Deliberate effort to eliminate the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority during World War I. Estimates for the number of people who perished in the ensuing genocide vary, but perhaps 1.5 million of the 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire died. One million were killed or died between 1915 and 1918, and another half million died as the Turkey of Mustafa Kemal "sought to free herself of foreign occupation and expel minorities" (Melson 2004, 122).
The Ottoman Empire’s violence against the Armenian minority predated World War I. Between 1894 and 1896, Sultan Abdul-Hamid launched a series of attacks on his Armenian subjects. Although between 100,000 and 300,000 predominantly male Armenians were killed, the purpose was not to eliminate the Armenian minority but to cow it into submission.
The campaign during World War I was different. The Young Turks (the Committee of Union and Progress) had seized power in 1908. The Press Reports of Armenian Holocaust "500,000 Armenians Said to Have Perished": A New York Times Report
"Reports reaching Washington indicate that about 500,000 Armenians have been slaughtered or lost their lives as a result of the Turkish deportation order and the resulting war of extinction. Turkish authorities drove the Gregorian Armenians out of their homes, ordered them to proceed to distant towns in the direction of Bagdad [sic], which could only be reached by crossing long stretches of desert. During the exodus of Armenians across the deserts they have been fallen upon by Kurds and slaughtered, but some of the Armenian women and girls, in considerable numbers, have been carried off into captivity by the Kurds."
New York Times, September 24, 1915, p. 2. "Says Extinction Menaces Armenia": A New York Times Report "Dr. M. Simbad Gabriel, President of the Armenian General Progressive Association in the United States told a TIMES reporter last night that no American could possibly conceive of the atrocities which the Turks had perpetrated on the Christian Armenians. He said that from correspondence he had received from Nubar Pasha, the diplomatic representative in Paris of the Katholikos or head of [the Armenian Church] the number of Armenians put to death as more than 450,000, while 600,000 others had been driven from their homes to wander among the villages of Asia Minor all these out of a population of 1,500,000.
" ‘We in America can’t begin to realize the extent of this reign of terror,’ says Dr. Gabriel, ‘because Armenians in Turkey are not allowed to write, nor even to converse with each other of what we are undergoing at the hands of the Turks. . .
" ‘I was talking to an Armenian woman two or three days ago,’ he continued, ‘who had come from Constantinople last month with her three children. Beseeching me not to reveal her name, lest vengeance be visited upon her husband, who is still in Constantinople, she told me of horrors that made my blood run cold. One morning twenty of her friends were taken out by the Turks and hanged in cold blood, for no other reason than that they were suspected of being unfriendly to the Turkish cause. This is but an example of what the Armenian in Turkey who has not been exiled wakes every morning to fear.’
"The doctor said that greed, religion, and politics all combined to induce the Turks to massacre the Armenians. The Government was always behind every massacre, and the people were acting under orders.
" ‘When the bugle blows in the morning,’ he said, ‘Turks rush fiercely to the work of killing the Christians and plundering them of their wealth. When it stops in the evening, or in two or three days, the shooting and stabbing stop just as suddenly then as it began. The people obey their orders like soldiers.
" ‘The dead are really the happiest,’ he continued. ‘The living are forced to leave their homes and wander in an alien country amid a hostile population. They are allowed as a food ration by the Government only half a pound of grain a day. The youngest and strongest of the men are forced into the army but not to fight. They are not armed and have to do all the trench digging and the supply carrying for the Turkish soldiers. Do you blame them that they do not favor their country’s cause?’. . .
" ‘What has occurred during the last few months in Cilicia and Armenia is unbelievable,’ he writes. ‘It is nothing more or less than the annihilation of a whole people.’
"A letter from Constantinople says that Armenians in all the cities and villages of Cilicia have been exiled to the desert regions south of Aleppo. ‘They have not been allowed to carry any of their possessions with them,’ the letter goes on, ‘and Moslems are occupying the lands and houses left vacant.’ . . .
" ‘The villages in the vilayets of Van and Bitlis have been pillaged and the population put to the sword. . . . Christian martyrdom has at no time assumed such colossal proportions; and if the neutral powers, especially the United States of America, do not intercede, there will be very few left of the million and a half of the Christian Armenians in the Turkish Empire.’ "
hope of the Young Turks of saving the empire by liberal reform foundered as Turkey continued to lose territory and population in the Italo-Turkish and Balkan Wars. The Young Turks then embraced ardent and exclusivist Turkish nationalism. As non-Turks and non-Muslims, the Armenians became a particular concern when the Ottoman Empire went to war with Russia in 1914. The Armenians, who were Christian, were concentrated in eastern Anatolia next to Russia. Other Armenians lived across the border in Russia. They were regarded as potential subversives and as an impediment to the creation of a Pan-Turkic state, which would extend eastward to China.
The 1915 genocidal campaign targeted the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey would be ethnically cleansed of this minority; the cultural heritage of the alien minority would be erased and its wealth confiscated. The thousands of Armenians in the Ottoman army were placed in labor battalions where they perished from exhaustion or were shot. Most male Armenians were then removed from towns and villages and shot. The remaining Armenians, the elderly, women, and children were brutally marched toward the Syrian Desert near Aleppo. Few on the death marches reached the supposed destination. Thousands died from exposure and starvation. Untold others were killed, often after rape and torture by killing squads (Teshkilat-I Makhsusiye), composed of released convicts and by Turkish and Kurdish peasants manipulated into a murderous anti-Armenian frenzy. Some individuals survived physically through enslavement or adoption or as involuntary sex slaves.
Armenians living in European Turkey were shipped across the Sea of Marmara. Once in Anatolia, they and other Armenians living near rail lines were packed into cattle cars for shipment to the desert concentration camps, where most perished due to starvation and thirst. Those who survived the ordeal joined other Armenians who had fled Turkey earlier and formed the Armenian diaspora in the West.
