The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  To this day, the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. This is strange, since the historical evidence of what happened is plentiful. Western observers like the US ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, wrote detailed reports about what was being done – including the telling statement of Mehmed Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister, that all the Armenians had to perish because ‘those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow’. Western missionaries too wrote harrowing accounts of what they witnessed. Their testimony formed an important part of the wartime report on ‘The Treatment of the Armenians’ compiled by Viscount Bryce, who had also investigated the German atrocities in Belgium in 1914. It might conceivably be argued that the citizens of Christian powers already – or later to be – hostile to the Turks had an interest in misrepresenting them. The Young Turks themselves insisted that they were merely retaliating against a pro-Russian fifth column. That was also the line taken by the Sultan in his reply to Pope Benedict XV’s intercession on behalf of the Armenians.

  Yet agents of the Turks’ own wartime allies gave the lie to these claims. Rafael de Nogales, a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus ‘to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over’. A German schoolteacher at Aleppo was appalled by what he saw of the ‘extermination of the Armenian nation’ and wrote urging his own government to ‘put a stop to the brutality’. According to Joseph Pomiankowski, the Austrian Military Plenipotentiary in Constantinople, the Turks had undertaken the ‘eradication of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor’ (he used the terms Ausrottung and Vernichtung). Pomiankowski rejected the Turkish government’s claim that they were acting in response to a concerted Armenian insurrection. The alleged ‘uprisings’ at Van and elsewhere were, in his view, ‘acts of desperation’ by Armenians who ‘recognized that the general butchery had begun and would soon come to them’. One of his colleagues in the Austrian embassy referred to the Turkish ‘extermination of the Armenian race’. His ambassador called the massacres ‘a stain on the Turkish government’, for which the Turks would one day be held to account. The German ambassador was, by contrast, reluctant to express disapproval, but German sources nevertheless confirm that mass murder was being perpetrated. There is even contemporary Turkish testimony that corroborates these reports. One Turkish officer ordered to deport the Armenians from Trebizond admitted that he ‘knew that deportations meant massacres’.

  The measures taken by the Turks were quite systematic. To begin with, Armenian men of military age were called up. Their political and religious leaders were arrested and deported. The violence mostly took place in 1915, though there were isolated incidents at the end of 1914. Armenian villages in the vicinity of Van were burned down, and the men and boys older than ten massacred. The more attractive young women were raped and abducted. Women, children and the elderly were driven towards the Persian frontier, often having been stripped. Usually the perpetrators plundered the homes of their victims. Money and other valuables were stolen. Rape was rampant. At Trebizond in July 1915 hundreds of Armenian men were ‘taken out of town in batches of 15 or 20, lined up on the edge of ditches prepared beforehand, shot, and thrown into the ditches’. The bodies of thousands of men, women and children from Bitlis and Zaart were dumped in the river or nearby ravines. Similar atrocities occurred in so many different places during 1915 that the existence of a deliberate plan for a violent ‘solution’ of the Armenian question cannot seriously be disputed. Equally well organized were the deportations of the Armenian women, children and old people. Trains ran along the Baghdad Railway carrying tens of thousands of them, crammed into carriages eighty or ninety at a time. Beyond the railheads people were made to walk literally until they dropped. For those who were marched half-naked and without water through the Syrian desert, ‘deportation’ meant death. The Bavarian theologian Josef Engert summed up these horrors in a memorandum to Eugenio Pacelli, the Papal nuncio and future Pope Pius XII:

  Around a million Armenians perished… Even if the Armenians were guilty of revolt (the proof has not yet been furnished because certain German officials assured me at the front that only great need and incessant torture caused the Armenians to take up… arms…) of what are [the] women and children guilty? The destiny of these miserable ones was still more horrible than that of the men: by the thousand they were abandoned in deserts and steppes, where they were left to hunger and thirst and to every sort of suffering… Thousands of women and girls were sold… and passed from owner to owner for a sum of twenty lira. They were consigned to harems and made concubines… The boys were abandoned to Turkish orphanages and compelled to adopt the Islamic religion… The Turkish affirmation that ‘The Armenian question is answered for us’ in reality meant the extermination of the Armenians.

  As Engert’s account makes clear, forced conversions also occurred, especially for young women and children; apostasy and sexual subjugation were alternative solutions to the ‘Armenian question’. But death was clearly the Young Turks’ first choice.* The number of Armenian men, women and children who were killed or died prematurely may have been even higher than a million, a huge proportion of a pre-war population that numbered, at the very most, 2.4 million, but was probably closer to 1.8 million. These acts, in short, were much more than pogroms in the Russian style.

  The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state. As the Archbishop of Aleppo vainly protested: ‘We don’t wish to separate ourselves from the Turkish state. A separation would be impossible, since nationalities and religions are so mixed that a pure division by nations is impossible. Additionally, the various groups are economically interdependent, one upon the other, in such a way that, should a division come, they would be destroyed.’ The methods used wilfully to destroy the Armenians – the train journeys to hellish wildernesses, the death marches, the neat rows of emaciated bodies – would be imitated and refined in the decades ahead, though it would be wrong to infer a direct link between Armenia and Auschwitz from the direct complicity of a few German soldiers in the first genocide,* much less from the German military’s fondness for the term ‘annihilation’.†

  Yet this was only the beginning of a wave of ethnic conflict that would fundamentally transform the social structure of the lands between the Aegean and the Black Sea.

