What They Said...

"...It would seem that three-fourths or four-fifths of the whole nation has been wiped out, and there is no case in history, certainly not since the time of Tamerlane, in which any crime so hideous and upon so large a scale has been recorded."

"...Wherever the Armenians, almost wholly unarmed as they were, have fought, they have fought in self-defence to defend their families and themselves from the cruelty of the ruffians who constitute what is called the Government of the country. There is no excuse whatever, upon any such ground as some German authorities and newspapers allege, for the conduct of the Turkish Government. Their policy of slaughter and deportation has been wanton and unprovoked. It appears to be simply an application of the maxim once enunciated by Sultan Abdul Hamid: "The way to get rid of the Armenian Question is to get rid of the Armenians"; and the policy of extermination has been carried out with far more thoroughness and with far more blood-thirsty completeness by the present heads of the Turkish Administration - they describe themselves as the Committee of Union and Progress - than it was in the time of Abdul Hamid."

VISCOUNT JAMES BRYCE

British Statesman and Scholar,

Regina Professor of Civil Law at Oxford,

Undersecretary of State for foreign affairs,

Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster,

President of the Board of Trade,

Chief Secretary for Ireland,

Ambassador to Washington,

    Author of many historical works among

which The Armenians under the Ottoman Empire.

Extracts from a speech delivered in the House of Lords

of Great Britain, on October 6, 1915.

"I would like to see Europe, that wept of Uncle Tom's Cabin, think over the outrages perpetrated by the Turks in Armenia. Eight centuries ago a lesser injustice than these crimes would have caused an avenging Crusade. It is the duty of the Allied Powers, fighting now against the Central Empires, to grant freedom to Armenia. Otherwise the remnant of this unfortunate nation will become anarchists, and if they were to destroy Constantinople by dynamite, I a bishop, standing before the altar of Christ, would without any compunction pronounce their action not only justified, but even sanctified."

MONSIGNOR TOUCHET

Bishop of Orleans, France.

"The Great Massacres and persecutions of the past seems almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."

"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race: they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact."

HENRY MORGENTHAU

United States Ambassador at Constantinople,

during the First World War.

Extract from "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story".

"If there is a race which has been closely connected with the Turks by its fidelity, by its services to the country, by the statesmen and functionaries of talent it has furnished, by the intelligence which it has manifested in all domains - commerce, industry, science and all the arts - it is certainly the Armenians."

GENERAL SHERIF PASHA

Turkish Exile in Paris.

"In April, 1915, the Ottoman Government began to put into execution throughout Turkey a systematic and carefully-prepared plan to exterminate the Armenian race. In six months nearly a million Armenians have been killed. The number of victims and the manner of their destruction are without parallel in Modern History."

DR. HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS

Extract from "The Blackest Pages of Modern History".

"The scheme was nothing less than the extermination of the whole Christian population within the Ottoman frontiers...Nothing remained but the opportunity to strike a stroke that would never need repetition. "After this", said Talat Bey, when he gave the final signal, "there will be no Armenian Question for fifty years"."

ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE

British Historian.

Extract from "The Murder of a Nation".

"Then, coming to the broad question of Armenia, we remember those terrible massacres in 1895 and 1896, but they pale into insignificance before what has been done during this War. The Germans have been guilty of the most ghastly and unspeakable crimes, but there is no crime so ghastly and unspeakable as the wholesale massacres, under circumstances of the greatest possible barbarity and atrocity, of the Armenians themselves."

SIR GEORGE GREENWOOD

"Of the 2,000,000 Armenians in Turkey in 1914, one million have been slaughtered, and the survivors only 130,000 remain in Turkey and the rest are refugees and exiles. Armenian property losses are valued at over 5,000,000,000 dollars are more than three fourths of the estimated wealth of the Armenian race."

H. ADAM

Extract from "Armenia in the World War".

