Robert Fisk
Newly discovered picture shows Kaiser's officers at scene
of Turkish atrocity. The photograph – never published before – was apparently
taken in the summer of 1915. Human skulls are scattered over the earth. They
are all that remain of a handful of Armenians slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks
during the First World War. Behind the skulls, posing for the camera, are three
Turkish officers in tall, soft hats and a man, on the far right, who is dressed
in Kurdish clothes. But the two other men are Germans, both dressed in the
military flat caps, belts and tunics of the Kaiserreichsheer, the Imperial
German Army. It is an atrocity snapshot – just like those pictures the Nazis
took of their soldiers posing before Jewish Holocaust victims a quarter of a
century later.
Did the Germans participate in the mass killing of
Christian Armenians in 1915? This is not the first photograph of its kind; yet
hitherto the Germans have been largely absolved of crimes against humanity
during the first holocaust of the 20th century. German diplomats in Turkish
provinces during the First World War recorded the forced deportations and mass
killing of a million and a half Armenian civilians with both horror and
denunciation of the Ottoman Turks, calling the Turkish militia-killers
"scum". German parliamentarians condemned the slaughter in the
Reichstag.
Indeed, a German army medical officer, Armin Wegner,
risked his life to take harrowing photographs of dying and dead Armenians
during the genocide. In 1933, Wegner pleaded with Hitler on behalf of German
Jews, asking what would become of Germany if he continued his persecution. He
was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo and is today recognised at the Yad
Vashem Jewish Holocaust memorial in Israel; some of his ashes are buried at the
Armenian Genocide Museum in the capital, Yerevan.
It is this same Armenian institution and its energetic
director, Hayk Demoyan, which discovered this latest photograph. It was found
with other pictures of Turks standing beside skulls, the photographs attached
to a long-lost survivor's testimony. All appear to have been taken at a location
identified as "Yerznka" – the town of Erzinjan, many of whose
inhabitants were murdered on the road to Erzerum. Erzinjan was briefly captured
by Russian General Nikolai Yudenich from the Turkish 3rd Army in June of 1916,
and Armenians fighting on the Russian side were able to gather much
photographic and documentary evidence of the genocide against their people the
previous year. Russian newspapers – also archived at the Yerevan museum –
printed graphic photographs of the killing fields. Then the Russians were
forced to withdraw.
Wegner took many photographs at the end of the
deportation trail in what is now northern Syria, where tens of thousands of
Armenians died of cholera and dysentery in primitive concentration camps.
However, the museum in Yerevan has recently uncovered more photos taken in
Rakka and Ras al-Ayn, apparently in secret by Armenian survivors. One picture –
captioned in Armenian, "A caravan of Armenian refugees at Ras al-Ayn"
– shows tents and refugees. The photograph seems to have been shot from a
balcony overlooking the camp.
Another, captioned in German "Armenian camp in
Rakka", may have been taken by one of Wegner's military colleagues,
showing a number of men and women among drab-looking tents. Alas, almost all
those Armenians who survived the 1915 death marches to Ras al-Ayn and Rakka
were executed the following year when the Turkish-Ottoman genocide caught up
with them.
Some German consuls spoke out against Turkey. The
Armenian-American historian Peter Balakian has described how a German
Protestant petition to Berlin protested that "since the end of May, the
deportation of the entire Armenian population from all the Anatolian Vilayets
[governorates] and Cilicia in the Arabian steppes south of the Baghdad-Berlin
railway had been ordered". As the Deutsche Bank was funding the railway,
its officials were appalled to see its rolling stock packed with Armenian male
deportees and transported to places of execution. Furthermore, Professor
Balakian and other historians have traced how some of the German witnesses to
the Armenian holocaust played a role in the Nazi regime.
Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, for example, was
attached to the Turkish 4th Army in 1915 with instructions to monitor
"operations" against the Armenians; he later became Hitler's foreign
minister and "Protector of Bohemia and Moravia" during Reinhard
Heydrich's terror in Czechoslovakia. Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg was
consul at Erzerum from 1915-16 and later Hitler's ambassador to Moscow.
