Serving in Silence: The Armenian Genocide

[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Dan Jones and This Is History A Dynasty To Die For is back for a brand new season. This time we meet Edward II, a larger than life character who starts out as the party

[00:00:12] boy prince and ends up… well I don't want to give too much away. He's got one thing on his mind, not war, not ambition, but love. And it's a love that will get him in burning hot trouble with his barons, his family and his queen.

[00:00:29] The king's affection for his favorite knight kicks off a wild rollercoaster reign full of love and hate, war and grief, famine and just about all the horsemen of the apocalypse. Along the way we'll meet tiger mums, Scottish legends, murderous cousins, a herd of camels

[00:00:46] and one extremely hot iron poker. Listen to and follow This Is History A Dynasty To Die For, available wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know that tens of thousands of German companies already use Shopify? From innovative start-ups to family businesses with a long tradition?

[00:01:10] The Shopify commerce platform revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide. With Shopify you can sell products via any channel, whether personal POS system or comprehensive e-commerce platform. Also social media and markets like Facebook, Instagram and eBay are supported. Thanks to the constantly growing selection of innovative functions and reliable technical

[00:01:33] support, it's very easy to set up your business with Shopify. Whether product presentation or order and payment development, Shopify offers everything you need for the management of your business. So you can focus entirely on your business. Try Shopify for free and make your business a success.

[00:01:52] Visit shopify.de-try. So shopify.de-try. Made for Germany. Powered by Shopify.

[00:02:45] I wanted to cover such a dark moment in history. We've had missionaries from all over the world and from almost every time period on this show we've had missionaries that have served in almost every cultural and political situation.

[00:02:59] But in the past two years of martyrs and missionaries, we've had Jane Heining who was a missionary who was murdered in a concentration camp in Germany during World War II. We've had Jimmy Rim who was a Christian who helped save orphans during the Cambodian genocide.

[00:03:13] We've had Asa Jennings who served with the YMCA who saved thousands of people during the Turkish assault on Smyrna in Greece in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide which happened after World War I. This episode is intended to be comprehensive, all-encompassing, start to finish narrative

[00:03:32] account of the Armenian genocide. Which means we will most likely not go back and cover it again. But I do want to say before we get into this that this is a graphic episode. It will have many different accounts of horrible atrocities committed.

[00:03:49] And so if you have sensitive listeners, if you yourself are a sensitive listener, you have young children, this may not be the episode for you. I do not get gratuitous. I never try to get gratuitous.

[00:04:01] But when you're covering an event like genocide, it's impossible to not get a little bit dark and sometimes graphic in the accounts that these eyewitnesses bring to us. What happened in Turkey is the first genocide in modern history.

[00:04:17] And it happened before there was even a word for genocide. In the years prior to the Armenian genocide, there had been a revitalization in the Western world to preach the gospel in the Near East.

[00:04:28] There were several missions agencies that had set up shop in various parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was once a world superpower ruling Northern Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. But it was rapidly losing size and strength by the close of the 19th century.

[00:04:43] And after a series of military defeats, they had been pushed out of Northern Africa and Egypt. In addition to that, ethnic and religious minorities were protesting for equal treatment and representation under the law and their economic situation was a hopeless disaster

[00:04:58] thanks to their military losses and the modern economic advances made by other European powers. The situation was so dire in the Ottoman Empire that they were colloquially known as the Sick Man of Europe.

[00:05:10] Because of their dire straits, they were forced to pursue an alliance with the other European powers. The Ottoman Empire was eyed hungrily because of their land holdings in the Balkans and their access to the Black and Mediterranean seas via the Turkish Straits which run right

[00:05:24] through Istanbul, which was at that time Constantinople, which was the seat of power in the Ottoman Empire. For the Ottoman Empire, the most important qualification for a potential future ally was an unadulterated hatred of Russia. So these two countries had been going to war for generations.

[00:05:43] These were both religious wars and territorial wars and there were reasons on both sides for them to strongly dislike each other. So France was out because they were too chummy with Russia. And Britain was a solid contender but ultimately it was Germany's strong position against

[00:06:00] Russia along with the promises of financial support and the construction of a Berlin to Baghdad railway that ultimately won the day. What was life like for Christians living in the Ottoman Empire? So under Ottoman rule, any non-Muslim was forced to pay taxes and they weren't guaranteed

[00:06:16] protection under the law and then religious and ethnic minorities were subject to pogroms and due to their vast land acquisition, the Ottoman Empire was filled with many different ethnic and religious minorities, most notably the Armenians, the Assyrians, the Kurds, the Greeks, both Jews and Christians.

[00:06:36] Armenia has a really interesting history. Originally they were called the Kingdom of Armenia and they were located in the southern Caucasus nestled between Western Asia and Eastern Europe. And they became a Christian nation when Gregory the Illuminator converted the king to Christianity

[00:06:50] in 301 and he was charged by the king to spread Christianity throughout the empire. This guy has a really interesting story. So he's born in Armenia, his father betrays the king and then Gregory is able to escape death, his father is not so lucky.

[00:07:06] He's raised in Cappadocia, he marries, he has a few kids and then he becomes a monk so his wife, they separate amicably. And then he gets this idea that he wants to atone for the sins of his father so he returns to his homeland to preach the gospel.

[00:07:22] And instead he's imprisoned in a pit for 12 years by the king for his father's sins and then he's released by the people to help restore the sanity of the king after his betrayal at the hands of Emperor Diocletian.

