Armenian Genocide | World War I

During World War I, the Ottoman Empire committed the Armenian genocide, which resulted in the systematic death of around one million ethnic Armenians. It was accomplished mainly by mass executions, death marches leading to the Syrian Desert, and the forced Islamization of Armenian women and children, spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Before World War I, Armenians were confined in eastern Anatolia and held a safe but inferior Ottoman society. In the 1890s and 1909, large-scale killings of Armenians occurred. The Ottoman Empire suffered a succession of military defeats and territory losses, particularly during the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars, prompting CUP officials to fear that the Armenians, whose country in eastern Anatolia was seen as the Turkish nation's heartland, might try to break free as well. Ottoman paramilitaries slaughtered local Armenians during their invasion of Russian and Persian lands. Even though no such insurrection existed, Ottoman commanders saw isolated signs of Armenian resistance as evidence of a general uprising. The goal of mass deportation was to end the Armenian Question and eliminate the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence for good. Following a February command, Armenian troops in the Ottoman Army were disarmed and executed.

Hundreds of Armenian academics and community leaders were picked up, detained, and deported from Constantinople on April 24th, 1915. (Istanbul). In 1915 and 1916, on Talaat Pasha's orders, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenian women, children, the elderly, and the infirm were forced on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert. The exiles were denied food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacre as paramilitary guards pushed them onward. The survivors were split up into detention camps in the Syrian Desert. Another wave of atrocities was planned in 1916, with about 200,000 deportees still alive by the end of the year. Among 100,000 and 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcefully embraced Islam and assimilated into Muslim families. Through the Turkish War of Freedom following World War I, the Turkish nationalist party carried out genocide and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors. More than two millennia of Armenian civilization were destroyed in eastern Anatolia due to the Armenian genocide. In addition, it permitted the establishment of an ethnonational Turkish state by destroying and expelling Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians. As of 2021, 31 countries and the vast majority of historians have recognized the events as genocide. However, the Turkish government claims that deporting Armenians was a legal action that could not be classified as genocide.

Table: Brief Details of the Armenian Genocide

Armenians in the Ottoman Empire

Armenians have been attested in Anatolia since the sixth century BCE, more than a millennium before the Turkish invasion. In the fourth century CE, the Kingdom of Armenia made Christianity its official religion, founding the Armenian Apostolic Church. Following the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Safavid Empire fought for control over Western Armenia, which was irrevocably divided from Eastern Armenia by the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639. Non-Muslims were given a low but safe position in Ottoman society under the millet system. Sharia law codified Islamic primacy while granting non-Muslims property rights and freedom of worship for a particular tax.

On the day earlier of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had almost two million Armenians. According to estimations from the Armenian Patriarchate for 1913–1914, the empire had 2,925 Armenian towns and villages, with 2,084 in the Armenian Highlands in the vilayets of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Erzerum, Harput, and Van. In most regions where they lived, Armenians were a minority, living alongside Turkish, Kurdish, and Greek Orthodox neighbours. Even though the majority of Ottoman Armenians were peasant farmers, they were overrepresented in trade. As middlemen minorities, there was a significant imbalance between certain Armenians' riches and the group's overall political power, leaving them particularly susceptible.

Land Conflict and Reforms

Armenians in the eastern provinces were subjected to semi-feudal conditions, including forced labour, unlawful taxation, and unsolved crimes, including robberies, murders, and sexual assaults. The Tanzimat reforms of the nineteenth century removed the safeguards that Armenian millet members had previously enjoyed. Still, they did not erase the common impression that they were different and inferior. The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 underprivileged Armenians, who faced double taxation from Kurdish landlords and the Ottoman government. From 1860 onwards, conditions for Armenian peasants in the eastern regions deteriorated.

As a result of the sedentarization of Kurdish tribes and the entry of Muslim refugees and immigrants following the Caucasus War, Armenians have faced large-scale land takeover since the mid-nineteenth century. When Sultan Abdul Hamid II took power in 1876, the state began confiscating Armenian-owned land in the eastern provinces and handing it over to Muslim immigrants as part of a deliberate program to diminish the Armenian population in these areas. The people of the Armenian Highlands plummeted due to these conditions; 300,000 Armenians left in the eras leading up to World War I, while others relocated to towns. A few Armenians joined revolutionary political parties to improve their situation, the most powerful of which was the Dashnaktsutyun, which was created in 1890.

