Spoiler
"Turkey initiated a policy of annihilation against the Armenians."
Paul von Hindenburg, German Field Marshall in the Ottoman Empire during WWI, From My Life, Leipzig, (1934) p169
Spoiler
"The systematic butchery of the uprooted and deported Armenians have assumed such a scope...it was not only tolerated but openly promoted by the government. It meant the extermination of the Armenians. Despite government assurances to the contrary, everything points to the goal of the destruction of the Armenian people."
Hohenloe-Langenburg, German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Oct-Nov 1915, German Foreign Ministry Archive
Spoiler
"The destruction of the Armenians was undertaken on a massive scale...This policy of extermination will for a long time stain the name of Turkey."
Richard Kuhlmann, German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire 1916-1917, Forieign Minister 1917-1918, German Foreign Ministry Archives
Spoiler
"The Turks have embarked upon the total extermination of the Armenians in Transcaucasia, also (May 1918)... On the basisof all reports and news comming to me here in Tbilissi [Georgia] there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks systematically are aiming at the... extermination of the few hundred thousand Armenians whom they have left alive until now."
Otto von Lossow, Major General, German Military Plenipotentiary in Turkey and German Representative at Batum Conference in May, 1918 - 11 July 1918 - German Foreign Ministry Archives
Spoiler
"The manner in which the matter of relocation is being handled demonstrates that the government is in fact pursuing the goal of annihilating the Armenian race in Turkey.”
Hans Von Wangenheim: Ambassador of Imperial Germany to Turkey from 1912 - 1915
Spoiler
"The Turks have by no means relinquished their intention to exterminate the Armenians. They merely changed their tactics. Wherever possible, the Armenians are being aroused, provoked in the hope of thereby securing a pretext for new assaults on them."
Friedrich Kress Kressenstein: Major General, Chief of Operations, Turkish
General Headquarters, August 5 1918 - German Foreign Ministry Archives
Spoiler
"In a realization of their plan to resolve the Armenian Question by destroying the Armenian race, the Turkish Government is not stopped neither by our representatives, nor by the public opinion of the west."
Comte Paul Wolff Metternich in a dispatch to the Chancellor Von Bethmann-Holweg, July 10, 1919
Spoiler
"This attempt of the Armenians to defend themselves against the Turkish attack in Van was promptly misrepresented in a communique' which was sent by Enver Pasha and the Turkish Government to Berlin, and thence spread all over the world, as an attack by bands of Armenian insurrectionists who, in the rear of the Turkish army had fallen prey upon the Muhammedan population. Out of 180,000 Moslems in the Vilayet of Van only 30,000 had succeeded in escaping! In a later report issued by the Turkish embassy in Berlin on October 1, 1915, the story was further embellished: 'No fewer than 180,000 Moslems had been killed. It was not surprising that the Moslems had taken vengeance for this'. Some 18 Turks, answering to the number of Armenians they had killed in Van, had turned into 180,000! This astonishing impudent lie has a kind of foundation. According to statistics there should be 180,000 Moslems, including 30,000 Turks and 150,000 Kurds, in the Vilayet of Van. The Turks fled westwards when the Russian army advanced, while the 150,000 Kurds remained where they were, and were molested neither by the Russians nor the Armenians."
Dr. Fridtjof Nansen in Armenia and the Near East (1928) p. 302
Spoiler
"The Van uprising certainly was an act of desperation. The local Armenians realized that general massacres against the Armenians had already started and they would be the next target. In the course of the summer 1915 the Turkish government with inexorable consequence brought its bloody task of extermination of an entire nation to an end...The gruesome destruction of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor by the Ittihadist government was an act which was barbaric and which to the highest degree outrages all human senses."
