Hitler's Armenian reference

Adolf Hitler's Obersalzberg Speech may conclude with the rhetorical question: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" This version of the speech is disputed; not all historians accept that Hitler made the alleged statement.

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

Speech by Hitler with the Armenian reference[1]

The reference

The key area of contention regarding the Armenian reference to the Armenian Genocide, referencing the ethnic extermination of Armenians during World War I in the Ottoman Empire, where an estimated one to one-and-a-half million ethnic Armenians were killed by Turks.[2][3][4] The reference now inscribed on one of the walls of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2009 the International Association of Genocide Scholars used the quote in a letter to Barack Obama related to the Armenian Genocide recognition.[5] When the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal got hold of the first note of the speech, named "L-3", they rejected its use as evidence because the American newspaperman that provided the document refused to disclose the source.[6]

The Trial of German Major War Criminals Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany. Fifth Day: Monday, 26 November 1945. Prosecutor Sydney Alderman to the president of the court:

In this presentation of condemning documents, concerning the initiation of war in September 1939, I must bring to the attention of the Tribunal a group of documents concerning an address by Hitler to his chief military commanders, at Obersalzburg, on 22 August 1939, just one week prior to the launching of the attack on Poland. We have three of these documents, related and constituting a single group. The first one, I do not intend to offer as evidence. The other two, I shall offer. The reason for that decision is this: The first of the three documents came into our possession through the medium of an American newspaperman, and purported to be original minutes of this meeting at Obersalzberg, transmitted to this American newspaperman by some other person; and we had no proof of the actual delivery to the intermediary by the person who took the notes. That document, therefore, merely served to keep our prosecution on the alert, to see if it could find something better. Fortunately, we did get the other two documents, which indicate that Hitler on that day made two speeches, perhaps one in the morning, one in the afternoon, as indicated by the original minutes, which we captured. By comparison of those two documents with the first document, we conclude that the first document was a slightly garbled merger of the two speeches.[6]

Historians assessment

Abram L. Sachar, an American historian and founding president of Brandeis University, wrote: "...the genocide was cited approvingly twenty-five years later by the Fuehrer...who found the Armenian 'solution' an instructive precedent".[7] Richard Lichtheim, one of the German Jews who, as a young leader of the Zionist movement, feverishly negotiated with Ittihadist leaders in wartime Turkey, described the "cold-bloodedly planned extermination of over one million Armenians (kaltblutig durchdacht)" as an act of perpetration "akin to Hitler's crusade of destruction against the Jews in the 1940–1942 period."[8][9]^:409

German periodical Die Zeit (Hamburg) mentioned in 1984 that "Hitler must have known exactly about the Armenian case of Genocide" because one of his closest collaborators at the early stages of the National Socialist movement was Dr. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, i.e. Germany's former Vice Consul at Erzurum and later Co-Commander of a joint Turko-German Expeditionary guerilla force "whose awful reports on the massacre of the Armenians are preserved". The periodical went even one step further asserting that the skills used in the Armenian episode served as an example for Hitler's similar initiative against the Jews.[10] Scheubner, in one of his World War I reports to his ambassador characterized the city-dwelling Armenians as "these Jews of the Orient, these wily businessmen" (gerissene Handelsleute).[11][9]^:411–412

Richard Albrecht, a German social researcher and political scientist,[12] published a three-volume study (2006–08) on 20th century genocides that contained the document of the original German version of the Armenian quote (the L-3 text) for the first time.[13] The book is summarized as "When discussing, and applying, all relevant features scholarly accepted as leading principles of classifying documents as authentic, the author not only works out that the L-3-document as translated and brought in a few days later at 25 August 1939, by the US-newspaper man Louis P. Lochner (1887–1975) from Associated Press, and first published in 1942, whenever compared with any other version of Hitler's speech – above all the Nuremberg-documents 798-PS, 1014 PS, and Raeder-27, as produced by a dubious witness after realising the L-3-version, too – this version must be regarded as the one which most likely sums up and expresses what Hitler said – for what Hitler really said in his notorious second speech was only written down simultaneously during his speech by one of his auditors: Wilhelm Canaris (1887–1945), at that time chief of the military secret service within the Third Reich".[12]

