When a reporter from ATA-USA Magazine inquired about the documentation of the Wegner photos to the director of the German museum where the Wegner photo originals are housed (Stutgart's Schiller-Nationalmuseum Deutsches Literaturarchiv), the director replied:

“Unfortunately, we do not have any indication regarding when or in what country the Wegner photographs were taken. As a result, the dating, and sites depicted must be determined by whoever uses the photos.’’ 

 

This dramatic shot was used to identify the "Genocide" chapter in The Great War.

Poor children. There was a lot of suffering going on, to be sure. 
The other PBS Armenian program that is highlighted on this web site, "The Armenians, a Story of Survival," used this shot as well, along with certain others. On the latter program, the filmmakers decided to crop out much of the photo in order to highlight the crying girl... to accentuate the misery even further.

Here are two of the sadder images featured in The Great War

 

Children apparently dead of starvation

What a heart-breaking sight. This one, and the one underneath. Again, we have no idea who the victims are. However, let's say these dead children are Armenians, as they likely are.

What do these photos prove?

Surely the Armenians who were being resettled faced deplorable conditions, starvation being one of them. However, was this a case of the Ottoman Empire's deliberate campaign of murder, as the genocide advocates have attested?

Here is what Henry Morgenthau, one of those very genocide advocates said in his ghostwritten book, "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story" (but on this point, he had no reason to exaggerate... besides, he is far from the only source to proclaim the awful conditions of "The Sick Man of Europe"):

The Turkish Government paid its soldiers 25 cents a month, and gave the families a separation allowance of $1.20 a month. As a result thousands were dying from lack of food and many more were enfeebled by malnutrition.And this was during the German-initiated mobilization period, before the war had even started!

Even Ottoman SOLDIERS died of malnutrition. General Liman von Sanders, as an unfriendly witness in the trial of Talat Pasha's assassin, testified:"...The economic situation was so dismal that not only many Armenians, but thousands of Turkish soldiers as well died of the lack of food supplies, disease, and other consequences of poor organization in the Turkish government. In my division alone, after the battle of Gallipoli, thousands died of malnutrition. IMAGINE! The Ottoman Empire is in its death throes, desperately fighting superior foes on multiple fronts. You would think if the limited resources would have to go anywhere, it would go to the one component that was keeping the nation from getting eaten alive —  the military personnel. If the SOLDIERS were dying of malnutrition and disease by the thousands, who in their right minds would fault the government for not feeding the Armenians as a first priority?

Yes, it's mortifying to see these photos of suffering and dying people.

Horrible! (This was one of the photos from "The Great War" that is NOT one of Armin Wegner's... it's a frame capture from archival footage. ADDENDUM, 9-08: A closer  look at the above.

However, the overexposed presentation of these photographs is a perfect example of how unfairly one-sided the Armenian "Genocide" has been. The Armenians who starved and suffered from malnutrition were only one segment of the population who suffered from the same causes.

Moreover, the Armenians would soon have a flood of Christian charities, organized by the Near East Relief fund, to help them in this dark hour. (To the tune of over a whopping 113,000,000 American dollars, "more than a billion dollars in contemporary terms," according to Peter Balakian.) The Turks would be totally on their own, facing even more desperate conditions, as the war came to an end and their nation crumbled.

Armenian Relief Camp

My first impression, when I saw the photo at right among the other "genocide" photographs in "The Great War," was that this was a concentration camp. No doubt others came to the same conclusion, supporting the case for genocide. I've now come to realize, based on what I've learned through the Near East Relief drive, that the photo (which is not an Armin Wegner photo) most likely depicts the tents put up by the Christian relief organizations. Not that the Armenians were having a wonderful time, but at least food and other needs were being provided for them.... while the Turks continued to suffer.

The reader must ask:

If the famine implied in photos as the first two shown here was a result of the Ottoman government's deliberate policy of extermination, why then did the Ottomans spend a small fortune on the resettling of the Armenians... when such money could have been put the good use, elsewhere? Remember, the Ottomans were broke! Even such a powerful "Armenian source" as Morgenthau's book confirms this.

If the Ottoman government intended to do away with the Armenians, it would have slaughtered them on the spot... just like the Armenians massacred their Turkish cousins. Why bother with resettlements? (The word "deportation" is incorrect; it's defined as "banishment or expulsion from a country" in my dictionary. The Armenians were taken from one place of the Ottoman Empire to another... within the country.)

 

An Armenian family sitting in a tent inside a refugee camp is what this photo appears to be.

To sum up, most of the Armin Wegner photos shown in "The Great War" were of the variety of people on the march or in refugee camps, such as this shot at right. The worst of the lot has been shown above. (And even one that was not an Armin Wegner photo... to be more fair; and I'm not referring to the "skulls" shot, whose origin is dubious.) What's the verdict?

Of course, the Ottoman Turks did not have the efficiency of the Nazis, and photographic equipment was not as widely present as during the days of WWII. However, we've all seen tons of photographic proof of WWII's Holocaust...  incriminating shots of bulldozers pushing countless corpses into pits, and the like... you would think there would at least be some photos that would make you think, there's a full-scale GENOCIDE going on. All I'm seeing are undocumented photographs of suffering, miserable people, and some that have died or look like they are about to. It's a mighty big leap to prove a government-sponsored extermination occurred, on the basis of these photographs.

