VAHAGN DADRIAN AND STEPHEN FEINSTEIN REBUT GENOCIDE DENIAL IN TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Azg/arm
27 Nov 04

The following letter was published in the November 19, 2004 issue of the
Times Literary Supplement

Armenia in history

Sir, – The seemingly persistent attempts of Norman Stone from Ankara’s
Bilkent University to question the historical reality of the Armenian
genocide during the First World War are dismaying indeed (Letters,
October 15, November 5). A cursory examination of his use of source
materials may in part explain the nature of the problem. Professor
Stone insists, for example, that the provinces of Ardahan, Kars
and Batum “were not ceded to Turkey”. In the text of the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk, however, Article Four, paragraph iii, reads: “Russia
will do all within her power to insure the immediate evacuation of
the provinces of eastern Anatolia . . . . The districts of Ardahan,
Kars, and Batum will without delay be cleared of Russian troops
. . . “. This can be interpreted only as Russia ceding control over
these areas (Jane Degras, ed, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy,
Volume One, 1917â~@~S24; 1951, p53).

Stone likewise keeps insisting that, according to “the transcript
of the German court case”, the Naim-Andonian documents were
“discarded”. But on more careful reading he may recognize the critical
difference between a conscious decision not to question the central
message of the documents, on the one hand, and a decision to “discard”
them, on the other. (Tessa Hofmann, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern
vor Gericht: Der Prozess Talaat Pasha, 1985).

Moreover, Robert Kempner, a prominent German jurist who served as
Deputy to Justice Jackson – the chief American prosecutor at the
Nuremberg Trials, and who as a young law student had attended the
Talaat Pasha murder trial in Berlin, in a noted law journal identified
the jury’s verdict as a recognition and condemnation of the “gross
human rights violations caused by a government, especially genocide
perpetrated against the Armenians” (“Sixty Years Ago – A German Jury
Trial: The Genocide of the Armenians” [in German], Recht und Politik,
Volume Three, 1980, p167).

Professor Stone persists in questioning the veracity of the 1939
statement, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the
Armenians?”, attributed to Hitler, by discounting evidence that is
compelling. After some meticulous research, the author Edouard Calic
established the fact that, already eight years earlier, Hitler twice
had spoken in the same sense (Unmasked: Two confidential interviews
with Hitler in 1931, 1971, p154).

Perhaps the most authoritative validation in this respect issues
from University of North Carolina’s Gerhard L. Weinberg. Following
his extensive research in the archives of the British Foreign Office
and the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich in 1968 and
1971, Professor Weinberg, in his book The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s
Germany, and subsequently in the New York Times (“Hitler’s Remark
on Armenians Reported in 1939”, June 18, 1985), gave credence to
the authenticity of the document containing Hitler’s statement. He
found it in the secret notes Admiral Canaris, the head of German
counter-intelligence, had taken during Hitler’s August 22, 1939,
speech, delivered to the German generals in Obersalzberg. As to
Professor Heath Lowry, Stone’s principal source for disputing
much of the Armenian genocide, he, Lowry, characterizes American
Ambassador Morgenthau’s “wartime dispatches and written reports . . .
submitted to the US State Department” as “the real”, i.e. authentic
material – as compared to his subsequently published book (The Story
behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, Istanbul, 1990, p. 91).

Well, here is then “a proper account” Stone stipulated as a condition
for conceding the Armenian genocide. In a nine-page “Private and
Confidential” letter Morgenthau sent to the US Secretary of State
Robert Lansing on November 18, 1915, he wrote, “I am firmly convinced
that this is the greatest crime of all ages . . . . The war was
a great opportunity to put into effect their long cherished plan
of exterminating the Armenian race . . . ” (US National Archives,
R.G.59.876.00/798 1/2, pp7…8).

All this casts in stark relief Norman Stone’s purported “neutrality”
on the subject. Should he need to overcome this, he might obtain
special inspiration from the 126 Holocaust scholars, including the
Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who at the thirtieth anniversary of
the Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches held
in Philadelphia, issued a declaration. That statement, published
in the June 8, 2000, issue of the New York Times, and subsequently
in the Jerusalem Post, declared that: “The Armenian genocide is an
Incontestable historical Fact”.

By Vahagn Dadrian and Stephen Feinstein, Center for Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress