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Trial by Fire

On March 14, 1921, on a damp day in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, a twenty-four-year-old Armenian crept up behind a man in a heavy gray overcoat swinging his cane. The Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian, placed a revolver at the back of the man’s head and pulled the trigger, shouting, “This is to avenge the death of my family!” The burly target crumpled. If you had heard the shot and spotted the rage distorting the face of the young offender, you might have suspected that you were witnessing a murder to avenge a very different kind of crime. But back then you would not have known to call the crime in question “genocide.” The word did not yet exist.

Tehlirian, the Armenian assassin, was quickly tackled. As pedestrians beat him with their fists and house keys,he shouted in broken German, “I foreigner, he foreigner, this not hurt Germany…It’s nothing to do with you.”¹ It was national justice carried out in an international setting. Tehlirian had just murdered Mehmed Talaat, the former Turkish interior minister who had set out to rid Turkey of its Armenian “problem.” In 1915 Talaat had presided over the killing by firing squad, bayoneting, bludgeoning, and starvation of nearly 1 million Armenians.²

The outside world had known that the Armenians were at grave risk well before Talaat and the Young Turk leadership ordered their deportation. When Turkey entered World War I on the side of Germany against Britain, France, and Russia, Talaat made it clear that the empire would target its Christian subjects. In January 1915, in remarks reported by the New York Times, Talaat said that there was no room for Christians in Turkey and that their supporters should advise them to clear out.³ By late March Turkey had begun disarming Armenian men serving in the Ottoman army. On April 25, 1915, the day the Allies invaded Turkey, Talaat ordered the roundup and execution of some 250 leading Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople. In each of Turkey’s six eastern provinces, local Armenian notables met roughly the same fate. Armenian men in rural areas were initially enlisted as pack animals to transport Turkish supplies to the front, but soon even this was deemed too dignified an existence for the traitorous Christians. Churches were desecrated. Armenian schools were closed, and those teachers who refused to convert to Islam were killed. All over Anatolia the authorities posted deportation orders requiring the Armenians to relocate to camps prepared in the deserts of Syria. In fact, the Turkish authorities knew that no facilities had been prepared, and more than half of the deported Armenians died on the way. “By continuing the deportation of the orphans to their destinations during the intense cold,” Talaat wrote, “we are ensuring their eternal rest.”⁴

“Official proclamations,” like this one from June 1915, cropped up around town:

Our Armenian fellow countrymen,…because…they have…attempted to destroy the peace and security of the Ottoman state,…have to be sent away to places which have been prepared in the interior…and a literal obedience to the following orders, in a categorical manner, is accordingly enjoined upon all Ottomans:

1 With the exception of the sick, all Armenians are obliged to leave within five days from the date of this proclamation…

2 Although they are free to carry with them on their journey the articles of their movable property which they desire, they are forbidden to sell their land and their extra effects, or to leave them here and there with other people…⁵

The Young Turks—Talaat; Enver Pasha, the minister of war; and Djemal Pasha, the minister of public works—justified the wholesale deportation of the Armenians by claiming that it was necessary to suppress Armenian revolts.⁶ When Russia had declared war on Turkey the previous year, it had invited Armenians living within Turkey to rise up against Ottoman rule, which a small minority did. Although two prominent Ottoman Armenians led a pair of czarist volunteer corps to fight Turkey, most expressed loyalty to Constantinople. But this did not stop the Turkish leadership from using the pretext of an Armenian “revolutionary uprising” and the cover of war to eradicate the Armenian presence in Turkey. Very few of those killed were plotting anything other than survival. The atrocities were carried out against women, children, and unarmed men. They were not incidental “by-products” of war but in fact resulted from carefully crafted decisions made by Turkey’s leaders.

In June 1915 Erzindjan, the hometown of Talaat’s eventual assassin, was emptied. Soghomon Tehlirian, then nineteen, marched in a column of some 20,000 people, with his mother and siblings—two sisters of fifteen and sixteen, another of twenty-six who carried a two-and-a-half-year-old child, and two brothers of twenty-two and twenty-six. The journey was harrowing. The gendarmes said to be protecting the convoy first dragged Tehlirian’s sisters off behind the bushes to rape them. Next he watched a man split his twenty-two-year-old brother’s head open with an ax. Finally, the soldiers shot his mother and struck Tehlirian unconscious with a blow to the head. He was left for dead and awoke hours later in a field of corpses. He spotted the mangled body of a sister and the shattered skull of his brother. His other relatives had disappeared. He guessed he was the sole survivor of the caravan.⁷

Recognition

The “international community,” such as it was, did little to contest the Turkish horrors,which began nine months into World War I. Germany was aligned with the brutal regime and thus was best positioned to influence it. Instead, German officials generally covered up Talaat’s campaign, ridiculing the Allied accounts of the terror as “pure inventions” and “gross exaggerations.” The Germans echoed the Turks’ claims that any harsh policies were a measured response to Armenian treason during wartime.⁸ The German chancellor met in person with German Christian missionaries who presented eyewitness testimony about the slaughter. But he rejected their appeals. Berlin would not offend its Turkish ally.

