Ha’aretz, Israel
April 11 2005

The blackest page of history

By Yair Auron

“United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador
Henry Morgenthau, 1913-1916,” Gomidas Institute, Princeton & London,
500 pages

“United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917”
edited by Ara Sarafian, Gomidas Institute, Princeton & London, 706
pages

“Lawyer, Ambassador, Statesman: The Memoirs of Abram I. Elkus,”
Gomidas Institute, Princeton & London, 122 pages

On June 19, 1915, as the genocide of the Armenians reached a peak,
Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, penned a letter to
his son: “The ruin and devastation that is being wrought here is
heart-rending. The government is using its present opportunity while
all other countries are at war, to obliterate the Armenian race, and
the worst of it is that it is impossible to stop it. … The United
States as a neutral power has no right to interfere in their internal
affairs, and as I receive report after report of the inhuman
treatment that the Armenians are receiving, it makes me feel most
sad. Their lot seems to be very much the same as that of the Jews in
Russia, and belonging to a persecuted race myself, I have all the
more sympathy with them.”

Almost 30 years later, on January 16, 1944, Henry Morgenthau, the
son, U.S. secretary of the treasury during World War II, met with
President Roosevelt to discuss “the problem of the remaining Jews in
Europe.” Not only was the State Department ineffectual in its
treatment of the problem, said Morgenthau, but it was “actually
taking action to prevent the rescue of the Jews.” He was convinced
that “affective action” could be taken, citing the success of his
father, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., in saving the lives of Armenians when
he was ambassador to Turkey.

These brief quotes from the protocol of the meeting between
Morgenthau, Jr. and Roosevelt illustrate how important it is that
these diaries are finally being published today, 90 years after the
genocide. How the world acted before and after the massacre of the
Armenians in Turkey is critical for our understanding of the
circumstances that enable genocide to happen. We need reminding that
genocide is possible only when the balance of power between the
victims and the murderers is such that the murderers enjoy absolute
superiority. And this depends to a large extent on the actions of the
“third party,” by which we mean the rest of the world.

This third party can be schematically divided into three groups:
those who help the murderers, those who help the victims and those
who stand on the sidelines and do nothing. Morgenthau, Sr. was the
man who urged the U.S. not to stand there and gape, but to do all it
could to contribute to the rescue effort. Morgenthau tried to talk to
the Turkish rulers, but never got very far because a neutral power
like the U.S. had no right to intervene in another country’s internal
affairs, as he explained to his son.

It is worth pointing out that formally, at least, this state of
affairs has changed since the Holocaust, thanks to the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the
United Nations in 1948. According to this convention, intervention in
cases of genocide is not only a right, but a duty. But this has not
kept genocide from happening, because the world is still reluctant to
intervene.

While the genocide was going on, Morgenthau wrote in his diary, and
in numerous memos submitted to the U.S. Secretary of State, Robert
Lansing – some of which have now been made public for the first time
– that the “persecution of Armenians is assuming unprecedented
proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate a
systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and
through arbitrary efforts, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions
and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other, accompanied
by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into
massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them.”

Personal shock

Morgenthau writes of many talks with the grand vizier, Said Halim
Pasha, his interior minister, Talat Pasha, and his war minister,
Anwar Pasha, but these came to nothing. Morgenthau was convinced that
the only country that might assist in lessening these atrocities was
Turkey’s ally, Germany. He approached the German ambassador in
Turkey, but was under no illusions. “I believe [the embassy] will
simply content itself with giving advice and formal protest probably
intended for the record, to cover itself from future responsibility,”
he wrote.

Morgenthau was clearly the driving spirit behind the rescue effort,
but his writings also provide vital source material for documenting
and studying the Armenian genocide, which the Turks, until today,
deny ever happened. To our great shame, Israel has helped them in
this act of denial, as have academics around the world, including
several Israelis. Morgenthau knew what was happening from thousands
of reports filed by American consuls and missionaries working in
various parts of the Ottoman Empire, and he documented and passed on
this information in real time, out of a deep sense of personal shock
and horror.

Arriving in Constantinople in November 1913, Morgenthau kept a diary
that he filled with accounts of his official duties, his social life
as an ambassador, his personal affairs, his humanitarian endeavors on
behalf of Turkish soldiers and citizens wounded in the war, and his
efforts to stop the brutal attacks on the Armenians.

Some of this material is incorporated in a book published in 1918,
“Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” where he portrays the Armenian
genocide as “the greatest crime in modern history” and observes that
“among the blackest pages of modern history, this is the blackest of
them all.” “I am confident that the whole history of the human race
contains no such horrible episodes as this,” he writes in hindsight.

Morgenthau’s diaries, however, are a valuable source of firsthand
information composed in real time. Together with the recently
published “United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide,
1915-1917,” they offer a clear picture of what the U.S. government
knew. Hence their importance for understanding genocide in general,
and the circumstances that would enable such a thing to happen. The
“Official Records on the Armenian Genocide” consists of memos filed
on a daily basis, informing the U.S. Secretary of State and President
Woodrow Wilson of the efforts to rescue as many Armenians as possible
and the obstacles that faced the rescuers along the way.