The Ottoman Empire was obliged to lose sections of eastern Anatolia, the Balkans, and Cyprus due to Russia's crushing victory in the 1877–1878 war. The Ottoman government pledged to implement reforms and ensure the physical protection of its Armenian citizens at the 1878 Berlin Congress. Still, there was no enforcement mechanism in place, and conditions continued to deteriorate. This was the first time Armenians were employed to influence Ottoman affairs, and it marked the beginning of the Armenian Question in foreign diplomacy. Despite being dubbed the "faithful millet" compared to Greeks and others who had previously defied Ottoman control, Armenians began to be seen as provocative and ungrateful after 1878. Abdul Hamid formed the Hamidiye regiments from Kurdish tribes in 1891, empowering them to operate against Armenians with impunity. Between 1895 and 1896, at least 100,000 Armenians were killed by Ottoman soldiers, Kurdish tribes, and mobs incited violence. A large number of Armenian communities were forced to convert to Islam. The massacres were carried out with the intent of brutally restoring the former social order, in which Christians would accept Muslim authority without Question, and driving Armenians to depart, so reducing their numbers.

Young Turk Revolution

Abdul Hamid's authoritarianism led the development of the Young Turks, an opposition movement dedicated to overthrowing him and restoring the Ottoman Empire's 1876 Constitution, which Abdul Hamid had suspended in 1877. The undisclosed and groundbreaking Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), centred in Salonica, was one of the Young Turks' factions, with flamboyant conspirator Mehmed Talaat emerging as a significant member. Despite their reservations about the Young Turk movement's expanding, exclusionary Turkish nationalism, the Dashnaktsutyun allied with the CUP in 1907. The Young Turk Rebellion, which began with a succession of CUP killings of top Hamidian officials in Macedonia, brought the CUP to power in 1908. Abdul Hamid was obliged to reinstate the 1876 constitution and re-establish parliament, which Ottomans of all races and religions applauded. Although security in the eastern provinces improved after 1908, the CUP did not undo decades of land usurpation.

In early 1909, Abdul Hamid staged an abortive coup, backed by conservatives and some liberals who were fed up with the CUP's increasingly harsh rule. Armed Muslims stormed the Armenian quarter of Adana after learning of the coup, and Armenians retaliated. Instead of protecting Armenians, Ottoman forces armed the riots. As a result, between 20,000 and 25,000 people were killed in Adana and surrounding towns, Armenians. Local politicians, academics, and Islamic clerics, especially CUP members in Adana, provoked the events, unlike the Hamidian atrocities coordinated by the central government. Although the horrors went unpunished, the Dashnaktsutyun remained hopeful that changes would be implemented to improve security and restore lands until late 1912, when they broke with the CUP and appealed to European powers. Finally, the CUP grudgingly consented to the German-brokered Armenian reforms on February 8th, 1914. The reforms, which were never implemented due to World War I, called for two European inspectors to oversee the Ottoman east and the reserve of the Hamidiye. Leaders of the CUP thought that these reforms would lead to partition and used them as a justification for the Armenian population's extermination in 1915.

Balkan Wars

The First Balkan War of 1912 cost the empire nearly all of its European territory and culminated in the mass deportation of Muslims from the Balkans. The crimes committed against Balkan Muslims enraged Ottoman Muslim society, fueling anti-Christian feelings and a thirst for vengeance. The Balkan Wars are primarily regarded as the end of Ottomanism, the movement for pluralism and coexistence. Instead, the CUP moved to a more radical form of Turkish nationalism to keep the empire alive. Many of the empire's troubles were blamed on non-Muslim population concentrations in critical places, with CUP leaders like Talaat and Enver Pasha concluding by mid-1914 that they were "internal malignancies" that needed to be removed. Because CUP officials believed that their homeland in Anatolia, which they saw as the final refuge of the Turkish nation, would become another Balkans, Armenians were seen the most threatening.

In January 1913, the CUP staged another revolution, establishing a one-party state and ruthlessly suppressing all internal rivals, real or imagined. The CUP altered the demography of border areas after the coup by resettling Muslim immigrants while forcing Christians to flee; newcomers were granted property that had previously belonged to Christians. When the Ottoman Empire reclaimed parts of Eastern Thrace during the Second Balkan War in mid-1913, a plundering and intimidation campaign against Greeks and Armenians forced many to flee. In May and June 1914, Muslim bandits backed by the CUP and occasionally joined by the regular army forcibly evicted around 150,000 Greek Orthodox from the Aegean coast. According to historian Matthias Bjrnlund, the perceived success of the Greek deportations allowed CUP leaders to anticipate even more drastic actions as a continuation of the Turkification campaign.     

