WHAT PIUS XII LEARNED FROM THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

[Yervant1]

WHAT PIUS XII LEARNED FROM THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

German Historian Says Pacelli's Experience With Ottoman Empire
Influenced His Behavior With Hitler

Vatican City, November 13, 2014 (Zenit.org) Deborah Castellano Lubov

Though historians contest it, Pius XII is still accused of failing
to do enough to help the Jews during World War II. In particular,
he is criticized for too much silence.

But well-known German historian Michael Hesemann says the Pope's
decision to be guarded in protest was a result of what he'd learned
some years before, when while working in the Vatican Secretariat of
State and as nuncio, he was privy to the Vatican's information on
the Armenian genocide and its attempts to stop it.

Protests from Pope Benedict XV and his diplomats only made the
situation worse for the Armenians and that was history Pius XII didn't
want to repeat, Hesemann explains.

In an interview with ZENIT ahead of Pope Francis' Nov. 28-30 trip to
Turkey, Hesemann analyzes this massacre, and gives insight into the
parallels with the Holocaust and Pius XII's actions during the war.

ZENIT: Could you give a little information about yourself and your
studies on both the Armenian genocide and Pius XII?

Hesemann: For the last 10 years, I worked on Pope Pius XII and tried to
understand the motives for his alleged "silence" during the Holocaust
and his numerous actions to save as many Jews as possible at the same
time, which, may initially sound contradictory.

There is no doubt that the Jews were dear to his heart and important
for him, but why didn't he protest when he learned of their fate? This
was a question I wanted to solve.

As a matter of fact, before he became Pope, Eugenio Pacelli had a long
history serving in Vatican diplomacy, beginning with his career in
the Secretariat of State, his 12 years as nuncio in Germany and his
nine years as cardinal secretary of state under Pope Pius XI. When
I, as a historian, received permission to study his files in the
Vatican Secret Archives, I came across several documents dealing
with the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, which piqued my interest. To
learn more, I started to dig deeper into this subject and eventually
located about 2,000 pages of hitherto unpublished documents on the
biggest crime of World War I.

ZENIT: Could you please briefly explain the Armenian Genocide and
what happened?

Hesemann: Under close scrutiny, the "Armenocide" appears like a
model for the Shoah. Obsessed by a racist and nationalist worldview,
the Young Turks, a political movement which came to power just
before World War I, intended to transform the multinational and
multireligious Ottoman Empire into a homogenous "Volksgemeinschaft"
[literally "people's community," a term which referred to Hitler's
vision for an ideal German society]. Since racial characteristics
were difficult to determine in the mixed population of Turkey,
religion became the indicator of "true Turkishness:" A "true Turk"
had to follow Sunnite Islam. Only homogenous "purity," they believed,
would save Turkey from "inner microbes" and "parasites" and make it
strong enough to fight for the Pan-Turkish vision of this movement.

As "microbes" and "parasites," the Young Turk ideologists recognized
the Christian minorities: Armenians, Greeks and Syriac Christians.

When the Germans dragged Turkey into World War I, when the Sultan,
backed by the Sheikh-ul-Islam, the highest Muslim authority in Turkey,
declared the djihad ("Holy War") in November 1914, the Young Turks
saw the opportunity they had been waiting for to solve their "Armenian
problem" by eliminating the Armenians.

On April 24, 1915, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders
in Constantinople were arrested and deported to the interior of
the country, and most of them were murdered afterwards. To justify
their actions, the Young Turk government accused the Armenians of
a conspiracy with Russia and the preparation of a revolt, although
it was never able to present any evidence for this claim. At this
point, most male Armenians already served in the Turkish Army and were
suddenly forced to do slave labor or got massacred. Beginning in May
1915, nearly the entire remaining Armenian population (of 2.1 million,
before the war) was, province by province, town by town and village by
village, deported. On foot, with nearly no bread and not even water,
old men, women, children and those Armenians who were wealthy enough
to avoid military service, were sent to Der Zor in the Syrian desert.

On those death marches, hundreds of thousands died of exhaustion,
starvation or diseases. Those who survived the miserable conditions
were forced into concentration camps, starved there or died from
cholera, typhoid and dysentery during the following months, became
victims of massacres or were sent even deeper into the desert where
local tribesman slaughtered them.

ZENIT: How did the Vatican learn about it?