[00:07:35] And then five years later Christianity is declared the national religion that makes them the oldest Christian empire in the world. Armenia maintains that it actually had access to the gospel far before that, that was brought to them by Bartholomew and Thaddeus.

[00:07:50] And it's a really interesting story, I'm not going to tell it here but feel free to give it a google, it's fascinating. But the kingdom of Armenia became absorbed into the Ottoman Empire in 1453. So now we're going to skip forward about 400 or so years to the late 1800s.

[00:08:07] There are approximately 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire and they're seeing the decline of the empire and the rise of the European influences all around them. So many Armenians see this as their opportunity and they begin to call for civil reforms.

[00:08:21] They pressed for an end to the usurpation of their land and the looting and murdering in Armenian towns, the improprieties during tax collection, criminal behavior by government officials and the refusal to accept Christians as witnesses at trials.

[00:08:34] The Ottoman Empire, specifically Sultan Abdul Hamid II took offense to these requests, especially when a delegation of Armenians went to both England and Berlin to protest their treatment. He decided that the Ottoman Armenians were an extension of foreign hostility and a means

[00:08:49] by which he said Europe could get at our most vital places and tear out our very guts. And while he admitted that some of their complaints were well founded, he likened the Armenians to hired female mourners who simulate a pain which they do not feel.

[00:09:04] They are an effeminate and cowardly people who hide behind the clothes of the great powers and raise an outcry for the smallest of causes. In 1878, a reforms package called the Treaty of Berlin was signed but never implemented.

[00:09:18] Instead local militias supplied by the state were given free reign to attack Armenians, confiscating stores of grain, foodstuffs and driving off livestock, confident of escaping punishment as they were subject to only military courts.

[00:09:30] Britain, France and Russia came together to force Hamid to sign a reform which would curtail the power of these Hamidian regiments as they were known. This was never implemented and instead 2,000 Armenians go to Constantinople to protest that these reforms were never implemented.

[00:09:46] Then these are violently broken up and the violence spreads and massacres occur in Constantinople and other heavily Armenian populated cities. One American journalist present in Erzurum in 1895 during one of the massacres wrote a letter to the New York Times detailing what he saw.

[00:10:03] What I myself saw this Friday afternoon, November 1st is forever engraven on my mind as the most horrible sight a man can see. I went with one of the English guards, a soldier, my interpreter and a photographer who was Armenian to the Gregorian cemetery.

[00:10:18] Along the wall on the north in a row 20 feet wide and 150 feet long lay 321 dead bodies of the massacred Armenians. Many were fearfully mangled and mutilated. I saw one with his face completely smashed in with a blow of some heavy weapon after he was killed.

[00:10:35] I saw some with their own necks almost severed by a sword cut. One I saw whose whole chest had been skinned, his forearms were cut off and the upper part of his arm was skinned of flesh.

[00:10:45] I asked if the dogs had done this but no, the Turks had done it with their knives. A dozen bodies were half burned, all the corpses had been rifled of their clothing except for a cotton undergarment or two.

[00:10:56] To be killed in battle by brave men is one thing. To be butchered by cowardly armed soldiers in cold blood and utterly defenseless is another thing. These Hamidian regiments rarely attacked a victim who could defend themselves and they focused instead on women and children and old men.

[00:11:12] And the worst atrocities took place in Urfa where 3,000 people had gathered in a cathedral to protect themselves. The soldiers burned down the cathedral with everyone inside. And then in 1897 Hamid considered the Armenian question closed. Most of the revolutionaries had been killed or had fled to Russia.

[00:11:29] The death toll was hard to calculate but a fair estimation seems to be about 250,000 people killed by murder or exposure between the years 1894 and 1896. This doesn't include the 1 million people who were pillaged and displaced during these Hamidian massacres.

[00:11:47] Many people in the Ottoman Empire had good reason to dislike Abdul Hamid no matter what end of the religious or political spectrum you aligned with. A group of progressive leftist intellectuals formed a constitutionalist reform movement in response to Hamid's disillusion of the constitution and parliament.

[00:12:04] And they were known as the Committee of Union and Progress or more famously the Young Turks. They were a mixed bag of Arabs, Armenians, Jews, Greeks, and Albanians from all walks of life. You have medical professionals, civil servants, exiles, and army officers.

[00:12:21] In 1908 they marched on Constantinople and attempted to force Hamid to restore the constitution. And instead he attempted a counter coup which failed but instigated yet another attack against Armenians. And in this attack you had 20 to 25,000 Armenians and 1,300 Assyrians killed in a series of

[00:12:39] pogroms which spread out from this counter coup. Prior to the success of their coup, the Young Turks had been united against a common foe. But after the revolution, they began to splinter an ideology into two main factions. There was the pro-decentralization Turks and the nationalistic pro-centralization Turks.

[00:12:59] And these two sides continued to struggle for power. It's a long story, there's lots of political maneuvering, I will spare you that. But this went on until the prime minister was assassinated in 1913 which allowed the nationalistic pro-centralization party to take control of all the institutions and to

[00:13:15] install a one-party state which exercised complete control of the Ottoman Empire. They still called themselves the Young Turks and their regime was led by three important figures. Talat Pasha, the new prime minister, Enver Pasha, the minister of war, and Kemal Pasha who was the minister of the navy.

[00:13:34] And oftentimes they're just called the three Pashas. And Pasha is an honorary title that denotes high rank and throughout the episode we will most often refer to Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha.

[00:13:47] And before we go any further, I want to give a major distinction to the nature of this genocide. It was not a religious genocide so much as it was a secular genocide. The Young Turks were a secularist movement. They were socialist in nature.

