Witnesses and testimonies of the Armenian genocide
[15] Hundreds of these testimonies and eyewitness accounts will be incorporated into the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education as part of archival research project for the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide.
[27] According to David Gaunt and other historians, Kemal was "involved in completing genocide and ethnic cleansing in the years 1919 to 1924 [and] he used outright anti-Christian rhetoric to urge his cohorts to drive the last remaining Christians out".
"[31][32][33][34] Ottoman naval officer and statesman Rauf Orbay mentioned in his memoirs during a discussion with James Harbord: "Kemal used the 800,000 figure to describe the number of Armenian victims.
The account of one acquaintance, however, accuses her of "calmly planning with [Cemal Pasha] forms of human tortures for Armenian mothers and young women" and taking on "the task of making Turks of their orphaned children.
[56] In addition to these demands, Celal Bey sent many telegraphs and letters of protest to the Sublime Porte stating that the "measures taken against the Armenians were, from every point of view, contrary to the higher interests of the fatherland.
It was impossible to carry out the Armenian deportations with the Circassian gendarme team and members of Bedirhani, Millı, Karakecili tribes who were actually Kurdish militia, because these groups were interested in plunder and pillage.
[83] When referring to the confiscated Armenian properties and assets, Fehmi (Ataç) stated: "Not a single Muslim's good were liquidated, you can establish these facts by examining the old records of the secret deliberations.
[100] During his time as governor of Baghdad, Nazif visited Diyarbakir where he encountered a "pungent smell of decaying corpses" which "pervaded the atmosphere and that the bitter stench clogged his nose, making him gag.
at the thought that a people so gifted, which has served as the fructifying soil for the renovation of the Ottoman Empire, is on the point of disappearing from history-not enslaved, as were the Jews by the Assyrians, but annihilated-even the most hardened heart must bleed: and I desire, through the medium of your estimable journal, to express to this race which is being assassinated, my anger toward the butchers and my immense pity for the victim's.
"[128] "The anti-Armenian atrocities will at long sight press down on the Turkish name"[129] Like his predecessor Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim, Kühlmann was initially reluctant to expose the massacres against the Armenian population.
[143] Wegner protested against the atrocities perpetrated by the Ottoman government against the Armenian people in an open letter, published in the Berliner Tageblatt, submitted to American President Woodrow Wilson at the peace conference of 1919.
[145] "...Here they died-slain by Kurds, robbed by gendarmes, shot, hanged, poisoned, stabbed, strangled, mowed down by epidemics, drowned, frozen, parched with thirst, starved-their bodies left to putrefy or to be devoured by jackals.
from the 24th June onwards, the Armenians were all "interned" — that is, ejected by force from their various residences and dispatched under the guard of the gendarmerie to distant, unknown destinations, which for a few will mean the interior of Mesopotamia, but for four-fifths of them has meant already a death accompanied by unheard-of cruelties.
[185] Becoming American Consul of Izmir once again during the time of the Great Fire of Smyrna, Horton became an eyewitness to the destruction of the city and notes that the goal of the Ottoman government was to get rid of all Christian peoples in the Empire.
Generally they choose as their victim's sepulchre deep lakes in which there are no indiscreet currents to bear the corpse to shore, or lonely mountain caves where dogs and jackals aid in erasing all traces of their crime.
The women, the old men, and children were, after a few days, deported to what Talat Pasha called "agricultural colonies," from the high, cool, breeze-swept plateau of Armenia to the malarial flats of the Euphrates and the burning sands of Syria and Arabia ... Mutilation, violation, torture, and death have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all ages.
[205][206] Often writing about the systematic drowning of Armenians in the Black Sea, Heizer exposed the direct link and collaboration between the central Ottoman government and local members of the Committee of Union and Progress.
[214] Elkus reported that the Armenian situation in the Ottoman Empire had not changed since the departure of his predecessor, except that by now the deported had in large numbers been killed, or had died of exhaustion, starvation, or disease, or had become refugees in unfamiliar lands.
From all the villages and towns of Cilicia, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia the Armenian Christians were driven forth on their death march; the work was done systematically, clearing out one district after another, whether the population happened to be near the scene of war or hundreds of kilometres away from it.
The poor creatures were rounded up from the different villages and driven in long columns across the mountains to the Arabian desert plains, where no provision had been made for the reception and maintenance of these herds of starving wretches, just as nothing had been done to keep them alive on the march.
"[245][247] "After a three day ride I reached the heart of Mesopotamia where I was a witness to a terrible tragedy...The Circassian soldiers ordered the Armenians to gather thorns and thistles and to pile them into a tall pyramid...afterwards they tied all the Armenians who were there, almost five thousand souls, hand to hand, encircled them like a ring around the pile of thistles and set it afire in a blaze which rose up to heaven together with the screams of the wretched people who were burned to death by the fire...Two days later I returned to this place and saw the charred bodies of thousands of human beings.
"[253] "When the wave of deportation had reached, and swept over, the neighboring towns and was threatening Aintab, Dr. Shepard made a strong appeal to the Vali [Governor General] of the province of Aleppo, and this official, who was a righteous man, firmly prevented the action being carried out.
I then took over these 24 & as Shed had had his last fight 18 miles further on decided to ride out & hide my force in the rough country & give them a go with the M.G's trusting that the new weapon would lead the enemy to believe that British Troops were now in the field & bluff them off.
[285] "There was a trench full of human bones, and I was told of the brave fight that 2,000 Armenians, standing for their homes and for the honor of their wives and daughters, had waged with their flintlock rifles against the Turkish troops.
"[301] Prior to the establishment of the Young Turk government in 1908, White regarded the demographic situation in the eastern provinces of the Empire as an "internal breach that would come to surface as a deadly wound.
"[306] "On the pretext of searching for deserting soldiers, concealing bombs, weapons, seditious literature or revolutionists, the Turkish officers arrested about 1,200 Armenian men at Marsovan, accompanying their investigations by horrible brutalities.
[327] With such weapons confiscated, Ussher reported that Cevdet Bey initiated a "reign of terror" campaign by arresting, torturing, and ultimately killing the Armenian population in the region.
He described in revolting detail actual atrocities, -women and children, ranging from six years to eighty, outraged and mutilated to death,-but made one diabolical change in his description: he said these women were Moslems thus treated by Christians.
The first book, The mission at Van in Turkey in war time,[341] describes in detail the incidents that unfolded during the conflict and the massacres committed against the Armenians by Turkish soldiers during the resistance.
"[350] "As soon as the men left us, the Turkish Arabajis [convoy drivers] began to rob the women saying "you are all going to be thrown into the Tokma Su [River], so you might as well give your things to us and then we will stay by you and try to protect you."
