Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler

by Stefan Ihrig

Overview

The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that the Armenians were restless under Ottoman rule, they were a problem for Germany too. From the 1890s onward Germany became accustomed to excusing violence against Armenians, even accepting it as a foreign policy necessity. For many Germans, the Armenians represented an explicitly racial problem and despite the Armenians’ Christianity, Germans portrayed them as the “Jews of the Orient.”

As Stefan Ihrig reveals in this first comprehensive study of the subject, many Germans before World War I sympathized with the Ottomans’ longstanding repression of the Armenians and would go on to defend vigorously the Turks’ wartime program of extermination. After the war, in what Ihrig terms the “great genocide debate,” German nationalists first denied and then justified genocide in sweeping terms. The Nazis too came to see genocide as justifiable: in their version of history, the Armenian Genocide had made possible the astonishing rise of the New Turkey.

Ihrig is careful to note that this connection does not imply the Armenian Genocide somehow caused the Holocaust, nor does it make Germans any less culpable. But no history of the twentieth century should ignore the deep, direct, and disturbing connections between these two crimes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674504790
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/04/2016
Pages:	472
Sales rank:	963,183
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Stefan Ihrig is Professor of History at the University of Haifa.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Franz Werfel Meets Adolf Hitler 1

Introduction: Questions of Genocide? 4

Part I Armenian Blood Money 17

1 Beginnings under Bismarck 19

2 Germany and the Armenian Horrors of the 1890s 31

3 The Triumph of German Anti-Armenianism 59

4 From Revolution to Abyss 82

Part II Under German Noses 91

5 Notions of Total War 93

6 Dispatches from Erzurum 105

7 "Interlude of the Gods" 139

8 What Germany Could Have Known 157

Part III Debating Genocide 191

9 War Crimes, War Guilt, and Whitewashing 193

10 Assassination in Berlin, 1921 226

11 Trial in Berlin 234

12 The Victory of Justificationalism 270

Part IV The Nazis and the Armenian Genocide 299

13 Racial Discourse and the Armenians 301

14 The Nazis' New Turkey 320

15 No Smoking Gun 333

Epilogue: Armenian Writings on the Wall 359

Notes 373

Acknowledgments 449

Index 451

Editorial Reviews

Yet another excellent book by Stefan Ihrig about the uncanny German–Turkish connection. The story of the Armenian Genocide and its reception in post–World War I Germany thus becomes a German, not a Turkish or Armenian, story about racism and the road taken by Germany toward the Holocaust. A surprising answer to the question: How was the Holocaust possible in twentieth-century Germany of all places?

Moshe Zimmermann

After Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, Stefan Ihrig again presents an intelligent book of uncommon originality. By exposing how ‘justificationalism’ led to an ethic-free thinking in concepts of ‘final solutions,’ he shows how this became a strong mental link between the Armenian Genocide and the Shoah. Written in the elegant style of a historical drama in several acts, this is a great achievement.

Rolf Hosfeld

It is striking to see the ideological similarities between Germany in the late 1920s and Kemalist Turkey, or Mussolinian Italy. Written in a lively style, well-balanced and well-documented, this book will advance the debate on the relationship between mass violences that marked the twentieth century.

Raymond Kévorkian

This book is a major contribution to the study of German attitudes toward the Armenian Genocide. It puts German policies and reactions to Ottoman Turkey in the general perspective of Germany’s policies before, during, and after World War I. It deals with the parallels between German attitudes to Armenians and to Jews, and permits us to understand the complexities and problems of different minority groups within German society relative to Turkey.

Yehuda Bauer

Fascinating and highly readable… Ihrig brilliantly lays bare the ‘confluence’ between German anti-Semitic and anti-Armenian stereotypes.

Lawrence Douglas

It is striking to see the ideological similarities between Germany in the late 1920s and Kemalist Turkey, or Mussolinian Italy. Written in a lively style, well-balanced and well-documented, this book will advance the debate on the relationship between mass violences that marked the twentieth century.

Raymond Kévorkian

Fascinating and highly readable… Ihrig brilliantly lays bare the ‘confluence’ between German anti-Semitic and anti-Armenian stereotypes.

Irish Times - Lawrence Douglas

2015-10-22
This scholarly study reveals how the Germans "received" the events of the Armenian genocide—and later whitewashed and even found motivation from it. The attempted extinction of the Armenians by the Turks constitutes what Ihrig (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute) calls "the original sin of the 20th century," not only by the Ottoman perpetrators, but also by the bystanders. In light of the later Holocaust visited upon the Jews and others by the Nazis, the Armenian genocide—the word was not actually defined by the U.N. until 1948—poses particular questions about guilt for the Germans, who were the Ottoman allies. They were knowledgeable about the massacres (both in 1894-1896 and in 1915-16) and were "inspired" (during the Third Reich) to use such methods and justification for purposes of "ethnic cleansing." In this compelling narrative, Ihrig finds that the so-called Armenian Horrors were vigorously debated in the government and in periodicals of the time. Several important events would affect how the German public and private spheres came to view the "Armenian question": the rise of the restive Young Turks in 1908; reports of Armenian rebellion and "treachery"; the strengthening of racial attitudes, especially during the 1920s; and the sensational assassination of the former Ottoman grand vizier in Berlin in 1921. Ihrig's deep, scrupulous research reveals the official pattern set by the Germans "vis-à-vis the Armenians" as an "enabler" for the Ottomans, later giving way to open justification, denial, and whitewashing of the horrors visited on the Armenian people. In the final chapter, the author reveals how Hitler and the Nazis admired and were influenced by Ataturk and the new Turkey's policies of ethnic cleansing based on a "foundation of national purity." A groundbreaking academic study that shows how Germany derived from the Armenian genocide "a plethora of recipes" to address its own ethnic problems.

Kirkus Reviews