[00:14:02] In fact, some could say that they were proto-communist and they were a secular socialist government. This was not a holy war. This was purely enacted by people convinced of the need to ethnically cleanse Turkey and to Turkify it, as they said.

[00:14:19] So there were moments during the war when religious fervor was ignited and kind of used to encourage people to do things. But this was a genocide enacted on a governmental level by a socialist, secularist, nationalist regime.

[00:14:37] In the fall of 1914, Turkey signed a secret treaty with Germany aligning itself against the Allied powers. Only about five people knew about this treaty. In October of 1914, the supposedly neutral Ottoman Empire began bombing Russian Black Sea ports.

[00:14:54] Russian Armenians were enthusiastic about the war, but Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were rightfully wary. Military conscriptions began en masse and disproportionately affected the Greeks and the Armenians. A 10% of able-bodied Armenian men were conscripted, leaving their families unable to defend themselves.

[00:15:13] From December 1914 to January 1915, Ottoman troops fought bitterly against the Russians in the battle at Sarikamish. They were unprepared for the harsh winter conditions and they lost more than 60,000 troops. And you have to wonder how the same mistake was repeated 30 years later by the same people

[00:15:29] who were allies with the Ottoman Empire. As the Ottoman Empire retreated, they burned and looted Russian Armenian villages, killing the inhabitants. Enver Pasha, Minister of War, publicly blamed their defeat on the treacherous Armenians who had sided with the Russians and were working to destroy the empire from within.

[00:15:46] In February of 1915, Talat Pasha, the Prime Minister, told the German Ambassador that it was time to conclude the Armenian question. And the Turkish government begins brainstorming how to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety.

[00:16:01] So first what they did is disarmed Armenian soldiers and forced them to serve in labor battalions and then, unable to defend themselves, they were systematically killed. The next decisive moment in this early timeline of the genocide is what would become known as the Von Resistance.

[00:16:18] Many of the details we have about this resistance have come from Clarence Usher, who was an American medical missionary who was serving there in Von. And his accounts are corroborated by other eyewitnesses. Surprisingly, the Von Resistance is still considered to be a hot-button topic.

[00:16:34] Genocide deniers consider it to be proof of the Armenian conspiracy, while everyone else acknowledges that they were in a no-win situation. The previous governor of Von was replaced by the brother-in-law of Enver Pasha and his name was Javed Bey.

[00:16:48] And he had previously earned the nickname Lord Horseshoe because he nailed horseshoes to his victims' feet. Clarence Usher was a missionary with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. And he had arrived in Harput in 1898, but then he had transferred to Von a year later

[00:17:03] because the city was in dire need of a physician. And when he arrived in Von, he noticed that the village was still heavily damaged from the Hamidian Massacres and the population was still traumatized. And he immediately began his work in orphanages where hundreds of Armenian orphans of the

[00:17:17] Hamidian Massacres were being housed. The new governor arrived in Von in late March of 1915 with several thousand soldiers. And his first decree as governor was that the Armenians supply 4,000 able-bodied men for work battalions. And the Armenian leaders counter-offered 500 men while offering to pay exemptions for the rest.

[00:17:38] The governor refused and had a popular community leader jailed instead. And then he invited a small group of Armenians to meet their leader on a peace mission, but instead he had them murdered en route. And in response, Clarence went to speak with the governor in person.

[00:17:53] And he writes, While I was in his office, the colonel of the butcher regiment entered and said, You sent for me? Yes, replied the governor. Go to Shaddaq, which is a province in Von, and wipe out its people.

[00:18:05] And turning to me, he said savagely, I won't leave one, not one so high, holding his hand below the height of his knee. This attack on Shaddaq was a lie, and instead they attacked six villages that were filled with old men, women, and children. And he writes,

[00:18:19] The soldiers were mounted, armed with daggers, automatic pistols, and modern repeating rifles. They would gallop into a crowd of fleeing women and children, draw their daggers, and rip up the unfortunate creatures. I forbear to describe the wounds brought to me for repair.

[00:18:35] Grace Knopp was an American missionary serving as a teacher in Von, and she wrote, While the governor was having no work and much fun, his soldiers and their wild allies, the Kurds, were sweeping the countryside, massacring men, women, and children, and burning their homes.

[00:18:48] Babies were shot in their mothers' arms. Small children were horribly mutilated. Women were stripped and beaten. The police seemed to have gone mad in their thirst for Armenian blood. The screams of women and children could be heard at almost any time during the day.

[00:19:02] The cries that rang out through the darkness of the night were even more heart-rending. After this, the governor again demanded 4,000 Armenians to give themselves up to the military. Releasing a couple of Armenian leaders is a goodwill gesture, but the Armenians were

[00:19:17] now convinced of the governor's hostile intentions and they delayed giving him a reply. Meanwhile, Usher and the Italian consular continued negotiating with the governor, attempting to persuade him that his actions were inflaming rather than calming the situation.

[00:19:32] But the governor had by this time chosen another course, and on April 19th, he had a secret order issued to his forces. The Armenians must be exterminated. If any Muslim protected Christian, first his house shall be burned, then the Christian

[00:19:45] killed before his eyes, and then his family and himself. Usher reports that on the following day, Monday, April 20th, units under the governor's command attacked Armenian villages throughout the province. In its second largest town, the commander assembled the town's leaders, and its 2,500

[00:20:02] men had them marched into a nearby river where they were slain in groups of 50, after which the women and children and property were divided among the Turks. The village of Shadok previously mentioned proved unconquerable, and another was effectively protected by a Kurdish chief.