These books should be required reading for anyone researching World
War I, American diplomacy, the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian
genocide. The university libraries in Israel contain very few volumes
on the history of the Armenian genocide, and those available are
chiefly books by Turks who deny that it happened. These new
publications help somewhat to set the record straight.

Worthy of mention here is the Gomidas Institute, cofounded by the
young British-Armenian historian Ara Sarafian, which specializes in
publishing collections of documents, meticulously edited, with an
introduction and annotations that make the work accessible to
contemporary readers. To date, the institute has managed to scrape
together funding to publish 10 volumes – a very important
contribution to the desperate and sometimes frustrating battle of the
Armenians and their friends to win recognition of their national
tragedy.

`Never again’

One sad example: During the same week that the world marked the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, constantly repeating the
refrain “never again,” and “we have learned our lesson,” the state of
Brandenburg in Germany caved in to Turkish pressure and deleted half
a sentence about the Armenian genocide from a 10th-grade textbook on
the history of World War I. It was the only textbook in Germany that
even mentioned the genocide.

Morgenthau’s diaries have now been joined by another memoir. This one
is by Abram I. Elkus, who succeeded Morgenthau as U.S. ambassador to
Turkey in 1916-1917. Elkus was also Jewish, and he made no effort to
hide it. He, too, worked tirelessly on behalf of the Armenians,
possibly identifying with their suffering because he knew, as a Jew,
what it was like to be an underdog.

Morganthau and Elkus, as we see from their books, were of great
assistance to the Yishuv – the pre-state Jewish community in
Palestine – which found itself in dire straits during World War I.
What saved the Jews in Palestine from a fate similar to that of the
Armenians is very much a matter of debate. Was it the intervention of
the U.S., largely through the auspices of Morgenthau and Elkus? The
actions taken by Germany? The public outcry that the Jews managed to
arouse? Was it the docile behavior of the Jews, as opposed to what
the Turks perceived as Armenian rebelliousness? Maybe the Turks had
no intention of wiping out the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, or maybe
they wanted to, toward the end of the war, but by that time, they
couldn’t.

The work of the two American ambassadors on behalf of the Yishuv has
not been sufficiently studied, perhaps because Morgenthau was not a
Zionist and did not regard Zionism as a solution to the Jewish
problem. Nevertheless, he was instrumental in arranging passage for
refugees on American ships that sailed between Beirut, Jaffa,
Alexandria and Constantinople. Morgenthau maintained close ties with
the Jewish community in Turkey and representatives of the World
Zionist Organization such as Victor Jacobson and Richard Lichtheim.
He helped Hashomer leaders Manya and Israel Shochat, who were
arrested and exiled to Turkey by the Ottomans. Morgenthau intervened
to keep them from being sent to east Turkey. He ordered the U.S.
consul to visit them every Sunday and send him a report on how they
were faring.

“The local authorities and top echelons in Constantinople knew about
the consul’s visits to us,” wrote Israel Shochat in his memoirs, “and
I am convinced that this is what saved us from torture, harassment
and possibly even death.” Ambassador Elkus continued in this vein.

Yishuv connection

The comments made about them by members of the Yishuv during World
War I are enlightening. Avshalom Feinberg of the intelligence ring,
Nili, wrote about the Armenian genocide in a letter to Henrietta
Szold, secretary of the Experimental Station in Atlit, headed by Nili
chief Aaron Aaronsohn, in October 1915. In this letter, he also
mentions Morgenthau:

“Allow me at this point to pay honor to your country. I must say that
without American Jewry we would not have been able now to survive in
Palestine. Both the U.S. and our people were represented in these
dark days – decisive days, I would say – in the most glorious and
valuable manner by Ambassador Morgenthau. Does it not seem that
Divine Providence has helped us, this time, by placing this man in
this position at this moment? He knew brilliantly how to bring honor
to his country and to his origins, and it goes without saying that he
will forever deserve the thanks of his people. It is fair to say that
this man has entered human history through the front door, by virtue
of his approach to the defense of the Armenians. In his defense of
the Armenians he acted not only as a brave American and the valuable
ambassador of a great nation. He also gave of himself.”

Feinberg goes on to say that the Egyptian newspapers announced
Morgenthau’s commitment of $2 million to aid the Armenians. “This
constitutes a rousing rebuttal of the petty aphorism that `charity
begins at home,'” he writes. “We can only support and applaud these
millions, which will ease the suffering of the Armenian victims whose
plight may become ours tomorrow. … It is a touching and uplifting
sight, that a son of such an impoverished people should be the first
to offer aid to another wretched people, with whom we have no ties of
blood, faith or tradition. Is not the nobility here even greater?”

Prof. Yair Auron is the author of “The Banality of Indifference:
Zionism and the Armenian Genocide” and “The Banality of Denial:
Israel and the Armenian Genocide,” both published by Transaction. His
new book, “The Pain of Knowledge: Holocaust and Genocide Issues in
Education,” will be coming out this month.

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