The Forty Days of Musa Dagh also foreshadows the Holocaust of World War II due in part to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, which paralleled the novel's creation.

Franz Werfel had served as a corporal and telephone operator in the Austro-Hungarian Army artillery during the First World War on the Russian front and later as a propaganda writer for the Military Press Bureau (with Rainer Maria Rilke and others) in Vienna.

The miserable sight of maimed and famished-looking refugee children, working in a carpet factory, gave me the final impulse to snatch the incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian people from the Hell of all that had taken place.

He had served as an artillery officer in the 1912 Balkan War, had been involved in the progressive wing of Turkish politics and had been a vocal Armenian supporter of the CUP and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.

Being a reserve officer, Bagradian becomes suspicious when he is not called up; learning that Turkish authorities have seized the internal passports of Armenian citizens further fuels his suspicions.

Werfel intended his depiction, almost entirely drawn verbatim from Lepsius's published account, to be sympathetic and damning, especially when Enver consults with Talaat on the progress of the deportations.

Those who decide to resist, dig up a cache of rifles left over from the revolution of 1908, when they were allies of the Young Turks and subsequently bury their church bells, so that these do not fall into Turkish hands.

The chapter ends with Bagradian helping Krikor carry the last volumes of his magnificent if eclectic library to the Damlayik, the plateau the Armenians have chosen as their refuge.

Book Two opens during the high summer of 1915, with the establishment of the Armenian encampment and defenses, the Town Enclosure, Three Tent Square, South Bastion, Dish Terrace and other sites on Musa Dagh, that become familiar place names during the course of the novel.

Characters who will figure in the defense of the mountain also come into more relief, such as the loner and Ottoman Army deserter Sarkis Kilikian (who suffered the loss of his entire family during the pogrom-like Hamidian massacres) and the former drillmaster, Chaush Nurhan.

Juliette apprehends the growing estrangement of her husband and son, seeking purpose and solace in nursing the Armenian wounded and in her friendship with Gonzague Maris, which develops into a passionate affair.

The scene changes to Constantinople and Johannes Lepsius's meeting with members of a dervish order called the ″Thieves of the Heart.″ It was important to Werfel to show that the Young Turks and the Three Pashas did not represent Turkish society.

Most of the first chapter of Book Three is written as a dramatic dialogue, during which Lepsius witnesses the Sufi whirling devotions and learns first-hand about the deep resentment against the West—especially Western "progress" as instituted by the Young Turks—and the atrocities in concentration camps set up in the Mesopotamian desert for deported Armenians.

They encounter the inshaat taburi, notorious forced labor details composed of Armenian draftees into the Ottoman Army and travel through a swamp, where Stephan and Haik form a real friendship.

It is cut short, when Stephan falls ill; he is cared for by a Turkmen farmer, another of the righteous Muslims that Werfel represents in The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

The Armenian camp and resistance faces its greatest challenge from within, when criminal elements among the Ottoman Army deserters—whom Bagradian allowed to help in Musa Dagh's offense—go on a rampage.

As Ter Haigasun prepares to celebrate a mass to ask for God's help, the deserters set the altar on fire and the resulting conflagration destroys much of the Town Enclosure, before the uprising is suppressed by Bagradian's men.

Soon after, he discovers the large Red Cross distress flag, the Armenians flew to attract Allied ships and sights the French cruiser Guichen in the fog.

[7] The Forty Days of Musa Dagh received much critical praise from Austrian and Swiss reviewers when the book, over 900 pages long, was published in two volumes in November 1933.

According to Neal Ascherson, Werfel was only interested in collecting the royalties paid from the translations and that otherwise he did not care what happened to the English version, and that the public at the time did not draw attention to the abridgement.

[7] Louis Kronenberger, the editor of the New York Times Book Review described The Forty Days of Musa Dagh as "A story which must rouse the emotions of all human beings ... Werfel has made it a noble novel.

"[13] Ascherson stated: "For Armenians, it remains unique and precious: for all its minor inaccuracies, it's the one work whose urgency and passion keeps the truth of their genocide before the eyes of a world that would prefer to forget about it.

With these scenes restored in the revised and expanded edition of 2012, the novel's meaning to Armenians is all the more poignant, as Vartan Gregorian writes in the preface: "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was meant as a memorial set against a new historical phenomenon that had been described as the murder of a nation, the extermination of a race, and the assassination of Armenia ...

"[I]t is truly remarkable," continues Gregorian, "to consider how closely The Forty Days of Musa Dagh foreshadows the cataclysm that would befall the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe at the hands of the Nazis."

Many Jews in the Palestinian Mandate contemplated retreating to Mount Carmel and organizing a defense line, due to prospects of a Nazi invasion of the region.

[24] Despite reservations on the part of legal counsel, who felt such a film would offend the Turkish government, MGM started pre-production work in 1934 and tentatively cast a rising young star named Clark Gable to play Gabriel Bagradian.

When reports surfaced in the Hollywood press about the film late in 1934, Turkey's ambassador to the United States, Mehmed Münir Ertegün, was ordered by his government to prevent it from being made.

Ertegün turned to the U.S. State Department and told it that he "earnestly hoped that [the movie studio] would desist from presenting any such picture, which would give a distorted version of the alleged massacres.

Michael Bobelian, a lawyer and a journalist, observes that the ″Musa Dagh incident is critical in understanding the evolution of Turkey's campaign of denying the crimes committed by the Young Turks ...

[31] In early 2009, reports surfaced that Mel Gibson was also considering directing a documentary and appearing in the adaptation of Werfel's novel but was dissuaded after receiving 3,000 e-mails from a Turkish pressure group.