Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust

According to historians Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, it is a widely held belief that there is a causal connection between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust.[1] However, as of 2010 this has not been proven.[2] 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 accumulating evidence he concludes that the Nazis were well aware of the previous genocide and, to a certain extent, inspired by it.[3] Reviewing Ihrig's book, Armenian historian Vahagn Avedian is convinced that "there are simply too many factors which connect these two cases together".[4]

According to Vahakn Dadrian, David Matas, Yair Auron, and other scholars the perpetrators of the Holocaust were emboldened by the failure to punish the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide.[5][2][6] 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. In contrast, after World War II the Allies understood the danger of impunity and created the Nuremberg trials.[5]

During a 1939 speech, Hitler was quoted as stating:

I have placed my death-head formation 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 and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?[7]

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.[8] Historians, such as Ihrig and Jersak, have emphasized that the Nazis would have concluded that genocide could be camouflaged under the guise of war and would go unpunished.[8][9]^:575 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."[10]

In 1933, Austrian-Jewish writer Franz Werfel published The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a book about Armenian resistance at Musa Dagh. The book was intended not just to memorialize atrocities against Armenians, but also a warning of the consequences of racial hatred and Nazism in particular. During the Holocaust, many Jews found parallels between their experience and the book.[11]

Many anti-Nazis compared the fate of Jews in Nazi Germany to the genocide of Armenians. For example, a February 1939 Sopade report by the German resistance stated:

At this moment in Germany the unstoppable extermination of a minority is taking place by way of the brutal means of murder, of torment to the degree of absurdity, of plunder, of assault, and of starvation. What happened to the Armenians during the [world war] in Turkey, is now being committed against the Jews, [but] slower and more systematically.[12]

Ihrig suggests that there is no reason that perpetrators did not make the same connection.[12]

In 2006 a memorial commemorating the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust was erected in Yerevan, Armenia.[13]

Historian Francis Nicosia writes that the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust are the two most-compared genocides in the twentieth century.[14] For historian Robert Melson, "The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust are the quintessential instances of total genocide in the twentieth century."[15] Richard Lichtheim, 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 (kaltblutig durchdacht)" as an act of perpetration "akin to Hitler's crusade of destruction against the Jews in the 1940–1942 period".[16][17]^:409

According to Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer,

The differences between the holocaust and the Armenian massacres are less important than the similarities—and even if the Armenian case is not seen as a holocaust in the extreme form which it took towards Jews, it is certainly the nearest thing to it.[18]

There are many similarities with the Holocaust, on such issues as occurring during a world war, attempted destruction of an ethnoreligious community which had previously been citizens of the polity,[15] deportation in trains as well as the role of racism and religious prejudice.[19] Historian Hans-Lukas Kieser states, "In both cases, young imperial elites and would-be saviors of empire had traumatically witnessed the loss of power, prestige, territory, and homes. In an unstable political situation and fearing imperial and personal ruin, they succeeded in establishing a single-party regime that allowed them to implement policies of expulsion and extermination based on crazy, but calculated social Darwinist engineering."[20] There are also differences: racial antisemitism is not equivalent to the Turkist nationalism that fueled the Armenian Genocide, and unlike the Holocaust in which many Jews died in death camps, the methods used for the Armenian genocide were deportation, massacres, and starvation.[15]

In 2010, the President of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, stated: "Quite often historians and journalists soundly compare Deir ez Zor with Auschwitz saying that 'Deir ez Zor is the Auschwitz of the Armenians'. I think that the chronology forces us to formulate the facts in a reverse way: 'Auschwitz is the Deir ez Zor of the Jews'.[21][22]

The comparison with the Holocaust is strongly rejected in many works denying the Armenian Genocide, which try to appeal to a Jewish audience by "emphasizing the uniqueness and absolute difference between, on the one hand, what was indeed a real, horrific genocide and, on the other, what they call the hoax of a politically motivated Armenian claim of genocide", according to historian Richard Hovannisian.[23]

While Armenian Genocide denial is an official policy of the Turkish state, Germany acknowledged the Holocaust and paid reparations for it. Holocaust denial is therefore a much more marginal phenomenon.[24]

In Perinçek v. Switzerland (2015), the European Court of Human Rights determined that Armenian Genocide denial falls within the right to freedom of speech guaranteed in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, whereas member states are permitted to criminalize Holocaust denial. Law professor Uladzislau Belavusau criticized this decision for "creat[ing] a speculative distinction between the Holocaust and other 20th-century atrocities" that amounted to trivialization of the Armenian Genocide.[25]

In October 2020, Facebook banned Holocaust denial from its platform, but continued to allow denial of the Armenian Genocide. It did not offer any reason for this different treatment.[26][27] Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, himself of mixed Armenian-Jewish ancestry, criticized Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after his Facebook page was shut down after posting an interview, which mentioned the Armenian Genocide. "So Holocaust denial is now banned on FB, according to Zuckerberg, but those who deny the Armenian Genocide are very welcome on Facebook—and even rewarded by having their targets' pages blocked," said Kasparov.[28] Armenian diaspora and anti-hate groups, such as the AGBU, Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and Genocide Watch, have called on Facebook to ban Armenian Genocide denial on its platform.[29]

• Armenian–Jewish relations
• Hitler's Armenian reference

• Bardakjian, Kevork B. (1985). Hitler and the Armenian Genocide. Zoryan Institute. ISBN 9780916431181.
• Ben Aharon, Eldad (2019). "Recognition of the Armenian Genocide After its Centenary: A Comparative Analysis of Changing Parliamentary Positions". Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. 13 (3): 339–352. doi:10.1080/23739770.2019.1737911.
• Dadrian, Vahakn N. (1988). "The Convergent Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide. A Reinterpretation of the Concept of Holocaust". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 3 (2): 151–169. doi:10.1093/hgs/3.2.151.
• Dawoodi, Dlpak Jabar Ali (2019). "The Aftermath of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust: A Comparative Study". Journal of Garmian University. 6 (3): 349–359. doi:10.24271/garmian.196361. Retrieved 23 December 2020.
• Gruner, Wolf (March 2012). "'Peregrinations into the Void?' German Jews and Their Knowledge About the Armenian Genocide During the Third Reich". Central European History. 45 (1): 1–26. doi:10.1017/S0008938911000963. ISSN 0008-9389. JSTOR 41410719.
• Melson, Robert (1992). Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-51990-6.
• Travis, Hannibal (Winter 2013). "Did the Armenian Genocide Inspire Hitler?". Middle East Quarterly. 20 (1): 27–35. Retrieved 23 December 2020.
• Kieser, Hans-Lukas; Schaller, Dominik J., eds. (2004). Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah / The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (in German and English). Chronos. ISBN 978-3-0340-0561-6.