Siranush Ghazanchyan
A third digital exhibit on the Armenian Genocide
consisting of 128 images on 24 panels entitled “The First Deportation: The
German Railroad, the American Hospital, and the Armenian Genocide” was released
today by the Armenian National Institute (ANI), Armenian Genocide Museum of
America (AGMA) and Armenian Assembly of America (Assembly). Available on the
ANI, AGMA, and Assembly websites, the exhibit focuses on two localities,
Zeytun, an Armenian city in the Taurus Mountains, and Konya, a Turkish city in
the central Anatolian plain, both linked by the Armenian Genocide.
The remote and self-sustaining city of Zeytun was the
first Armenian community in Ottoman Turkey deported en masse in April 1915. To
deprive the Zeytun Armenians of any capacity to defy the deportation edicts,
the Young Turk government divided its population sending one part east toward
the Syrian Desert and another part west to the barren flats of the Konya Plain.
By this fate, the Zeytun deportees were routed down from
their mountain homes through the nearby city of Marash and the Cilician Plain
and back up through the high passes of the Cilician Gates of the Taurus Range,
the only accessible road from Cilicia to Anatolia. This route also placed them
along the Berlin-Bagdad rail line then under construction through those very
same passes.
By intersecting that rail line, Zeytun Armenians soon
found themselves among the rest of the Armenian population of western Anatolia
being deported east by train to the main terminus at Konya and substations
beyond, where they were offloaded from cattle cars to walk down the mountain
passes, while work crews led by German and Swiss engineers were cutting open
new roads and tunnels to complete the construction of the rail system.
There also happened to be an American hospital in Konya
manned by three outstanding figures who soon found themselves in the midst of
hundreds of thousands of Armenian deportees and as such became witnesses to the
unfolding of the Armenian Genocide. The station at Konya was supposed to serve
only as a transit camp, but with all of the Armenians of western and central
Anatolia routed through the city, the open spaces beyond the station
transformed into a vast concentration camp. Because Konya was never intended to
exist as a destination camp and was evacuated within a short time, it has been
forgotten as a major site in the trail of deportation and the central object of
what transpired there overlooked. It was evident to all observers in the city
how rapidly the Ottoman Turkish government reduced an industrious and
prosperous people to misery. In Konya it was already visible that all it took
was a matter of days, not even weeks.
The testimony provided by Dr. Wilfred Post and Dr.
William Dodd, and the efforts of Miss Emma Cushman, all three American medical
missionaries, provide compelling information about the rapidly deteriorating
conditions along the rail line and the start of the process of extinguishing
Armenian life across the region. Their information is paralleled by the protests
of German civilians in the same area who sharply criticized the Ottoman
authorities and raised questions with their own government about the morality
of German wartime policies.
More compelling still were the photographs taken by Dr.
Wilfred Post and the German railroad engineers that documented the wartime
reality on this particular swath of Ottoman territory. While as wartime allies
of the Turks, Germans enjoyed a certain amount of liberty in their actions, Dr.
Post took a serious risk in defying the ban on photographing the Armenians.
Retrieved from the United States National Archives, the
entire set of photographs taken by Dr. Wilfred Post are being issued for the
first time in this exhibit. They constitute the central evidence around which
the entire exhibit is constructed.
Dr. Post captioned the photographs, and succeeded in
delivering them to the American Embassy in Constantinople, the Ottoman capital,
from where they were sent by diplomatic pouch to Washington, DC. They might
have been the very first images of the Armenian Genocide to arrive into the
hands of U.S. officials. In this regard, the historic value of Dr. Post’s
photographs are matched only by those taken by U.S. consul Leslie Davis who
documented the Armenian Genocide in the region of Harput/Kharpert.
