A reign of terror that history has chosen to ignore – reflections on Armenia’s holocaust

October 2007: Turkey’s reign of terror against the Armenian people in the early 20th century was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race, writes Robert Fisk

As the Ottoman empire’s minister of the interior, Mehmet Talaat Pasha was largely responsible for the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey in 1915 (Getty)

The story of the last century’s first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used that very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews idle ones.

Turkey’s reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to “resettle” their Armenian population – as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe – the true intentions of Enver Pasha’s Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear.

On 15 September 1915, for example, Talaat Pasha, the Turkish interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. “You have already been advised that the government … has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons [Armenians] living in Turkey ... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be; and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience.” Those words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.