Armenian Genocide

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What past events inspired the Holocaust?

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SCAPEGOAT

A scapegoat is a person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place. If you say that someone is made a scapegoat for something bad that has happened, you mean that people blame them and may punish them for it although it may not be their fault.

To scapegoat someone means to blame them publicly for something bad that has happened, even though it was not their fault.

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POGROMS

A pogrom is an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe.

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PROPAGANDA

Propaganda is the effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions for a specific purpose. To maximize effect, they may omit or distort pertinent facts or simply lie, and they may try to divert the reactors’ attention. Propaganda is always biased and can be negative or positive, but usually has a negative connotation.

Propaganda is information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.��

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The Nazis effectively used propaganda to win the support of millions of Germans in a democracy and, later in a dictatorship, to facilitate persecution, war, and ultimately genocide.

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The stereotypes and images found in Nazi propaganda were not new, but were already familiar to their intended audience. Nazi propaganda played an integral role in advancing the persecution and ultimately the destruction of Europe’s Jews.

“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

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-Adolf Hitler, November 22, 1939

Sadly, Hitler was right..

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• What do we know about the Armenian Genocide?

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Armenian dignitaries and women stand around skulls of victims of Armenian genocide.

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What is Genocide?

• Genocide is an internationally recognized crime and is understood by most to be the gravest crime against humanity it is possible to commit.

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• Genocide is definded as the deliberate killing or mass extermination of a whole group of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group and wiping them out of existence.

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• The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

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• The term genocide is retroactively appled to the mass killings of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

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What is the Armenian Genocide?

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• The Armenian genocide refers to the physical annihilation of Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire from spring 1915 through autumn 1916.

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• As many as 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 died during the genocide, either in massacres and individual killings, or from systematic ill treatment, exposure, and starvation.

What was the religious context?

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• The Armenians were Christians living in the Ottoman empire where most of the people were Muslims.

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• The Ottoman rulers permitted religious minorities like the Armenians to maintain some autonomy, but they also subjected Armenians, who they viewed as “infidels,” to unequal and unjust treatment.

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• In 1908 a small group of Ottoman revolutionaries—the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), —came to power. The CUP activists envisioned a future state that was not multi-ethnic and “Ottoman,” but culturally and homogeneously Turkish. They viewed non-Turks – and especially Christian non-Turks – as a grave threat to the new state.

The beginning of the single story. Christians as “other” and a threat.

How did WWI allow for the Armenian Genocide to occur?

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• Mass atrocities and genocide often occur within the context of war.

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• In 1914, the Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (At the same time, Ottoman religious authorities declared a holy war against all Christians except their allies.)

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• Military leaders began to argue that the Armenians were traitors: If they thought they could win independence if the Allies were victorious, this argument went, the Armenians would be eager to fight for the enemy.

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• On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. That day, the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals.

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Continuation of the single story of Armenians as “other” and a threat. This becomes the ratinonale for the genocide.

Condition of genocides

What happened during the

Armenian Genocide ?

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• The victims of the Armenian genocide include people killed in local massacres that began in spring 1915.

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• Many Armenians died during deportations, under conditions of starvation, dehydration, exposure, and disease.

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• In addition, tens of thousands of Armenian children were forcibly removed from their families and converted to Islam.

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• Though no one is sure how many Armenians were killed, most sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. When the genocide was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire.

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Recognizing the Armenian Genocide

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• After the Ottomans surrendered in 1918, the leaders of the Young Turks fled to Germany, which promised not to prosecute them for the genocide.

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• Turkey has steadily refused to recognize that the events of 1915–16 constitute a genocide, even though most historians have concluded that the deportations and massacres do fit the definition of genocide—the intentional killing of an ethnic or religious group.

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• On December 12, 2019, the US Senate voted and unanimously passed a resolution that recognizes as a genocide the mass killings of Armenians a century ago.

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• The passage of the legislation, a symbolic victory for Armenians around the world, is the first time Congress has formally designated the 1915 mass killings of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire as a genocide.

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• The United States is one of 30 countries that recognize the Armenian Genocide. See the full list here.

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Is there a connection between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust?

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OPTIONAL

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• This debate regarding the slaughter of Armenians by its ally the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s came down in favor of genocide. By the time the Nazis came to power, violence against the Armenians had been understood and even outright justified, already for decades.

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• This justification was based in part on the racial and national view of the Armenians held by many of the German commentators: they were seen as the (true) “Jews of the Orient,” either as equivalent to the Jews of Europe or even “worse.”

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The beginnings of the Germans’ justification for the Holocaust are rooted in their justification of the Armenian genocide.

What did the Nazis learned from the Armenian Genocide?

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• The Nazis learned that there were many people who would ignore, rationalize, or even outright justify genocidal violence.

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• Even the Churches did not significantly intervene for fellow Christians.

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• If nobody would save Christians, who would intervene for the Jews?

