The First Genocide

Last time: did fighting this war across Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific make it more winnable, or just wider? Some of both, unevenly distributed. Japan's Pacific campaign and the naval blockade genuinely narrowed Germany's options. Gallipoli and the African campaigns mostly widened the war's cost without shortening it — real strategic logic, real strategic failure, and real human cost carried overwhelmingly by people who had no say in any of it. The empires that made this a world war were the same empires that decided, without asking, whose soldiers and whose porters would carry that width.

This part has no mechanism tag, no prediction, no debate meter, and no closing prompt asking you to weigh in. That is deliberate. What follows is not a system to analyze or a decision to second-guess from a safe distance — it is a record of what was done to a specific group of people, and this series treats that record differently than it treats strategy.

Beginning most visibly on the night of April 24, 1915, the Ottoman government arrested several hundred Armenian political, religious, and intellectual leaders in Constantinople. Most were deported and killed in the weeks that followed. That night is now marked, in Armenian communities and by many governments worldwide, as the start of the Armenian Genocide — though the campaign it opened had roots in policy decisions made earlier in 1915, and continued in phases for several years after.

What followed was the systematic deportation of Ottoman Armenians from Anatolia, ordered and organized by the Ottoman government under the wartime leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress — principally the “Three Pashas,” Talaat, Enver, and Cemal. Deportation orders sent hundreds of thousands of people on forced marches south toward the Syrian desert, with minimal food or water provided along routes where local militias and irregular forces frequently attacked the columns. Large numbers of Armenian men were separated out and killed outright, often in the first days after a community’s deportation order arrived. Death toll estimates for the campaign as a whole vary by source: figures commonly used by genocide scholars and by Armenian historical organizations range from roughly 600,000 to 1.5 million deaths; some historians, including Justin McCarthy, whose work is frequently cited by the modern Turkish government’s official position, argue for a lower total and dispute that the deaths were the result of a centrally organized policy of extermination rather than the general chaos and privation of wartime relocation. The overwhelming majority of historians who have worked directly with Ottoman and foreign archival records — including the Turkish historian Taner Akçam, writing from within that archival record — conclude the campaign was centrally directed and met the definition of genocide; that finding is echoed by most professional bodies of genocide scholars and by a large and growing number of national governments, though Turkey’s official state position has historically rejected the “genocide” characterization.

The events were witnessed and documented in real time by foreign diplomats stationed in the Ottoman Empire, most extensively by Henry Morgenthau Sr., the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, who sent detailed cables to Washington describing the deportations as they occurred and later published his own account. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” in 1944, cited the Armenian case directly, alongside the Holocaust he had lived through, as one of the events that led him to conclude a word — and a body of international law — did not yet exist for what he was describing.

A small number of the individuals swept up in the first wave of arrests are documented by name, and this part holds space for a few of them rather than the number alone.

Overlapping campaigns of mass violence against Ottoman Assyrian and Greek populations occurred in roughly the same years and are documented by many of the same historians; this series treats the Armenian Genocide as its own subject here rather than folding those campaigns into a single combined account, since each has its own documentary record and its own historiography, deserving treatment on its own terms rather than as a footnote to this part.

The genocide continued in further phases through the remainder of the war and, for some communities, into the early 1920s. It happened inside a conflict already consuming the world’s attention, carried out by a government that was, at the same time, fighting on three fronts against three of the powers this series has spent eleven parts following. That timing was not incidental to how it was carried out, or to how slowly the outside world responded to it.