50 Fun Facts About Armenian Genocide

Which dictator is reported to have asked his generals in 1939 who still spoke of the annihilation of the Armenians?

Adolf Hitler reportedly closed his Obersalzberg speech with that question, a week before invading Poland. Notes of the speech reached the West through an American reporter based in Berlin.

Which lawyer, who coined the word genocide, told his professor that the Armenians are not chickens?

Raphael Lemkin was answering a professor who likened a state killing its own people to a farmer killing his flock. The United Nations later built its 1948 convention on his proposals.

Which American ambassador called the Ottoman deportation orders a death warrant to a whole race?

Henry Morgenthau received almost daily reports from American consuls across the empire. He published his account in 1918 and raised funds for the survivors once he was home.

Which legal phrase did Britain, France and Russia use in May 1915 to condemn the Armenian massacres?

Crimes against humanity appeared in the three allies' joint declaration of 24 May 1915, which also threatened to hold the perpetrators personally accountable.

Which pope called the Armenian massacres the first genocide of the 20th century at a centenary Mass?

Pope Francis used the phrase in St. Peter's Basilica in April 2015, with Armenia's president and the heads of the Armenian church in the congregation.

Which reality TV star visited Armenia's genocide memorial in April 2015, drawing global media attention?

Kim Kardashian made the trip with her sister Khloé, and her then husband Kanye West came to Armenia as well.

Which US president kept a campaign pledge by formally recognizing the Armenian genocide?

Joe Biden issued the statement on 24 April 2021, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Both houses of Congress had passed their own resolutions in 2019.

Which California metal band played a free concert in Armenia to mark the Armenian genocide centenary?

System of a Down, whose four members are all of Armenian descent, named the tour Wake Up the Souls. It was the band's first show in the country.

Which Turkish novelist faced trial after saying that a million Armenians had been killed in Turkey?

Orhan Pamuk made the remark to a Swiss magazine in 2005. The charges were dropped the next January, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature later that year.

Which small flower became the symbol of the Armenian genocide's hundredth anniversary in 2015?

Forget-me-not petals carry the message: the emblem's five purple petals stand for the five continents where survivors settled, and its black centre for the suffering of the past.

Which Austrian novelist wrote The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a 1933 epic the Nazis banned within a year?

Franz Werfel based the novel on Armenian villagers who held a mountain against Ottoman troops in 1915. Copies are reported to have passed from hand to hand among Jewish ghetto defenders.

Which newspaper editor's 2007 murder brought mourners out chanting that they were all Armenians?

Hrant Dink, who had been prosecuted three times for his writing, was shot by a 17-year-old nationalist. More than 100,000 people marched at his funeral.

Which Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate called denial of the Armenian genocide a double killing?

Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, used the phrase repeatedly. In 2007 his foundation gathered 53 Nobel laureates behind a letter condemning the denial.

Which Ottoman interior minister said Armenians could live in the desert but nowhere else?

Talaat Pasha made the remark to the United States ambassador on 2 August 1915. A postwar Ottoman tribunal sentenced him to death in his absence for organizing the massacres.

Which Batman actor played an American journalist in The Promise, set during the Armenian genocide?

Christian Bale played an Associated Press reporter, a composite of several correspondents who witnessed the killings. Oscar Isaac co-starred as an Armenian medical student.

Which mountain names Atom Egoyan's 2002 film about a crew shooting an Armenian genocide drama?

Ararat screened out of competition at Cannes and went on to win five Genie Awards in Canada, including Best Motion Picture.

Which French singer co-wrote the song Ils sont tombés in memory of the Armenian genocide's victims?

Charles Aznavour, born in Paris to Armenian immigrant parents, wrote it with Georges Garvarentz in 1975. An English version followed under the title They Fell.

Which Armenian survivor told a Berlin court in 1921 that he had killed a man but was not a murderer?

Soghomon Tehlirian had shot the exiled architect of the deportations in the street. The twelve-man jury acquitted him.

In which present-day Turkish city were Armenian intellectuals rounded up on 24 April 1915?

Istanbul, then the Ottoman capital, saw 235 to 270 community leaders seized that first night, and most were later killed. The date is now Remembrance Day.

Which South American country was the first in the world to officially recognize the Armenian genocide?

Uruguay acted in April 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of the killings. Dozens of governments have followed, among them France, Germany and Russia.

Which US president promised as a candidate to recognize the Armenian genocide but never did so in office?

Barack Obama made the pledge during his 2008 campaign, then avoided the word through both of his terms while his administration reassured Turkey.

Which US president's State Department drew the borders of an Armenian state promised by the Treaty of Sèvres?

Woodrow Wilson gave his name to the plan, Wilsonian Armenia, but the 1920 treaty was never ratified and the enlarged state never came into being.

Which 1923 treaty replaced Sèvres and ended efforts to prosecute Ottoman officials for the Armenian genocide?

The Treaty of Lausanne came with an amnesty for offences committed between 1914 and 1922, and it won international recognition for the new Republic of Turkey.

Which British statesman used the word holocaust for the Armenian massacres as early as 1929?

Winston Churchill was one of several writers who applied the word to the Armenian killings between the wars. The New York Times had used it for Ottoman massacres as early as 1895.

Which Ottoman sultan gave his name to the 1890s massacres that killed at least 100,000 Armenians?

Abdul Hamid II was branded the bloody Sultan and the great assassin in the European and American press after the Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1896.

Which reform movement, whose name became a byword for brash rebels, held power during the Armenian genocide?

Young Turks began as a loose network of exiled opponents of the sultan. Their main organisation, the Committee of Union and Progress, ran the wartime government that ordered the deportations.