I have seen a PAINTING in Armenian sites of Turkish soldiers on horseback attacking half-naked women, but... that's a make-believe image created from the artist's imagination. Even if there were a few actual photographs with similar scenes, would that prove the Armenian "genocide"? Turks are the first to admit brutalities occurred on their end. There is no denying that Armenians have been massacred. However, massacres by themselves do not constitute genocide, not according to the definition of the 1948 U.N. convention.

What I don't see in Armenian web sites is any mention of Armenians having massacred Turks. Why is this?

The reason, of course, is that it would take away from the Myth of Innocence Armenians and their sympathizers have worked so long to establish, almost exclusively offering their side of the story, with no opposing view.

Massacred Turkish women and children in the village of  Subatan

If Armin Wegner's photos serves as sufficient proof of a genocide for you, then what does the photo at left suggest? I only became recently aware of photos like these when I started constructing this web site because, probably like yourself, I've only been exposed to Armenian visual "evidence." (Living in the United States as I do.) However, there is a whole slew of photographs such as these. Moreover, many of these shots appear fully documented, unlike the images at the Armenian sites, the origin of which are mostly unknown.

I can bombard this site with such sad images as the ones you're seeing, but my intention is not to go for the sympathy vote. What I'm interested in is uncovering the truth and FAIRNESS of this issue. Why have I never seen such images of murdered Turks? If you are from America, Europe or Australia... have you seen such images?

Don't forget, these butchered Turks were murdered under a campaign to systematically eliminate them, to make room for Armenians in provinces where they were far from in the majority.

Massacred Turks left on snow in Erzican

This is like in the Old West, to bring up the "Indian" analogy again. Indians would kill a settler's family, and the press would howl in outrage. When U.S. troops would clean out a whole Indian settlement, mum would be the word. Conclusion: the Indian's lives... just like Turkish lives... were regarded as less than human.

 

 

The caption for this is: "An innocent and defenceless Turkish lad whom Armenians wanted to kill by lighting a fire on his abdomen"; (Collection of Photographs, First World War, Album no. 4, Photo No. 69, Archives of the Department of Military History and Strategic Studies, Turkish General Staff.) Just one of the countless Turkish victims of Armenian brutality... but the reason I chose to include it was not because this boy was a victim of the Armenians, but to show off his legs. He's just as skeletal as the photos of the Armenian children you see above... shedding light on how commonplace famine was for all the people.

Between April 17th and May 20th 1918, the German author Dr. Weiss, Austrian writer Dr. Stein and Turkish writer Mr. Ahmet Refik (Altinay) visited Trabzon, Kars, Erzurum, Batum and environs to record the cruelties of the Armenians. The latter author's observations are in two books, "Two Committees and Two Massacres" and "On the Caucasian Roads." For more photographs exploring this far lesser known arena:

http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/yayinlar/yayin3/arm111_150.pdf

Excerpts from Refik's books:

"Two Committees and Two Massacres," Istanbul, 1919, pp.
71–72, describing Erzincan: "..fresh corpses lying about in the streets and deep in the wells covered with blood not yet dried were those of the poor Turks killed by Armenians. When looked down into the narrow wells, a bad odor would strike the nose and one would feel faint. Hairs and pieces of clothes of the unfortunate Turks were still there stuck to the stones of the wells. Places of ruins, places of burnt down houses, bottoms of the walls were filled with the corpses of the Turks, severed arms, skulls, fatty leg bones, bodies not yet decayed. People were grieved and wretched. Those wandering in the downtown were without shoes, with burnt faces and in tattered clothes. Only grass was on sale in the shops to feed the people. Wheat was not available anywhere but with the military command. Were it not for the kindness of the Commander, even the Sub-governor would no doubt starve to death."

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"On the Roads of the Caucasus," describing Erzurum: "I am in a place destroyed by fire. This historical and devoted land of the Turks lay in ruins. Streets, buildings, mosques, madrasas and entirely destroyed houses are filled up with bodies. When the rubbles of burnt down houses are slightly moved heads of men and children, arms, legs, parts and pieces of bodies and feet are revealed.... While fighting against the Ottoman Army in the formation of armed bands outside the town, the Armenians were killing the people in the town by stuffing them into caserns and shutting in houses. Sometimes they chopped the heads on a log and threw the bodies into wells.... There is nothing under the rubbles of walls but Turkish bodies. When the soil is slightly dug, a human arm would first appear, then the head and the whole body displaying a tragic scene. Corpses were so rotten that brains would flow out at the slightest touch, grinning chins would disintegrate and fatty, burnt and crushed chests would appear naked and wretched in soiled clothes.... The Armenian savagery had terribly devastated Erzurum. Streets were all filled with bodies of women and children. Women’s breasts and even private organs were nailed to walls. Children’s lungs were hanging from telegraph wires. Entirely naked woman bodies with pierced abdomens were put in rows on both sides of the road. When we had seen this state of my unfortunate nation, we became almost crazy. I wonder if civilized Europe will try to find out those who are guilty of these crimes. History has never recorded such brutalities before. They caught innocent maidens, attacked them like wild animals and satisfied themselves on their innocent bodies and then ripped their abdomens with bayonets and threw them onto ruins. We were occupied for weeks to gather these corpses, take their photographs and bury them. While entering the town it was terrible to see the roadsides. On both sides were arranged woman corpses. The genital organs of women were torn and male genital organs were pushed into. Tears were coming involuntarily from my eyes and I was feeling a bitter curse at the deepest point of my heart."

