Final Research Paper - The Holocaust

and Armenian Genocide

By: Angeleah Salo

SSO 306 45 & 75 - Genocide in Comparative Perspective

Dr. O'Dell

February 26, 2020

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The two genocides I have decided to compare are the Holocaust and the Armenian
genocide. I have decided to compare the two because I feel that in many ways they are similar
due to nationalism and ethnicity/race ideals that divided the people to the point of allowing their
government to exterminate the people living amongst them. I aim to explain the ways
nationalism and its ideals allow the minority races to be seen as were less than and a utopian
society could only be formed without their presence. Ethnicity and race also played a role in the
ways to divide the nations, people living in an area that they had inhabited for years then being
forced to leave due to being seen as subhuman by their peers due to their ethnicity. In both
cases, nationalism was the main way the government was able to turn people against each
other, by pursuing an idea that the country was not living up to its full potential due to an
existence of lesser than people living among them. These nationalist ideas are the main causes
of these genocides, but both were carried out very differently and with different government and
social tactics used to turn people against each other. Occurring just over twenty years apart
they both affected hundreds of millions of people and changed the course of history for the
countries affected. In the below report I will try to not only explain the history and background
allowed these genocides to occur, but also the stories of the genocides themselves, and the
people affected by them.

First, to understand the Armenian genocide, it’s important to understand the government
and the area in which it took place. The Ottoman Empire, in which most Armenians lived,
spread across a large area from West Asia, North Africa, and South Eastern Europe. The
Ottoman Empire was ruled by Turks who were a majority Muslim people, while Armenians were
Christians in faith. The Armenian people had lived in these lands for centuries under whichever
receive took over the territory. Armenians were always treated as “second class citizens'
although they had a population of about two million they had legal restrictions with little security
for their lives or property. Armenians also had to pay a separate tax due to being non-Muslims
living under a majority Muslim government. In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire was
extremely powerful and had great economic success. But beginning in the nineteenth century
the empire started to lose mass territories in Europe and Asia and began to suffer economically
due to this. These economic difficulties created political issues which in turn intensified ethical
tensions within the empire. Remains began to ask for more political representation as well as
social protections. These requests made Turks in power fearful that Armenians would try to gain
power and overthrow the government in place, so began the need to eliminate the Armenians
from the Ottoman Empire all together. In response to the continued decline of the Ottoman
Empire, a new political group called the Young Turks seized power in 1908, they later became
the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). This new government adopted an ideology which
advocated for the creation of all Turkish states by not only removing Armenians from Turkey,
but also from neighboring countries as well. To create this state they thought to move eastward
and gain more territories which were inhabited by Turkish people. Under the cover of war to
fight for the land, the Ottoman army campaigned a series of massacres against civilian
Armenians who lived in the areas affected by war. This was the beginning of the genocidal
program which resulted in 1.5 million Armenians being killed. (Adalian, R. P. 2017)

Early in the fighting Armenian soldiers had been disarmed by the Ottoman forces and
either worked to death or executed, which allowed for the elimination of the able-bodied men of
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the population to be diminished, and all to be left were women, children, and elderly who would
show little resistance. In the spring and summer of 1915, Armenians in Turkey and neighboring
countries were ordered deported and were forced to walk in convoys hundreds of miles through
the desert. This “resettlement program” forced brutal treatment on the deportees, most of whom
were forced to walk, made it apparent that the deportations were mainly created to be death
marches. During these marches the convoys would be regularly attacked by killers who were
organized by the Ottomans to specifically slaughter the deportees. These killings were
extremely cruel and vicious mostly being executed by sword, and survivors were left with the
trauma of watching their friends and family murdered in front of them. The government had also
made no plans for how to feed the deported people or how to hydrate them on these marches
through the desert, resulting in hundreds of people succumbing to dehydration and starvation
along the way. Many children were left orphaned, as a result and once orphaned, would be put
into orphanages to be “turkified” so that they would relinquish their Armenian heritage. Sadly,
the cruelty did not stop there, these children were forced to give up their surnames and be
diminished to a number. One of these orphaned children was Harutyum Alboyadjian, “When
they killed my parents, they took me and other under-age children to Djemal pasha’s Turkish
orphanage and Turkified us. My surname was ‘535’ and my name was Shukri. My Armenian
friend also became an Enver. They circumcised us. There were many others who did not know
Turkish; they did not speak for weeks, with a view to hiding their Armenian origin. If the
gendarmes knew about it, they would beat them with ‘falakhas.’ The punishment consisted of
twenty, thirty or fifty strokes on the soles of the feet, or being forced to look directly at the sun for
hours.” (V. Svazlian, 2016)

Not only did the force relocation remove the unwanted society from the area it also
served as a major opportunity for the CUP to take over material wealth and properties that the
Armenians had left behind. “By the autumn of 1915, the Ottoman bureaucracy had depopulated
most Armenian settlements, isolated or eliminated Armenian community leaders, and was
already micromanaging the expropriation of Armenians and the allocation of their property to
CUP loyalist Muslims. The destruction of the Ottoman Armenians denuded a vast economy of
its owners: farms, businesses, factories, workplaces, ateliers, in some cities entire sections of
bazaars were confiscated. (Üngör, U. Ü. 2008)”.

