A forgotten genocide
from Barnabas Fund:
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” were the words of Adolf Hitler in a speech to his generals on the eve of the German invasion of Poland at the beginning of the Second World War. His directive was to kill every man, woman and child of the mainly Roman Catholic Polish population, just as the Nazis were soon to slaughter millions of Jews, and other “undesirables”, in Germany. Hitler reasoned that if history had simply overlooked the first major genocide of the century, who would care about the extermination of the Polish people?
Why was the genocide not prevented?
An estimated 1.5 million Armenian Christians are thought to have died in a state-sanctioned genocide by the Ottoman authorities. By 1922, the Armenian population of the former Ottoman Empire was depleted by at least 90%.
Why did no nation, especially the European “Christian” powers, rise up to protect the Christian minority living under Ottoman dominion from the annihilation that came in a sequence of massacres, beginning in 1843 and peaking in the horrific slaughter of 1915?
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