I would like to thank you very warmly for the invitation to be able to speak to you especially in this place.
The 24th of April is for you, Armenians and German-Armenians, certainly the most painful day in the history of your people, since it was on April 24, 1915 that the Armenian elite in the then-Ottoman Empire was extinguished. This day is now a symbol for the first genocide on European territory in the modern era. We commemorate this dreadful event here today in the Frankfurt Paulskirche, a richly symbolic place in German history. For it was here that the only attempt of the German people to build a modern democracy by themselves and to guarantee the right to freedom for all citizens began and ended.
The historical failure of the German democrats from 1848 to 1851 and the annihilation of the Armenian people in Turkey in 1915-1916 are directly related: The genocide against the Armenian people could not have taken place with an alliance partner of the Entente or with a Germany as was envisioned in 1848 and which exists today. And without powerful allies, the Ottoman Empire, in taking this barbaric step, would have run the risk of being annexed and split up. Plans for such a development lay on the drawing boards of the Great Powers. It was only with the authoritarian German Empire as a military guarantor that the Young Turk regime could dare undertake the genocide in the First World War.
After having studied thousands of German documents on this theme, it is fully clear to me that the Armenian genocide was a genuinely Turkish genocide. The German Empire as a state neither encouraged nor planned it, even if individual Germans approved of it, perhaps even demanded it, or at least supported it. But Germany as a nation played a fatal role. German co-responsibility is my theme today, and the question whether or not Germany could have saved the Armenians.
That Germans in positions of responsibility could have saved Armenians is demonstrated by the case of Smyrna, where a German General with decision-making power did prevent the deportations of Armenians. Were there other possibilities to save Armenians? I believe: yes. Only it was not at all attempted. And therefore it is important to investigate what went wrong on the German side. And in this context it is important to find out: Who in Germany knew about the genocide and when?
The Turkish government at the time – like the current Turkish government still today – justified the deportations of the Armenians with the military danger constituted by Armenian revolutionaries, especially on the front lines with Russia. The German authorities used the same rationale to justify their support for the Turkish action. My astonishment was great when I looked more closely at the military part of the reports of the German Foreign Ministry to the Grosses Hauptquartier (Military Headquarters). The GH was the actual political and military center during the war. The Emperor was part of it, in his capacity as Supreme Commander, the Chancellor, the Supreme Armed Forces Leadership, many more staffs down to the liaison officers to the allied powers, that is, also Turks, and always a high-level representative of the Foreign Ministry, who was best informed about the events in Turkey, - all together up to one thousand persons.
Thus these reports pulled together in concentrated form what the Foreign Ministry considered important. The astonishing thing was that in this top selection, references to military rebellions of Armenians or even the danger of such rebellions during the entirety of the genocidal events in 1915 and 1916 did not appear at all. In their place were reports of attacks by Turkish troops inside Russian borders, even the takeover of the Russian city Batum by Turkish guerillas. In short, the Germans registered military-revolutionary actions only on the part of the Turks. Thus, according to the view of the German Foreign Ministry, there were apparently no grounds whatsoever for the deportations.
In the first years, the Armenian genocide was not even once the subject of any report of the Foreign Ministry to the GH. I can refer only to these reports, since most of the military reports fell victim to a bomb attack in Potsdam at the close of World War II. Even regarding the military events in these Foreign Ministry documents, which dominated almost all reports to this power center, the warlike incidents in Turkey never came up in the years 1915-1916. There was one sole exception: that was the battle of the Dardenelles. No mention of Enver’s enormous defeat in the campaign against Russia in Spring 1915, an event which some historians consider the trigger for the genocide against the Armenians. I will be publishing the most important of these reports in the foreseeable future.