Britain and France were at war with the Ottoman Empire and publicized the atrocities. The British Foreign Office dug up photographs of the massacre victims and the Armenian refugees in flight. An aggressive, London-based, pro-Armenian lobby helped spur the British press to cover the savagery.⁹ But some had trouble believing the tales. British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, for one, cautioned that Britain lacked “direct knowledge” of massacres. He urged that “the massacres were not all on one side” and warned that denunciation would likely be futile. Indeed, when Russia’s foreign minister drafted a public threat that he hoped the Allies could issue jointly, Grey said he doubted that the message would influence Turkish behavior and might even cause Turkey to adopt more serious measures against the Armenians.¹⁰ Since Britain was already at war with Turkey, other British officials argued that the most expedient way to end the killings would be to defeat the German-Austrian-Turkish alliance. On May 24, 1915, the Allied governments did deliver a joint declaration that took the unprecedented step of condemning “crimes against humanity and civilization.” The declaration warned the members of the Turkish government that they and their “agents” would be held “personally responsible” for the massacres.¹¹ Generally, though, the Allies were busy trying to win the war. At the same time the Turks were waging their campaign against the Armenian minority, the German army was using poison gas against the Allies in Belgium. In May 1915 the German army had torpedoed the Lusitania passenger liner, killing 1,200 (including 190 Americans). The Germans had also just begun zeppelin attacks against London.¹²

The United States, determined to maintain its neutrality in the war, refused to join the Allied declaration. President Woodrow Wilson chose not to pressure either the Turks or their German backers. It was better not to draw attention to the atrocities, lest U.S. public opinion get stirred up and begin demanding U.S. involvement. Because the Turks had not violated the rights of Americans,Wilson did not formally protest.

But in Turkey itself America’s role as bystander was contested. Henry Morgenthau Sr., a German-born Jew who had come to the United States as a ten-year-old boy and had been appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire by President Wilson in 1913, agitated for U.S. diplomatic intervention. In January and February 1915, Morgenthau had begun receiving graphic but fragmentary intelligence from his ten American consuls posted throughout the Ottoman Empire. At first he did not recognize that the atrocities against the Armenians were of a different nature than the wartime violence. He was taken in by Talaat’s assurances that uncontrolled elements had simply embarked upon “mob violence” that would soon be contained.¹³ In April, when the massacres began in earnest, the Turkish authorities severed Morgenthau’s communication with his consuls and censored their letters. Morgenthau was reluctant to file reports back to Washington based on rumors, and the Turks were making it impossible for him to fact-check.

Although he was initially incredulous, by July 1915 the ambassador had come around. He had received too many visits from desperate Armenians and trusted missionary sources to remain skeptical. They had sat in his office with tears streaming down their faces, regaling him with terrifying tales. When he compared this testimony to the strikingly similar horrors relayed in the rerouted consular cables, Morgenthau came to an astonishing conclusion. What he called “race murder” was under way. On July 10, 1915, he cabled Washington with a description of the Turkish campaign:

Persecution of Armenians assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, whole-sale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place.

Response

Morgenthau was constrained by two background conditions that seemed immutable. First, the Wilson administration was resolved to stay out of World War I. Picking fights with Turkey did not seem a good way to advance that objective. And second,diplomatic protocol demanded that ambassadors act respectfully toward their host governments. U.S. diplomats were expected to stay out of business that did not concern U.S. national interests. “Turkish authorities have definitely informed me that I have no right to inter-fere with their internal affairs,” Morgenthau wrote. Still, he warned Washington, “there seems to be a systematic plan to crush the Armenian race.”¹⁴