On August 2nd, 1914, just a few days after World War I broke out, the CUP allied with Germany. In the same month, CUP officials attended a Dashnak convention. They demanded that the Dashnaktsutyun urge Russian Armenians to participate on the Ottoman side in a conflict with Russia. Instead, the delegates decided that Armenians should fight for the nations in which they were born. As a result, the Ottoman government recruited thousands of captives during its war preparations to join the paramilitary Special Organization, which was initially tasked with inciting Muslim revolts behind Russian lines before the Ottoman Empire formally entered the war. The Ottoman Empire joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers on October 29th, 1914, when it launched a surprise attack on Russian ports in the Black Sea.

Requisitions during the war were frequently corrupt and arbitrary, and Greeks and Armenians were repeatedly targeted. Many troops of all races and religions left owing to strict conditions and worry for their families, despite Armenian officials urging young men to embrace conscription into the army. The Special Organization killed local Armenians and Syriac Christians during the Ottoman invasion of Russian and Persian lands. Beginning in November 1914, the provincial governors of Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum sent a flurry of telegrams to the central government, urging the central government to take harsher actions against Armenians throughout the empire. These forces were a significant factor in increasing anti-Armenian persecution, which the central government had already sanctioned before 1915. In late 1914 and early 1915, Armenian civil officials were fired from their jobs. The CUP authorities agreed in February 1915 to disarm Armenian soldiers in the army and assign them to labour battalions. Although many competent employees were spared until 1916, Armenian soldiers in labour battalions were ruthlessly executed.

At the Combat of Sarikamish, fought from December 1914 to January 1915, Ottoman Minister of War Enver Pasha gained leadership of the Ottoman army to invade Russian territory and attempted to encircle the Russian Caucasus Army. His forces were crushed, losing about 60,000 soldiers, unprepared for the brutal winter circumstances. In Bitlis Vilayet, the fleeing Ottoman army indiscriminately demolished scores of Ottoman Armenian villages, massacring their residents. Enver publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians, accusing them of intentionally siding with the Russians, a theory that CUP officials agreed on. Any local event or finding of arms in the hands of Armenians was used as proof of a larger conspiracy against the empire. The assertions of an Armenian insurrection in the records, according to historian Taner Akçam, have no basis in reality and were purposefully invented.

Since December, massacres of Armenian men have been taking place in the vicinity of Başkale in Van vilayet. Dashnak leaders attempted to maintain calm, saying that even justified self-defence could escalate violence. On April 18th, the governor, Djevdet Bey, ordered the Armenians of Van to hand over their weaponry, posing a problem. The Armenians anticipated being killed if they complied, but if they refused, it would justify murders. The Ottoman onslaught began on April 20th, and Armenians fortified themselves in Van and withstood it. On Djevdet's orders, Armenians in nearby villages were slaughtered during the siege. On May 18th, Russian soldiers took Van, discovering 55,000 corpses in the province, over half of the area's prewar Armenian population. Djevdet's army marched to Bitlis and raided Armenian and Syriac villages, killing males on the spot, kidnapping women and children, and marching others away to be executed later. Only a dozen Armenians lived in the vilayet by the end of June.

Djemal Pasha planned the first deportations of Armenians in February 1915, targeting Armenians in Cilicia who was moved to central Anatolia's Konya region. The CUP Central Committee agreed in late March or early April to remove Armenians from locations near the front lines significantly. Hundreds of Armenian political intellectuals, activists, and community leaders were arrested in Constantinople and around the empire on the night of April 23-24, 1915. The majority of those imprisoned were killed due to Talaat's command to remove the Armenian leadership and everyone capable of organizing resistance. On the same day, Talaat ordered the closure of all Armenian political organizations and the relocation to the Syrian Desert of Armenians who had already been transferred from Cilicia from central Anatolia, where they would have likely survived.