[00:20:17] But while some other villages were able to mount a degree of resistance, most had no means of doing so. The citizens of Van had long planned a resistance, but they were thwarted by the earlier conscription

[00:20:28] order which had emptied the city of most of their Armenian men and also the discovery of their cache of weapons and ammunition. 300 men had modern rifles, and 1,000 had pistols and other antique firearms. Turkish troops burned the surrounding villages and then settled in for a siege, but the Armenians

[00:20:46] were able to develop a network of indoor routes going in between the houses, and they reinforced the walls of their home to withstand Turkish bombardment. They were even able to tunnel under the enemy defenses and destroyed the police station, military barracks, and the British consulate.

[00:21:03] During the siege, the governor had a really smart idea. He sent 15,000 refugees flooding into Van in hopes of dwindling their food supply. Many of these refugees Clarence himself treated, and in mid-May, roughly three weeks after the siege began, the Armenians did become concerned about the dwindling food supply.

[00:21:22] But then the next day, the governor and the Turks retreated, and then four days later, it made sense why they left. The Russian army had arrived. When they went out to reoccupy the outlying districts of Van, these defenders discovered

[00:21:36] many people with their throats cut and wells filled with mutilated bodies. These were the Armenians who had been unable to retreat to the defensive perimeter at the onset of the siege. It had also become apparent that the governor's forces had slaughtered all of the Armenian

[00:21:50] and Russian prisoners before they retreated. While in Van, the Russian army found 55,000 corpses, which equaled half of the city's pre-war Armenian population. Van was briefly able to govern themselves for the first time in 700 years, but in June,

[00:22:07] typhus spread through the city, and Clarence himself was sick for many weeks, and his own wife succumbed to the illness. And meanwhile, the Russians had suffered several setbacks and were forced to retreat, leaving Van once again open to Turkish attack.

[00:22:20] But rather than face the Turks again, many fled to the Russian Caucasus. 270,000 refugees, including Clarence, made it safely across the border. Interestingly enough, the story of Van was told all over Turkey, every single detail, but there was one minor change.

[00:22:39] The Armenians were cast as the perpetrators, and you can only imagine how enraged the populace must have felt against the Armenians when they heard this propaganda. Hundreds of Armenian political activists, intellectuals, and community leaders were rounded up in Constantinople and across the empire.

[00:22:58] This order came from Talat Pasha, intending to eliminate the Armenian leadership and anyone capable of organizing resistance, eventually resulting in the murder of most of those arrested. The same day, Talat banned all Armenian political organizations in order that the Armenians

[00:23:13] who had previously been removed from southern Anatolia be deported again from central Anatolia, where they would have most likely survived, to the Syrian desert. Once upon a time in medieval England, there was a young king who would do just about anything for his favourite knight. They were inseparable.

[00:23:43] With love at the front of a king's mind, instead of war or ambition, you'd think the kingdom would be in for a golden era of peace. But England is headed for the most catastrophic collapse seen for hundreds of years. The saga continues.

[00:23:57] Join me, Dan Jones, on This Is History, a dynasty to die for, available wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know that tens of thousands of German companies are already using Shopify? From innovative start-ups to family businesses with a long tradition?

[00:24:17] The Shopify commerce platform is revolutionizing millions of companies worldwide. With Shopify, you can sell products via any channel, whether personal POS systems or comprehensive e-commerce platforms. Social media and markets like Facebook, Instagram and eBay are also supported.

[00:24:35] Thanks to the ever-growing selection of innovative features and reliable technical support, it's very easy to set up your business with Shopify. Whether product presentation or order and payment development, Shopify offers everything you need for the management of your business. This way, you can fully focus on your business.

[00:24:54] Try Shopify for free and make your business a success. Visit shopify.de-try. So, shopify.de-try. Made for Germany. Powered by Shopify. Now, Eastern Turkey, which bordered Russian-held territory, had a 45% Christian population, mostly Armenians but there were also Assyrians and Greeks.

[00:25:25] And the Turkish government feared that Russia wanted to annex Eastern Turkey. And Turkey refused to see a future where there was an Armenian independent state. Instead, they wanted to annihilate them. So in response to this perceived threat, they began emptying out all the Armenians in Eastern Turkish cities.

[00:25:42] This includes Van, which we've already mentioned, as well as Harput and Armenia. And while there are many other cities that were also emptied out, I mention these two cities specifically because each of them had missionaries who were able to give eyewitness accounts of what happened there.

[00:25:57] In Ermiya, which is now located in Iran, American missionary Frederick Cohen was serving there when Kurdish and Turkish troops broke through the Russian lines in January 1915 and they stationed themselves all around the Ermiya plains. 20,000 Armenians and other Christians fled to Ermiya to take shelter.

[00:26:14] And Cohen was able to provide food and shelter to the refugees until May when the forced deportations emptied the city. And he continued to travel to the cities where they had been deported to try and deliver what little aid that he could.

[00:26:26] And here are some excerpts from his journal. Then, through deportation, they determined to complete what they had already begun by the sword. The Turkish soldiers, in many cases offered by Germans, drove the Armenians across the plains, perpetrating upon them brutalities that were enough to break anyone's heart.

[00:26:43] I found one day a great mass of human bones 30 feet high and I said to my Turkish guide, how do you account for this? And he replied, we got tired of driving them, we got tired of hearing their moans and cries,

[00:26:56] and we took them up to that precipice one day and flung them down to get rid of the job. There was another trench full of human bones and I was told of the brave fight that 2,000

[00:27:05] men, standing for their homes and for the honor of their wives and daughters, had waged with their flintlock rifles against the Turkish troops. They held off a Turkish regiment for two weeks until their ammunition was exhausted.

