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Armenian horror was a blueprint for Hitler

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  • Armenian horror was a blueprint for Hitler

    DAILY MAIL (London), UK
    December 23, 2011 Friday

    ARMENIAN HORROR WAS A BLUEPRINT FOR HITLER

    BY PAUL HARRIS


    THEY call it the forgotten holocaust, a mass slaughter conducted under
    cover of war.

    For nearly a century now it has been shrouded in secrecy and mystery;
    coloured with denial and contention.

    But the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turks
    between 1915 and 1916 is still held to be one of the worst atrocities
    committed by one race against another ` and a historical blueprint
    for Hitler's massacre of the Jews.

    In towns and villages across the Ottoman Empire, Turkish gendarmes
    began rounding up Christian families and deporting them en masse.

    The men were seized in the dead of night, and either killed, tortured
    or imprisoned. Women and children were raped, beaten and abused. Many
    would perish on the `death marches' that forced them to walk
    towards desert concentration camps. Those who didn't may have wished
    they had.

    Accounts of atrocities said to have been carried out by the Turks told
    how mothers were forced to watch their babies being smashed to their
    deaths against rocks¦ how their daughters were raped in front of
    them¦ and how guards beheaded their menfolk and played football with
    their heads.

    Some of the torture to which prisoners were subjected was so
    unbearable they doused themselves in paraffin from prison lamps and
    set themselves alight.

    At one stage a caravan of more than 40,000 women was seen under escort
    through the desert, some so starved they were described by one witness
    as `mere skeletons enveloped in rags¦ their leathery skin burned
    by the sun, cold and wind'.

    According to the Armenians, it was a systematic slaughter designed to
    eliminate the Armenian people whom the Turks regarded as `vermin'.
    It is recorded as the first `ethnic cleansing' of the 20th
    century. Most historians accept that up to 1.5million Armenians may
    have died.

    `Forgotten' therefore, is a curious term to apply to what is
    widely described as an act of genocide. But in the 96 years that
    followed, Turkey has consistently and resolutely refused to
    acknowledge that genocide took place. It accepts that there were
    atrocities but insists there was no systematic attempt to wipe out
    Christian Armenians.

    Now the poisonous legacy of 1915 has surfaced again. And even after so
    many years, the bitterness has far from subsided.

    At the turn of the 20th century, there were two million Armenians in
    the Ottoman Empire. Some 200,000 had already died in pogroms. The
    Ottoman Empire wanted to build a huge Muslim empire ` but the
    Armenians' Christian civilisation stood in its way.

    When the First World War broke out Armenia was divided between the
    Russian and Ottoman empires, which were on opposite sides of the
    conflict.

    Armenians on the Russian side formed volunteer battalions to help the
    Russians fight the Turks and persuaded separatist-minded Turkish
    Armenians to join them.

    The Ottoman government responded by ordering the `deportation' of
    the entire Turkish Armenian population to Syria and Palestine. It
    formed `Special Organisation' units to implement mass killings.

    Winston Churchill described the massacres as `an administrative
    holocaust' and `a crime planned and executed for political
    purposes'. Years later, Hitler's bid to exterminate the Jews would
    bear startling similarities to the Armenian massacre, right down to
    the number of people that could most efficiently be crammed into a
    cattle truck.

    The `deportation' began on the night of April 24, 1915. The date
    is seared in blood into the Armenian calendar, marked annually by
    Armenians around the world.

    It is unlikely ever to be erased, whatever becomes of the French
    `genocide bill'.

    Mass slaughter: Many Armenians were killed, others died on forced marches

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