In all it is believed that as many as a million and a half Armenians were killed during this
genocide. The loss of these people still affects the population today, with the loss of history and
culture. ”The surviving refugees spread around the world and eventually settled in some two
dozen countries on all continents of the globe.” (Adalian, 2017). After the end of the genocide,
around four hundred of the key CUP officials arrested and charged. With crimes ranging from,
unconstitutional seizure of power and subversion of the legal government, the conduct of a war
of aggression, and conspiring the liquidation of the Armenian population, to more explicit capital
crimes, including massacre. Some of the accused were found guilty of the charges. Most
significantly, the ruling triumvirate was condemned to death. However, most eluded justice by
fleeing abroad. Still today, the Turkish republic refuses to address this time in history or call it a
genocide at all, “Triumphant in its total annihilation of the Armenians and relieved of any
obligations to the victims and survivors, the Turkish Republic adopted a policy of dismissing the
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charge of genocide and denying that the deportations and atrocities had constituted part of a
deliberate plan to exterminate the Armenians.” (Adalian, 2017).

The Holocaust, was the systematic killing of over 6 million Jews throughout Europe. The
general mass of the holocaust is hard to comprehend and the ability of the Nazi party to
orcastrate this mass killing is above anything we have since seen in history.
In order to understand how the mass genocide of Jews in Europe, known as the
holocaust, it is important to understand the economic and general background of what was
happening in Germany at the rise of the Nazi party in 1933. The First World War killed about 17
million Europeans and left a “crippled and broken world” the Treaty of Versailles that ended the
war left Germany with no military, less land mass, and to pay for reparations left after WWI, this
took a large toll of Germany economically with much of the middle class losing their savings due
to inflation. Then in 1929, the great depression hit western society but hit Germany and its
people particularly hard, with unemployment at 22%. These things combined with changes in
society as a whole allowed for more right wing political views to become more popular. Adolf
Hitler, a former WWI soldier and increasingly popular Nazi party leader, wrote his personal
memoir Mein Kampf (My Struggle) which played on German people’s fears and imagined a
utopian society that Germany could become if subhuman were to be eliminated from Germany
and Europe as a whole. These subhuman, were anyone not of the Aryan race, including Jews,
Gypsies, and people with intellectual and physical disabilities. In his book Hitler wrote that it was
necessary for Germans to “occupy themselves not merely with the breeding of dogs, horses,
and cats but also with care for the purity of their own blood.” (The Editors of Encyclopedia
Britannica 2019). In 1933 Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany which started his political
career in Germany and paved the way for his future powers. Hitler promised full employment,
national unity, the safeguarding of eternal values, and Germany’s return to great power, but
Hitler knew though that his power base was still fragile and sought to allay fears and keep the
wavering middle class on his side (Weitz, 2003), this just increased his popularity throughout
Germany. On February 27, 1933, the German parliament building burned down due to arson.
The Nazi leadership exploited the fire and persuaded German President Paul von Hindenburg
that Communists were planning a violent uprising. Nazi leadership convinced the president that
emergency legislation was needed to prevent this and to abolished a number of constitutional
protections of the people including constraints on the press and authorized, the police to ban
political meetings and marches, effectively hindering electoral campaigning, and the suspension
of civil rights (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Reichstag Fire.”). These limitations
for citizens paved the way for the Nazi party to have full control and begin to systematically
suppress and eliminate Jews.