Local witnesses urged him to invoke the moral power of the United States. Otherwise, he was told, “the whole Armenian nation would disappear.”¹⁵ The ambassador did what he could, continuing to send blistering cables back to Washington and raising the matter at virtually every meeting he held with Talaat. He found his exchanges with the interior minister infuriating. Once, when the ambassador introduced eyewitness reports of slaughter, Talaat snapped back: “Why are you so interested in the Armenians anyway? You are a Jew, these people are Christians…What have you to complain of? Why can’t you let us do with these Christians as we please?” Morgenthau replied, “You don’t seem to realize that I am not here as a Jew but as the American Ambassador…I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion but merely as a human being.” Talaat looked confused. “We treat the Americans all right, too,” he said. “I don’t see why you should complain.”¹⁶

But Morgenthau continued to complain, warning that Talaat and other senior officials would eventually be held responsible before the court of public opinion, particularly in the United States. Talaat had a ready response: “We don’t give a rap for the future!” he exclaimed. “We live only in the present!” Talaat believed in collective guilt. It was legitimate to punish all Armenians even if only a few refused to disarm or harbored seditious thoughts. “We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty,” Talaat told a German reporter. “But that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow.”¹⁷

Instead of hiding his achievements, as later perpetrators would do, Talaat boasted of them. According to Morgenthau,he liked to tell friends, “I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years!”¹⁸ (The Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid had killed some 200,000 Armenians in 1895–1896.) Talaat once asked Morgenthau whether the United States could get the New York Life Insurance Company and Equitable Life of New York,which for years had done business with the Armenians, to send a complete list of the Armenian policyholders to the Turkish authorities. “They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs,” Talaat said. “The Government is the beneficiary now.”¹⁹

Morgenthau was incensed at the request and stormed out of Talaat’s office. He again cabled back to Washington, imploring his higher-ups to take heed:

I earnestly beg the Department to give this matter urgent and exhaustive consideration with a view to reaching a conclusion which may possibly have the effect of checking [Turkey’s] Government and certainly provide opportunity for efficient relief which now is not permitted. It is difficult for me to restrain myself from doing something to stop this attempt to exterminate a race, but I realize that I am here as Ambassador and must abide by the principles of non-interference with the internal affairs of another country.²⁰

Morgenthau had to remind himself that one of the prerogatives of sovereignty was that states and statesmen could do as they pleased within their own borders. “Technically,” he noted to himself, “I had no right to interfere. According to the cold-blooded legalities of the situation, the treatment of Turkish subjects by the Turkish Government was purely a domestic affair; unless it directly affected American lives and American interests, it was outside the concern of the American Government.”²¹ The ambassador found this maddening.

The New York Times gave the Turkish horrors steady coverage, publishing 145 stories in 1915. It helped that Morgenthau and Times publisher Adolph Ochs were old friends. Beginning in March 1915, the paper spoke of Turkish “massacres,” “slaughter,” and “atrocities” against the Armenians, relaying accounts by missionaries, Red Cross officials, local religious authorities, and survivors of mass executions. “It is safe to say,” a correspondent noted in July, “that unless Turkey is beaten to its knees very speedily there will soon be no more Christians in the Ottoman Empire.”²² By July 1915 the paper’s headlines had begun crying out about the danger of the Armenians’ “extinction.” Viscount Bryce,former British ambassador to the United States, pleaded that the United States use its influence with Germany. “If anything can stop the destroying hand of the Turkish Government,” Bryce argued, as did the missionaries who had appealed to Morgenthau, “it will be an expression of the opinion of neutral nations, chiefly the judgment of humane America.”²³ On October 7, 1915, a Times headline blared, “800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DESTROYED.” The article reported Bryce’s testimony before the House of Lords in which he urged the United States to demonstrate that there were “some crimes which, even now in the convulsion of a great war, the public opinion of the world will not tolerate.”²⁴ By December the paper’s headline read, “MILLION ARMENIANS KILLED OR IN EXILE.”²⁵ The number of victims were estimates, as the bodies were impossible to count. Nevertheless, governmental and nongovernmental officials were sure that the atrocities were “unparalleled in modern times” and that the Turks had set out to achieve “nothing more or less than the annihilation of a whole people.”²⁶

Witnesses to the terror knew that American readers would have difficulty processing such gruesome horrors, so they scoured history for parallels to events that they believed had already been processed in the public mind. One report said, “The nature and scale of the atrocities dwarf anything perpetrated…under Abdul Hamid, whose exploits in this direction now assume an aspect of moderation compared with those of the present Governors of Turkey.” Before Adolf Hitler, the standard for European brutality had been set by Abdul Hamid and the Belgian king Leopold, who pillaged the Congo for rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁷

