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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
All that I have seen and heard surpasses all imagination. Speaking of ‘thousand and one horrors’ is very little in this case, I thought I was passing through a part of hell. The few events, which I will relate, taken here and there hastily, give but a weak idea of the lamentable and horrifying tableau. The same scenes repeat in the different localities through which I have passed, everywhere it is the same Governmental barbarism which aims at the systematic annihilation through starvation of the Armenian nation in Turkey, everywhere the same bestial inhumanity on the part of these executioners and the same tortures undergone by these victims all along the Euphrates from Meskene to Der-I-Zor.
So wrote Bernau, an American representative of the Vacuum Oil Company of New York, whose business trip across Anatolia in 1915 proved unexpectedly horrendous (U.S. Documents, 1993: III, 131).
This genocide was committed well before the rise of Hitler. It was not the product of “terrible Turks” or “alien Asiatics,” as Europeans have often liked to believe. Instead, it was perpetrated by the “Young Turks,” secular, European-style modernizing nationalists. The Ottoman Turkish state was also a player in European power politics, being in World War I allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary. This genocide emanated from Europe, even if almost all the killing occurred just over the Bosphorus in Asia. Nor was genocide the culmination of ancient ethnic hatreds, though these tensions were indeed old.
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