Joseph Pomiankowski, Vice-Marshall, Austrian Military Plenipotentiary in Wartime Turkey during WWI, Collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Vienna, 1928, p.160 - 161
Spoiler
"The criminal gangs who were released from the prisons, after a week's training at the War Ministry's training grounds, were sent off to the Caucasian front as the brigands of the Special Organization, perpetrating the worst crimes against the Armenians ... The Ittihadists intended to destroy the Armenians, and thereby to do away with the Question of the Eastern Provinces.... In order to justify this enormous crime [of the Armenian genocide] the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as:] the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Ittihadist leaders and will succeed in opening up the straits [to enable the Allied fleets to capture Istanbul]. These vile and malicious incitements [were such, however, that they] could persuade only people who were not even able to feel the pangs of their own hunger. ... among those Armenians who were atrociously wasted, despite the fact that they were most innocent, guiltless, and who had committed no crime whatsoever, were the Armenians of Bursa, Ankara, Eskiehir, and Konya."
Ahmet Refik, Turkish Military Intelligence Officer in WWI in İki Komite-İki Kıtâl, İstanbul 1919
Spoiler
"I defended the Armenians who, even though they were completely innocent, were murdered simply because they were Armenians. The dictates of justice and the state's badge required such intervention."
Ottoman Senator Ahmet Riza, from his memoirs
Spoiler
"The partisans of Ittihad are unabashedly conceding that their ultimate aim [Endziel] is the total annihilation (ganzliche Ausrottung) of the Armenians of Turkey, adding, 'After the war we no longer will have any Armenians in Turkey.'"
Dr. Ludwig Maximilian Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, German Vice Consul, Erzerum, 28 July 1915
Spoiler
They [the Ittahadist leaders] have fabricated, for the benefit of Allied Powers, an alleged revolution stirred up by the Dashnak party. They have inflated the importance of isolated incidents and acts of self-defense by the Armenians and used it as an excuse to deport the bordering population. On the way. the Armenians have been murdered, on orders of the Committee, by gangs of Kurds and Turks and at times, even by gendarmes."
Dr. Ludwig Maximilian Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, dispatch to German Authorities, December 1916, Document No. 309
Spoiler
"The deprotation and destruction of the Armenians was decided by the Young Turks Committee in Constantinople."
Colonel Stange, Commander of the 8th Regiment (consisting mostly of convicts released from Turkish prisons to join the killer bands of the Special Organization), German Foreign Ministry Archives.
Spoiler
"It can no longer be denied that the Turks... have undertaken the extermination of the Armenian race and it appears that they have largely succeeded in it. With certain air of gleefulness Talaat recently told me that in Erzerum, for example, there should be remaining not a single Armenian... Turkey today is under a maniacal spell due to the realization that she carried out the extermination of the Armenian race with impunity."
Karl Count zu Trautmansdorff-Weinsberg, Temporary Ambassador to Turkey, 30 September 30, 1915, Austrian Foriegn Ministry Archives
Spoiler
"By February 1916, 1.5 million Armenians were destroyed ... the first step toward the recovery of the economic predominance in Turkey ... there was joy in the government circles that the long-desired opportunity finally presented itself..."
A. A. Türkei, 134/35, A18613, pp. 1,2,3,4 "Volkswirtschaftliche Studien in der Türkey" report.
Spoiler
"As for the Armenians, they were treated differently in the different vilayets. They were suspect and spied upon everywhere, but they suffered a real extermination, worse than massacre, in the so-called 'Armenian Vilayets.' from the 24th June onwards, the Armenians were all "interned" — that is, ejected by force from their various residences and despatched under the guard of the gendarmerie to distant, unknown destinations, which for a few will mean the interior of Mesopotamia, but for four-fifths of them has meant already a death accompanied by unheard-of cruelties. The official proclamation of internment came from Constantinople. It is the work of the Central Government and the "Committee of Union and Progress." The local authorities, and indeed the Moslem population in general, tried to resist, to mitigate it, to make omissions, to hush it up. But the orders of the Central Government were categorically confirmed, and all were compelled to resign themselves and obey. It was a real extermination and slaughter of the innocents, an unheard-of thing, a black page stained with the flagrant violation of the most sacred rights of humanity... There were about 14,000 Armenians at Trebizond — Gregorians, Catholics, and Protestants. They had never caused disorders or given occasion for collective measures of police. When I left Trebizond, not a hundred of them remained."
G. Gorrini, former Italian Consul-General at Trebizond, Il Messaggero Journal (Rome), August 25 1915