Which American charity, chartered by Congress in 1919, raised over $116 million for Armenian survivors?

Near East Relief cared for 132,000 orphans in its own orphanages and is credited with saving more than a million refugees between 1915 and 1930.

Which teenage survivor played herself in Auction of Souls, a 1919 silent film about the Armenian genocide?

Aurora Mardiganian reached America in 1917 and co-wrote the book the film was based on. A humanitarian prize awarded since 2016 is named in her honour.

Which Armenian priest and composer, arrested in April 1915, never recovered from what he had seen?

Komitas had collected more than 3,000 Armenian folk songs before his arrest. After a mental breakdown he spent his last years in psychiatric hospitals in Paris.

Which German army medic smuggled out photographs of the Armenian deportation camps hidden in his belt?

Armin T. Wegner took hundreds of pictures in the camps before he was arrested and recalled at the Ottoman command's request. The negatives he saved became lasting evidence.

Which abstract painter, who fled the Armenian genocide as a boy, painted The Artist and His Mother?

Arshile Gorky based both versions of the painting on a childhood photograph of the two of them. His mother died of starvation in 1919, four years after the family escaped.

Which city in the Syrian Desert was designated the final destination of the Armenian death marches?

Deir ez-Zor was ringed by makeshift camps where deportees died of starvation, thirst and massacre. Pilgrims were still finding bones in the surrounding sand in the 1990s.

Which Egyptian city took in some 4,000 Armenians whom French warships rescued from Musa Dagh in 1915?

Port Said received the villagers after they had held the mountain for fifty-three days. Five ships, led by the cruiser Guichen, took them off as food and ammunition ran out.

Which codename did Armenian revolutionaries give their campaign to assassinate the genocide's organizers?

Operation Nemesis took its name from the Greek goddess of divine retribution. Its small clandestine cell carried out seven killings between 1920 and 1922.

What burns at the centre of the twelve inward-leaning stone slabs of the Tsitsernakaberd memorial?

An eternal flame sits at the heart of the 1967 monument. Popular belief links the twelve slabs to the provinces lost to Turkey, though the number was chosen on geometric grounds.

Which historian compiled Britain's 1916 Blue Book of reports on the Armenians with Viscount Bryce?

Arnold J. Toynbee, later known for the twelve-volume A Study of History, assembled 149 documents for the 742-page parliamentary report.

Which other people of the Ottoman Empire suffered a wartime genocide known as the Sayfo?

Assyrians, also called Syriac Christians, were killed and deported across southeastern Anatolia and neighbouring Persia by Ottoman forces and allied Kurdish tribes.

Which city's Armenian defenders held out in spring 1915, giving Ottoman leaders a pretext for deportation?

Van had long been a centre of Armenian cultural life. The city was held until the Russian army arrived, and denial literature still cites the episode as proof of rebellion.

Which Norwegian polar explorer devoted his later years to finding homes for Armenian genocide refugees?

Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations refugee commissioner, pressed for a national home for them from 1925. The office that carried on his work resettled some 50,000 Armenians.

Whose description of the Armenian deportations as a shameful act gave Taner Akçam's book its title?

Kemal Atatürk used the phrase for the wartime deportations. Akçam's book, first published in Turkish in 1999, argues that the ruling party orchestrated the killing.

Which Ottoman governor, sacked for defying the deportation orders, is often called the Turkish Oskar Schindler?

Mehmet Celal Bey lost his post in Aleppo and then in Konya. He likened himself to a man beside a river of blood, saving whoever he could reach with his bare hands.

Which German chancellor wrote that keeping the Ottoman alliance mattered more than Armenian lives?

Bethmann Hollweg wrote the note as reports of massacres piled up from German officials in the empire and even his own ambassador called for intervention.

Which Ottoman city gave its name to the 1909 pogroms that killed at least 20,000 Armenians?

Adana and the towns around it erupted during the Ottoman countercoup of April 1909. Unlike the massacres of the 1890s, the violence was not organised by the central government.

Which river carried so many Armenian dead in 1915 that explosives were sometimes used to clear it?

Euphrates currents carried some of the bodies as far as the Persian Gulf. Officials treated rivers as a cheap means of disposal, and the water stayed polluted long afterwards.

What does Tsitsernakaberd, the name of the hill where Armenia's genocide memorial stands, mean in English?

Swallow's fortress recalls a legend that the birds living on the hill carried messages between the pagan gods Vahagn and Astghik.

Which 1923 appeal asked Americans to eat an orphanage meal and give the savings to Armenian orphans?

Golden Rule Sunday fell on 2 December 1923 with the backing of President Calvin Coolidge, and it was marked across Europe and Australia as well.

Which Hollywood studio scrapped its 1930s film of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh after pressure from Turkey?

MGM had tentatively cast a rising Clark Gable as the hero before its studio chief gave way to Turkish demands. No film of the novel appeared until 1982.

Which Ottoman paramilitary force, recruited partly from prisoners, carried out many Armenian massacres?

Special Organization units took their orders directly from the ruling party's central committee and often wore gendarme uniforms at the killing sites.

Musa Dagh, the mountain where Armenians resisted deportation in 1915, is named after which biblical figure?

Moses gives the mountain its name in Turkish, Arabic and Armenian alike. One leader of the 1915 defence, Movses Der Kalusdian, carried the Armenian form of it himself.

In which Soviet city did 100,000 people march on the Armenian genocide's fiftieth anniversary in 1965?

Yerevan's mass demonstration, along with a smaller gathering in Moscow, pushed the Soviet authorities to complete the hilltop memorial in November 1967.