The Armenian Genocide: Hayots Tseghaspanutyun, also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, traditionally by Armenians, as Medz Yeghern, "Great Crime", was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects from their historic homeland within the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day Ottoman authorities rounded up and arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labour, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre. Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians and the Ottoman Greeks were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is considered by many historians to be part of the same genocidal policy. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide.
Further considerations below:
A major actor, Enver Pasha:
Enver Pasha, former Ministry of War of the Ottoman Empire and one of the main perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide, had become a fugitive of justice after his condemnation to death in absentia by the Ottoman court-martial in July 1919. He had first left Constantinople for Berlin in late 1918 and in 1919 had gone to Moscow, where he engaged in pro-Turkish activities among the Bolsheviks. After participating in the Congress of Eastern Peoples of Baku (September 1920), he tried to reenter Anatolia in 1921, but was rejected by Mustafa Kemal.
Enver decided to return to Moscow and won over the trust of Soviet authorities. Lenin sent him to Bukhara, in Soviet Turkestan, to help suppress the Basmachi Revolt. He arrived on November 8, 1921. Instead of carrying his mission, he made secret contacts with some rebel leaders and defected along with a small number of followers. He aimed at uniting the numerous rebel groups under his own command and taking the offensive against the Bolsheviks. He managed to turn the disorganized rebel forces into a small well-drilled army and establish himself as its supreme commander. However, David Fromkin has written, “he was a vain, strutting man who loved uniforms, medals and titles. For use in stamping official documents, he ordered a golden seal that described him as ‘Commander-in-Chief of all the Armies of Islam, Son-in-Law of the Caliph and Representative of the Prophet.’ Soon he was calling himself Emir of Turkestan, a practice not conducive to good relations with the Emir whose cause he served. At some point in the first half of 1922, the Emir of Bukhara broke off relations with him, depriving him of troops and much-needed financial support. The Emir of Afghanistan also failed to march to his aid.”
At the time of the genocide,
Allen Welsh Dulles, later the Director of the CIA, but at that time the Assistant Secretary & Near East Division chief of the State Department, in a secret State Department memorandum, April 1922:
Confidentially the State Department is in a bind. Our task would be simple if the reports of the atrocities could be declared untrue or even exaggerated but the evidence, alas, is irrefutable and the Secretary of State wants to avoid giving the impression that while the United States is willing to intervene actively to protect its commercial interests, it is not willing to move on behalf of the Christian minorities.
Armenians suffered and died while privileged academics elegantly and eloquently quibbled about the meaning of genocide.
Hitler thought the Ottoman massacre of the Armenians a splendid inspiration -- author Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law,and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, 1993:
Citing newly uncovered archival sources, Simpson ... first argues that Hitler emulated the Turkish government's 1915-1918 policy regarding the massacre of Armenians by offering economic incentives and other rewards to citizens willing to participate in the extermination of the Jews. He then examines the U.S. government's response to both genocidal campaigns. Of utmost interest here is the evidence he presents that President Eisenhower's secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and Dulles's brother Allen, director of the CIA, deliberately stymied efforts to bring to justice many German bankers and industrialists involved in the Nazis' extermination-through-labor programs.
From Simpson's book:
Friedrich Nietzsche called the aristocratic predators who write society's laws "the splendid blond beast" precisely because they so often behave as though they are beyond the reach of elementary morality.