The Independent photo links Germans to Armenian Genocide

October 22, 2012 - 13:23 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - The British newspaper The Independent has published a photograph linking Germans to the Armenian Genocide.

The photograph never published before was apparently taken in the summer of 1915. Human skulls are scattered over the earth. They are all that remain of a handful of Armenians slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. Behind the skulls, posing for the camera, are three Turkish officers in tall, soft hats and a man, on the far right, who is dressed in Kurdish clothes. But the two other men are Germans, both dressed in the military flat caps, belts and tunics of the Kaiserreichsheer, the Imperial German Army. It is an atrocity snapshot just like those pictures the Nazis took of their soldiers posing before Jewish Holocaust victims a quarter of a century later.

“Did the Germans participate in the mass killing of Christian Armenians in 1915? This is not the first photograph of its kind; yet hitherto the Germans have been largely absolved of crimes against humanity during the first holocaust of the 20th century. German diplomats in Turkish provinces during the First World War recorded the forced deportations and mass killing of a million and a half Armenian civilians with both horror and denunciation of the Ottoman Turks, calling the Turkish militia-killers "scum". German parliamentarians condemned the slaughter in the Reichstag,” The Independent reported.

Citing the memories of Germans on the Armenian Genocide, including those who tried to make the whole world aware of the atrocities committed by the Turks, the paper concludes, “We may never know, however, the identity of the two officers standing so nonchalantly beside the skulls of Armenian victims.”