Aims

Deportation was a death sentence; the authorities had planned and intended the deportees to die. Deportation took place only behind enemy lines, where there was no active insurrection, and only in the absence of widespread resistance. Armenians in the battle zone, on the other hand, were massacred. According to Ottoman records, the administration planned to reduce the population of Armenians in the sources of deportation to no more than 5% and 10% in the destination districts. Without mass murder, this goal would be impossible to achieve. The deportation of Armenians and the resettling of Muslims in their ancestral territories were intended to alter Anatolia's demographics permanently. By eradicating the concentrated Armenian population of the empire's eastern provinces, CUP planned to extinguish any possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence forever. The goal of the deportations, according to Talaat, was to find a permanent solution to the Armenian problem. However, the contention is whether the genocide was carried out to protect the empire or pave the way for a Turkish nation-state.

Even though it was done for military reasons, the deportation and massacre of Armenians provided no military benefit to the empire and harmed the Ottoman war effort. The Ottoman Empire was torn between its desire to eradicate Armenians and its practical necessity for their labour; those Armenians maintained for their abilities, particularly in war industries, were critical to the Ottoman Army's logistics. The CUP had eliminated Armenian presence in eastern Anatolia by late 1915. Deportation was expanded to western Anatolia and European Turkey in August 1915. Some cities and places with a small Armenian population were spared from deportation in part.

Administrative Organization

Talaat ordered the expulsion of all Armenians in Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum on May 23rd, 1915. The Council of Ministers passed the Temporary Law of Deportation, which authorized authorities to deport anyone deemed "suspicious," to give the deportation, which was already well underway in eastern Anatolia, a veneer of legitimacy. Talaat ordered the expulsion of all Armenians across the empire on June 21st, including those at Adrianople, which was 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) from the Russian front.

Overall, governments at the national, regional, and municipal levels collaborated with the CUP to commit genocide. The Directorate supervised the deportation and resettlement of Muslim immigrants in unoccupied houses and lands for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants (IAMM). Talaat's Bureau of the Interior and the Special Organization, which received orders directly from the CUP Central Committee, closely coordinated their efforts through the IAMM. Instructions for the expulsion of Armenians were conveyed through official channels. Still, orders of a criminal nature, such as those calling for genocide, were communicated through party lines and destroyed upon receipt. Gendarmes or local militia escorted most deportation convoys. The Special Organization carried out the killings close the front lines, while those further away were carried out by local militias, bandits, gendarmes, or Kurdish tribes, depending on the area. The military was only involved in genocidal atrocities in the vilayets of Van, Erzerum, and Bitlis inside the territory controlled by the Third Army, which held eastern Anatolia.

Many of the murderers were Caucasians who equated Armenian oppressors with Russian oppressors. During the genocide, nomadic Kurds perpetrated many atrocities, whereas settled Kurds did so only seldom. Ideology, retribution, a desire for Armenian property, and careerism were among the objectives of the perpetrators. State-appointed imams encouraged the killing of Armenians to motivate perpetrators, and killers were entitled to a third of Armenian movable goods. Beyond that, embezzlement was punished. Some Ottoman politicians spoke out against the massacre, but many were fired or assassinated. In addition, the government issued an order that any Muslim who housed an Armenian against the authorities' wishes would be put to death.

Death Marches

Even though most non-disabled Armenian males were drafted, others defected, paid the exemption task, or were too young to be conscripted. Unlike the Hamidian massacres or the Adana events, massacres in Armenian villages were rarely carried out to avoid property destruction or unauthorized theft. Instead, during the first several days of deportation, the men were frequently removed from the rest of the deportees and executed. Few objected, believing that doing so would put their families in jeopardy. Boys over the age of twelve were treated as though they were adults. The locations of executions were chosen for their proximity to main roads and challenging terrain, lakes, wells, or cisterns, which made it easier to conceal or dispose of the bodies. The convoys would halt near a transit camp when the escorts would demand a ransom from Armenians. Those who were unable to pay were killed. Units of the Special Organization were stationed at the assassination sites, typically in gendarme uniforms, while escorting gendarmes did not always engage in the killing.

From June 1915, at least 150,000 Armenians travelled through Erzindjan, where a series of transit camps were established to regulate victims' flow to the Kemah gorge slaughter site. Thousands of Armenians were slaughtered when paramilitaries shoved them off rocks near Lake Hazar. During the genocide, about 500,000 Armenians passed through the Firincilar plain south of Malatya, one of the worst regions. Arriving convoys would have discovered gorges already full with bodies from previous convoys after passing through the plain on their way to the Kahta highlands. The Special Organization systematically killed many more trapped in valleys of tributaries of the Tigris, Euphrates, or Murat Rivers. Armenian men were frequently drowned by being chained back-to-back and thrown into the water, a procedure that was not employed on women.