"Let us not forget that the Armenian Nation has had a long and glorious history; that it was one of the earliest to create a civilisation and cultured society; that is was the first nation to adopt Christianity for all these centuries, through every horror. But even this is not enough to say of the essential greatness of Armenian History and the Armenian character. It is necessary to remember that it was at one period of its history, the greatest power among nations of Asia, that it governed itself with success and Christianity between Asia and Europe and finally these traditions of faith and of patriotism have been carried on through many centuries and numberless generations while religion and national spirit have not suffered the slightest diminution in either valor or tenacity."

THOMAS POWER O'CONNER

(Tay Pay)

(1848-1929)

Irish journalist and nationalist leader.

"Our fellow countrymen committed unheard of crimes, resorted to all conceivable methods of despotism, organised deportations and massacres, poured gas over babies and burned them, raped women and girls in front of their parents who were bound hand and foot, took girls in front of their parents and fathers, appropriated personal property and real estate, drove people to Mesopotamia and treated them inhumanly on the way... they put thousands of innocent people into boats that were sunk at sea... they put Armenians in the most unbearable conditions any other nation had ever known in its history."

NEMRUD MUSTAFA KEMAL PASHA

Judge of the Turkish Court Marshall No.1

Constantinople, January 20, 1920

Extract from court records.

"The whole plan of extermination was nothing less than a cold blooded, calculated political measure, having for its object the annihilation of a superior element in the population, which might prove troublesome, and to this must be added the motive of greed".

FRIDTJOF NANSEN

(1861-1930)

Norwegian Statesman and humanitarian,

Winner of the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize,

High Commissioner for Refugees under

the League of Nations.

"As for the Armenians, they were treated differently in the different vilayets. They were suspect and spied upon everywhere, but they suffered real extermination, worse than massacre, in the so-called "Armenian Vilayets". There are seven of these, and five of them (including the most important and thickly populated) unhappily for me formed part of my own Consular Jurisdiction. These were the vilayets of Trebizond, Erzeroum, Van, Bitlis and Sivas.

"In my district 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 Mesopotamia, but for four-fifths of them has meant already a death accompanied by unheard-of cruelties."

COMM. G. GORRINI

Italian Consul General at Trebizond.

Extracts from an interview published in the

newspaper IlMessaggero, Rome, 25th August 1915.

"The Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor. The clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be."

SIR WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL

(1874-1965)

    British Prime Minister and Historian.

"From May until October, the Ottoman Government pursued methodically a plan of extermination far more hellish than the worst possible massacre. Orders for deportation of the entire Armenian population to Mesopotamia were despatched to every province of Asia Minor. These orders were explicit and detailed. No hamlet was too insignificant to be missed. The news was given by town criers that every Armenian was to be ready to leave at a certain hour for an unknown destination. There were no exceptions for the aged, the ill, the women in pregnancy."

DR. HERBERT A. GIBBONS

Extract from "The Blackest Page of Modern History".

Putnam, New York, 1916.

"A pallid light extends over the atrocities committed against the Armenians, atrocities which have raised the indignation of humanity. They gave us our country transformed into a gigantic slaughter house."

RASHID PASHA

Minister of Foreign Affairs.

December 21, 1918.

"Have you thought of the sufferings of Armenia? You poured out your money to help succor the Armenians after they suffered; now set your strength so that they shall never suffer again."

PRESIDENT  WOODROW WILSON

President of the United States of America

Extract from a "Speech in Boston, Massachusetts,

February 24, 1919.

"The Allies see clearly that the time has come to put an end to Turkish domination over other races. During the past twenty years Armenians have been massacred with unexampled brutality. During the war, the exploit of the Turkish Government, in massacres, deportations and bad treatment of prisoners of war, exceeded in ferocity its former misdeeds. Not only has the Government failed to protect its subjects against murder and pillage, but it itself has organised and perpetrated these outrages. The Allies are determined to liberate from Turkish rule the regions inhabited by non-Turks."

ALEXANDER MILLERAND

(1859-1943)

President of the French Republic.

July 16, 1920.

"The Ottoman Empire should be cleaned up of the Armenians and the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by the sword, we shall destroy the latter through starvation."

ENVER PASHA

One of the triumvirate rulers.

Publicly declared on 19 May 1916.
 

"It was at first communicated to you that the Government, by order of the Jemiet had decided to destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey...An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex nor to conscientious scruples."