Dr. Kevork B. Bardakjian, an expert in Armenian studies, also argues that the L-3 document originates in the notes secretly taken by Wilhelm Canaris during the meeting of 22 August 1939:

To conclude, although its author is unknown, L-3 and its unsigned counterparts 798-PS and 1014-PS originate from the notes Wilhelm Canaris took personally as Hitler spoke on 22 August 1939. ... Although not an "official" record, L-3 is a genuine document and is as sound as the other evidence submitted at Nuremberg.[14]

In his 1987 survey of the historiography of the Holocaust, the Canadian historian Michael Marrus wrote that "recent research" pointed towards the "authenticity" of the controversial L-3 document, but he however cautioned against scholars who used a single reference to the Armenian genocide in the speech as proving that Hitler was inspired by the example set by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).[15] Marrus wrote that however horrifying the Armenian genocide was, Hitler had a very low opinion of non-white peoples, making it unlikely that he would have seen the CUP as a role model.[16]

According to Christopher Browning in 2004, American historian of the Holocaust, L-3 document, which contains the Armenian quote, is an "apocalyptic" version of Hitler's speech that day which was purposefully leaked to the British in order to gain their support to Poland. But he did use it as a source in his book about the holocaust [17]

German historain Tobias Jersak cites the statement as evidence that Hitler believed that crimes committed during wartime would be overlooked. According to this interpretation, Hitler planned to unleash genocide upon the outbreak of war: "war would serve as a cover for extermination and the fighting would conceal the real war aim".[18]^:575

According to Margaret L. Anderson in 2010, Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, "we have no reason to doubt the remark is genuine, both attack and defense obscure an obvious reality" that the Armenian Genocide has achieved "iconic status... as the apex of horrors imaginable in 1939," and that Hitler used it to persuade the German military that committing genocide excited a great deal of "talk" but no serious consequences for a nation that perpetrates genocide.[19]

References

1. Lochner, Louis Paul (1942). What About Germany?. Dodd, Mead & Company. pp. 11–12.
2. Dictionary of Genocide, by Samuel Totten, Paul Robert Bartrop, Steven L. Jacobs, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008, ISBN 0-313-34642-9, p. 19
3. Intolerance: a general survey, by Lise Noël, Arnold Bennett, 1994, ISBN 0-7735-1187-3, p. 101
4. Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, by Richard T. Schaefer, 2008, p. 90
5. "Letter to President Obama" "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 July 2011. Retrieved 7 September 2009.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
6. "Trials of German Major War Criminals: Volume1". web.archive.org. 2007-06-10. Retrieved 2020-05-09.
7. Howard M. Sachar, The Emergence of the Middle East, 1914–1924 (New York, 1969), 115.
8. Richard Lichtheim, Ruckkehr, Lebenserinnerungen aus der Fruhzeit des deutschen Zionismus (Stuttgart, 1970), 287, 341.
9. Dadrian 1995.
10. Die Zeit (German weekly in Hamburg), No. 50, "Dossier", 7 December 1984.
11. A. A. Turkey 183/39, A28584, enclosure no. 2, in "secret report" No. 23, pp 11–12 of the 15 pp. report of August 5, 1915 filed from Erzurum
12. "Book summary, Richard Albrecth"http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=160809
13. " Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier " http://www.shaker.de/de/content/catalogue/index.asp?lang=de&ID=8&ISBN=978-3-8322-6695-0
14. K. B. Bardakjian (1985). Hitler and the Armenian Genocide. Special Report No. 3, The Zoryan Institute. ISBN 978-0-916431-18-1. Available on-line (8.1 MB).
15. Marrus, Michael The Holocaust In History, Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1987 p.20-21.
16. Marrus, Michael The Holocaust In History, Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1987 p.21.
17. Browning, Christopher R. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy University of Nebraska Press, 2004. p. 437-438. ISBN 0-8032-5979-4
18. Jersak, Tobias (2000). "Revisited: a new look at Nazi war and extermination planning". The Historical Journal. 43 (2): 565–582. doi:10.1017/S0018246X99001004.
19. "Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians: German Talk and German Silences" in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. R. Suny, Oxford, 2010, p. 199.

Sources

• Dadrian, Vahakn (1995). The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. Oxford: Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1571816665.