Hesemann: By mid-June 1915, the apostolic delegate in Constantinople,
Msgr. Angelo Dolci, learned about "rumors of massacres," as he wrote
in a telegraph to the Holy See. About a week later, he received
confirmation that indeed a "persecution" with the purpose "to remove
the element of the Christian Armenians from the entire province" took
place. Among the victims were many Catholic Armenians, too. Even the
Catholic bishop of Mardin, Msgr. Ignatius Maloyan (who was canonized by
John Paul II), and several of his dignitaries were slaughtered after
their deportation by mid-June. After learning the details of this
massacre, [Msgr.] Dolci sent a written protest to the Grand Vizier,
the "Prime Minister" of the Sultan, requesting the immediate stop of
those deadly deportations at least for the Armenian Catholics.

He did not even receive a reply. When the massacres continued, the
Armenian-Catholic Archbishop of Chalcedon, Msgr. Peter Kojunian, sent
an emotional letter to Pope Benedict XV, stating that "a systematic
extermination of the Armenians in Turkey" was taking place

ZENIT: Did the Pope react to this letter?

Hesemann: Immediately! Benedict XV wrote a handwritten letter to Sultan
Mehmet V, appealing to his "high-hearted generosity" and requesting
his compassion for the innocent Armenians. The papal initiative was
made public and reported by newspapers all over the world. At the
same time, Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Gasparri contacted the
nuncios in Vienna and Munich, ordering them to promote the Holy See's
initiative to Turkey's allies and urging them to interfere so that
"these barbaric acts should immediately be stopped."

At the same time in Constantinople, Msgr. Dolci desperately tried to
get the papal autograph to the Sultan but was refused several times
by the Sublime Porte (Ottoman Porte). Only when the German ambassador
interfered, Msgr. Dolci was received by Mehmet V on Oct. 23, 1915,
after nearly six weeks. One month later, he was invited to pick up
the sultan's reply, justifying the deportations by the claim of an
Armenian conspiracy.

ZENIT: Did the deportations, did the massacres, stop?

Hesemann: Not at all! The Turks promised all sorts of things, they
promised to spare the Armenian Catholics ... They promised that all
deported Armenians would be home for Christmas, but these were all
lies and false promises. The deportations and massacres continued
until late 1916. Far away from being spared, at the end, 87% of the
Armenian Catholics were murdered, an even higher percentage than that
of the Orthodox Armenians, of which "only" 75% were killed. The papal
protest not only had no success, it turned out to be counterproductive!

ZENIT: How did the Pope react?

Hesemann: Well, Benedict XV continued to try his best. In an
allocution to the consistory on Dec. 6, 1915, he explicitly mentioned
"the unlucky people of the Armenians who are nearly completely
sent to extermination." In 1918, when the Russians withdrew their
troops from northeastern Turkey and new massacres occurred against
the surviving Armenians, Pope Benedict sent a second letter to the
Sultan; once again without any success. He had to learn that public
protests just did not work and were even counterproductive, triggering
the anger of the aggressor even more. Eventually, Msgr. Dolci, the
apostolic delegate, wrote to - yes, indeed! - Msgr. Eugenio Pacelli:
"By defending the Armenians, I lost the grace of Caesar, the Nero of
this unlucky nation. I mean the Secretary of the Interior, Talaat
*****, Grandmaster of the Masonic Orient. He must have learned of
the great pressure which followed after the intervention of the Holy
Father in form of his autograph, by the other embassies. Since then,
I receive only malevolent looks from him."

ZENIT: What does that mean for Pius XII and the Holocaust?

Hesemann: Well, all historians agree that his experience during World
War I and especially the papal policy of neutrality and peacemaking,
followed by Benedict XV, highly influenced the performance of Pius XII
during World War II. Of course it did, since Pacelli already served
in key positions during della Chiesa's [benedict XV's] pontificate,
first as secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Affairs of
the Secretariat of State, then as nuncio. I discovered that nearly
all information on the Armenian genocide went over his desk. The
document I just quoted was only one example. So he also learned that
all papal protests were not only useless, but even turned out to
be counterproductive.

