For the 127th anniversary of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s occupation of the Ottoman Bank—which, interestingly, coincides not only with the 101st anniversary of the Büyük Taarruz but also with the 78th anniversary of Franz Viktor Werfel’s death—I want to talk to you about the Armenians.

For anybody unaware, the Armenian massacres, also known as the Meds Yeghern, was an atrocity carried out by the Central Powers from 1915 to 1918. At least 800,000 Armenians perished in this tragedy, but the actual number could have been as high as 1,500,000. I say ‘Central Powers’ because although the primary perpetrator was the Ottoman Empire, there is evidence that the Second Reich had at least a modicum of direct involvement in it as well, though the exact extent is not entirely clear.

Franz Viktor Werfel’s familiarity with the Armenian massacres lead him to predict the Shoah, and many people—including some Shoah victims and survivors themselves—have compared the two tragedies ever since the latter started. Some have gone so far as to suggest that there is a direct link between the two.

For example, William Mishell (himself a Shoah survivor) said:

No doubt Hitler knew all about these massacres and the criminal neglect by the [so‐called] free world, and was convinced that he could proceed with impunity against the helpless Jews.

Given how many potentially incriminating documents the Axis destroyed in 1945, we unfortunately have no evidence that proves conclusively that the Armenian massacres inspired the Shoah. Certainly, in any case, it would be an exaggeration to claim the the Shoah was directly modelled after the Armenian massacres.

Nonetheless, given how infamous the topic was in the German media throughout the 1920s (with many well respected anticommunist papers openly justifying the massacres), and the German officials with some links to the atrocities who later became Fascists (Rudolf Hoess, Hans‐Heinrich Dieckhoff, Otto von Feldmann & alii), and the famous Fascists such as Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Günther, and Adolf Schicklgruber himself who disparaged the Armenians in German media, and the Fascists’ respect for the Kemalists, the chances that the Armenian massacres had no influence whatsoever on the Shoah are extremely unlikely.

The closest that we have to a direct, unambiguous link between the two events is a comment from Hans Tröbst in 1924. From Professor Stefan Ihrig’s Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler, page 326:

As a (one‐off) commentary on the ongoing Hitler trial, Hans Tröbst answered Lossow’s attempts to distance himself from the “Ankara in Munich” solution in a front‐page article in the now‐leading [NSDAP] newspaper, the Völkischer Kurier. Again, he expanded on the “ethnic problem,” which the Turks, he claimed, had solved “in a most exemplary fashion.” He then mashed up the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish–Greek population exchange:

The alien blood suckers were given one month to leave the country in order to create room for the national colleagues [Volksgenossen]. Who hinders us from doing the same? Just as the American Armenians immediately sent ships in aid of their brethren in Anatolia when they realized what the bell had tolled […], so will the coreligionists of the children of Israel in America and England organize the necessary ships when at some point in the future they will be “treading water” on the shores of the North Sea. And if [they do] not? What business of ours is it?¹⁸

Thus, ethnic cleansing in the form of mass expulsion, with the possibility of genocide, was already an option for at least some of the early [German Fascists].

It may be hard to believe, but (as Ihrig notes on pages 345–6) there is actually a sudden and very conspicuous scarcity of direct references to the Armenian massacres that date back to the Third Reich. We can only speculate, but a plausible explanation for this silence was to help hide the criminal conspiracy to commit populicide. On the other hand, some of you may be familiar with this quote attributed to Adolf Schicklgruber:

Our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my Death‐Head formation [that is, the SS] in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

This is apocryphal. Page 348:

Hitler’s question was perhaps never posed. The document and its trail are sketchy, and the sentence in question is absent in other accounts of the meeting—though, of course, that may simply mean that others did not write down this remark concerning genocide, not necessarily that it was never actually uttered.

Nevertheless, even if inauthentic, it would not disprove the postdiction that the Ottoman Empire’s violence against a minority positively influenced the Third Reich. Page 349:

The burden of proof is actually not on showing that Hitler and the other Nazis did know of the Armenian Genocide; it is quite the reverse: there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the Germans had actually forgotten about the Armenian Genocide by 1939, as the famous Hitler quotation is often believed to have proven—and less even that the leading [Fascists] had not been somewhat inspired by it.

And furthermore, there is every reason to believe that what Hitler meant in that part of his speech—if he did in fact ever utter it—was similar to what the Nevile Henderson excerpt suggested (in reference to the Greeks): the Turks (as a whole) had never had to “pay” for the Armenian Genocide; they got away with it unscathed, without negative consequences.

Indeed, quite the contrary, if we were to adopt the perspective of German (extreme) nationalists and [Fascists] in the 1920s and 1930s, the New Turkey was instead a hugely successful new state, built upon the solid foundation of wholesale “ethnic cleansing.” The [German Fascists], as a political movement, had grown up with Turkey, that is, the Turkish War of Independence.

Hitler was in such awe of Atatürk that he had even modeled his first attempt to take power, the Hitler Putsch, on Atatürk’s rebellion. But this also means that Hitler “grew up,” politically, as a [Fascist], that is, with the debates about the Armenian Genocide. How could it and the debates we have discussed in the previous chapters not have impressed and inspired the future Führer?

There can be no doubt that the [Fascists] had incorporated the Armenian Genocide, its “lessons,” tactics, and “benefits,” into their own worldview and their view of the new racial order they were building. Werner Best, [Fascist] legal specialist and politician, wrote in a book compiled in honor of Heinrich Himmler and presented to him in 1942 that “history proves that the annihilation or expulsion of a foreign nationality is not contrary to biological law, if carried out totally” (this excerpt was also published in the journal Zeitschrift für Politik, in June 1942).

We can sum it all up with this, from page 353:

Hitler’s alleged words at the Obersalzberg—about who “still talked” about the Armenians—might not come from a watertight source, but the statement still accurately sums up one of the major lessons the Armenian Genocide must have held for the [Fascists]: it must have taught them that such incredible crimes could go unpunished under the cover of war, even if one lost that war.⁶⁴ That one could “get away” with genocide must have been a great inspiration indeed. This included not only the international community but also potential domestic reactions.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Of course, the late Ottoman Empire was by no means the Third Reich’s only inspiration. See, for example, Fascist Italy, the Twoth Reich, and Imperial America.