TALAT PASHA

Minister of the Interior 

September 6, 1916. - To the Government of Aleppo.
 

"Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that it still has left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die."

ANATOLE FRANCE

French Author, 1916.

"Turks continued their previous policy. They would not stop committing massive and most awful massacres that even Leng Timur (Tamerlane) would not dare to do."

VALERII BRUSOV

Russian Poet, 1916.

"Who can describe the feelings that an eyewitness experiences when he thinks of this heroic and unfortunate nation. Its courage and spirit surprise the world. A nation that yesterday was one of the most energetic and progressive nations of the Ottoman Empire is becoming a memory."

FAYEZ EL HUSEIN

Arab Publicist, 1917.

"The deportations of Western Armenians are nothing but concealed race extermination. There is no language rich enough to describe the horrors of it."

JACQUES de MORGAN

French scientist, 1917.

"The German Consul from Mosul related, in my presence, at the German club at Aleppo that, in many places on the road from Mosul to Aleppo, he had seen children's hands lying hacked off in such numbers that one could have paved the road with them."

DR. MARTIN NIEPAGE

Extract from the Horrors of Aleppo, seen by a German eyewitness,

translated by the New York Times publication

Current History Vol. 5 Nov. 1916 pp 335-37.
 

"A remarkable thing about the bodies that we saw that nearly all of them were naked. I have been informed that the people were forced to take off their clothes before they were killed as the Mohammedans consider the clothes taken from a dead body to be defiled. There were gaping bayonet wounds on most if the bodies, usually in the abdomen or chest, sometimes in the throat. Few persons had been shot, as bullets were too precious. It was cheaper to kill with bayonets and knives. Another remarkable thing was that nearly all the women lay flat on their back and showed signs of barbarous mutilation by the bayonets of the gendarmes, these wounds having been inflicted in many cases probably after the women were dead. We also noticed that all the bodies in these valleys were apparently those of people who had been on the road at least one or two months, showing that they were not from Harput but were from distant places.

"We estimated in the course of our ride around the lake, and actually within the space of twenty-four hours, we had seen the remains of not less than ten thousand Armenians who had been killed around lake Goeljuk."

LESLIE A. DAVIS

Lawyer and U.S Consul at Harput (Turkey) 1914-1917.

132 Page report prepared at the request of Wilbur J. Carr,

director of the Consular Bureau of the US Department of State.

The Slaughterhouse Province. An American Diplomat's Report

on the Armenian Genocide 1915-1917. (New Rochelle, NY, 1989)

"As one of the few Europeans who have been eyewitness of the dreadful destruction of the Armenian people from its beginning in the fruitful fields of Anatolia up to the wiping out of the mournful remnants of the race on the banks of the Euphrates, I venture to claim the right of setting before you these pictures of misery and terror which passed before my eyes during nearly two years, and which will never be obliterated from my mind. I appeal to you at the moment... When the Turkish Government, in the Spring of 1915, set about the execution of its monstrous project of exterminating the Armenians, all the nations of Europe were unhappily bleeding to exhaustion, owing to the tragic blindness of their mutual misunderstandings, and there was no one to hinder the lurid tyrants of Turkey from carrying onto the bitter end those revolting atrocities which can only be likened to the acts of a criminal lunatic...

"...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. Children wept themselves to death, men dashed themselves against the rocks, mothers threw their babies into the brooks, women with child flung themselves, singing into the Euphrates. They died all the deaths on the earth, the deaths of all the ages...

"Everyone who knows the events of this war in Anatolia, who has followed the fortunes of this nation with open eyes, know that all those accusations which were brought, with great cunning and much diligence, against the Armenian race, are nothing but loathsome slanders fabricated by their unscrupulous tyrants, in order to shield themselves from the consequences of their own mad and brutal acts, and to hide their own incapacity for reconciliation with the spirit of sincerity and humanity."

ARMIN T. WEGNER

Ein Vermachtnis in der Wuste (A Testament in the Desert)

Berliner Tageblatt No 86, 23 February 1919.

Appeared in an Open letter to President Woodrow Wilson.