The very courageous intervention of Johannes Lepsius for the Armenians obstructs up to the present day the overall position of the Germans vis-à-vis the Armenians. This position was marked by disregard and often simple contempt for the Armenians, who were almost always described as greedy tradesmen. This began with Bismarck, who thought “that an Armenian will do almost nothing unless there is a pecuniary profit in it.” Anton Freiherr Saurma von der Jeltsch, who was ambassador in Constantinople beginning in 1895, and after all a mediator in the conflict around the Armenian stronghold Zeitun, believed: “The Armenian does not know gratitude. He views the situation merely from the standpoint of the greatest possible profit for him.” This viewpoint is best known among anti-Semites, and the Armenians were always compared to Jews, most frequently with the notion that they were even worse than the Jews. But it was not only in the business-mindedness of the Armenians that the Germans saw a blemish. Marshall von Bieberstein, who was in the Foreign Ministry for seven years, that is, Foreign Minister, and then a kind of super ambassador in Constantinople, did not want to hear anything about the massacres that took place in Adana in 1909, which constituted a sort of regional genocide. When Consul Christmann, who was responsible for Adana, presented him the details, he considered it all “gossip,” as he termed it. One couldn’t believe it, because the reports came from Armenians, and, as Marshall put it, “the Armenians belong to the most mendacious nationalities that exist.” This can be read in a documentation on Adana 1909 which I placed on the Internet some days ago.
Marshall’s successor in Constantinople, Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim, was then the first German ambassador who cautiously attempted to win over the Armenians for the Germans, in one or another form, and to provide a certain protection for them. He too picked on businessmen, but he had above all discovered the Armenian farmers and craftsmen – and certainly harbored an ulterior motive. The competent Armenians were settled in southeastern Turkey, right in that land area that the Germans were particularly interested in, and that they called their “working area,” that is, a possible colony, in the event Turkey were to break apart. But Foreign Ministry head Gottlieb von Jagow blocked Wangenheim’s plans immediately, so as not to torpedo good relations with Turkey. From then on, what ruled was the statement of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, which we recently published: “Our sole aim is to keep Turkey on our side until the end of the war, no matter whether the Armenians go under or not.”
In several articles and speeches, I have described Germany’s complicity in the genocide and even named specific people. I do not wish to repeat this here. But naturally, I was interested from the beginning in understanding where this contempt for the Armenians came from, even though very few Germans even knew Armenians. I believe that one of the decisive factors was that the Armenians were extremely Western-oriented, many of them studied in the United States, England, or France. And in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians were the pet students of American missionaries with their excellent educational institutions. There they learned ideals of democracy and freedom, which again and again met with the criticism of German diplomats. When the Armenian specialist in Constantinople, Johannes Mordtmann, spoke of the “ultra-democratic spirit which always prevailed among the Gregorian Armenians,” that was not praise coming out of the mouth of a German, but the greatest possible reproach.
For, following the failure of the democracy movement here in Frankfurt, Germany had distanced itself increasingly from the West and had developed its own culture which stood in strict contrast to Western civilization, which even a Nobel Prize winner, Thomas Mann, still in the First World War vehemently fought against. A German Empire, no matter how large, was yet only one part of the German-speaking world and – unlike Great Britain or France or even America – did not have to develop a values canon, which subjugated or immigrant people could come to an understanding of, in order to grow together into a nation. The Germany of the turn of the century understood itself increasingly as a “Volksgemeinschaft”, an ethnically defined community with rather diffuse values, which during the First World War found their highpoint in the so-called “Ideas of 1914,” of the popular Swedish state law expert Rudolf Kjellén. “During the coming century, German culture isolated itself more and more from the spiritual traditions of the Occident,” writes the Scandinavian expert Klaus von See, who provided the most precise description of the development of Germany into a “Voelkisch” state (with hints of a blood-and-soil ideology), while other nations, according to Klaus von See, “did not need to do anything more than to identify with the natural law-Enlightenment definitions of democracy, which elsewhere had long since become common knowledge – with the ideas of 1789.” The Armenians also felt duty-bound to these French ideals, ideals which they for a certain period of time hoped to realize even together with the Young Turks, until the latter swung around to the wrong track.