Authorities saw dumping bodies in rivers as a cost-effective and practical procedure, yet it resulted in widespread pollution downstream. Many bodies drifted down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, clogging them and necessitating explosives to clean them. Other decomposing bodies clung to riverbanks, and some even made it as far as the Persian Gulf. Long after the atrocities, the rivers remained contaminated, spreading illnesses downstream. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died on the highways, and their bodies were either buried quickly or just dumped beside them. Due to the pollution of corpses, key roads were impassable, and typhus epidemics spread throughout adjacent villages; the Ottoman authority also wanted the corpses cleaned to prevent photographic recording. The Ottoman authorities ordered that the bodies be cleared as soon as possible, but this was not always done.

Women and children, who made up most deportees, were often put to long marches over rugged terrain without food or water rather than being executed right away. Those who couldn't keep up were either shot or left to die. In the summer of 1915, some were forced to trek up to 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) in the heat. Exiles from western Anatolia were permitted to travel via train. As a result, there was a contrast between the convoys from eastern Anatolia, which was nearly destroyed, and those from the west, which made up the majority of those making it to Syria. Around 99 per cent of Armenians deported from Erzerum, for example, never arrived at their destination.

Islamization

Islamization of Armenians was a crucial structural component of the genocide and was carried out as a systematic state strategy involving the bureaucracy, police, court, and church. Among 100,000 and 200,000 Armenians were reportedly converted to Islam. Some Armenians were permitted to convert to Islam and avoid deportation. Still, the state insisted on their physical elimination if their numbers exceeded the 5 to 10% barrier or if there was a risk of them losing their nationality and culture. Talaat Pasha personally authorized Armenian conversion and meticulously documented converted Armenian loyalties until the war's end. Although conversion to Islam was the first and most crucial phase, the procedure also demanded the abolition of Armenian names, language, and culture and rapid marriage to a Muslim man for women. Thus, although Islamization provided the best chance of survival, it also violated Armenian moral and social values.

Because these ladies would have to convert to Islam and lose their Armenian identity, the CUP allowed them to marry into Muslim households. Young girls and women were frequently used as domestic servants or sex slaves. Some youngsters were kidnapped and forced to work as slaves for individual Muslims. Some children were taken from their parents without their consent, while others were sold or given up by their parents to preserve their lives. Special state-run orphanages were also established with stringent protocols aimed at robbing their kids of their Armenian identity. As a result, most Armenian children who survived the genocide were subjected to exploitation, forced conversion to Islam, and physical and sexual abuse.

In contrast to those taken in Syria by Arabs and Bedouins, women and children who fell into Muslim hands during the journey often ended up in Turkish or Kurdish hands. Military commanders instructed their soldiers that they could do whatever they wanted, which led to numerous rapes. Despite Armenian women's best efforts to prevent sexual violence, death was frequently the only option. Deportees were paraded naked in Damascus and sold as sex slaves in some localities, providing a lucrative source of cash for the gendarmes who accompanied them. Some were sold to Muslim Hajj pilgrims in Arabian slave markets and as far afield as Tunisia or Algeria.

In mid-1915, the first arrivals were housed in Aleppo. Since mid-November, convoys have been refused entrance to the city and have been rerouted to Mosul through the Baghdad Railway or the Euphrates. The first transit camp was set up in Sibil, east of Aleppo, with one truckload arriving each day and another departing for Meskene or Deir ez-Zor. In Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, dozens of concentration camps were established. Around 870,000 deportees had arrived in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia by October 1915. Most of the survivors were relocated between centres several times, each for a few weeks until only a few remained. This method debilitated the Armenians physically and spread sickness to the point where, in late 1915, specific camps were closed due to the possibility of disease spreading to the Ottoman soldiers. The camps near Aleppo were liquidated in late 1915, and survivors were forced to march to Ras al-Ayn; in early 1916, the centres around Ras al-Ayn were closed, and survivors were transferred to Deir ez-Zor.