  The Greek population of western Anatolia and the Black Sea littoral (the Pontus) had numbered around two million on the eve of the First World War. Their communities were very ancient; they had been there for more than two thousand years, a fact to which magnificent edifices like the theatre at Ephesus bore witness. They continued to thrive in the modern world, as any visitor to the busy waterfront of Smyrna could see. Yet as early as October 1915 the German military attaché reported to Berlin that Enver wanted ‘to solve the Greek problem during the war… in the same way that he believes he solved the Armenian problem’. The process began in Thrace. It was in fact more plausible for the Turks to portray the Greeks as a fifth column, since the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos strongly favoured Greek intervention on the side of the Entente powers and, although King Constantine resisted until finally driven to abdicate in June 1917, the presence of an Anglo-French force at Salonika from October 1915 cast doubt on the credibility of Greek neutrality. Viewed from Salonika, the First World War was the Third Balkan War, with Bulgaria joining Germany and Austria in the rout of Serbia; indeed, it was to shore up the disintegrating Serbian position that the Entente powers had sent their troops to Salonika. It was too late. The Anglo-French force remained penned in, unable, despite Greece’s belated entry into the war, to prevent the German-Bulgarian defeat of Romania in 1917. Yet the final phase of the war saw a collapse as complete as that suffered by the Germans on the Western Front. An offensive on the Salonika Front
forced Bulgaria to sue for peace on September 25, 1918; six days later the British marched into Damascus, having defeated the Turkish army in Syria. On October 30 the Turks surrendered.

  For Venizelos it was a moment of intoxicating triumph. He had begun his political career by leading the revolt that had driven the Turks out of Crete; he had led Greece to victory in the First and Second Balkan Wars; he had finally got his way over the Third, and won that too. Now he saw an opportunity to extend Greek power further, from the Peloponnese across the Aegean to Anatolia itself. It was in fact the British government that initially encouraged Greek forces to occupy Smyrna. Lloyd George’s motive was to forestall Italian moves to annex the city; mutinous Italian troops, led by the flamboyant poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, had already acted unilaterally by occupying Fiume on the Adriatic in defiance of the other members of the Big Four. At first the campaign went the Greeks’ way. They advanced deep into Anatolia. In the best traditions of classical Greek drama, however, hubris was soon followed by nemesis. The crisis of defeat had led to revolution in Turkey. In April 1920 a Grand National Assembly was established in Ankara, which repudiated the Treaty of Sèvres and offered the post of President to the fair-haired, blue-eyed, hard-drinking General Mustafa Kemal. Almost simultaneously, Venizelos fell from power in Athens and the British, French and Italians withdrew their support for the Greek expedition.*

  Born in Salonika, Kemal had played a key role in the defence of Gallipoli against British invasion in 1915. He now masterminded the expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia. After fierce fighting in the area of Eskişehir, 100 miles west of Ankara, the Greeks cracked. Those who did not surrender took to their heels. As they fled towards the Aegean, their ranks were swelled by tens of thousands of civilians, hoping that in Smyrna they would find protection from the reprisals already being taken against Greek communities along the Black Sea littoral, who were being deported and in some cases massacred much as the Armenians had been seven years before. There was in fact still a large Armenian community living in Smyrna, who had been spared during the war, possibly at the insistence of General Liman von Sanders. In September 1922, however, Kemal’s army occupied the town. They sealed off the Armenian quarter and began systematically butchering its 25,000 inhabitants. Then they set fire to it, to incinerate any survivors. The American consul, George Horton, described the unfolding horror:

  At first, civilian Turks, natives of the town, were the chief offenders. I myself saw such civilians armed with shotguns watching the windows of Christian houses ready to shoot at any head that might appear. These had the air of hunters crouching and stalking their prey… The hunting and killing of Armenian men, either by hacking or clubbing or driving out in squads into the country and shooting, caused an unimaginable panic… I saw a young couple wade out into the sea. They were a respectable, attractive pair and the man was carrying in his arms a small child. As they waded deeper and deeper into the water, till it came nearly up to their shoulders, I suddenly realized that they were going to drown themselves.

  The London Daily Mail ’s reporter filed copy that might have been lifted straight from The War of the Worlds:

  What I see… is an unbroken wall of fire, two miles long; against this curtain of fire, which blocks out the sky, are silhouetted the towers of the… churches, the domes of the mosques, and the flat square roofs of the houses… The sea glows a deep copperred, and, worst of all, from the densely packed mob of thousands of refugees huddled on the narrow quay, between the advancing fiery death behind and the deep water in front, comes continuously such a frantic screaming of sheer terror as can be heard miles away.