To designate a Johannes Lepsius today as the “founding father of human rights,” as some have done, demonstrates the whole lack of understanding of historical developments on the part of some of our contemporaries. For, the word “human rights” does not even appear in Lepsius or in the correspondence of German diplomacy in the First World War, because it was regarded as a French speciality, practically as something perverse. When the Entente in May 1915 first spoke of the genocide [in English] as “crimes against humanity,” the Germans could not even translate the term. They did not speak, as would have been correct – and today established by the U.N. – of “crimes against mankind or humanity (Menschheit),” but rather – as occurs still today – at best of “crimes against humaneness (Menschlichkeit).” The vague German word “Menschlichkeit” was then the only one that appears in German diplomatic correspondence. “Menschlichkeit” was an expression of feelings, which was often uttered in connection with the suffering Armenians, but, unlike “humanity (Menschheit),” it carried no sense of moral duty with it.
At the beginning of the war, Johannes Lepsius was intended by the German government to take up the task of placating “his” Armenians. He was supposed to make sure that the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire behaved peacefully. But Lepsius in 1915 was at the disposition of this appeasement mission only for a short period of time. When he heard straight from the mouth of War Minister Enver in Constantinople that it was hopeless to stop the deportations, he withdrew from the German justification line and from then on denounced the genocide in journalistic activities.
There were, however, in Germany, along with the all-powerful military, definitely still persons and social forces that had enough power to stop the genocide against the Armenians, or, at least, to significantly alleviate their catastrophic situation. One such person, for example, was the Emperor, one such organization was in particular the church.
The Emperor was very inconsistent towards the Armenians. In the period prior to the war, he sometimes insulted them, sometimes felt sorry for them and made a racket about the perpetrators. In the course of the war, the Emperor progressively withdrew from the political stage, but he was still the Supreme Military Commander and above all, Prussian King, a title he cherished more than that of Emperor. Still more important is that the German military mission in Turkey was under his personal command. And there it was the Prussians officers who dominated. To refuse to execute an order of the supreme chief was hardly imaginable for a Prussian officer.
There is one highly interesting example for the possibilities the Emperor did have, especially at the beginning of the war, in which the final decision for the genocide was made. Following the Balkan wars, Turkey had a great need to ally with the middle powers, naturally not Italy, which it was waging war against, but Austria-Hungary and above all Germany. The driving force was War Minister Enver, who, as former military attaché in Berlin, was the most pro-German of the Young Turk leaders. The closer the beginning of World War I approached, the more Turkey curried favor and sought solidarity with the German Empire. Finally, Turkey offered to place a fourth of the Turkish army directly under German command. But its offer found little favor. Ambassador Wangenheim advised against it, because Germany would only end up paying, it did not go down well with Foreign Minister Jagow, and Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg was not to be won over to an alliance either. Enver played his last card and it was a trump. He offered Germany not only the command over one-fourth of the Turkish army, but accepted placing the entire Turkish army under Germany’s command. The Emperor, who had been hesitant earlier, toppled – something he did often – and ordered his ambassador in Constantinople to accept the offer. Wangenheim parried.
Then, however, the Turks showed the Germans that they were overwhelmingly superior, not militarily, but in terms of cunning. They led Wangenheim by the nose in the final negotiations. In the end, the German ambassador signed a contract which acknowledged a significant right to have a say for the German military, but did not in practice alter the command structure. Nominally the Sultan remained the supreme commander; in reality it was War Minister Enver and with him, a group of German generals and admirals who were extremely hostile to the Armenians, as the Swiss historian Christoph Dinkel has convincingly shown. This officers’ clique around Enver undertook everything in order to demote, or neutralize, the nominal chief of the German military mission, Otto Liman von Sanders.
And this political clique supported the genocide against the Armenians, something the Emperor knew practically nothing about. The news about the terrible events in Turkey, may have reached the chief of the Imperial Military Cabinet, Moritz Freiherr von Lyncker, who wrote to his wife: “It is really horrible how the Turks are raging against the Christian Armenians, their own subjects. – Men, women, children are executed or deliberately condemned to death by hunger. Our diplomacy seems to be powerless in this issue.” The diplomacy was powerless, because it wanted to be powerless, and Lyncker was too. For, he talked to the Emperor daily, played skat with him hours on end, but spoke not a word with him about the fate of the Armenians.