Because the Turks continued to block access to the caravans, reporters often speculated on whether their sources were reliable. “The Turkish Government has succeeded in throwing an impenetrable veil over its actions toward all Armenians,” a frustrated Associated Press correspondent noted. “Constantinople has for weeks had its daily crop of Armenian rumors…What has happened…is still an unwritten chapter. No newspapermen are allowed to visit the affected districts and reports from these are altogether unreliable. The reticence of the Turkish Government cannot be looked upon as a good sign, however.”²⁸Turkish representatives in the United States predictably blurred the picture with denials and defenses. The Turkish consul,Djelal Munif Bey, told the New York Times, “All those who have been killed were of that rebellious element who were caught red-handed or while otherwise committing traitorous acts against the Turkish Government, and not women and children, as some of these fabricated reports would have the Americans believe.” But the same representative added that if innocent lives had in fact been lost, that was because in wartime “discrimination is utterly impossible, and it is not alone the offender who suffers the penalty of his act, but also the innocent whom he drags with him…The Armenians have only themselves to blame.”²⁹

The Turks, who had attempted to conduct the massacres secretly, were unhappy about the attention they were getting. In November 1915 Talaat advised the authorities in Aleppo that Morgenthau knew far too much. “It is important that foreigners who are in those parts shall be persuaded that the expulsion of the Armenians is in truth only deportation,” Talaat wrote. “It is important that, to save appearances, a show of gentle dealing shall be made for a time, and the usual measures be taken in suitable places.” A month later, angry that foreigners had obtained photographs of corpses along the road, Talaat recommended that these corpses be “buried at once,” or at least hidden from view.³⁰

Sensing Turkish sensitivity to the outside world’s opinion, Morgenthau pleaded with his superiors to throw protocol and neutrality aside and to issue a direct government-to-government appeal “on behalf of humanity” to stop the killings. He also urged the United States to convince the German kaiser to stop the Turks’ “annihilation of a Christian race.” And he called on Washington to press the Turks to allow humanitarian aid deliveries to those Armenians already deported and in danger of starving to death in the desert.³¹ But because Americans were not endangered by the Turkish horrors and because American neutrality in World War I remained fixed, Washington did not act on Morgenthau’s recommendations. Officials urged him instead to seek aid from private sources.

Morgenthau did get help from outside the U.S. government. The Congregationalist, Baptist, and Roman Catholic churches made donations. The Rockefeller foundation gave $290,000 in 1915 alone. And most notable, a number of distinguished Americans, none of Armenian descent, set up a new Committee on Armenian Atrocities.³² The committee raised $100,000 for Armenian relief and staged high-profile rallies, gathering delegations from more than 1,000 churches and religious organizations in New York City to join in denouncing the Turkish crimes.

But in calling for “action,” the committee was not urging U.S. military intervention. It was worried about the impact of an American declaration of war on American schools and churches in Turkey. In addition, the sentiment that made committee members empathize with their fellow Christians in Armenia also made some pacifists. In decrying the atrocities but opposing the war against Turkey, the committee earned the scorn of former president Theodore Roosevelt. In a letter to Samuel Dutton, the Armenia committee secretary, Roosevelt slammed the hypocrisy of the “peace-at-any-price type” who acted on the motto of “safety first,” which, he wrote, “could be appropriately used by the men on a sinking steamer who jump into boats ahead of the women and children.” He continued:

Mass meetings on behalf of the Armenians amount to nothing whatever if they are mere methods of giving a sentimental but ineffective and safe outlet to the emotion of those engaged in them. Indeed they amount to less than nothing…Until we put honor and duty first, and are willing to risk something in order to achieve righteousness both for ourselves and for others, we shall accomplish nothing; and we shall earn and deserve the contempt of the strong nations of mankind.³³

Roosevelt wondered how anyone could possibly advise neutrality “between despairing and hunted people, people whose little children are murdered and their women raped, and the victorious and evil wrongdoers.” He observed that such a position put “safety in the present above both duty in the present and safety in the future.”³⁴ Roosevelt would grow even angrier later in the war, when the very relief campaign initiated to aid the Armenians would be invoked as reason not to make war on Turkey. In 1918 he wrote to Cleveland Dodge, the most influential member of the Armenia committee: “To allow the Turks to massacre the Armenians and then solicit permission to help the survivors and then to allege the fact that we are helping the survivors as a reason why we should not follow the only policy that will permanently put a stop to such massacres is both foolish and odious.”³⁵