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• If German nationalists could find it in themselves to justify the genocide of Christians and were not met with much opposition in the German public, who would speak out for the Jews?

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“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

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Remember what Hitler will say in November of 1939:

Why does this matter?

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“Although we often dismiss history as nothing more than times passed, we must recognize that it informs our current and future perspectives, beliefs, and values. It is important, therefore, to acquire and maintain a truthful, uncensored account of our history, including the pages that bring us shame, as well as those that make us proud.”

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Propaganda and Stereotypes

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The propaganda manufactured by Hitler and Nazi Germany against the Jews, shows the "single story" the Third Reich wished to tell.

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The message they repeated over and over again, in all forms of media, was that the Jews were not human and must be exterminated if Germany was to survive. It is one of the most powerful, state-sanctioned "single stories" (stereotypes) ever told.

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The Nazi government engineered a technologically efficient system to commit mass murder and countless people set aside their humanity long enough to believe the stereotype/”single story” and carry out the extermination of millions of Jews.

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Antisemitism - German Nazi Propaganda Poster - WWII

The Star of David is a symbol for Judaism.

What is Antisemitism?

In 2005, the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), now the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), adopted a “working definition of antisemitism” which has become the standard definition used around the world.

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• Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

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The origins of antisemitism date back to the days of the early Christian church and continued until the era of the Holocaust in the mid-20th century.

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It raises questions about why Jews have been targeted throughout history and how antisemitism offered fertile ground to the Nazis.

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Persecution and Scapegoating

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Throughout the Middle Ages (500AD - 1500AD or the 5th-15th centuries), Jews were persecuted and portrayed as aliens or as the devil.

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Jews were scapegoated (blamed) for poisoning the wells of Europe and causing the Black Plague.

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Throughout history, Jewish people were offered the chance to convert to Christianity or to be persecuted.

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They repeatedly refused and stayed true to their own religious beliefs and customs.

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Origins of Money Stereotypes

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Guilds (an association of artisans and merchants who oversaw the practice of their craft/trade in a particular area during the Middle Ages) excluded Jews from most occupations.

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This exclusion forced Jews into pursuits like money-lending, trade, and commerce.

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Beginnings of common stereotypes about Jewish people and money.

The Next Big Lie

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Around 1900, a new lie was promoted: that Jews conspired to dominate the world using their money and intelligence to manipulate trusting Christians.

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Russian secret police forged a document supposedly authored by a conference of Jewish leaders. Even though it was proven to be a forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was nevertheless translated into every major language and distributed worldwide. It is circulated even today despite indisputable proof that it is a fake.

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Russian authorities encouraged antisemitic violence. Jews were blamed for the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. Pogroms, massacres of Jews, erupted in Russia many times during the next three decades.

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The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fabricated antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination.

The ‘Stab in the Back’ Myth

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The Germans were devastated after World War I. They were angry and humiliated by:

• The Treaty of Versailles
• Assuming guilt for World War I
• Reparations
• Limited army

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They were also in an economic crisis.

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The presence of Jews in German cultural, economic, and political life made them convenient scapegoats.

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The myth was that the German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially Jews.

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This 'Stab in the Back' myth would become hugely popular among many Germans who found it impossible to swallow defeat. During the war, Adolf Hitler became obsessed with this idea, especially laying blame on Jews in Germany for undermining the war effort.

Hitler’s Ideal: The Aryan Race

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One of the reasons the Nazis’ form of antisemitism was so effective is that it crossed class barriers.

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The idea of Aryan racial superiority appealed both to the masses and to economic elites.

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In Germany anti-Semitism became official government policy—taught in the schools, elaborated in “scientific” journals and research institutes, and promoted by a huge, highly effective organization for international propaganda.

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We will be learning about just how effective and devastating that propaganda was in the next stepping stone.

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A Nazi propaganda poster depicting an ideal "Aryan" man.

Why does this matter?

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The stereotypes/single story about the Jews as “other” and inferior developed over time and was used by Hitler and the Nazis to create the conditions for the mass genocide of millions of Jews, known as the Holocaust.

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We must realize the potentially devastating consequences of perpetuating single stories and stereotypes and we must all work to listen to multiple perspectives as we seek the truth.

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Watch this video to synthesize the content from this lesson and to support the completion of your ELA.1.3 Assessment Graphic Organizer.

Reflect and Record

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What did you learn about the history of antisemitism that made the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust possible?

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What context is important to know and remember to understand how the Holocaust was possible?

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What conditions, events, and ideas led to the rise of Hitler and made the Holocaust possible?

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What role does propaganda play in the telling and believing of stereotypes (single stories)? In mass deception? In the story of the Jewish people?

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How are stereotypes formed and reinforced?

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Complete the Stepping Stone 2 history of antisemitism context section of your ELA.1.3 Assessment Graphic Organizer.