  When the desperate refugees arrived at the quayside they saw a flotilla of foreign ships in the harbour – more than twenty British, French and American warships. It must have seemed as if salvation was at hand. Yet the Western forces did next to nothing; not for the last time in twentieth-century history, an international contingent looked on as (in the phrase of one British diplomat) ‘a deliberate plan to get rid of minorities’ was carried out. What better symbol could be imagined of the decline of the West, than the brutal expulsion of the heirs of Hellenic civilization from Asia Minor – except perhaps the utter failure of the heirs of ancient Greek democracy to do anything to prevent it?

  To the appalled George Horton, who desperately tried to buy a few Greeks and Armenians safe passage with his own money, the destruction of Smyrna was ‘but the closing act in a consistent programme of exterminating Christianity throughout the length and breadth of the old Byzantine Empire; the expatriation of an ancient Christian civilization’. The idea persists that religion was the principal motivation for what happened. Yet the emergent Turkish republic was not an Islamic state; on the contrary, Kemal would later introduce the separation of religion and state and abort moves towards parliamentary democracy precisely in order to stop a nascent Islamist opposition from reversing this. In reality, what happened between 1915 and 1922 was more ethnic cleansing than holy war. As Horton himself noted bitterly: ‘The problem of the minorities is here solved for all time.’ The New York Times detected the sexual dimension of Turkish policy, reporting that ‘the Turks frankly do not understand why they should not get rid of the Greeks and Armenians from their country and take their women into their harems if they are sufficiently good looking.’ Kemal saw no need to massacre all the Greeks in Smyrna, though a substantial number of able-bodied men were marched inland, suffering assaults by Turkish villagers along the way. He merely gave the Greek government until October 1 to evacuate them all. By the end of 1923 more than 1.2 million Greeks and 100,000 Armenians had been forced from their ancestral homes. The Greeks responded in kind. In 1915 some 60 per cent of the population of Western Thrace had been Muslims and 29 per cent of the population of Macedonia. By 1924 the figures had plunged to 28 per cent and zero per cent, their places taken by Greeks.

  The Armenian genocide, the massacres of the Pontic Greeks and the agreed ‘exchanges’ of Greek and Turkish populations after the sack of Smyrna illustrated with a terrible clarity the truth of the Archbishop of Aleppo’s warning: when a multi-ethnic empire mutated into a nation state, the result could only be carnage. It was as if, for the sake of a spuriously modern uniformity, the basest instincts of ordinary men were unleashed in a kind of tribal bloodletting. There was certainly no meaningful economic rationale for what happened. Along the Anatolian coast it is still possible to find ruined villages whose inhabitants were forced to flee in 1922 but which were never subsequently reoccupied. At least five hundred people must once have lived in the village of Sazak, not far from what is now the holiday resort of Karaburun. With its well-built stone houses and its steep cobbled streets, Sazak has the air of vanished peasant prosperity. Now it is a ghost town, visited only by wandering goats and sea mists – a desolate memorial to the death throes of an empire.

  THE GRAVES OF NATIONS

  The old multi-national empires of continental Europe had been the architects of their own destruction. Like train drivers knowingly steaming full tilt towards one another, they themselves had caused the great train crash of 1914. But though it spelt the end of four dynasties and the creation of ten new independent nation states, the end of the war did not mean the end of empire. The British and French empires grew fatter on the remnants of their foes’ domains. Meanwhile, two of the defunct empires were able to reconstitute themselves with astonishing speed and violence. A new and more ruthless Russian empire emerged behind the façade of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A new and less tolerant Turkey was born in Ankara, abandoning the ruins of the Sublime Porte, just as the Bolsheviks had moved their capital eastwards to Moscow.

  And what of the Germans, who had lost not one but two empires in the débâcle of 1918 and who now found themselves divided up between two rump republics, with a diaspora scattered across more than seven other states? Keynes, who proved to be the most influential of all the critics of the Paris Peace, was quite right to foresee a period of severe economic crisis i
n Germany, though how far the hyperinflation of 1922–3 was a direct consequence of the Versailles Treaty, as opposed to German fiscal and monetary mismanagement, remains debatable. Keynes’s remedy was clear: reparations should be set at the relatively modest level of £4 billion, to be paid in thirty annual instalments starting in 1923.* Germany should be lent money, allowed to trade freely, encouraged to rebuild her economy. This was not a matter of altruism, but enlightened self-interest. For there could be no stability in Central Europe without a German economic recovery.

  ‘Unless her great neighbours are prosperous and orderly,’ Keynes remarked in the final chapter of his Economic Consequences, ‘Poland is an economic impossibility with no industry but Jew-baiting.’ With Russia in chaos, the only salvation could come through ‘the agency of German enterprise and organisation’. Hence the Western powers must ‘encourage and assist Germany to take up again her place in Europe as a creator and organiser of wealth for her eastern and southern neighbours’. The alternative would be ‘a final civil war between the forces of reaction and the despairing convulsions of revolution, before which the horrors of the late… war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation’.

  Yet what would a German recovery mean for the politics of Mittel-europa – for the new states created by the peacemakers and for the minorities within them? If the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic had been attended by genocide and mass expulsions, what was to prevent similar things happening in the fractious patchwork-quilt of nation states that the peacemakers had made in Central and Eastern Europe? As the German-Jewish physician Alfred Döblin succinctly put it: ‘Today’s states are the graves of nations.’