TURKISH SCHOLAR DENIES REMARK ON ARMENIANS
Hurriyet
Feb 25 2009
Turkey
WASHINGTON – A leading Turkish historian has said that a controversial
remark by Adolf Hitler about the Armenians’ claims of "genocide",
which Armenians say inspired the Nazi dictator to launch the Holocaust,
simply did not exist.
Armenians often quote Hitler as having told his aides in 1939, "after
all, who remembers the Armenians" on the eve of Poland’s invasion
and one of the worst points of the Holocaust. But Turkkaya Ataov,
a professor emeritus at Ankara University, told a lecture here late
Monday that this remark did not exist in original Nazi documents.
The Nuremberg court, which punished Nazi leaders in the wake of World
War II, did not accept this remark as true during the trials in 1946,
Ataov told the lecture organized by U.S. Turkish groups at George
Washington University.
He said the quote in this form first appeared in two separate
reports in The New York Times and the London Times on the same day,
on Nov. 24, 1945.
He said the articles had not carried a reporter’s name and only had
the byline, "by our special correspondent."
"There is no indication that Hitler, who was ignorant and an idiot
who led his nation to a disaster, had any comprehensive knowledge
about Turkish-Armenian relations," said Ataov.
Armenians and their supporters claim that nearly 1.5 million Armenians
were killed between 1915 and 1923 by the Ottoman empire, modern
Turkey’s predecessor, qualifying the deaths as "genocide."