[00:27:16] Then the Turkish officer, taking an oath on the Quran, promised the Armenian fighters that if they surrendered, he would, in deference to their courage, allow them to go unarmed. These 2,000 men no sooner had surrendered when they were given picks and spades and

[00:27:30] told to dig a trench, and when they had dug it, they were shoved in with the bayonet. In the city of Harput, Tasi Atkinson kept a diary of the atrocities happening around her, but she was afraid to be too specific for fear that the Turks would find it.

[00:27:45] She helped save what Armenians she could, and in one case she even smuggled razor blades into prison cells so that prisoners could cut their ropes when they were hung. She left Turkey in 1917, leaving behind her diary in a sealed trunk because no written

[00:27:58] materials were allowed out of the country, and then after the war the entire trunk was mailed back to her, still sealed. And here are some of her accounts. We all know such clear-cut, well-planned, all well carried out work is not the method of the Turk.

[00:28:13] The German, the Turk, and the devil made a triple alliance, not to be equaled in the world for cold-blooded hellishness. What an awful sight! People shoved out of their houses, the doors nailed, they were piled into ox carts or on donkeys and many on foot.

[00:28:27] Police and guards were armed, shoving them along. Yesterday a large crowd of women arrived but no men. The men were all killed or in prison, and their girls were carried away. We've had women, children, and boys come to us bruised, hacked, and bleeding.

[00:28:40] One little girl said that the women were stripped, then laid two together, and their heads cut off. She happened to be under one, and she escaped with a deep cut on the back of her neck and came here. These people I met were put into a churchyard overnight.

[00:28:53] They can't go far, and they will be killed close by. Henry Riggs was another missionary serving in Harput, and he documents the timeline from the deportation proclamations to the eventual outcomes. It was evident that some terrible fate was being planned for the Armenians, though as

[00:29:10] of yet no hint had been given as to what that fate should be. By June 20th, several hundred of the eliting Armenians had been put into prison, and on that day, 150 from the prison in Harput were sent out, and three days later they were sent to their death.

[00:29:24] And on June 26th came an edict. It was posted in public places and announced by street criers throughout the Armenian quarters of the city. All the Armenians and Syrians of Harput and the vicinity must go into exile to a destination in Mesopotamia.

[00:29:37] The announcement was made on Saturday, and all the people were commanded to be ready to start on the following Thursday. They followed the highway for about ten miles, and then they were turned off towards the right and marched up into the mountains.

[00:29:50] Soon after passing the crest of the ridge, they were marched down into a deep ravine where they were ordered to sit on the ground. When they were all seated, bound as they were, their guards with their rifles and bayonets

[00:30:00] fell upon them and commenced a bushery that the imagination refuses to picture. So huge was the task of slaughter that three or four men succeeded in escaping from the ravine while the guards were busy with their horrid labor.

[00:30:12] These fugitives scattered and hid, but were pursued and hunted out by their relentless guards who found them and butchered them in their hiding places. Only one escaping so far is known. The young man whose name I dare not reveal as he is still living in Turkey succeeded

[00:30:25] in evading his pursuers and hid until nightfall. Then he started out trying to return to some place of safety, but lost his way in the dark and wandered all night long not knowing which way he was going.

[00:30:35] At last as dawn began to break, he found his bearings again, and in the gray light stole into the American hospital and to safety. During the summer of 1915, Riggs observed the transit camps of the deportees using a

[00:30:48] telescope and wrote that for most of the women and children was reserved a long and lingering suffering that massacre seemed to them a merciful state. Suffering such as was foreseen and planned by the perpetrators of this horror, I speak

[00:31:00] guardedly and state as a fact this horrid indictment of the young Turks by whom this crime was committed. Driven to death, threatened, outraged, raped, starved and perishing with thirst, it is not to be wondered that the vast majority of the weary host lay down by the roadside to

[00:31:13] die. And of those who escaped and found their way to us, many were emaciated, weakened beyond description and many more heartbroken at the loss of those who had not survived the ordeal. On several occasions, mothers who succeeded in coming to us for help told how with their

[00:31:29] own hands they had thrown their little ones into the river rather than endure the prolonged agony of seeing them slowly starve to death at their empty breasts as they themselves were starving. And in this last account I'll tell, this really shows how incredibly helpless many

[00:31:45] of these missionaries felt. They had no military might and it was rare that they had sufficient political ties to do seemingly anything of significance. They did what they could but even then the people they helped could be snatched away from them at a moment's notice.

[00:31:59] Alma Johansen was a Swedish missionary who was working in a German orphanage for Armenian children in the city of Muş in Western Armenia. Alma tells how women took poison so they wouldn't be captured by the Turks and how the soldiers

[00:32:12] transported bloody, wounded women and children through the city while other soldiers fired at them just to frighten them. When the wounded fell to the ground, the soldiers would hit them with the butt end of their rifles.

[00:32:22] I can never forget the sight, she says, and nothing you could do for them. She then told about how the kids at her orphanage were handed over to a Turkish officer and then they were taken to a building outside the city where they were all murdered.

[00:32:37] After these deportations were complete, Muslims were then moved in to inhabit old Armenian homes and businesses. And Muslims who were not ethnically Turkish were scattered throughout the area but never enough to become concentrated so that they would lose their heritage and their language and become in essence Turkified.

