Germany and the Armenian Genocide (pg. 1)
Germany and the Armenian Genocide
An Interview with Margaret Anderson
Khatchig Mouradian interviewed by
November 14, 2006
The issue of German responsibility in the Armenian Genocide has been researched by a number of scholars in the past decades. The Ottoman Empire was an ally of Germany during WWI, when up to a million and a half Armenians were uprooted from the Empire and perished in a state-sponsored campaign of mass annihilation.
On June 15, 2005, the German Parliament passed a motion honoring and commemorating “the victims of violence, murder and expulsion among the Armenian people before and during the First World War.” The Bundestag deplored “the deeds of the Young Turkish government in the Ottoman Empire which have resulted in the almost total annihilation of the Armenians in Anatolia.”
The Bundestag also acknowledged and deplored “the inglorious role played by the German Reich which, in spite of a wealth of information on the organized expulsion and annihilation of Armenians, has made no attempt to intervene and stop these atrocities.”
In this interview with Professor Margaret Anderson, conducted by phone from Beirut, we discuss issues related to Germany and the Armenian Genocide.
Margaret Anderson is a professor of history at the University of California in Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University. She has researched electoral politics and political culture in Germany and in a comparative European perspective; democracy and democratic institutions; religion and politics; and religion and society, -especially Catholicism in the 19th century. She is the author of Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford University Press, 1981 and , Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton University Press, 2000). Her research has more recently revolved around Germany and the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian Genocide.
Khatchig Mouradian: How did you first become interested in the Armenian Genocide?
Margaret Anderson: It was quite an accident. When I finished my last book, I needed to do something different so that I didn’t get stale. A colleague of mine, who researched Italian history during the same period, said “You should work on the Armenians.” I told him that I can’t work on the Armenians, I don’t read Armenian, I don’t read Turkish. And he said, yes, but you read German and there is a lot of stuff to do on Germany.” He was right. There are 56 volumes in the German Foreign Office devoted to the Armenian persecutions, as well as many more under other titles—like the embassy in Constantinople—that are quite relevant to this horrible story.
I have a colleague, Stephan Astourian, a specialist in Armenian history, without whom I could never have begun this. He was immediately helpful in steering me to the proper Armenian sources and letting me understand the historiography.
K.M.: How thoroughly have these documents been researched?
M.A.: Vahakn N. Dadrian has used them, most notably in German Responsibility in The Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (1996), and even before that several other people have done it. Ulrich Trumpener had an excellent chapter in his 1968 book, Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914-1918. More recently, Rolf Hosfeld's Operation Nemesis: Die Türkei, Deutschland und der Völkermord an den Armeniern (2005); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Cornell, Ithaca, 2005) and Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Armenians (Oxford, 2005) employ these documents to good effect. As far as I know, scholars in Turkey haven’t published anything using these materials; though when I was in the German Foreign Office Archives in Berlin, it was clear that some Turkish scholars had seen them. When you work in German archives you have to sign a sheet saying you have used these documents. So sometimes you can see who has used them ahead of you. Now, the documents from the German Foreign Office published by Johannes Lepsius in 1919 (under the title Deutschland und Armenien), along with the parts that his edition left out (which are not as significant as some scholars have thought) can be found online, edited by Wolfgang Gust. Gust has inserted in italics the parts that Lepsius's Deutschland und Armenien left out. Gust was able to do this by comparing Lepsius’s collection with the original documents. These are available online [at www.armenocide.de].
K.M.: In German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide, Dadrian argues that Lepsius left these sections out on purpose.
M.A.: I think Gust himself has now become a little more moderate on that issue. Most of the phrases and passages left out are completely insignificant from the standpoint of the question, Was there an Armenian Genocide and who was involved? They do not bear significantly on the question of the Genocide’s character. In some cases, Lepsius—if it was Lepsius who was responsible for the omissions—may have been protecting fellow Germans and Germany’s reputation, but in most of the cases, it seems to me, he was protecting Armenians. That is—and the national school of Turkish historians will be quick to jump on this—he would soften or leave out cases of Armenian revolutionary violence, and cover that up. Lepsius presents a picture of almost complete Armenian victimhood, of a people with no ability to strike back. Well, we know that is not true; the Armenians struck back when they could. But Lepsius was a churchman, and so disapproved of violence. And he was also trying to protect Armenians against what he had long known was the false charge of the German Turkophiles: that the Armenians were terrorists, that the “deportations” were a security measure against traitors, and that the CUP [Committee of Union and Progress] was only protecting the Ottoman state.
K.M.: Before we discuss Germany and the Ottoman Empire during WWI, can you put the pre-war German-Ottoman relations into perspective?