Because of the numbers of Armenians being deported and
the pace at which the western Anatolian cities were emptied of their Armenian
inhabitants, the Konya train station became a choke point in the deportation
process. Vast concentration camps of homeless Armenian families soon formed
along the tracks. The brutality of the process, the complete lack of
sanitation, and the absence of sources of food very rapidly created an
explosive situation threatening the spread of epidemics. Thousands of Armenians
never made it beyond the stations of the Konya line and conditions in the
refugee camps were so foul and violent that a train conductor is quoted by Dr.
Dodd describing the Bozanti station as “hell on earth.”
Consisting of 121 images, 7 maps, and containing a rich
variety of eyewitness testimony, the exhibit reconstructs Armenian life in
Zeytun, reproduces the two rare photographs showing the arrest of the Zeytun
men, outlines the deportation route to the degree that contemporary photographs
allow, depicts the city of Konya, showing the contrast between the rugged
mountains in which Zeytun Armenians were accustomed to living and the flat,
arid, and sparsely populated plain of Konya.
The exhibit includes previously unpublished photographs
of Zeytun, reproduces newly released images from German sources, and, in
addition to the United States National Archives material, presents images from
the Australian War Memorial; University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England,
Gertrude Bell Archives; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Kelsey Museum;
Mennonite Church USA Archives; the Armenian Missionary Association of America
and the Haigazian University Archives of Beirut, Lebanon; Library of Congress;
Republic of Armenia National Archives; as well as online resources and private
individuals.
ANI especially recognizes the historian Aram Arkun whose
close study of documentary sources addressed the complex situation surrounding
the denouement in Zeytun and who served as project consultant for the exhibit.
ANI also thanks Gunter Hartnagel, a professional photographer, who provided
valuable guidance on German historical images, and whose researches in
historical geography helped understand the terrain that was covered by the
Zeytun deportees and appreciate the hardships endured by those who trudged
through the mountains of Cilicia at the point of a bayonet.
The location of Konya on the train line also helped to
document the post-war situation in the city.
Accompanying a U.S. aid mission and relief workers, the American photographer
George Robert Swain recorded the efforts of Miss Cushman to create a safe haven
for surviving Armenian orphans. In so doing Swain added another layer of
documentation about the fate of the Armenian population and helped create, in
sum with Dr. Post’s pictures, one of the more comprehensive photographic
records of a single location so directly impacted by the Armenian Genocide.
The final demise of the Armenians of Konya was sealed
with the fate of Dr. Armenag Haigazian who, as a highly-regarded educator,
embodied the Armenian Protestant community’s hope of recovery. He had survived
the war years and the violence of the Young Turk regime, but his restoration of
the Apostolic Institute made him the target of the Turkish Nationalist
movement, which saw to the shuttering of the school and the second exile and
persecution of Dr. Haigazian. World War I may have ended and the Young Turk government
overthrown, but the Armenian Genocide in Turkey continued, making the death of
Dr. Haigazian a most poignant tragedy, especially as he famously held a
doctorate from Yale University.
This third digital exhibit continues and builds upon the
themes developed in the exhibits released earlier, including the role and fate
of Armenian clergy, churches and schools, the role of American missionaries and
relief workers, and the role of Germans in Ottoman Turkey, while distinguishing
between the attitudes of civilian, military, and diplomatic representatives.
The exhibit highlights the unsolvable dilemma faced by
the Armenian Catholicos of Cilicia Sahag II Khabayan, who, unaware of the
broader scheme about to be implemented by the Young Turk regime, advised the
Zeytun population to cooperate with the authorities in the hope of avoiding a
repetition of the Cilician massacres that spread terror across the region a
mere six years earlier. The acts and observations of other clergymen, including
Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople Zaven Der Yeghiayan, his successor
Archbishop Mesrob Naroyan, Archbishop Stepannos Hovagimian of Ismit, Grigoris
Balakian, and Reverend William Peet, are also explained as part of the
testimony on this specific aspect of the Armenian Genocide.
