7 Documents of Armenian Genocide at Schools

[man]

DBQ

Turkey’s Motives for the Armenian Genocide

6^th Grade curriculum

 

By: Joseph Hladis

Methods of Social Studies

 

Document-Based Question

 

 

Directions: Included in this packet is documents #1-7. Review and analyze each document. This will test your ability to work with historical documents.

 

Historical Background: Armenian Christians are native to the Armenian Highlands (Caucasus and Anatolia region) since the beginning of time. Since the fall of Byzantine Empire the kingdom of Armenian and its people have been engulfed by Islamic control. During World War I, the Armenians and other minorities lived under the Ottoman Empire and were citizens of the empire. Because of their differences, the Turks mistreated the Armenians and used them as scapegoats during the war. By their inhumane treatment by the Turks, the Ottoman Turkish government gave an order to annihilate all Armenians and other minorities living in the Empire.

 

Task

 

Part A – Short Answer Response: Study each document carefully then answer your question or questions. These answers will help you write your essay.

 

Part B – Essay: You will choose 3 of your top favorite documents. Use information from the documents that you chose, your answers, and your knowledge of the topic to plan and write a well-organized essay.

 

Thesis Statement: What are reasons why the Ottoman Turks killed millions of Armenians during World War I?

 

-By using this thesis statement, you will analyze each document and complete an essay on why the Turks killed and mistreated the Armenians that were living in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

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Document #1

 

During World War I, the German Vice Consular to the Ottoman Empire, Count Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, summarizes the Armenian Genocide in a report to his superiors:

 

To: The German Chancellor and Kaiser Wilhelm II

From: Count von Scheubner-Richter, Vice Consular

RE: Situation in Ottoman Turkey

 

I have conducted a series of conversations with competent and influential Turkish people, and these are my impressions: A large segment of the Young Turk party maintains the viewpoint that the Ottoman Empire should be based only on the principle of Islam and Pan-Turkism. The non-Muslim and non-Turkish inhabitants should either be forcibly Islamized (converted to Islam) and follow Turkish customs, or otherwise they ought to be destroyed. These gentlemen in Turkey believe that the time is now for the realization of this plan. The first item on this agenda concerns the liquidation of the Armenians. Ittihad (a Turkish leader) will dangle before the eyes of the Allies the idea of an alleged revolution prepared by the Armenian leaders. Moreover, local incidents of social unrest and acts of Armenian self-defense will deliberately be provoked and inflated and will be used as pretexts to effect the deportations. Once en route however, the convoys will be attacked and exterminated by Kurdish and Turkish brigades, who will be hired for that purpose by Ittihad.

1. What belief system influenced the Turks and Kurds to carry on mass killings of the Armenians?
   

1. How did the Turks erase non-Muslims and non-Turkish identities?
   

1. What kind of propaganda did the Turks use on the Armenians?
   

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Document #2

 

http://www.armeniansworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/htmlimage.gif

[official Turkish position now: The hundreds of thousands of Armenians died not from a deliberate attempt at mass killing, but from general unrest, civil war, and famine! ...in the process of our confiscation of their property and mass deportation]

 

1-What is turkey’s excuse of why the Armenians died?

 

2-How is Pan-Turkism and Turkishness similar?

 

3-What effect would this cartoon have on shaping public opinions about Turkey and the Armenian genocide?

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Document #3

(http://www.history.c...menian-genocide)

The Roots of Genocide: The Ottoman Empire

 

The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus region of Eurasia for some 3,000 years. For some of that time, the kingdom of Armenia was an independent entity–at the beginning of the 4th century AD, for instance, it became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion–but for the most part, control of the region shifted from one empire to another. During the 15th century, Armenia was absorbed into the mighty Ottoman Empire.

 

The Ottoman rulers, like most of their subjects, were Muslim. They 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. Christians had to pay higher taxes than Muslims, for example, and they had very few political and legal rights.

 

In spite of these obstacles, the Armenian community thrived under Ottoman rule. They tended to be better educated and wealthier than their Turkish neighbors, who in turn tended to resent their success. This resentment was compounded by suspicions that the Christian Armenians would be more loyal to Christian governments (that of the Russians, for example, who shared an unstable border with Turkey) than they were to the Ottoman caliphate.

 

These suspicions grew more acute as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II–obsessed with loyalty above all, and infuriated by the nascent Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights–declared that he would solve the “Armenian question” once and for all. “I will soon settle those Armenians,” he told a reporter in 1890. “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.”

 

Genocide Begins

On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. That day, the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals. After that, ordinary Armenians were turned out of their homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water. Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot.

 

At the same time, the Young Turks created a “Special Organization,” which in turn organized “killing squads” or “butcher battalions” to carry out, as one officer put it, “the liquidation of the Christian elements.” These killing squads were often made up of murderers and other ex-convicts. They drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them and burned them alive. In short order, the Turkish countryside was littered with Armenian corpses.

Records show that during this “Turkification”campaign government squads also kidnapped children, converted them to Islam and gave them to Turkish families. In some places, they raped women and forced them to join Turkish “harems” or serve as slaves. Muslim families moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property.

 

1-What were Turkey’s motives for genocide?

 

2-Why did Christians have to pay a higher tax?