When Adolf Hitler became the Fuhrer (abolishing the presidency and becoming head of
the government) in 1934, the Nazi party became even more powerful and antisemitism became
public and official government policy, with segregation of the Jewish community. Beliefs that
Jews were dangerous and a threat to the nation spread through German propaganda through
the radio, school teachings such as Hitler Youth training, magazines, posters, and movies. With
these large amounts of propaganda Hitler and the Nazi’s were able to brain wash even the
youth that the Jews living among them were subhuman not deserving of life, as Wiesenthal says
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in his book The Sunflower of a dying SS soldier who has committed horrendous crimes against
Jews, “Obviously he was not born a murder nor did he want to be a murder. It was the Nazis
who made him kill defenseless people.” (Wiesenthal, 1969). The Nazis’ abolition of freedom of
speech and a free press ensured that Germans heard no voices advocating tolerance. (United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Introduction to the Holocaust”). Within the next year
Germany also openly defied the Treaty of Versailles with reinstituting the draft and building an
army to gain military power over Europe. As the military became stronger the harsh treatment of
Jews became more prominent. In September of 1939 invaded Poland and the Second World
War begins (WWII) with this, Nazi officials gain the opportunity to begin more radical measures
against the Jews population in not only Germany, but also Poland. German authorities began
confining the Jewish population to ghettos (Ghettos were closed off areas of the city that
isolated Jews by separating from the non-Jewish population), to which they also later deported
thousands of Jews to concentration camps located throughout German occupied territory
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Final Solution”). “German SS and police
murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or
by shooting. In its entirety, the "Final Solution" called for the murder of all European Jews by
gassing, shooting, and other means. Six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed
during the Holocaust—two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before World War II.” (United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Final Solution”).

When WWII ended in 1945, top Nazi officials were put on trial in Nuremberg, Germany,
these trails became famously known as the Nuremberg Trails. Presiding over these proceedings
were top allied nation judges from Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United
States—presided over the hearing of 22 major Nazi criminals, and officials. 199 defendants
were tried on charges such as, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and
conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes. 161 were convicted and 37 sentenced to
death. The most well-known and the man whose ideas started this genocide, Adolf Hitler, had
committed suicide during the final days of the war. Other war criminals and top Nazi officials
killed themselves during this time or fled Germany to start new lives abroad, never to be found
or tried for their crimes. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nuremberg Trials)
In both the above cases of genocide, things didn’t just change or happen overnight.
People became extremely unhappy with their government and lifestyles, called for a new
political order, and were easily susceptible to an enemy. In both cases these governments,
chosen by the people were able to divide them and spread hate among them. Society today
should learn from the mistakes of the people. “Beginning with the Armenians, genocides have
become more extensive, more systematic, and more through” (Weitz, 2003) as time has gone
on and technology has advanced so has the art of killing in masses. As the above shows,
millions more human lives were taken during the Holocaust which only occurred about 20 years
after the Armenian genocide. As we also saw with the Armenian genocide, no one was every
brought to justice for their crimes, and as Weitz writes “Adolf Hitler was well aware of another
precedent - the genocide of the Armenians. In an oft-quotes statement, he reportedly said “who,
after all speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?” (Weitz, 2003). With this it is
easy to say that if we allow war criminals to get away with their crimes then it sets a president
for other nations to allow for these genocides to happen. As a society we must stand up for the
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defenseless, and give voices to those who cannot be heard. It’s important to educate our
younger generations on past mistakes and flaws of their ancestors so that these crimes are
never committed in the future.
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Bibliography:
● Peer-reviewed journal articles,
○ Armenian
■ Üngör, U. Ü. (2008, September 23). Geographies of Nationalism
and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk 'Soc... Retrieved February
20, 2020, from https://journals.openedition.org/ejts/2583
○ Holocaust
■ Kolman, J. M., & Miller, S. M. (2018, January 29). manuscript 804
- html. Retrieved February 20, 2020, from
https://www.rmmj.org.il/issues/36/804/manuscript
● Books
○ Weitz, E. D. (2003). A century of genocide: utopias of race and nation.
Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
■ (Weitz, 2003)
○ Wiesenthal, S., (1998). The sunflower: on the possibility and limits of
forgiveness. New York: Schocken Books.
■ (Wiesenthal, 1998)
● Primary sources

○ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2016, May 27). The Path to
Nazi Genocide, Chapter 1/4: World War II and the Holocaust, 1939–1945
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LrR08F5ZAA&t=636s
○ Hitler Speech
■ Mein Kampf. (2019, January 4). Retrieved February 20, 2020,
from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mein-Kampf
○ Armenian Journal
■ Svazlian, V. (2016, January 5). Genocide Museum: The Armenian
Genocide Museum-institute. Retrieved from http://www.genocide-
museum.am/eng/harutyun-alboyadjian-eng.php
● Websites
○ Adalian, R. P. (2017). Armenian Genocide. Retrieved from
https://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocide.html
■ (Adalian, 2017)
○ INTRODUCTION TO THE HOLOCAUST. (2018, March 12). Retrieved
from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-
the-holocaust
○ The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Mein Kampf.” Encyclopædia
Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 4 Jan. 2019,
www.britannica.com/topic/Mein-Kampf.