Rudolf Hoess was a German army captain in Turkey in 1916;
from 1940-43, he was commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp and then
deputy inspector of concentration camps at SS headquarters. He was convicted
and hanged by the Poles at Auschwitz in 1947.
We may never know, however, the identity of the two
officers standing so nonchalantly beside the skulls of Erzinjan.
Armin T. Wegner
Intellectual, Doctor in Law, Photographer, Writer, Poet,
Civil Rights Defender, and Eyewitness to the Armenian
Genocide
he photos of Armin T. Wegner are among the few that
capture the bleak struggle for survival that faced Armenian deportees. As a
second lieutenant in the German army stationed in the Ottoman Empire in April
1915, Wegner took the initiative to investigate reports of Armenian massacres.
Disobeying orders intended to stifle news of the massacres, he collected
information on the Genocide and took hundreds of photographs of Armenian
deportation camps, primarily in the Syrian desert. Wegner was eventually
arrested, but not before he had succeeded in channeling a
portion of his research material to Germany and the
United States through clandestine mail routes. When he was transferred to
Constantinople in November 1916, he secretly took with him photographic plates
of images he and other German officers recorded.
Armin T. Wegner was born in Germany in 1886. At the
outbreak of World War I, he enrolled as a volunteer nurse in Poland during the
winter of 1914-1915, and was decorated with the Iron Cross for assisting the
wounded under fire. In April 1915, following the military alliance of Germany
and Turkey, he was sent to the Middle East as a member of the German Sanitary
Corps. Between July and August, he used his leave to investigate the rumors
about the Armenian massacres that had reached
him from several sources. In the autumn of the same year,
with the rank of second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal Von der
Goltz, commander of the 6th Ottoman army in Turkey, he traveled through Asia
Minor.
Eluding the strict orders of the Turkish and German
authorities (intended to prevent the spread of news, information,
correspondence, visual evidence), Wegner collected notes, annotations, documents,
letters and took hundreds of photographs in the Armenian deportation camps.
With the help of foreign consulates and embassies of other countries, he was
able to send some of this material to Germany and the United States. His
clandestine mail routes were discovered and Wegner
was arrested by the Germans at the request of the Turkish
Command and was put to serve in the cholera wards. Having fallen seriously ill,
he left Baghdad for Constantinople in November 1916.
Hidden in his belt were his photographic plates and those
of other German officers with images of the
Armenian Genocide to which he had been a witness. In
December of the same year he was recalled to Germany.
Wegner was deeply moved by the tragedy of the Armenian
people to which he had been eyewitness in Ottoman Turkey. Between 1918 and
1921, he became an active member of pacifist and antimilitary movements while
dedicating his literary and poetic output to the search for the truth about himself
and his fellow man. On February 23, 1919, Wegner's "Open Letter to
President Wilson" appealing for the creation of an independent Armenian
state was published in Berliner Tageblatt.
A man of conscience who protested his country's
responsibilities in the Armenian Genocide, Wegner was also one of the earliest
voices to protest Hitler's treatment of the Jews in Germany. He dedicated a
great part of his life to the fight for Armenian and Jewish human rights. In
1968 he received an invitation to Armenia from the Catholicos of All Armenians
and was awarded with the Order of Saint
Gregory the Illuminator. Armin Wegner died in Rome at the
age of 92 on May 17, 1978.
Photographs by Armin T. Wegner and Others
1915: Armenian deportees-women, children and elderly men.
Woman in foreground is carrying a child in her arms, shielding it from the sun
with a shawl; man on left is carrying bedding; no other belongings or food
noticeable among effects being carried. All are walking in the sun on an
unpaved road with no means of shelter from the elements. Location: Ottoman
empire, region Syria.
Scattered deportees in a desert wasteland, individually
foraging for grain as their only source of food. There is no shelter, water, or habitation
in sight.
Taken by Armin t. Wegner
Orphan Camp
Orphan Camp 1915
Armenian Orphans in a Danish Orphanage
Emmaus, a German-Danish Orphanage in Mezre, near Harput,
that gave refuge to hundreds of Armenian girls in 1915 despite strict orders
forbidding shelter to Armenians
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