Armenian Genocide (1915-1916): Deportations and Mass Killings

The Armenian Genocide was the systematic deportation and mass killing of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire by its government during the First World War. It is usually dated from 24 April 1915, when Armenian leaders were arrested in Constantinople, and its main phase lasted into 1916. An estimated 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians died, and an ancient community was almost completely removed from its homeland in Anatolia.

Background

Armenians had lived in eastern Anatolia and the southern Caucasus for well over two thousand years. In the Ottoman Empire they were a Christian minority of roughly 1.5 to 2 million people in 1914, living mainly in the eastern provinces but also in cities such as Constantinople, Smyrna and Adana.

In the late 19th century tensions grew as Armenians demanded reforms and protection, and European powers used the “Armenian question” to pressure the Ottoman state. Under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, massacres in 1894-1896 killed an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians. In 1909 another wave of violence in and around Adana killed some 20,000 people.

In 1908 the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), known as the Young Turks, came to power. By 1913 a small group dominated the government, notably Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Djemal Pasha. After defeats in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, the CUP increasingly favoured a Turkish and Muslim national identity for what remained of the empire.

The war and the decision to deport

The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany in late 1914. In the winter of 1914-1915 Enver led an offensive against Russia in the Caucasus that ended in disaster at Sarikamish. Some Armenians from the Russian side of the border served in Russian volunteer units, and the government came to portray the entire Armenian population as a dangerous internal enemy.

Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army were disarmed in early 1915 and moved into labour battalions, where many were later killed. In April 1915 Armenians in the city of Van, fearing massacre, resisted Ottoman forces until Russian troops arrived in May.

On the night of 24 April 1915, while Allied forces prepared to land at Gallipoli, the authorities arrested more than 200 Armenian intellectuals, clergy and political figures in Constantinople. Most were deported to the interior and murdered. On 27 May the government approved a temporary law authorising the deportation of populations considered a threat to security.

Deportations and killings

From the late spring of 1915 Armenian communities across Anatolia were ordered to leave their homes, often at short notice. Men were frequently separated and shot or killed outside towns. Women, children and the elderly were marched hundreds of kilometres south towards the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia.

On these death marches many died from hunger, thirst, exhaustion and exposure, and columns were attacked by irregular forces and members of the Special Organisation (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa), a paramilitary body linked to the CUP. Thousands of women and children were abducted, forcibly converted to Islam or taken into Muslim households. Property left behind was confiscated.

Survivors were held in camps along the Euphrates and around Deir ez-Zor in Syria. In 1916 a second wave of killings there destroyed many of those who had survived the marches. Some Armenians were saved by Muslim neighbours, officials who refused orders, Arab communities and foreign missionaries. Assyrian and Greek Christian communities also suffered mass violence in the same period.

The evidence

The events were widely reported at the time. The American ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau Sr., sent detailed reports to Washington and later wrote about what he called a campaign of race extermination. German diplomats and officers, allies of the Ottomans, also reported deportations and massacres to Berlin. Missionaries, consuls and survivors provided further testimony, and the German medic Armin T. Wegner took photographs of deportees.

On 24 May 1915 Britain, France and Russia issued a joint declaration warning that they would hold Ottoman leaders personally responsible for “crimes against humanity and civilisation”. In 1916 the British government published a large collection of documents compiled by James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee.

Aftermath and justice

After the Ottoman defeat in 1918, courts-martial in Constantinople in 1919-1920 tried CUP leaders and sentenced Talat, Enver and Djemal to death in absentia; all three had fled abroad. Talat was assassinated in Berlin in March 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, a survivor, who was acquitted by a German court. The Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 promised an Armenian state in eastern Anatolia, but it was never implemented. In the Caucasus, a small independent Republic of Armenia had been declared in May 1918 and took in many refugees; it was absorbed into Soviet rule at the end of 1920.

Survivors formed a worldwide diaspora in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. The Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin later cited the Armenian case when he coined the word “genocide” in 1944.

By the numbers

Figures are disputed because Ottoman population statistics were incomplete and many deaths were never recorded. Many historians give a death toll of around one million or more.

Resistance, rescue and relief

In a few places Armenians resisted. In the summer of 1915 villagers from around Musa Dagh, a mountain near the Mediterranean coast, refused to obey deportation orders and defended themselves on its slopes for several weeks. In September French warships evacuated about 4,000 of them to Port Said in Egypt. Their story became widely known through Franz Werfel’s novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933).

In the United States, reports of the deportations led to the founding in 1915 of the relief organisation later known as Near East Relief. Over the following years it raised very large sums from American donors and cared for tens of thousands of Armenian orphans in the Middle East and the Caucasus.

Recognition and denial

Most historians and genocide scholars describe the events of 1915-1916 as genocide. Many countries have formally recognised it, including France, Germany, Canada, Russia and the United States, as has the European Parliament. Each year on 24 April, Armenians gather at the Tsitsernakaberd memorial in Yerevan, completed in 1967.

The Republic of Turkey does not accept the term. Its official position is that many Armenians and Muslims died during a wartime conflict and relocation, and that there was no intention to destroy the Armenians as a people. The issue remains a source of diplomatic tension.

Timeline

• 1894-1896: Hamidian massacres of Armenians.
• 1914, December - 1915, January: Ottoman defeat at Sarikamish in the Caucasus.
• 1915, 24 April: Arrest of Armenian leaders in Constantinople.
• 1915, 24 May: Allied declaration on “crimes against humanity and civilisation”.
• 1915, 27 May: The Ottoman deportation law is approved.
• 1916, summer: Mass killings of deportees around Deir ez-Zor.
• 1919-1920: Ottoman courts-martial sentence CUP leaders in absentia.
• 1921, 15 March: Talat Pasha is assassinated in Berlin.

Why it matters

The Armenian Genocide destroyed one of the oldest communities of the Middle East and created a global diaspora. It shaped the modern legal idea of genocide and remains central to Armenian identity and to debates about memory, responsibility and recognition, alongside later cases such as the Rwandan Genocide.