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Denying Hitler's Question - National Assembly of Wales - Cardiff - 25 April 2002 - Mike Joseph

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Cardiff, April 2002 - Denying Hitler's Question (1)

Late last year I was invited to address a Swansea University seminar (2) on the subject of Questioning Hitler's Question.

My subject was the question (3) that Adolf Hitler put to his top generals on August 22 1939:

"Who after all talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

In my lecture, I showed how the record of Hitler's outrageous speech on the eve of war was immediately leaked to the western press by Admiral Canaris and others who later conspired to bomb Hitler; how the speech, including that contemptuous question, was published during the war by the head of Berlin's foreign press corps, Louis Lochner, bureau chief of the Associated Press; I showed that Hitler's purpose in making this speech was to convince his generals that genocide was part and parcel of Germany's war aims, and I showed that he explicitly referred to the Armenian Genocide to demonstrate that genocide may be committed with impunity. I showed that, with one Welsh exception - to which I will return - Hitler was right to taunt the world for forgetting the Armenian Genocide by 1939; and nevertheless knew that his generals would be impressed with his reference to the Armenian catastrophe: because the German army would have vivid personal memories of it from their war service in the Ottoman Empire just twenty years earlier.

After all, the Armenian Genocide was conducted under the cover of the First World War by Germany's ally, the Ottoman Turks, and it was monitored, supported and even led by many of the 800 German officers and 12,000 German troops stationed in Turkey, including those who became leading Nazi criminals.

It was a remarkable fact, I told my Swansea audience, that while we have no documented record of Hitler referring to the Holocaust as an accomplished deed, here was hard evidence of Hitler attesting to the earlier genocide to pave the way for the Holocaust. It was indeed a smoking gun.

But as I spoke, I was noticing a postgraduate student, sitting in a corner of the Swansea seminar room, smiling with that fixed, waterproof kind of smile that displays scorn rather than satisfaction.

When I had finished talking and taken some questions, he finally spoke up. Everything I said was suspect. I had failed to consider Turkish sources which showed that there had been no genocide, that the Armenians had been just as bad, and that all western references to genocide were mistakes, lies and forgeries. I paraphrase, but you get the drift.

From an academic point of view, these were pretty lame assertions, which simply ignored the detailed evidence I had just presented. I had analysed a paper by a leading Turkish denier of the Armenian Genocide, Professor Dr. Turkkaya Ataöv. Ataöv is Professor of International Relations at Ankara University. His department boasts that it trains its graduates for positions in the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So when Professor Ataöv spins, we may be confident he spins in time with the Turkish government.

His paper, Hitler and the Armenian Question, deals with the awkward fact - for the denier - of Hitler's question. You can read it on the web at www.mfa.gov.tr. I showed the Swansea seminar how Ataöv's claim that Hitler did not ask his question, and his claim that he made only one other reference to the Armenians are both disproved by published evidence; and I went on to show that Ataöv's claim that Hitler's associates were "completely ignorant" of the genocide is hopelessly wrong. I only have time for one piece of the evidence, but it is unnerving.

Hitler's most intimate knowledge of the Armenian Genocide came from Dr Max Erwin von Scheubner Richter. Richter had been Vice-Consul in Erzurum, and Co-Commander of a joint Turko-German guerilla force. He learnt the whole apparatus of modern genocide - deception, concealment, lulling and trapping the victims. He reported extensively on the massacres. In his last report to Berlin he declared:

"The Armenians of Turkey for all practical purposes have been exterminated"

Scheubner Richter joined the Nazi party a few years later, on attending a gathering addressed by Hitler. He now called for

"a ruthless and relentless campaign to cleanse Germany of aliens"

and Hitler made him general manager of the party's military wing, the SA.

Now Scheubner Richter may have been a fascist and a racist, but he was also a clear thinking strategist. He wrote that:

"the nationalist revolution must not precede the acquisition of political power, rather control over the nation's police constitutes the prerequisite for the nationalist revolution".

Six weeks after he wrote this, Scheubner Richter's warning was brought home in the most forceful way to Hitler. On November 9 1923, a column of several thousands Nazis led by standard-bearers left Munich's Bürgerbräukeller to march across the city to the Bavarian War Ministry - the first steps of a march to Berlin and seizing power. Hitler had vacillated for a day, uncertain whether this was the time and the way to challenge the state. Now he was marching silently, at the head of the column, supported by Ludendorff and Scheubner Richter. He took Scheubner Richter's arm, an uncharacteristic gesture of seeking support. At the Odeonsplatz they came up against a police cordon beside the Bavarian War Memorial. A shot rang out, followed by an exchange of fire. Scheubner Richter was the first to fall dead, pulling Hitler down, and wrenching his arm out of joint.

Hitler later had the flag that had headed the march soaked in the blood of the 14 Nazis killed at Odeonsplatz. He made the annual commemoration of the march the central image of Nazi sacrifice. But of the 14 dead, Hitler said:

"all are replaceable, but for one: Scheubner Richter".

Ten years' later, Hitler achieved the control of the state that Scheubner Richter had warned was the prerequisite for his revolution. By then, no doubt Hitler had thought carefully about all that his irreplaceable colleague had to say about getting away with genocide.