[00:32:55] On September 1918, Talaat emphasized that regardless of losing the war, he had succeeded at transforming Turkey to a nation state in Anatolia. The undertaking of these mass deportations took away vital resources from the war effort

[00:33:09] but the war came second to the ethnic cleansing of Turkey and if anything it actually provided the cover needed for it to occur. In order to have enough manpower to carry out the genocide, murderers and other undesirables

[00:33:21] were released from prison and they became known as the Special Organizations serving directly under Enver Pasha. They were the SS of Turkey. Other participants who weren't military were motivated by greed. If they assisted in the killings, they were guaranteed one third of all movable property left behind.

[00:33:38] And politicians or governors who refused to carry out the genocide in their own cities were replaced or killed. By late 1915, all Armenians had been removed from Eastern Anatolia so now the deportations began throughout the rest of the country.

[00:33:54] Many of the able-bodied men had been conscripted into the military early on at the outbreak of the war but many others had paid a bribe or were exempted or were considered too young at the time of conscription.

[00:34:05] And these men were marched out of the city with the rest of the deportees and then taken away and executed. Few of these men resisted because they didn't want to endanger their families. Boys from as young as 12 were also included.

[00:34:19] Execution sites were chosen for proximity to major roads and for rugged terrain, wells, lakes, and cisterns to facilitate the concealment or disposal of corpses. At least 150,000 Armenians passed through a city called Erzincan in central Turkey from

[00:34:35] June 1915 where a series of transient camps were set up to control the flow of victims to the killing site at a nearby gorge. Thousands of Armenians were killed near Lake Hazar being pushed by paramilitaries off the cliffs.

[00:34:48] More than 500,000 Armenians passed through the plains in central Turkey headed towards Syria which is one of the deadliest areas during the genocide. Arriving convoys having passed through the plain approached the highlands and they found gorges already filled with corpses from previous convoys.

[00:35:04] Many others were held in tributary valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates and then systematically executed by the special organization. Armenian men were often drowned by being tied together back to back before being thrown into the water, notably a method that was not used on women.

[00:35:20] Archaeologists viewed disposal of bodies through rivers as a cheap and effective method but unsurprisingly it caused widespread pollution downstream. So many bodies floated down the Tigris and Euphrates they sometimes blocked the rivers and needed to be cleared with explosives.

[00:35:37] Other rotting corpses became stuck to the riverbanks and still others traveled as far as the Persian Gulf. And if you look at a map these are not close destinations by any stretch of the imagination. These rivers remained polluted long after the massacres causing epidemics downstream.

[00:35:54] Tens of thousands of Armenians died along the roads and their bodies were buried hastily or more often just simply left beside the road. The Ottoman Empire ordered the corpses to be cleared as soon as possible to prevent

[00:36:05] both photographic documentation and disease but these orders were not always followed. Women and children who made up the vast majority of these deportees were not usually executed immediately but were instead subjected to these hard marshes through mountainous terrain without food or water.

[00:36:23] Those who could not keep up were left to die or shot. During 1915 some were forced to walk over 600 miles in the summer heat. Some deportees from Western Anatolia were allowed to travel by rail using this prestigious

[00:36:36] Berlin to Baghdad train that was built by the Germans as a symbol of their goodwill and allyship. However this train was not a privilege. They were shoved into overcrowded train cars and the dead were dumped off at each stop

[00:36:49] and sometimes they wouldn't even wait to stop and they would just throw them off beside the tracks. In one of the documentaries I was watching, one person said that at one of the stops he

[00:36:57] found a pile of children's hands and someone else found a pile of violated young women grouped beside the tracks. However those who were transported by rail from Western Turkey into Syria had a higher rate of survival compared to those who were forced to march from the east.

[00:37:13] 99% of those who marched from the east did not survive. Early arrivals to Syria were placed in the city of Aleppo which is in northwestern Syria. By October of 1915 almost 900,000 Armenians had arrived in Syria. Dozens of concentration camps were set up to handle the influx.

[00:37:33] However these weren't places of rest. These deportees were given no food or water. Some were able to find first aid. There were clandestine ways to find that but others refused believing that it would only prolong their agony.

[00:37:45] Mothers not being able to kill their own children but unable to watch them suffer placed them outside the camp and listened to their screams until they died. Many women begged locals for poison so that they could kill themselves and their children. Sexual exploitation in the camps was common.

[00:38:00] Bedouins would come into the camp to rape the women or force them into marriage. Wealthy Turks, Arabs, and Jews who were unable to have children would come into the camps to buy them.

[00:38:11] These were held in the camp for a few weeks and then marched to another, held for a few weeks there and then moved to another. And this goal was to kill them but in the slowest possible way.

[00:38:21] These camps understandably became hotbeds of disease from typhus, dysentery, and pneumonia. Camps had to be shut down so that officers wouldn't catch the disease. Now despite all of this there was an active Armenian resistance group that was based in

[00:38:35] Aleppo which was able to smuggle out many of the victims. At the beginning of 1916, 500,000 Armenians were still alive in Syria and in Upper Mesopotamia. But Talat Pasha, fearing that they would return after the war, ordered a second wave of massacres. 200,000 Armenians were killed in six months.

[00:38:55] Many who survived the camps did not survive the second massacres. By early 1917, the majority of the state-sponsored killings had stopped. Localized massacres and starvation didn't necessarily stop but they were no longer being pushed by the state.