If only the Emperor knew about this, wrote the German missionaries in their desperate reports on the atrocities against the Armenians. A single order by the Emperor would have, in fact, been enough to save many Armenians. Wilhelm II certainly would not have ordered a stop to the deportations, since the Germans themselves had deported tens of thousands of civilians in Belgium and France. If even Johannes Lepsius considered the deportations of his Armenians as acceptable on military grounds, how could the Emperor whom he admired decide otherwise? But deportations did not necessarily mean a death sentence. If the Emperor had prohibited the slaughter of the Armenians by an order, many would have survived, even in the death zones on the Euphrates. There is a German document which shows how the Armenians with their proverbial industriousness built up a run-down village to live there. And the level of the Euprates offered ample irrigable land for them to hold out until the end of the war. In addition, Cilicia and the Euphrates valley were for Emperor and Chancellor a chosen land for a German takeover, were Turkey to disintegrate, an option that came from Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow for example. There were, therefore, good arguments to make the Emperor see a survival order as tempting. And there were also the highest court chaplains, sort of Protestant confessors, clergymen in his immediate vicinity, who were very well informed, either through their own sources or through Lepsius. The Emperor was, in the end, not only a practicing Protestant but also its highest bishop.
But the Emperor was only one among those who could have saved the Armenians. There were also other powerful, because more effective, institutions – the German churches. The highest-ranking Catholic among the politicians, Matthias Erzberger, was in Turkey frequently, and wrote reports about how the Armenians could be helped. And yet his proposals were rather naïve. All the same, through him the Catholic church in Germany was informed. And what did it do? Nothing.
Even more significant was the position of the Evangelical (or Protestant) church. Their relief organizations in Turkey did everything to alleviate the suffering of the Armenians. And they report very precisely on the genocide, just as Lepsius had informed his Protestant brethren in secret meetings. But what did the highest German Protestants do? Nothing.
They wrote a joint resolution to the Chancellor, whose policy towards the Armenians they knew. This memorandum, which was outstanding because of the number and quality of its signatories, was sent to the embassy in Constantinople and led to the fact that Germany’s highest representatives in Turkey begged for the Armenian Catholics and especially the Armenian Protestants to be spared, because they were particularly loyal and therefore averse to any revolution. In other words: in the view of the German Protestants, the Gregorian Armenians were really not to be trusted. The Turkish officials responsible for the genocide must have rubbed their hands in glee because of this unexpected support. It did, however, not help the Catholic and Protestant Armenians at all, as they were slaughtered just like their Armenian Apostolic brothers.
If only there had been no censorship, was a complaint that was to be heard often after the war, from Lepsius but also from the churches. Lepsius had published his famous report on the situation of the Armenians in Turkey in 1916. It was the best that up to that point had been written on the genocide. Lepsius had 20,000 copies printed, despite the resistance of some of his collaborators. He sent about 500 copies to the most important politicians in Germany. They were taken out of circulation by the censorship. The remaining copies were destined to the Protestant parishes. Lepsius and his family members and friends carried huge cartons of the reports to the post office. The censors let these copies go through.
When the German government, on the request of the Turkish Embassy in Berlin, lodged a complaint about these mailings, the Foreign Ministry answered, saying that they had been forbidden. This was formally true. But “almost all the copies were sent out,” as also the Church historian Uwe Feigel established in his book on Protestant Germany and the Armenians. If only one out of every ten pastors had announced Lepsius’s message from the pulpit in short but forceful words, then the most important political force in Germany which had accepted Western values, i.e. the Social Democrats, would have been alarmed – and with them many Germans. It was not the evil Prussian censorship that prevented the dissemination of the truth of the genocide during the war, but the good Protestant church. “Every German rectory must have been in possession of my report,” Lepsius himself wrote, “if the superintendants and representatives, to whom the packets were sent, had done their duty.”