M.A.: Twenty years before the war and even right before the war, Germany didn’t have as many interests in the Ottoman Empire as, for example, the French and even the Austrians. It had less economic investment and fewer cultural institutions, but it certainly hoped to have a future there. Until the second Balkan war (1912-13), Germany worked very hard to keep the Ottoman Empire in operation because it was afraid, as many of the great powers were, that if the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, another European power would get it—probably Russia, and maybe even England or France. There was the fear that any country that annexed the Ottoman Empire, or parts of it, would grow too powerful, and the European equilibrium would grow dangerously unbalanced. Germany would suffer in particular, because unlike the others it had no foothold in the Mediterranean. This is why the Germans didn’t want the Ottoman Empire to dissolve.
After 1912, the Ottoman Empire began to look as if it were going to dissolve anyway, whatever Germany or the other European powers did. This feeling that it would soon go into “liquidation,” as the German Foreign Office called it, caused Germany to suddenly support the Armenians in 1913-14 in ways it had not done before. Germany in fact now so supported the reform deal in Eastern Anatolia that the powers finally forced the Ottomans to sign in February 1914, granting the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia a certain parity in public offices with the Muslim population there, and thus a kind of regional autonomy. Germany had not been in favor of insisting on reforms in the past, siding with the Ottoman government in resisting them. But in 1913 and the first half of 1914, seeing that the dissolution of the Empire might be near, it wanted to have friends in what would be the leftover pieces. These friends, they hoped, would be the Armenians.
K.M.: But this was far from materializing into something positive for the Armenians, wasn’t it? According to Hilmar Kaiser, from 1915-16 a uniform position toward the Ottoman Armenians did not exist.
M.A.: Well, yes. But by 1915-16, Germany was in the midst of a World War, which changed every calculation. And remember, the German government lacked a uniform position on many burning issues: about the future of the Ukraine, which the Germans were occupying in 1915, and the future of Belgium, which they had occupied since August 1914. There was no uniform German position on any of the central questions about the post-war settlement. Rather, there were huge conflicts within the German government itself during WWI as the right-wingers (much of the Army) and the moderates (mostly the Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, and the Foreign Office) struggled for control over future policy. So the absence of a uniform position on the Ottoman Armenians is not surprising. However, having said that, I think it is also true that at the higher reaches of the German government, the decision was that they had an ally—the Ottoman government—and they would not do anything that would jeopardize their alliance with it. Although there were many Germans in the Ottoman Empire itself—businessmen, bankers, engineers, diplomats—protesting the Ottoman policy, by the time the issue got to the top in Berlin, the Chancellor’s position was clear: Whatever the Turks may do, they are our allies and not the Armenians.
K.M.: So can we say that there was a policy of denying the extermination of the Armenians.
M.A.: Yes and no. Yes, it was denied to the public at large. This was a policy in which other sections of society were complicit. My work has been on German public opinion, and the elites knew what was going on. Top professors of oriental languages; some journalists; at least six superintendents (roughly bishops) in the Protestant church; certainly the lay leadership among German Catholics (such as the Center Party's leader in parliament Matthias Erzberger, who was assassinated by Right-wing thugs after the war); the pope; the head of the Deutsche Bank (as Hilmar Kaiser and Gerald D. Felman have shown); and other important members of the Reichstag, such as the later winner of the Nobel Peace Price, the liberal Gustav Stresemann, knew. Stresemann decided to keep silent about it. An Armenian-born graduate student in Berlin, Frau Elizabeth Khorikian, did a study of one of the largest circulation (and Left-wing) newspapers in Berlin during 1915, the Berliner Tageblatt. This paper issued sometimes three to four different editions a day, because every time there was war news, they brought another edition. And She looked at every single one. And in all of these issues, she found only five mentions of the Armenians during that whole period. Three were interviews with Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Halil Pasha, and two were reproductions of Turkish news releases. That’s it. The newspapers knew very well what was going on. Both the Social Democratic and the Christian press knew it. Christian journals said the most, although they said it carefully and in guarded language. Lepsius gave an interview on the 5th of October, 1915, to a group of newspapermen in Berlin, to tell them what he had learned on his recent trip to Constantinople/Istanbul from late July to early August. An editor of a socialist newspaper wrote: “If one wanted to apply European concepts of morality and politics to Turkish relationships, one would arrive at a completely distorted judgment.” In general, the newspapers were willing to follow the view that, We are in a war and the government thinks this alliance is important to us, so we will continue this alliance.
K.M.: Are you saying that there was no direct censorship?
M.A.: There was also direct censorship. When Lepsius printed 20,500 copies of his documents, many of them were confiscated by the German General in charge of censorship for the Berlin area before the Turks had even protested. But I think that had the press wanted to break the story, they could have done it. There was so much self-censorship that the government didn’t have to intervene. We will never know what would have happened if the press had tried to distribute Lepsius’s material, but they didn’t try, because they believed that it was more important to have the Turks on their side. The Allied invasion of Gallipoli began in March 1915. The defense of Gallipoli, it was believed, was absolutely central to a German victory, which Germans equated with their survival. And remember: 1,303 German soldiers died, on average, every day between August 1914 and armistice in November 1918. Not surprisingly, Germans were preoccupied by what was happening in Belgium, France, Galicia and the eastern front. They were not thinking that much about Turkey.