[00:39:11] At least a million Armenians had died during the genocide, the Greeks had lost just as many, and roughly 500,000 Assyrians were also killed. By late 1916, only 200,000 Armenians were left alive in the empire. Despite the empire's harsh ban on documenting any of these atrocities, a lot of photographic

[00:39:30] evidence made it out of the country and into the Western world. In May of 1915, Russia, France, and England formally condemned the crimes against humanity happening in the Ottoman Empire, vowing to hold those responsible to account. This of course amounted to nothing in actuality.

[00:39:46] Germany as an ally of the empire said nothing, and in fact the original limited deportation was actually supported by the German government. There were many Germans on the ground who wrote to their superiors demanding action, but none

[00:39:58] was ever taken, and in fact after the war, Germany even helped smuggle the three Pashas to Germany. Henry Morgenthau was serving as the US ambassador to Constantinople, a position he didn't originally want. He had almost single-handedly financed Woodrow Wilson's run for presidency, which he obviously

[00:40:17] won, and so he was expecting a high-level position, but instead he was sent to the Ottoman Empire. Not long into his tenure, Armenian genocide accounts and pictures began flooding across his desks. He confronts Talat Pasha, who asks him, why do you care about the Christians? You're a Jew.

[00:40:34] Morgenthau answered, I'm not here as a Jew, but as an American ambassador. My country contains something more than 97 million Christians and something less than 3 million Jews. So at least in my ambassadorial capacity, I am 97% Christian.

[00:40:49] He begged the US to intervene, but they did not want to get involved because they were neutral. Later on, they did send ships and offer to take Armenians, but Talat Pasha refused. Instead he summoned Morgenthau again, and he said, hey, I know that a lot of the Armenians

[00:41:03] had taken out some pretty hefty life insurance policies through an American company. I need you to get me the names of the Armenians who held those policies, and then actually just transfer me the money because they're not going to need it back.

[00:41:17] Morgenthau obviously didn't do that, but it was a good indication of just what kind of evil man that Talat Pasha was. Morgenthau was able to use his contacts back home to put together a relief effort, and it was the largest and first of its kind ever.

[00:41:31] Businessmen, politicians, and missionaries all came together to raise money to care for these Armenian refugees. The equivalent of $1.4 billion today was raised. And there was even this day which was instituted called Golden Rule Sundays where families

[00:41:45] would get together and eat like an Armenian refugee, and the money that they would normally have spent on dinner would be sent back to the Armenian refugees. This method of aid was wildly popular, and 49 countries participated. Near East relief workers built hundreds of orphanages, vocational schools, and food

[00:42:03] distribution centers. Overseas relief workers were responsible for the direct care of orphans and refugees, including the organization of vast feeding and educational programs. After the war, thousands of Americans volunteered throughout the U.S. by donating money or supplies

[00:42:17] and hosting special events to benefit the Near East Relief's work. But in 1916, Morgenthau resigned his post because he felt that he had been unable to stop the genocide and was as such unfit to serve.

[00:42:32] Earlier I referenced how alone these missionaries must feel, and I shared the story of Alma Johansson and certainly Morgenthau also felt as though he did not do enough. And obviously it can feel that way, especially for these people who are isolated and they

[00:42:45] don't see what's going on in the other cities. But if you zoom out a little bit, you can see that there were many, many people that were working to help these refugees and saved many lives. And I want to share a few of their stories here.

[00:42:59] Badil Bjorn was a Norwegian missionary serving in Muş, and she wrote much of what she witnessed in her personal diary. And she's also noted for taking hundreds of photographs providing details of the events in the back of each photograph.

[00:43:11] She eventually took care of Armenian orphans in Syria, Lebanon, and Constantinople. In 1922, she founded an orphanage in Soviet Armenia, and then she continued her work by aiding the Armenian refugees in Syria and Lebanon. Ernst Christophel was a German pastor, doctor, and founder of the Christian Blind Mission.

[00:43:31] When the genocide took place, Christophel was instrumental in saving many Armenian lives during the deportations. George White was an American who was working as the head of a local college, and during the genocide he attempted to save many lives, the Armenians, and in one such instance he

[00:43:46] refused to tell where Armenians were hiding to save them from getting killed and deported. In the aftermath of the genocide, he was involved with a Near East Relief Fund and headed an expedition consisting of 250 people with the objective of aiding the Armenian refugees.

[00:44:02] Karen Jeppe was a Danish missionary who organized rescue efforts and helped the Armenian refugees driven through Urfa on their way to the death camps in the Syrian desert, providing food and water and hiding many of them under the floor in her house.

[00:44:15] She never left Urfa during the war and helped many Armenians escape by disguising them as Kurds and Arabs. Floyd Smith was an American medical missionary serving under the Near East Relief. He was the caretaker of many Armenian genocide victims.

[00:44:29] He received many patients throughout his province who suffered from deportations, torture, and massacre. He was also accused of being an agent of the Armenian insurgency and was removed from the country. Beatrice Rohner was a Swiss missionary who had become a key member of the Aleppo Resistance

[00:44:44] while operating an orphanage which enabled her to smuggle out over 700 children. Ernest Yarrow was an American missionary and director of the Near East Relief. During the defense of Van, Yarrow had helped the Armenians become more organized, strengthening their chances of resistance.

[00:44:59] He had helped the Armenians create a central committee which voiced the affairs of the Armenians. He had helped them organize a semblance of government agencies such as judges, police, mayor, and the board of health.

[00:45:09] He also reopened bakeries, ovens, and mills to provide provisions and food to the starving Armenian refugees. Hospitals and soup kitchens were also opened by him in order to provide shelter and care for the wounded and sick.