Pacelli, when confronted with the Holocaust, knew that Adolf Hitler
would never react any better. Keep in mind that he knew Hitler for
19 years at that time; as nuncio in Munich, Pacelli had followed
even the earliest footsteps of the Nazi dictator, describing National
Socialism, in a memorandum sent to the Holy See already on May 1, 1915,
as "the most dangerous heresy of our times." In a conversation with
the American consul in Cologne, reported to the [uS] State Department
in 1939, Pacelli's views on Hitler, to quote the reporting diplomat
"surprised me by their extremeness... He regarded Hitler not only
as an untrustworthy scoundrel, but as a fundamentally wicked person
... not capable of moderation."

He knew that an open protest, which didn't work in 1915, would never
work in 1942, when he dealt with an even more evil, uncompromising
and unscrupulous leader. He knew a protest would not help the Jews
at all but only cause Hitler to turn against the Church and destroy
the only infrastructure able to help and save many Jews.

ZENIT: Pope Francis is going to Turkey this month. Should he address
this subject?

Hesemann: Indeed, it is a shame that the Turkish government still
denies the Armenian genocide, using the very same lies and excuses as
they did in 1915 in their reply to the papal initiative. Pope Francis
experienced this on his own, when in June 2013 he called the events
of 1915 absolutely, correctly "the first genocide of the 20th century."

Ankara immediately protested, called back its ambassador from the
Holy See and called the Pope's remark "absolutely unacceptable."

But Pope Francis was right ... Every neutral historian would support
his view. I am very proud that this great Pope did not give up, but
remembered the martyrdom of the Armenian nation again on May 8, 2014,
when he received the Armenian Orthodox Patriarch Karekin II in the
Vatican. And I am sure he will not ignore this subject during his
visit to Turkey, since the Turkish attitude is just unacceptable.

Next year, on April 24, the world will commemorate the 100th
anniversary of the beginning of that genocide. Don't you think it is
eventually time to admit that it happened? I mean, look, I am German.

My nation has committed the biggest crime in human history, the Shoah.

We can't bring 6 million Jews back to life, unfortunately. But we can
regret, we can try our best to reconcile, we can learn from our history
and prevent it from repeating. Isn't it an originally Catholic concept
that God will forgive you any sin when you only sincerely regret it,
confess it and do penance? Nobody would blame modern-day Turks for
what their ancestors did. But we blame them for denying it today,
since any denial of a crime makes you an accomplice, a partner in
that crime, a protector of murderers!

ZENIT: Do you think the Pope should also travel to Armenia?

Hesemann: That would be wonderful, since it would be a sign of
fraternal solidarity with a suffering nation, a nation of martyrs. A
sign against the silence, covering up so many endless chapters of
human suffering, and a victory of the truth! I pray that he will visit
Armenia in 2015, without any fear of diplomatic consequences. And
I trust he will, since he fears only God, not men. But even more
important would it be to reconcile those two nations. This can and
will only happen when Turkey admits what happened a century ago. Only
the truth makes us humans free to forgive.

ZENIT: How do you believe this visit can happen, or these steps toward
reconciliation be achieved?

Hesemann: Well, who am I to recommend anything to the Successor of St.

Peter? I trust in the intuition, the empathy and the genius of Pope
Francis. Look what he did on his trip to the Holy Land, establishing
a dialogue and the first step towards a reconciliation of Israelis and
Palestinians, inviting them to a common day of prayer in the Vatican?

This was so wonderful! Maybe such a gesture, bringing both, victims
and 'committers' together, presenting the facts and inviting them
to reconcile, would be the right sign for 2015. I have full trust
in the Holy Father, that he will find the right words and gestures,
once again.

***

On the NET:

Michael Hesemann Official Website: www.michaelhesemann.info

http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/what-pius-xii-learned-from-the-armenian-genocide

[Yervant1]

ARMENIAN MEMORIES: THE ARMENIANS DETERMINED NEVER TO LET THE GENOCIDE OF 1915 PASS INTO OBLIVION.

Aleteia
Nov 28 2014

Philip Jenkins

In 1939, plotting the invasion of Poland, Hitler urged his generals
on to ruthless savagery. They should not worry about the judgment of
history, he said. "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation
of the Armenians?" He was referring of course to the genocide of
Armenian Christians, about which we will be hearing a great deal in
the coming centennial year of 2015. The scale of those planned global
commemorations of itself makes nonsense of Hitler's boast. But some
of those memories - some of those long-term impacts - are remarkable,
and unexpected. The Armenian experience certainly did remain in the
public consciousness, in the West as well as the Middle East, and it
had a lasting relevance for both Christians and Jews.