This is precisely what they did not do. For too many Protestant church leaders worked closely together with the government. The treasurer of the Evangelical Humanitarian Mission Friedrich Robert Faber, publisher of the Magdeburgischen Zeitung – Germany’s oldest newspaper – and at the same time chairman of the Association of German Newspaper Publishers, went so far as to offer his services to silence critical journalists. Johannes Lepsius knew well enough who had thwarted his most important concern, to save the Armenians. “And so could it come to pass,” he wrote right after the end of the war to his best friend, the theologian Albert Weckesser, with whom he had studied, “that in Germany during the war the Evangelical church was completely dragged into the nationalistic swindle and was morally bankrupt.”
Today the theme “Genocide against the Armenians” has again landed at the doorstep of the Protestant church. All the funds of the Bundestag allocated for dealing with study of the genocide, - little enough compared to the enormity of the crime, but nonetheless 100,000 Euros per year, - go to the Protestant church - run Lepsius house in Potsdam, thanks to skillful lobbying activity. In this connection it might interest you to learn about a statement I found in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung today, April 24, 2009, which shows how relevant this theme is: “The church is behaving like a firm. It solicits funds, in pursuit of its own interests. That is terrible.”
This statement was not by a church-hater but by a Protestant church pastor from Berlin, Constanze Kraft. For her the issue was the abolition of ethics classes, which are usually lessons in democracy, something which we in Germany are still in need of. She is certainly a practicing Protestant, just as Lepsius was, and just as I am. For various reasons, in the Lepsius house the German role in the genocide cannot be researched and worked through, because Lepsius never saw that as his task. And the process of working through the genocide itself does not take place there. The Lepsius archive contains nothing more that might throw light on the genocide, because Lepsius did – and that was certainly his main concern - publish everything that could contribute to clarification of the genocide.
Lepsius was “a child of his time,” as his current mentor writes, he was – as was practically the entire German elite – deeply conservative, with a shot of the usual anti-Semitism current at the time and an animosity to democracy which went along with it. In contrast to his comrade-in-arms for the Armenian cause – Armin T. Wegner – Lepsius was a devout follower of the Emperor, and moved more and more to the right towards the end of his life. As far as the Armenians were concerned, Lepsius played a completely different role for the German government – namely, that of a coveted fig leaf.
He served the Foreign Ministry as a fig leaf when he was supposed to try to convince the Armenians in Turkey not to put up any resistance, thus to submit to their destiny. After the end of the war, he served again as a fig leaf when he used his good reputation to publish German documents on the genocide, in which Germany’s complicity was largely hushed up. Lepsius was aware of this too. “I see us even now as complicit for the greatest massacre of Christians of all times,” he wrote at the beginning of 1920 to his cousin, Paul Vigand. And today too his name is used as a fig leaf. Johannes Lepsius would be most unhappy if he were to see that his house has become the site of a totally un-Protestant saint’s cult.
When, twenty years ago, I began to publish articles on the genocide, many Armenians from the Republic complained of the arrogance of German diplomats towards them. Today things are apparently different and the German Federal Republic stands in Europe at the head of donor states for Armenia. Certainly a guilty conscience vis-a-vis the Armenians played an important role. This guilty conscience has its origin in the research and elaboration of the German co-responsibility, a task which was not undertaken by the administrators of the Lepsius estate. For them, what is primary is to cherish Johannes Lepsius as an icon. To put it bluntly: Lepsius earned great honors and I am the last to deny that. But he would certainly have rejected the halo that has been placed on him today.
Alongside the research of the genocide itself, there is a political problem today to deal with: for you, Armenians, the recognition of the genocide by governments and parliaments is in the forefront and I can understand this all too well after almost a century of neglect of this mega-crime. In this regard, the question of the authenticity of the genocide for historians has long since been decided, since the deniers are no longer taken seriously in the scientific community; this must be clear even to the leading Turkish politicians and it is in fact. Precisely today the decision stands before us, which Taner Akcam so brilliantly formulated. The question is whether Americans will continue to acknowledge the truth 364 days a year, and then on the decisive day – today – lie. This applies even more to us Germans.