Courtesy of ARCHIVE DOCUMENTS ABOUT THE ATROCITIES AND GENOCIDE INFLICTED UPON TURKS BY ARMENIANS

"Untrustworthy" Wegner:
"The realm of legends"

 

ADDENDUM, 9-08
The following insight on Armin Wegner is from Guenter Lewy's The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (2005, pp. 135-6).



As a crucial ally Germany maintained a large military mission in Turkey that at all times had a sizable presence in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Some of these officers commanded or were staff officers of Turkish army units. Others had administrative assignments, such as on the Baghdad railway; military physicians sought to improve Turkish sanitation and medical services. In all of these positions German officers, though not proficient in the Turkish language and dependent on interpreters, were in an excellent position to observe the course of the Armenian deportations; and their reports, to be found in the archive of the German Foreign Ministry, contain much valuable information.

After the end of the war some of these officers published memoirs. The best known of these military authors are Colmar von der Goltz, Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, Otto Liman von Sanders, Ludwig Schraudenbach, and Theodor Wiegand, as well as the Austrian military attaché Joseph Pomiankowski. All of these books represent important sources for the wartime deportations.

In contrast, the work of the writer and poet Armin T. Wegner, who has been called the genocide's "leading eyewitness,"22 has been found to be untrustworthy. Serving as a young lieutenant in a volunteer sanitation unit, Wegner had learned of the deportations and massacres. On journeys in 1915 and 1916 between Baghdad and Aleppo Wegner observed the terrible suffering of the deportees and was able to take photographs, despite orders forbidding the taking of pictures. Wegner conveyed this information to Lepsius and Walter Rathenau, later to become foreign minister; but the publication of Wegner's findings ran into difficulties in wartime Germany and did not take place until 1919 and 1920.23 In January 1919 he also addressed an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson, in which he pleaded for the creation of an Armenian state in order to make up for the cruel fate of the Armenians and find a just solution of the Armenian question. The following excerpt from his letter to the American president is an example of what Tessa Hofmann, a generally sympathetic critic, has called a mode of description characterized by "pathos and passionate exaggeration."24

Children cried themselves to death, men threw themselves to their death on the rocks while women threw their own children into wells and pregnant mothers leapt singing into the Euphrates. They died all the deaths of the world, the death of all the centuries. I saw men gone mad, feeding on their own excrement, women cooking their newborn children, young girls cutting open the still warm corpses of their mothers to search their guts for the gold they had swallowed out of fear of the thieving gendarmes.25

Wegner was a poet, Hofmann has noted, and was prone to "a highly dramatized self-absorption."26 But Wegner's work on the Armenian tragedy suffers not only from excessive pathos and exaggeration. In 1993 the German scholar Martin Tamcke brought out a detailed critical examination of Wegner's writings on the deportations. Tamcke compared Wegner's published work with the original diary on which it was based, which had become available after his death in 1978. This comparison revealed numerous discrepancies as well as important differences of substance when contrasted with other available accounts of conditions in the Mesopotamian camps. Tamcke concluded that Wegner certainly did not deserve the title "chief eye-witness of the genocide," which had been bestowed on him by the Armenians and their friends. Wegner's published work, Tamcke wrote, could not be considered an authentic source on the Armenian deportation and belonged not to history but to "the realm of legends." 27


NOTES

22. Hofmann, "German Eyewitness Reports on the Genocide of the Armenians," p. 65. In a 1996 publication cited below and in a conversation with me in Berlin in September 2001, Professor Hofmann acknowledged that her earlier appraisal had been too flattering and that Wegner's testimony was less than reliable.

23. The most important and best-known of these publications is Armin T. Wegner, Der Weg ohne Heimkehr: Em Martyrium in Briefen.

24. Tessa Hofmann, Armin T. Wegner: Writer, Eyewitness and Photographer of the Armenian Genocide, p. 7.

25. Quoted in Hofmann, "German Eyewitness Reports on .the Genocide of the Armenians," p. 66. The complete text of the letter, albeit in a different translation, can be found in Andonian, Memoirs of Naim Bey, pp. 72-84.

26. Hofmann, Armin T. Wegner, p. 7.

27. Martin Tamcke, Armin T. Wegner und die Armenier: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit eines Augenzeugen, p. 220. A table listing the discrepancies between the original diary and its published version as well as differences from other accounts (especially by Lepsius) can be found on pp. 242—45.