I will not say much here about the actual events of the genocide,
except to stress its amazing scale - well over a million dead in all
between 1915 and 1917 - and the deliberate genocidal intent of the
Ottoman perpetrators. So much is familiar, and the reality of the
genocide is universally acknowledged, except by the modern Turkish
regime, and a few wayward historians.

The complex consequences, though, are less well known. Just in recent
weeks, German historian Michael Hesemann has stressed the crime's
aftermath in shaping Vatican policy for years to come. During the
Great War, the Vatican spoke out forcibly against the mass killings
of Armenian Christians, but to not the slightest avail. Arguably,
the appeals even drove on the Turks to still worse excesses.

The total failure of public appeals taught a harsh lesson to Eugenio
Pacelli, the Vatican diplomat who later became Pope Pius XII, and who
had to respond to the Nazi atrocities against Jews. As Hesemann says,
"He knew that an open protest, which didn't work in 1915, would never
work in 1942, when he dealt with an even more evil, uncompromising
and unscrupulous leader. He knew a protest would not help the Jews
at all but only cause Hitler to turn against the Church, and destroy
the only infrastructure able to help and save many Jews." Hence the
church's controversial public silence during the Holocaust, which has
often been tragically misunderstood as indicating Vatican cynicism
or callousness. In fact, as Pius knew, the greatest good could be
achieved behind the scenes.

But the Armenian disaster had consequences far beyond the Catholic
Church, and contributed mightily to shaping modern ideas of human
rights and international law. To understand this, we have to look at
the long aftermath of the genocide itself.

Armenians themselves determined never to let the crime pass into
oblivion. After the war's end, militant death squads assassinated many
former Ottoman leaders and collaborators, including junta leader Djemal
*****, as part of Operation Nemesis. One of these actions would have a
powerful aftermath, when in Berlin in 1921 an Armenian killed Talaat
*****, reputed mastermind of the genocide. The assassin's supporters
turned his subsequent trial into a new expose of the genocide, and
he succeeded so powerfully in stating their case that the German
court freed the Armenian on the basis of the traumatic horrors he
had undergone.

These experiences had a powerful effect on minorities of all kinds
in the turbulent interwar years, and Jews in particular drew ominous
lessons about what a sufficiently determined state mechanism could
perpetrate. Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin was fascinated by
the trial following the killing of Talaat *****. Why, he wondered,
did courts try a man for a single murder while no institutions existed
to punish the murderers of millions?

In the absence of international institutions to combat such massacres,
noted Lemkin, surviving victims were forced to resort to vigilante
justice. He developed the concept of "crimes of barbarity," an offense
against international law that demanded to be punished by a special
court or tribunal. He subsequently developed this into the modern
definition of "genocide," a word he coined in 1943. Based on his
advocacy, in 1948, the United Nations adopted its Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Armenian memories became founding texts for the new Jewish state,
and powerfully influenced Zionist thought. Austrian-Jewish author
Franz Werfel raised global awareness of the atrocities with his
bestselling 1933 novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which hymned the
heroic resistance of Armenian fighters during the massacres. Werfel,
incidentally, saw no conflict between his Jewish roots and his
passionate defense of persecuted Christians. Indeed, he went on to
write the famous novel The Song of Bernadette, about the Catholic
visionary of Lourdes.

In Germany, the Nazis promptly banned Werfel's Forty Days, citing what
they claimed were its false and inflammatory statements about the
genocide. But the book survived to stir Jewish militancy during the
Nazi years, when it forced activists to consider the possibility of
armed resistance. The book found a passionate readership in European
ghettos. When in 1942 German forces threatened to break through
British lines to invade Palestine, Zionists planned what they called
a new Musa Dagh, a fortress on Mount Carmel, where they would fight
until the last.

Memories of Musa Dagh inspired the earliest fighters of the state
of Israel long before the emerging state developed its own native
mythology based on the ancient fortress of Masada. Armenian activism
also influenced Israeli responses to the country's deadliest enemies,
whether Holocaust perpetrators or terrorists. Both were subjected to
assassination and covert warfare campaigns that were drawn exactly
from Operation Nemesis.

So, to rephrase the original question: what civilized person, today,
fails to speak of the annihilation of the Armenians?

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor
Universityand author of The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became
a Religious Crusade.

http://www.aleteia.org/en/world/article/armenian-memories-6370427051966464