Morgenthau tried to work around America’s determined neutrality. In September 1915 he offered to raise $1 million to transport to the United States the Armenians who had escaped the massacres. “Since May,” Morgenthau said, “350,000 Armenians have been slaughtered or have died of starvation. There are 550,000 Armenians who could now be sent to America, and we need help to save them.” Turkey accepted the proposal, and Morgenthau called upon each of the states in the western United States to raise funds to equip a ship to transport and care for Armenian refugees. He appealed to American self-interest, arguing, “The Armenians are a moral, hard working race, and would make good citizens to settle the less thickly populated parts of the Western States.”³⁶ He knew he had to preemptively rebut those who expected Armenian freeloaders. But the Turks, insincere even about helping Armenians leave, blocked the exit of refugees. Morgenthau’s plan went nowhere.³⁷

As American missionaries were driven out of Turkey, they returned to the United States with stories to tell. William A. Shedd, a Presbyterian missionary, chose to write directly to the new U.S. secretary of state, Robert Lansing:

I am sure there are a great many thoughtful Americans who, like myself, feel that silence on the part of our Government is perilous and that for our Government to make no public protest against a crime of such magnitude perpetrated by a Government on noncombatants, the great majority of them helpless women and children, is to miss an unusual opportunity to serve humanity, if not to risk grave danger of dishonor on the name of America and of lessening our right to speak for humanity and justice. I am aware, of course, that it may seem presumptuous to suggest procedure in matters of diplomacy; but the need of these multitudes of people suffering in Turkey is desperate, and the only hope of influence is the Government of the United States.³⁸

But Lansing had been advised by the Division of Near East Affairs at the State Department that “however much we may deplore the suffering of the Armenians, we cannot take any active steps to come to their assistance at the present time.”³⁹ Lansing instructed Morgenthau to continue telling the Turkish authorities that the atrocities would “jeopardize the good feeling of the people of the United States toward the people of Turkey.”⁴⁰ Lansing also eventually asked Germany to try to restrain Turkey. But he expressed understanding for Turkey’s security concerns. “I could see that [the Armenians’] well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government and the fact that the territory which they inhabited was within the zone of military operations constituted grounds more or less justifiable for compelling them to depart their homes,” Secretary Lansing wrote in November 1916.⁴¹ Morgenthau examined the facts and saw a cold-blooded campaign of annihilation; Lansing processed many of those same facts and saw an unfortunate but understandable effort to quell an internal security threat.

After twenty-six months in Constantinople, Morgenthau left in early 1916. He could no longer stand his impotence. “My failure to stop the destruction of the Armenians,” he recalled, “had made Turkey for me a place of horror—I had reached the end of my resources.”⁴² More than 1 million Armenians had been killed on his watch. Morgenthau, who had earned a reputation as a loose cannon, did not receive another appointment in the Wilson administration. President Wilson, reflecting the overwhelming view of the American people, stayed on the sidelines of World War I as long as he could. And when the United States finally entered the conflict against Germany in April 1917, he refused to declare war on or even break off relations with the Ottoman Empire. “We shall go wherever the necessities of this war carry us,” Wilson told Congress, “but it seems to me that we should go only where immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed any others.”⁴³ In the end it was Turkey that broke off ties with the United States.

America’s nonresponse to the Turkish horrors established patterns that would be repeated. Time and again the U.S. government would be reluctant to cast aside its neutrality and formally denounce a fellow state for its atrocities. Time and again though U.S. officials would learn that huge numbers of civilians were being slaughtered, the impact of this knowledge would be blunted by their uncertainty about the facts and their rationalization that a firmer U.S. stand would make little difference. Time and again American assumptions and policies would be contested by Americans in the field closest to the slaughter, who would try to stir the imaginations of their political superiors. And time and again these advocates would fail to sway Washington. The United States would offer humanitarian aid to the survivors of “race murder” but would leave those committing it alone.