Later their involuntary March to the Syrian Desert, Armenians were denied food and water in general; many died of malnutrition, weariness, or sickness, including dysentery, typhus, and pneumonia. Some local officials provided food to Armenians, while others accepted bribes in exchange for food and water. Officially, aid organizations were prohibited from delivering meals to deportees, yet some managed to get over this restriction. Some Armenians denied aid, according to survivors, because they feared it would only prolong their suffering. Female detainees were raped by the guards, who also enabled Bedouins to invade the camps at night for raiding and rape; some women were compelled to marry. Thousands of Armenian children were traded to childless Turks, Arabs, and Jews who came to the camps to acquire their parents' children. There were no detention camps or large-scale massacres on the Ottoman Fourth Army's region, which Djemal Pasha commanded; instead, Armenians were resettled and recruited to labour for the war effort. They were enforced to convert to Islam or risk expulsion.

The Armenians' ability to adapt and survive exceeded the perpetrators' expectations. Many deportees were helped, and Armenian lives were saved, thanks to a loosely structured, Armenian-led resistance network located in Aleppo. Around 500,000 deportees were still alive in Syria and Mesopotamia at the start of 1916. In February 1916, Talaat Pasha authorized the second wave of murders, fearing that surviving Armenians might return home after the war. Armenians who remained in Anatolia were targeted in the second round of deportations. Between March and October 1916, almost 200,000 Armenians were massacred, mainly in distant regions near Deir ez-Zor and parts of the Khabur valley where their bodies would not pose a public health problem. Maximum of the Armenians who had survived the camps were slaughtered in the massacres. By the end of January 1917, state-sponsored killings of Armenians had almost stopped, while occasional massacres and famine continued.

The eradication of the Armenian bourgeoisie to create a place for a Turkish and Muslim middle class and the construction of a statist "national economy" governed by Muslim Turks was a supplementary motivator for genocide. In June 1914, a decree requiring many ethnic minority merchants to hire Muslims kicked off the push to Turkify the economy. Following the deportations, the victims' companies were taken over by Muslims, who were frequently inexperienced, resulting in financial troubles. The genocide wreaked havoc on the Ottoman economy; the expulsion of qualified professionals harmed Muslims, and entire regions went hungry after their farmers were deported. To handle and redistribute property stolen from Armenians, the Ottoman and Turkish governments issued a series of Abandoned Properties Laws. Although the rules stated that the state was administering the assets on behalf of the absent Armenians, there was no provision in the regulations for the properties to be returned to their owners if they had ceased to exist.

The Republic of Turkey and its lawful arrangement, according to Akçam and Ümit Kurt, were based in part on the appropriation of Armenian cultural, social, and economic richness and the expulsion of Armenians. The confiscated property was frequently used to pay Armenian deportations and Muslim resettlement and army, militia, and other government expenditures. It eventually became a large part of the economy of the post-1923 republic, providing it with capital. Many lower-class Turks rose to the middle class due to the eviction and deportation of Armenian competition. Confiscation of Armenian properties persisted well into the twentieth century, with the National Security Council ruling in 2006 that property data dating back to 1915 must be kept secret to safeguard national security. All signs of Armenian existence were deliberately destroyed, including churches and monasteries, libraries, archaeological sites, khachkars, and animal and place names.

The genocide decimated the Ottoman Empire's Armenian population by 90%. The precise number of Armenians killed is unknown and impossible to estimate. Contemporaries and historians have put the number of Armenians who died in the genocide campaign during World War I at around 1 million, with estimates varying from 600,000 to 1.5 million. Deportations of Armenians ranged from 800,000 to 1.2 million. According to Talaat Pasha's inadequate numbers, 924,158 Armenians were deported; officials' notes estimate a 30% increase. The 1.2 million exiled figure is consistent with estimates by Johannes Lepsius and Arnold J. Toynbee. According to recent estimates, barely 200,000 deported Armenians were still alive in late 1916, according to Akçam.

By threatening journalists and photographers with arrest, the Ottoman Empire attempted to prevent them from documenting the atrocities. Nonetheless, corroborated stories of mass murders were widely reported in the Western press. The Triple Entente (Britain, Russia, and France) formally condemned the Ottoman Empire for crimes against humanity and civilization on May 24th, 1915, and threatened to hold those responsible to account. Following World War II, crimes against humanity became a category of international criminal law. Witness accounts were published in works like The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (1916) and Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1918), which helped to raise public knowledge about the genocide.