The exhibit also highlights the role of an exceptional
Ottoman official, who, as governor of Aleppo and of Konya, opposed the measures
of the Young Turk radicals. Jelal Bey was the highest ranking administrator in
the Ottoman Empire who disapproved of the policies of the triumvirate ruling
from Constantinople. A number of lower ranking officials who disagreed with the
regime were killed by Young Turk party henchmen. Opposing the Young Turk regime
required courage, and Jelal placed his life in jeopardy. He may have been spared only because of his
stature and lifelong service to the state.
The exhibit also reveals the involvement of a German
diplomat, who as an embassy councilor in Constantinople played a role in
maintaining German-Turkish relations, and as such became among the recipients
of the flow of information being reported about the implementation of the
Armenian Genocide. A lesser official at the time, Konstantin von Neurath rose
through the ranks eventually to serve as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Nazi
Germany and as governor of occupied Czechoslovakia, where Reinhard Heydrich,
one of the architects of the Holocaust, served as his deputy.
The exhibit concludes with testimony from Dr. Charles
Mahjoubian, a native of Konya who resettled in Philadelphia and entered the
profession of dentistry. As a survivor, he committed himself to testifying to
the events he witnessed in his hometown. He pointed with pride to his
birthplace as one of the earliest centers of Christianity, dating to St. Paul
preaching in Iconium (ancient name of Konya), and as a center of Turkish Islam
where religious piety restrained the hand of the local population, in sharp
relief to the political fanaticism of the Young Turk regime and the brutality
of its associates. According to Mahjoubian, by a strict reading of the
banishment legislation, Jelal Bey succeeded for a brief while in delaying the
deportation of Catholic and Protestant Armenians.
“The First Deportation: the German Railway, the American
Hospital, and the Armenian Genocide” strengthens and clarifies the photographic
documentation of the Armenian Genocide in a manner consistent and supportive of
third party records, eyewitness accounts and survivor testimony. It expands the
scope of the evidence and attests to the horrors that unfolded in 1915.
“It did not escape contemporaries that there were
immediate lessons to be drawn from the example of Zeytun,” observed Van Z.
Krikorian, ANI chairman. “Other communities grasped the methods by which the
Young Turk regime pressurized local politics and aggravated relations among
religious and ethnic groups in order to create conditions to justify the
wholesale depopulation of Armenian towns and cities. Reverend Ephraim Jernazian
drew a direct connection between the failure of the Zeytun Armenians to stand
their ground and the heroic defense of their neighborhood by Urfa Armenians.
Hopeless as their actions might have been at the time, the Armenians of Urfa
made the point that they would not be submitting to tyranny willingly, nor give
up their lives easily to help fulfill the violent designs of the Young Turks.”
“The clarity of that lesson from the past resonates today
with the necessary defense of Nagorno Karabakh where Armenians yet again a
century later face another enemy whose objective remains their expulsion from
their homeland. The commitment of the Armenians of Artsakh to avoid the fate of
the Western Armenian population was inspired by the tragedies of the Armenian
Genocide and the pledge of survivors to avoid a repeat of such a calamity,”
concluded Krikorian. “I want to thank Rouben Adalian for uncovering these
valuable records on the Armenian Genocide, and Joe Piatt and Aline Maksoudian
for working with Dr. Adalian in creating this impressive exhibit,” Krikorian added.
“Relief workers, educators, missionaries, orphanage
administrators, and other volunteers from the United States played a massive
role in relieving the plight of the survivors,” stated ANI Director, Dr. Rouben
Adalian. “Many of the longtime American residents of Turkey also witnessed and
reported the deportations and massacres of 1915. Because of the remoteness of Konya from the
other major centers of the Armenian Genocide, Dr. Wilfred Post, Dr. William
Dodd, and Miss Emma Cushman may not have been extended the recognition they
deserve. The compelling evidence of this exhibit now ranks them among the
heroic Americans who helped save lives during the Armenian Genocide.”
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