[00:45:22] When you look at it with a wider lens, it's not that it diminishes the atrocities or the scale of these massacres, but you see that it's not entirely hopeless, that there are still people who were on the ground doing what they could and as a result they saved

[00:45:34] many lives that would otherwise have been needlessly slaughtered. So what happened to Turkey after the 1918 armistice? The post-war Ottoman government held the Ottoman Special Military Tribunal which basically was an attempt, a successful attempt, to pin the genocide on the Young Turk leadership

[00:45:54] while exonerating the Ottoman Empire as a whole. And the court ruled that the crime of mass murder of Armenians was organized and carried out by the top leaders of the Young Turks. Only 18 perpetrators, including Talat and Enver, were sentenced to death, of whom only

[00:46:10] three of them were ultimately executed as the remainder had fled and were tried in absentia. In 1920, a treaty was signed which awarded Armenia a large area in eastern Anatolia and thereby eliminated the Ottoman government's purpose for holding the trials.

[00:46:27] Talat Pasha, who was, I want to say hiding out in Germany, but honestly he was quite popular as a socialite, was meeting with tons of different like-minded individuals. He was killed on March 15th by a young Armenian member of Operation Nemesis, which was formed

[00:46:41] to assassinate those responsible for the genocide. Talat was given a state funeral which was well attended by prominent members of the German government and society. The German Foreign Office sent a wreath which said, To a great statesman and faithful friend.

[00:46:56] Unsurprisingly, the Armenian Genocide would go on to be the blueprint for the Holocaust less than 20 years later. The Young Turks regrouped as the Turkish Nationalist Movement, which doesn't sound a whole lot different from what they were originally, and they even relied on the support of the

[00:47:11] perpetrators of the genocide. Now this movement saw the return of Armenian survivors as a mortal threat to its nationalist ambitions and the interests of its supporters, which it was. The return of these survivors was therefore impossible in most of Anatolia, and thousands of Armenians who tried were murdered.

[00:47:30] In 1920, a Turkish general invaded Armenia with orders to eliminate Armenia physically and politically. Nearly 100,000 Armenians were massacred by the Turkish army, and another 100,000 fled during the French withdrawal. In the end, it was only the Soviet occupation of Armenia which prevented another genocide.

[00:47:49] This nationalist party was successful in taking power, and the Republic of Turkey was declared in October of 1923, with Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk, serving as its first president. Despite propaganda about Atatürk, he was not a good guy.

[00:48:04] Two years before he became president, he founded a new secret police with the old head of the special organization as its leader. He oversaw the burning of Izmir in 1922, and he was considered the successor to Talat Pasha by Talat himself.

[00:48:19] They exchanged many letters during Talat's exile to Germany. Turkey's official denial of the Armenian genocide continues to rely on the Young Turk's justification of its actions. The Turkish government maintains that the mass deportation of Armenians was a legitimate

[00:48:35] action to combat an existential crisis to the empire, but there was no intention to exterminate the Armenian people. The Turkish state perceives open discussion of the genocide as a threat to national security because of its connection with the foundation of the republic.

[00:48:51] Instead, the three Pashas and Atatürk are lauded as national heroes and even have popular streets named after them. And the West refused to hold anyone accountable, citing the area's volatility after the fall of Russia to the communists. It was more important to have Turkey as an ally.

[00:49:07] Even today, long after the fall of the Soviet Union, only 33 countries have officially recognized the Armenian genocide, citing once again that Turkey is too important of an ally to ruffle. The US government only officially recognized the genocide in December of 2019.

[00:49:23] More countries participated in the Golden Rule Sunday than officially recognized the genocide today. This is an important reminder that a government does not always and often does not share the interests of its citizens.

[00:49:38] If you find yourself coming to the end of this episode thinking, why did I spend so much time on this specifically? Why did I read all those awful, heart-rending accounts? And it's because throughout church history there have been many missionaries, not just martyrs, that have witnessed terrible atrocities.

[00:49:54] In fact, oftentimes they are the ones who see the most evil side of mankind, because they're the ones that go to the places most people aren't willing to go and arguably that they themselves would not go without calling and commission from Christ.

[00:50:08] It's important to highlight these people who may never get a book written about them or have a legacy remembered, but nonetheless experienced untold tragedies of serving during some of the hardest moments in history, all because they trusted Christ.

[00:50:23] Jakob Künzler was a Swiss medical missionary serving in Urfa. During his time in the Ottoman Empire, Künzler and his wife Elisabeth helped the destitute and wounded Armenian orphans in the Syrian desert. He was especially involved with the Near East Foundation and he saved thousands of Armenian

[00:50:39] lives. He writes this, I want to leave you with a list of the references that I used for this episode in case you want to check them out, and I obviously encourage you to check them out.

[00:51:30] There's one resource that I have found invaluable when researching things of this nature, terrible atrocities that happen, and that's called Facing History. They have tons of resources if you're an educator, if you just want to be more informed on these moments in history, I highly encourage them.

[00:51:48] They have curriculums, they have documentaries. In fact, I watched one of their documentaries they had listed, which is called They Shall Not Perish, and I will link it. I will also link another documentary that is available on YouTube.

[00:52:00] I don't want to bore you with all the other resources that I used. These are just the three that I think will be most helpful to you if you want to explore more of this on your own.

[00:52:10] In the next episode, you can look forward to a more traditional missionary story, but I do hope that you found this episode insightful, eye-opening, and maybe not particularly encouraging, but it just shows a different side of mission work that we don't often get to see.

[00:52:27] As always, thank you for listening to Martyrs and Missionaries. I'm Elise.