Throughout World War I, the German Kingdom was a military ally of the Ottoman Empire. In early 1915, German diplomats permitted the limited evacuation of Armenians but did nothing to stop the genocide, which has sparked debate. Efforts to gather funds for Armenian survivors were launched in dozens of countries. People in 49 countries organized "Golden Rule Sundays" in 1925, during which they ate the diet of Armenian refugees to collect money for humanitarian activities. Near East Relief provided $110 million for Ottoman Empire refugees between 1915 and 1930.

In 1917 and 1918, as the British Army marched north through the Levant, they rescued 100,000 to 150,000 Armenians occupied for the Ottoman military in appalling conditions, not including those detained by Arab tribes. To reclaim stolen Armenian women and children, Armenians organized a coordinated operation known as vorpahavak. Armenian leaders abandoned traditional patrilineality to designate children born to Armenian women and their Muslim captors as Armenians. Alexandropol's orphanage housed 25,000 orphans, the world's most significant number. The Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople reported caring for 100,000 orphans in 1920, with another 100,000 estimated to be held hostage. Although the Ottoman government issued legislation ordering the recovery of stolen Armenian property after the war, 90 percent of Armenians were denied access to their homes, particularly in eastern Anatolia. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1920, gave Armenia a significant portion of eastern Anatolia, but it was never ratified.

Trials

Following the armistice, Allied governments pushed for war criminals to be prosecuted. The Ottoman Special Military Tribunal was founded when Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha openly acknowledged that 800,000 Ottoman people of Armenian heritage had died due to official action. Documentary evidence and sworn testimony from Muslims were almost solely relied on by the courts-martial. All government ministers, the army, and the CUP were named in the indictments, which concentrated on the crimes of deportation and murder. According to the court, the crime of mass murder of Armenians was "planned and carried out by the top commanders of CUP." Only three of the eighteen criminals were eventually hanged since the rest had fled and were convicted in their absence. The prosecution was complicated by the prevalent perception among Turkish Muslims that the Armenian genocide was not a crime. The atrocities were increasingly seen as necessary and legitimate in the establishment of a Turkish nation-state.

The nationalist movement approved a statute on March 31st, 1923, offering impunity to CUP war criminals. The Treaty of Sèvres was cancelled later that year by the Treaty of Lausanne, which established Turkey's existing borders and provided for the evacuation of the Greek people. Its minority protection clauses lacked a mechanism for enforcement and were largely ignored in practice. According to historian Hans-Lukas Kieser, the world community indirectly sanctioned the Armenian genocide by signing the pact. Talaat Pasha was assassinated in Berlin on March 15th, 1921, as part of Effort Nemesis, the Dashnaktsutyun's secret operation in the 1920s to kill the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. The prosecution of his confessed killer, Soghomon Tehlirian, centred on Talaat's genocidal culpability. Tehlirian was found not guilty.

Turkish War of Independence

Talaat stressed his fulfilment of the essential war goal, establishing Turkey into a nation-state in Anatolia, in September 1918. To fight the Turkish War of Independence, remaining CUP cadres created the Turkish nationalist movement. According to historian Raymond Kévorkian, the battle was designed to finish the genocide by destroying all Armenian, Greek, and Syriac survivors. The nationalist movement relied on the backing of the genocide's perpetrators and those who profited from it. Following the capture of Marash in February 1920, Turkish militants slaughtered thousands of Armenian residents. Between 1922 and 1929, Turkish authorities expelled thousands of Armenians from southern Turkey, which was under French mandate.

At least 200,000 people perished of starvation or sickness in the newly formed First Republic of Armenia in 1918, primarily due to a Turkish blockade of food supply. The purposeful destruction of crops in Eastern Armenia by Turkish troops, both before and after the armistice, increased food shortages. Between 1918 and 1920, Armenian militants killed at least 40,000 to 60,000 Muslims in retaliation, giving a pretext for genocide. In 1920, Turkish general Kâzm Karabekir invaded Armenia to physically and politically destroy the country. Only the takeover of Armenia by the Soviet Union averted another slaughter.