For me, that is all the more reason to see Lepsius, for all his flaws, as a hero. He didn’t pay attention only to what was best for Germany. Five days after his son was killed on the eastern front, he arrived in Constantinople, and according to him interviewed not just Enver Pasha but also Talaat. In my view, nobody has looked into the genuine mysteries behind Lepsius’s trip to Constantinople/Istanbul enough: Why did the German Foreign Office give him permission to go? How was he able to get an interview with Enver, and if he was telling the truth, also with Talaat? An ordinary friend of the Armenians and an ordinary writer and journalist (he wasn’t a pastor anymore since he had been forced to give that up when he refused to stop agitating on behalf of the Armenians in 1896) certainly would not have been able to in wartime talk to the War Minister or the Interior Minister of his own country, much less a foreign one. I believe that he was only able to do that because the German Foreign Office put pressure on the Turks to receive him. Why do you think they would have done that? Isn’t that a question worth asking?
K.M.: Why do you think they did that?
M.A.: In my view, they did it because at that time Lepsius made the German Foreign Office believe that the Armenians were, in fact, militarily important. Lepsius was playing a very dangerous game. He tried to play up the military importance of the Armenians on the Russian side of the border, and argued that they could be rallied to the side of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria), and that if they weren’t rallied behind the German cause—and here was the dangerous corollary—that they could actually hurt the Germans and the Turks in the war. That is, of course, the very excuse the Turkish government uses to justify what happened. But I think that in fact Lepsius was trying to exaggerate the military danger of the Armenian revolutionary movement in order to get Germany to pressure the Turks to stop the deportations and massacres. But by the time he got to Constantinople, by late July or early August 1915, most Armenians had already been deported, and it was clear to the German government that they had nothing to offer the Germans and posed no military threat to the Turks.
K.M.: Are there any documents on this?
M.A.: Beginning in late May 1915, Lepsius began contacts with the German Foreign Office in connection with the Van massacres and offered himself as a mediator between the Turks and Armenians. He tried to impress the Foreign Office with how important the Armenians could be for Germany. “One cannot treat a nation of four million as a quantité négligeable,” he said. He described the Armenians as a rope stretching from Turkey to Russia, with one half of in Russia and the other in Turkey. “It cannot be to our advantage, if one half, the Russian half, is constantly courted and flattered, while the other, the Turkish half, faces only oppression.” Like a tug-of-war, the advantage would go to whichever side can pull that rope over to its side. “It is impossible to cut that rope. Language, Literature, Church, Customs are an unbreakable band. The extermination policy of Abdul Hamid only wove the rope even tighter.” In early June 1915, the Undersecretary of State at the German Foreign Office, Arthur Zimmermann, thought that it might be true and asked the German Ambassador to Constantinople, Hans vonWangemheim, to arrange an interview. Wangenheim said that the Turks don’t want to see Lepsius, and advised against any visit. But the Foreign Office insisted, I think, not out of any particular humanitarianism, but because Lepsius had managed to convince it that the Armenians would be helpful to them. Lepsius, of course, knew that they were being victimized. If Lepsius had been able to get to Constantinople right away, maybe in early June, he would not have been able to convince the CUP. But given his Foreign Office backing, he just might have been able to bring more German influence to bear on Turkish policy.
It is not only now that Turkey tries to deny what happened. Even then the CUP tried to keep everything absolutely secret in order to maintain “deniability” at all times. In my view, the major weapon against what was happening was publicity, and that is what the Turkish government, and later Lepsius, understood. But not everyone who supported the Armenians understood that. On the 16th of July, 1915, the U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, wrote to the American State Department that “a campaign of race extermination is in progress,” yet he recommended against any protest, because he thought it would make the situation worse. Morgenthau is a hero among the Armenian-Americans (see, for example, Peter Balakian’s book, Black Dog of Fate), not only because of the efforts he made on behalf of the Armenians while he was in Turkey, but also, probably, because at the end of the war he writes memoirs in which he makes himself look brave and good—and the German diplomatic personnel look all bad. I don’t deny that Morgenthau helped the Armenians, and he gave information to Lepsius to publish. But he was also first and foremost an employee of the American government (just as German diplomats in Turkey were first and foremost employees of their governments). After he left Constantinople in the late winter of 1916, Morgenthau even went around making public appearances with the Turkish ambassador to the U.S. This infuriated an Armenian journal published in the United States. Pro-Armenians in America could not understand how Morgenthau would deign to appear on the same platform with a representative of the murderous Turkish government. They couldn’t understand why Morgenthau would do such a thing. He did it because he was an Ambassador of the USA and the USA was a neutral power interested in good relations with the Turks. In the summer of 1915, he reported everything to the American government, and privately did his best to help Armenians (as did German consuls on the spot). But he also advised his government that protests might only make matters worse, and suggested that it inform missionary groups to do the same, as well.
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