 

3-What do you believe was the strongest motive for the battalions to carry out the massacre?----------------

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Document #4

http://gallivantinggrandma.com/?p=644

 

 

Battle of Sarikamish was the site of a battle between the Russian and Ottoman Empires during the First World War. It took place from December 22, 1914 and January 15, 1915. The outcome was a Russian victory. Both sides had approximately 100,000 soldiers each. The war zone was almost 900 miles wide from the Black Sea to Lake Van. The forces were concentrated at each side of the border at the fortresses of Kars (Russian) and Erzurum (Ottoman).

 

The Ottoman troops were ill prepared for the brutal winter conditions and suffered major casualties. The elevation of the area ranges from 5000 to 6000 feet above sea level and winters are snowy and very cold. The Russian Tsar visited the battle front on December 30th, telling the head of the Armenian Church that “a most brilliant future awaits the Armenians.” With these words, the fate of hundreds of thousands of Armenians was endangered, as the Ottoman Empire perceived its large Armenian minority as a source of treachery and disloyalty and did nothing to discourage (and perhaps, encouraged) anti-Armenian feeling among its populace.

 

The relationship between the Armenians and the Ottoman Empire had already started to deteriorate after numerous massacres in eastern Anatolia during the 1890s. The Ottoman government claimed that it had a legitimate defense against a projected Armenian uprising in favor of a Russia and Western Allied invasion of the Ottoman heartlands. On his return to Constantinople, Enver ***** blamed his failure to win the Battle of Sarikamis on the actions of the region’s local Armenians, initiating the repressive measures against the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian population. This was an early stage of the Armenian Genocide.

1. Who did Enver blame for their lost in the battle of Sarikamish?
   

1. If the Russian Tsar never visited the Armenian Church would that have stop genocide from happening?
   

1. The Christians living in the Ottoman Empire were citizens. Do you think this is a poor excuse to carry out genocide?
   

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Document #5

http://www.newyorker...inks-voice.html

Hrant Dink’s Voice

 

Last week, tens of thousands of people marched from Istanbul’s Taksim Square to the offices of the Armenian weekly Agos to commemorate the death of its founding editor, Hrant Dink, and to protest a long-awaited verdict against Dink’s murderers, which had been delivered a few days earlier. At the doors of those offices, five years ago, on January 19, 2007, a teen-ager posing as an Ankara University student angling for an interview shot Dink at close range as he was returning to work. Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian heritage, was outspoken about Armenian issues; he was prosecuted three times for violating Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which makes it a crime to insult Turkishness, the Turkish nation, or Turkish institutions. Dink spent his career challenging the intolerance behind such statutes, becoming a champion of minority rights in a country where such causes are punishable.

 

The murder instantly became a symbol of the racism and ultranationalism grinding at the core of Turkish society, a war against freedom of expression, and the complacency of Turkey’s intellectuals. Images from the crime—of Dink’s shabby black shoes pigeon-toed beneath the coroner’s white tarp; of the leaderless but determined Agos staff; of teen-aged killer Ogun Samast seeming to celebrate with his arresting officers beneath a Turkish flag; of Samast’s white cap and his alleged cries when fleeing the scene of “I shot the infidel!”—were etched into the national consciousness.

 

Later, another potent symbol was added, that of a small, circular placard saying, “We are all Hrant. We are all Armenian.” In the aftermath of Dink’s assassination, an organized, angry, and determined protest movement was born in Turkey. Slogans professing brotherhood with Dink were code for larger frustrations. It became virtually impossible to talk about minority issues or human-rights abuses or freedom of the press in Turkey without mentioning the Hrant Dink assassination. Last week’s verdict, by which nineteen men were acquitted of conspiring to kill Dink, and one received a life sentence for instigating the crime (Samast was sentenced earlier to twenty-two years), angered many because it ignored the possibility of a wider conspiracy. “The case will not end like this!” was a common chant.

1. How is Hrant Dink’s assassination similar to the Armenian genocide in 1915?
   

1. What policies are still in place since the Armenian Genocide?
   

1. Does acting out in violence about the genocide help Turkey’s denial?
   

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Document #6

 

https://www.youtube....h?v=ej0sCaEsVmE

1. What did Maria say that the Gendarmes wanted?
    
   
2. What did the authorities do to stop the massacres and looting?
    
   
3. Based on this unit about the Armenian genocide and watching this eye witness account, why is it important to let the world know about what happen to the Armenians? Why is it important to respect people from different backgrounds?
   

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Document #7

 

Henry Morgenthau,U. S. Ambassador to Turkey, 1914-1916. One day Talaat made what was perhaps the most astonishing request I had ever heard. The New York Life Insurance Company and the Equitable Life of New York for years had done considerable business among the Armenians. The extent to which this people insured their lives was merely another indication of their thrifty habits.

‘I wish,’ Talaat now said, ‘that you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders. They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course all escheats to the State. The government is the beneficiary now. Will you do so?’ This was almost too much, and I lost my temper.

‘You will get no such list from me,’ I said, and I got up and left him.

1. What did Talaat want from Henry Morgenthau?
   

1. From reading this quote, what main reason for the genocide?
   

1. How would you feel if you witness a whole nation massacred and asked this request?
   

Part B – Essay: Use the information from the documents that you chose. Based off the thesis question, please construct your response. Also, use your answers and your knowledge of the topic to plan and write a well-organized essay of 150 words or more.

Edited June 18, 2013 by man