Aftermath

When the war ended in 1918, the question of war guilt loomed large at the Paris peace conference. Britain, France, and Russia urged that state authorities in Germany, Austria, and Turkey be held responsible for violations of the laws of war and the “laws of humanity.” They began planning the century’s first international war crimes tribunal, hoping to try the kaiser and his German underlings, as well as Talaat, Enver Pasha, and the other leading Turkish perpetrators. But Lansing dissented on behalf of the United States. In general the Wilson administration opposed the Allies’ proposals to emasculate Germany. But it also rejected the notion that some allegedly “universal” principle of justice should allow punishment. The laws of humanity, Lansing argued, “vary with the individual.” Reflecting the widespread view of the time, Lansing said that sovereign leaders should be immune from prosecution. “The essence of sovereignty,” he said, was “the absence of responsibility.”⁴⁴ The United States could judge only those violations that were committed upon American persons or American property.⁴⁵

If such a tribunal were set up, then, the United States would not participate. In American thinking at that time, there was little question that the state’s right to be left alone automatically trumped any individual right to justice. A growing postwar isolationism made the United States reluctant to entangle itself in affairs so clearly removed from America’s narrow national interests.

Even without official U.S. support, it initially seemed that Britain’s wartime pledge to try the Turkish leaders would be realized. In early 1919 the British, who still occupied Turkey with some 320,000 soldiers, pressured the cooperative sultan to arrest a number of Turkish executioners. Of the eight Ottoman leaders who led Turkey to war against the Allies, five were apprehended. In April 1919 the Turks set up a tribunal in Constantinople that convicted two senior district officials for deporting Armenians and acting “against humanity and civilization.” The Turkish court found that women and children had been brutally forced into deportation caravans and the men murdered: “They were premeditatedly,with intent, murdered, after the men had had their hands tied behind their backs.” The police commander Tevfik Bey was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor, and Lieutenant Governor Kemal Bey was hanged. The court also convicted Talaat and his partners in crime in absentia for their command responsibility in the slaughter, finding a top-down, carefully executed plan: “The disaster visiting the Armenians was not a local or isolated event. It was the result of a premeditated decision taken by a central body;…and the immolations and excesses which took place were based on oral and written orders issued by that central body.”⁴⁶

Talaat, who was sentenced to death, was living peacefully as a private citizen in Germany, which rejected Allied demands for extradition. Conscious of his place in history, Talaat had begun writing his memoirs. In them he downplayed the scale of the violence and argued that any abuses (referred to mainly in the passive voice) were fairly typical if “regrettable” features of war, carried out by “uncontrolled elements.” “I confess,” he wrote, “that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere…Some of the officials abused their authority, and in many places people took the preventive measures into their own hands and innocent people were molested.”Acknowledging it was the government’s duty to prevent and punish “these abuses and atrocities,” he explained that doing so would have aroused great popular “discontent,” and Turkey could not afford to be divided during war. “We did all we could,” he claimed, “but we preferred to postpone the solution of our internal difficulties until after the defeat of our external enemies.” Although other countries at war also enacted harsh “preventive measures,” he wrote, “the regrettable results were passed over in silence,”whereas “the echo of our acts was heard the world over, because everybody’s eyes were upon us.” Even as Talaat attempted to burnish his image, he could not help but blame the Armenians for their own fate. “I admit that we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces,” he wrote, but “the responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves.”⁴⁷

After a promising start, enthusiasm for trying Talaat and his henchmen faded and politics quickly intervened. With the Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) rapidly gaining popularity at home, the Ottoman regime began to fear a backlash if it was seen to be succumbing to British designs. In addition, the execution of Kemal Bey had made him a martyr to nationalists around the empire. To avoid further unrest, the Turkish authorities began releasing low-level suspects. The British had grown frustrated by the incompetence and politicization of what they called the “farcical”Turkish judicial system. Fearing none of the suspects in Turkish custody would ever be tried, the British occupation forces shipped many of the arrested war crimes suspects from Turkey to Malta and Mudros, a port on the Aegean island of Lemnos, for eventual international trials. But support for this, too, evaporated. By 1920 the condemnations and promises of 1915 were five years old. Kemal, who was rapidly consolidating his control over Turkey, had denounced as treasonous the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which committed the Ottomans to surrender war crimes suspects to an international tribunal. The British clung for a time to the idea that they might at least prosecute the eight Turks in custody who had committed crimes against Britons. But Winston Churchill gave up even this hope in 1920 when Kemal seized twenty-nine British soldiers whose immediate fates Britain privileged above all else.⁴⁸

In November 1921 Kemal put an end to the promise of an international tribunal by negotiating a prisoner swap. The incarcerated Britons were traded for all the Turkish suspects in British custody. In 1923 the European powers replaced the Treaty of Sèvres with the Treaty of Lausanne, which dropped all mention of prosecution. Former British prime minister David Lloyd George called the treaty an “abject, cowardly, and infamous surrender.”⁴⁹