The Bundestag published a declaration which reads very well in part, but leaves out the word “genocide” against the Armenians. German complicity cannot be dismissed with an apology, it has to be worked through, with care and thoroughness, as was the case with the holocaust, - albeit then with two decades of hesitation and initially halfheartedly. In Germany those who are dealing with the issue of complicity are in the first instance private individuals with a zero budget, a zero lobby, and thus sparse results. Due to a serious illness of my wife, I had to be inactive for five years. What was published in those years from among those German documents uniquely capable of uncovering our co-responsibility? Nothing.
Research into genocide and, in the case of mass murder, research into the German role must be carried out in a professional manner. This is certainly stuff for the history department of a German university. And it would be very helpful in this regard if work for doctoral candidates could be financed. But this is something that we Germans must do. The funds of the Bundestag for research purposes must benefit the Armenian community. You, the Armenians, are the ones who bear the suffering of the genocide, you have a primary interest in having Germany’s role clarified. Or, that what can be saved should be salvaged.
To give one example. In the period of my forced inactivity, the Holzmann firm went bankrupt. That was the firm that once built the Baghdad railway, with thousands of Armenian workers and a wealth of most valuable documents about them. If there had been an institution in Germany that dealt professionally with the destiny of the Armenians, it would have done everything thinkable to save this valuable archive. Another example: The Deutsche Bank, with its significant documents of the genocide, has refused up to the present day to allow me access to its archives, with the curious argument that I work for the Armenians. There are most interesting documents slumbering in German state and private archives which must be worked through, because otherwise they might disappear or fall into oblivion. There are many young Armenians here who would like to do something, who expect answers to many questions about the German position, but there is no committee, no institution, which focuses their curiosity in a meaningful manner.
In the documents about the massacres of Armenians in Adana in 1909, which I published a week ago on the 100th anniversary, foreign eyewitnesses report that the Armenians in Adana could even have been victorious militarily, or, at least, could have defended themselves from inside their stone houses long enough for foreign help to arrive. But their pronounced individualism hindered the necessary organization. The foreign eyewitnesses looked on almost in shocked amazement as the persecuted Armenians, with weapons in hand, let themselves be slaughtered, without defending themselves. So much for the cliché about the dangerous and revolutionary Armenians. I would hope that the Armenians would defend themselves, and their best weapon is the word.
You live here with us in a situation which many of you perceive as threatening, because you face a minority 60 to 80 times as large, which is hostile towards you, now as before. I can therefore understand your reaction, to try to be as invisible as possible. But your ancestors were trailblazers of a Western civilization which we Germans as late-comers finally also joined. You were ahead of us by a century. You, the Armenians in Germany and elsewhere, are no petitioners, you have every right to demand of us that we rectify a historical wrong, and help you.
We live in a world of symbols, and they are often more effective than words. One such symbol is the Holocaust memorial in the middle of Berlin, near the Reichtstag. You, the Armenians deserve such a symbol. Three, five, or seven stone crosses not somewhere out in the provinces, but in the heart of Berlin, could be such a monument. Three, five, or seven Khatchkars would also represent a correct ratio to the huge memorial, so that many politicians could free themselves of the fear that we might be suspected of wanting to diminish our responsibility for the Holocaust. And these stones, in times of tight budgets, cost almost nothing.
Three, five, or seven of the strong Armenian symbols, which stand both for death and reawakening life, on the site right in front of the Bundestag and visible from the Holocaust monument, - that would be a visible sign.
Our Parliament will not in the foreseeable future vote up a new resolution with the word “genocide” in it, even if Barack Obama were to utter it today. But many German members of Parliament could do it, and the Khatchkars in front of their building would remind them of their neglect. The Bundestag cannot ignore such a richly symbolic sign if it wants to take its own resolution seriously. It would be plea – carved in stone – for reconciliation with a people worn out through suffering and almost extinguished, a people whom we failed to aid. I hope that my country finds itself prepared to this gesture, a gesture that may help a bit better to heal the deep wounds.
Thank you for your attention.