Background The Armenian Genocide was the “first non-colonial genocide of the twentieth century”. It happened during
World War I, and it was carried out by the
Committee of Union and Progress; CUP, which included the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. After the CUP experienced military defeats, in the
Balkan Wars, against the Armenian army. During the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire began to invade most of Europe, the
Special organization began to massacre the people of Armenia. The Ottoman paramilitaries committed the massacres because of the isolated acts of resistance which were committed by some Armenians, the Ottoman paramilitaries believed that these acts of resistance were the precursor to a mass revolution and they also feared that the Armenians would attempt to claim independence. The start of the genocide occurred when the “Young Turk regime rounded up hundreds of
Armenians and hanged them in the streets of Istanbul.” ensured that the Jewish people were discriminated against and pushed out of German life. Between 1941 and 1945, Germany and its allied territories began to commit the mass murder of Jewish people. The main methods of killing were through mass shootings and gassing operations. The genocide was known as the
Final Solution to the
Jewish Question.
Causality , the main theorist of
Nazism, who defended
Taalat Pasha and the Armenian genocide in a press article Historian
Francis Nicosia writes that the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust are the two most-compared genocides in the twentieth century. For historian
Robert Melson, "The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust are the quintessential instances of total genocide in the twentieth century." According to historians Dominik J. Schaller and
Jürgen Zimmerer, it is widely believed that there is a causal relationship between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. In the 1920s, there was "a great genocide debate" in the German press which resulted in many German nationalists deciding that genocide was
justified as a tactic. In his book
Justifying Genocide (2016),
Stefan Ihrig writes that there is "no smoking gun" to prove that the Armenian genocide inspired the Holocaust. However, based on various pieces of evidence, he says that the Nazis were well aware of the previous genocide and, to a certain extent, they were also inspired by it. Reviewing Ihrig's book, Armenian historian
Vahagn Avedian is convinced that "there are simply too many factors which connect these two cases together".
Omer Bartov, Eldad Ben Aharon and
Tessa Hofmann all believe that at least to some extent, the Nazis were inspired by the Armenian genocide. During
Hitler's Obersalzberg Speech, he was
quoted as saying: Although this version of the speech is disputed, it is almost certain that Hitler knew about the Armenian genocide since he was an avid newspaper reader and the genocide was covered widely in the press. According to
Vahakn Dadrian,
David Matas and
Yair Auron, the perpetrators of the Holocaust were emboldened by the failure to punish the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. According to international law scholar
M. Cherif Bassiouni, the decision not to prosecute Ottoman war criminals slowed the development of international law and made it more difficult to prosecute Nazi war criminals. After World War II the Allies understood the danger of impunity and created the
Nuremberg trials. According to Ihrig, "There can be no doubt that the Nazis 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." However,
Uğur Ümit Üngör criticized the causality link. or
Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, to whom the first part of
Mein Kampf was dedicated, who was the German vice-consul of Erzurum during the Armenian genocide, and who documented it. According to historian
Stefan Ihrig, the Nazis viewed post-1923 Turkey as a post-genocidal paradise and "incorporated the Armenian genocide, its 'lessons', tactics, and 'benefits' into their own worldview." In 1933, Austrian-Jewish writer
Franz Werfel published
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a book about Armenian resistance at
Musa Dagh. The purpose of the book was not just to memorialize the atrocities which were committed against the Armenians, but to warn people about the consequences of
racial hatred in general and warn them about the consequences of
Nazism in particular. During the Holocaust, many Jews
found parallels between their experience and the book. Israeli Holocaust scholar
Yehuda Bauer points out that Werfel’s novel “connected the Armenian Genocide with the Holocaust almost physically.” Many anti-Nazis compared the fate of Jews in Nazi Germany to the genocide of the Armenians. For example, a February 1939
Sopade report by the
German resistance stated: , one of the German Jews who, as a young leader of the Zionist movement, feverishly negotiated with Ittihadist leaders in wartime Turkey, described the "cold-bloodedly planned extermination of over one million Armenians (kaltblütig durchdacht)" as "akin to Hitler's crusade of destruction against the Jews in the 1940–1942 period".
Turkey, the Armenian genocide and The Holocaust According to
Tessa Hofmann, Hitler was fascinated by the figure of
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and would have considered the Armenians as the loser nation that "deserved their doom". Turkey's policy under the leadership of
Atatürk until 1938 and
İnönü until 1950, remained sympathetic towards
Nazi Germany prior to the end of
World War II. During
the Holocaust, Turkey knowingly prevented Jewish emigrants from finding refuge there, despite several requests from Jewish officials, and openly called for the expulsion of Jewish refugees from
Turkey. to dock in Turkey, and forcefully sent it back into the sea, where it was subsequently sunk by a Soviet submarine
Adolf Hitler sent back the remains of
Taalat Pasha to Turkey on February 25, 1943, in an official joint act between
Nazi Germany and
Turkey. ==Comparison==