Surviving Armenians were concentrated in three areas. Around 100,000 Armenians lived in Constantinople and another 200,000 in the provinces of the Republic of Turkey, primarily women who had been forcibly converted or married and had adopted children. While Armenians in the city endured prejudice, they could keep their cultural identity; those living outside of Istanbul, however, continued to face forced Islamization and the kidnapping of girls after 1923. Courts in early republican Turkey did not enforce the property rights granted to non-Muslims on paper. According to estimates, up to 2 million Turkish nationals have at least one Armenian grandmother. During the genocide, around 295,000 Armenians escaped to Russian-controlled territory, most of whom ended up in Soviet Armenia. In the Middle East, there were an estimated 200,000 Armenian refugees. The ethnic cleansing of Anatolia, the Armenian genocide, the Assyrian genocide, and the expulsion of Greeks all cleared the ground for establishing a Turkish ethnonational state.

The Armenian genocide, according to historian Margaret Lavinia Anderson, became legendary as the pinnacle of horrors imaginable before World War II. Contemporaries referred to it as the biggest crime of all time and the worst chapter in modern history. In the aftermath of the war, the Ottoman grand vizier Ferid stated that humanity and civilizations were trembling and would continue to shake in the face of this disaster.

Turkey

The Turkish government claims that the mass deportation of Armenians was a lawful step to address an existential threat to the empire but that there was no desire to eliminate the Armenian people, based on the CUP's explanation for its actions. Except for the Peoples' Democratic Party, Turkey's major political parties embrace Armenian genocide denial, which most Turks share. However, many Kurds who have experienced political repression in Turkey have recognized and condemned the genocide.

Because of its connection to the republic's founding, the Turkish state views the discussion of the genocide as a danger to national security. Article 301 of the Penal Code, which prohibitions insulting the Turkish people and governmental institutions, makes acknowledgement of the genocide unlawful. Millions of dollars have been expended on lobbying, intimidation, and threats in Turkey's century-long effort to suppress any declaration or reference of the genocide in other countries. Since denial is accompanied by the rhetoric of Armenian treachery, aggressiveness, criminality, and territorial desire, historian Donald Bloxham recognizes this.

Armenia and Azerbaijan

Every year, on April 24th, the anniversary of the deportation of Armenian intellectuals, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is observed in Armenia and around the world. A hundred thousand Armenians rallied in Yerevan on April 24th, 1965, and diaspora Armenians demonstrated worldwide in support of genocide acknowledgement and land annexation from Turkey. Two years later, at Tsitsernakaberd, above Yerevan, a memorial was completed.

Armenians and Turkic Azeris have been at odds over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, since 1988. Initially marked by peaceful rallies by Armenians, the conflict quickly escalated into a bloodbath that saw both sides commit atrocities, displacing more than half a million people. Throughout the competition, the governments of Azerbaijan and Armenia frequently accused one other of plotting genocide. Azerbaijan has likewise joined Turkey in its denial of the Armenian genocide.

International recognition: Many Armenian diaspora activists have fought for legal acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide due to the Turkish state's continued denial. This activity has become a fundamental preoccupation of the Armenian diaspora. Many countries avoided recognition from the 1970s forward to maintain good relations with Turkey. As of 2021, 31 countries, including Pope Francis and the European Parliament, had recognized the genocide.

Cultural Depictions

Following his meetings with Armenian survivors in the Middle East, Austrian–Jewish writer Franz Werfel authored The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933), a dramatized retelling of the successful Armenian rebellion in Musa Dagh, as a warning of Nazism's dangers. According to Ihrig, the book is one of the most important works of twentieth-century literature dealing with genocide, and it is still required reading for Armenians around the world. In English-language Armenian-American writing, the genocide became a central theme. Ravished Armenia, the first feature film depicting the Armenian genocide, was released in 1919 as a fundraiser for Near East Relief and was based on survivor Aurora Mardiganian, who played herself in the film. To mark the occasion, more than 200 memorials have been created in 32 nations.

Archives and Historiography

Despite deliberate efforts to remove incriminating evidence, the genocide is thoroughly recorded in the records of Germany, Austria, the United States, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom, as well as the Ottoman archives. Thousands of eyewitness reports from Western missionaries and Armenian survivors are also available. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who popularized the word genocide in 1944, became interested in war crimes after reading about Soghomon Tehlirian's trial for the killing of Talaat Pasha in 1921. Lemkin regarded the tragedy of the Armenians as one of the most significant genocides of the twentieth century. Almost all historians and researchers outside of Turkey and an increasing number of Turkish scholars recognize the Ottoman Empire's genocide of Armenians.