So, far from Hitler and his aides being completely ignorant of the fate of the Armenians, they could not have been more steeped in it.

Thus when the voice of denial was raised in an obscure seminar room on a university campus on the western fringes of Europe, I felt many reactions. As an academic challenge, it was a non-starter. As evidence of the determination with which Turkey pursues its policy of denial into the furthest corners of the world, it was startling. But as a personal challenge, it was troubling.

Because my point of view, though deeply respecting evidence and truth, is not academic but personal. It is barely a year since I discovered the truth of that genocide. As a researcher of the Holocaust, and the son of a refugee survivor, the impact could not have been greater. Having worked for a decade to uncover the truth of how my mother and her family lost their home in Leipzig, and how her whole family lost their lives in the Soviet Union at the hands of one of the bloodiest SS murderers; having encountered the Nazi who plundered my mother's house, and the Nazis who continue to shelter my family's killers in today's Germany, it has still taken me all these ten years to appreciate the significance of the Twentieth Century's first genocide.

And having discovered it, I can no longer shake it off. 25 years before the Nazi Holocaust, the Turks had already done it all. Nothing was new.

There is the same demonising of a minority group as the enemy of the nation. These people are in our way, they are our misfortune. There is the same apparatus of state-run genocide: the deception, the pretexts, the concealments, the lulling and trapping of the victim people; the same round-up and instant execution of the most effective leaders and intellectuals who might lead resistance - the first on April 24th 1915; there is the same huge programme of plunder to accompany the murder; there are the same mass shootings with the victims forced to dig their own graves; the same lie that the mass deportations are for resettlement; there are the same death marches; there are the same concentration camps whose only product is death.

Responsible for implementing the genocide, the Turks had their own SS - the Special Organisation, and there was even a Turkish Wannsee Conference, a secret gathering of 75 top leaders in Istanbul on February 26, 1915 to finalise the operational plan for the solution to the Armenian Question. A plan which achieved the destruction of over a million and a half Armenians.

Therefore, when a smiling postgraduate student at a Welsh university college announces that all this is just lies and forgeries, he might as well have been denying the Holocaust.

But he has come to the wrong place to deny genocide. The UK may these days, for reasons of state, flinch from challenging Turkey's denial, but Wales, and Welsh politicians have long been concerned for the truth of these matters.

It was in 1914 that a Welsh MP, Aneurin Williams warned our Foreign Office of a "great fear of a massacre" in Turkey. Williams pursued his campaign to reveal the truth in parliament and the press, through the First World War and beyond.

His pressure must have contributed, in February 1916, to the British government commissioning and publishing a monumental Parliamentary Blue Book (4) to investigate the genocide and document it in detail from primary sources. Its co-author was Arnold Toynbee, the eminent British historian.

This book, the first record of the first genocide of the Twentieth Century, was presented to Wales' First Minister Rhodri Morgan at a ceremony just a year ago (5) ; his gesture of acceptance signalled that Wales is further along the road to truth than Westminster.

And then there was the Welsh politician who, in 1939, admitted Britain's role in the power politics that betrayed the Armenians to their fate in the First War: Writing his memoirs (6), David Lloyd George recalled that the Armenians had been guaranteed Russian protection, but Britain opposed the presence of Russian troops in eastern Turkey as a threat to colonial interests in India.

"The Russians were forced to withdraw; the wretched Armenians were once more placed under the heel of their old masters … the action of the British Government led inevitably to the terrible massacres … and worst of all to the holocausts of 1915. By these atrocities, almost unparalleled in the black record of Turkish misrule, the Armenian population was reduced in numbers by well over a million."

What of that use of the word holocaust in, of all years, 1939? In the year in which Adolf Hitler asked,

"Who after all talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

(1) This is an unrevised transcript of an address to the Armenian Genocide Commemoration at the National Assembly for Wales on April 25th 2002. The reader will be aware that it has not been adapted for the printed page. The material for the talk comes from work in progress on the author's forthcoming book, The Hundred Year House

(2) All non-attributed historical and journalistic references are from third party sources and/or the author's own research. For all enquiries re non-attributed sources, contact the author via CRAG

(3) Hitler's rhetorical question was posed in a speech to his military commanders on 22 August 1939. Versions of the speech were reported to the British Government by 25 August, published in the New York Times 18 October 1942, and published in the same month in a book, What About Germany, Louis P Lochner, New York, Dodd Mead & Co, 1942. Versions of the speech were also taken in evidence at the Nuremberg Trials.

(4) The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916, Bryce & Toynbee; Uncensored Edition, Gomidas Institute, Princeton New Jersey, 2000, ed Ara Sarafian.

(5) The event was a ceremony to commemorate the Armenian Genocide held on April 24th 2001 (the anniversary of the start of the Genocide in 1915), held at the Temple of Peace, Cardiff. The remembrance service was conducted by representatives from many Christian denomination in Wales, with the Church in Wales represented by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Wales. It was attended by the First Minister of the National Assembly of Wales, Rhodri Morgan. In attending and laying a wreath, Rhodri Morgan is seen as making a significant gesture of acceptance of the historical truth of the Armenian Genocide, contrasting with the continued reluctance of the UK government in the face of Turkish disapproval.

(6) Memoirs of the Peace Conference, David Lloyd George, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1939, Volume II page 811.