also in Anatolia. And, to make things worse, the empire had just acquired both a constitution and a parliament (promulgated by Abdul Hamid in late 1876 and suspended by him already in early 1878).

And then, of course, there was the Russo-Turkish War, and the Treaty of San Stefano—“an unmitigated disaster for the Ottomans,” in Erik J. Zürcher’s words.⁴ Finally, adding insult to injury, there was the Congress of Berlin. For the Ottomans and Abdul Hamid this was a disastrous congress. “The assembled diplomats,” as historian Donald Quataert has summed it up, “parceled out Ottoman lands as if they were door prizes at some gigantic raffle.”⁵ The empire had to cede territories to Russia, and even to Persia; it had to accept the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria, and of Tunis by France; and it had to grant full independence to Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania, as well as grant such wide-reaching autonomy to Eastern Rumelia that its actual loss was visible on the horizon. In many ways the heavy territorial losses of the empire in Europe marked the end of the Ottoman Empire as a major European power. It also transformed the overall ethnic composition of the empire, only now it had clear Muslim majority.

The young Sultan must have been shaken and shocked by his own and his empire’s powerlessness. The leading Ottoman representative, Alexander Karatheodori Pasha, found he had to negotiate much harder with the powers that were supposedly the empire’s allies, England and France, than with the immediate and warring opposite, the Russian Empire.⁶ It is not too far-fetched to claim that the experiences of these first years of government must have amounted to a trauma that, together with the continuous attempt to overcome it, put its slightly paranoid stamp on the following decades of Abdul Hamid’s reign. Of course, later Armenian plots to assassinate him did not help either. Abdul Hamid saw the congress as proof of a conspiracy of the powers against the empire—but, crucially, one not involving Germany. Bismarck’s heavy-handed and rather rude dealing with the Ottoman delegation had constituted a new low point of relations, but afterward, a rapid German-Ottoman rapprochement began, initiated by Abdul Hamid.⁷ And though Bismarck did not reciprocate to the extent the sultan had wished, it had begun in earnest. It was to really take off under Wilhelm II in the 1890s. The only way out of the Ottoman foreign policy conundrum was, it seemed, Germany—the only power without direct territorial interests in his empire.

After his return from the Berlin Congress, the former Armenian patriarch Mkrtich Khrimyan was scolded for his poor diplomatic abilities and his lack of knowledge of foreign languages by his fellow Armenians. He retorted by saying that he had not been given the proper mandate and that, in any case, he spoke the only language that counted for anything in these matters, that of pain and suffering—apparently he had, literally, cried in front of the Great Power delegates in Berlin.⁸ These tears, however, did not impress much. The former patriarch knew this now, and contrasted the thus far peaceful pleas of the Armenians with the more successful violent tactics of Balkan nationalists.⁹ The Armenians had hoped to gain provisions similar to those received by the Bulgarians in Eastern Rumelia—such as, for example, autonomous rule under a Christian governor. In the end, all they were left with were vague promises of reform, to be enforced by all the signatories instead of only by Russia—in the San Stefano Treaty, Russia would have had the right to occupy Eastern Anatolia if far-reaching reforms were not instituted. Upon meeting Armenian delegates in the preliminary negotiations for the Treaty of San Stefano, the Russian archduke Nicholas Nikolayevich had even pompously called himself the liberator of both the Bulgarians and the Armenians. And with article 16 of the San Stefano Treaty, the Armenian question had, indeed, officially entered the world diplomatic arena.¹⁰ While the Armenian delegation at Berlin was able to present its petition, it was excluded from the sessions deciding their fate. If Bismarck had been able to do so, he would have even excluded the Ottoman delegation as well. Bismarck thought they would only be cumbersome.¹¹ In any case, the resulting article 61 of the Berlin Treaty was rather vague, promising improvements, reforms, and security, but neither concrete steps for nor mechanisms of enforcing any reforms.¹² Russia had suggested making its withdrawal of troops from the Eastern Anatolian provinces conditional on the implementation of the reforms of article 61, but Britain objected—it had gained Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire on the understanding that it would defend the sultan’s Anatolian provinces and support the empire at the congress.¹³ Instead of a conditional occupation of the Eastern Provinces based on the promise of Armenian reforms, Russia now simply received the three provinces of Ardahan, Kars, and Batumi. Not surprisingly, for Bismarck, article 61 was little more than an “ornament” to the protocols—a judgment shared by many historians later: it was “sufficiently diluted to render it inoperative.”¹⁴

The Lightning Rod of Europe

On the other side of the political fence were Bismarck and his Germany. Formed in war against France in 1870/1871, Germany was a latecomer to the Great Power game in Europe and in the world. Formed in war against France, Germany was, for the time to come, to be afraid of, if not obsessed with, both French vengeance and any combination of powers against Germany involving France. Formed in war, and not, for example, in the 1848 revolutions, the modern German state began its life with a serious deficit in democratic legitimacy and democratic culture.¹⁵

Modern Germany’s architect and chancellor for the first two decades was Otto von Bismarck. His prime foreign policy goals were to safeguard the new German Empire, to protect it from French vengeance, and to prevent an encirclement of alliances. Bismarck’s system of alliances across the continent has since become famous. He managed to bind and include all, except for France—and except for the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were a special case for Bismarck. In 1876, he had said in the Reichstag, the German parliament, that the Oriental question was not worth the “healthy bones” of even “one Pomeranian musketeer.”¹⁶ This well-known quote—which Bismarck himself later described as having been “ridden to death”—has long been taken at face value and therefore misunderstood. It has been taken to convey a genuine and total lack of interest on the part of Bismarck in the Ottoman Empire. In denying that the empire was worth the loss of any German “bones,” what Bismarck meant to do, first, was to publicly distance Germany from the nature of the other Great Powers’ interests in the Ottoman Empire.¹⁷ Unlike other powers, Bismarck’s Germany did not covet territorial gains there. Second, he meant to signal a lack of interest in the internal situation of the Ottoman Empire—something that would evolve into a very cynical policy vis-à-vis the Armenians. Third, he meant to assure his German audience that Germany would either stand at the sidelines or, on the other hand, try its best to prevent a European war from breaking out over the Ottoman Empire. In the end, Bismarck’s statement was meant for public consumption; he and his Germany were indeed very much interested in the Ottoman Empire—just differently from how one might expect.

Bismarck was to claim later that he had acted as an honest broker at the Congress of Berlin, yet in the end he managed to anger both the Russians and the Ottomans. Brokerage here meant mainly keeping Europe from going to war. Bismarck wanted to use the Ottoman Empire as a kind of lightning rod for European tensions. And, as was to become increasingly clear in the following years, he was willing to give away Ottoman territory—even if it was not really his to give—in order to achieve peace in Europe. But the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Franz Werfel Meets Adolf Hitler
• Introduction: Questions of Genocide?
• PART I: Armenian Blood Money
• PART II: Under German Noses
• PART III: Debating Genocide
• PART IV: The Nazis and the Armenian Genocide
• Epilogue: Armenian Writings on the Wall
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index