Reality Denied

When Hitler first proposed his plans to kill any Poles who stood in the way of his invasion of Poland, he allegedly silenced the naysayers by demanding “Who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Between the years 1915 and 1923, during the death throes of the once-great Ottoman Empire, two thirds of the Armenian population of that empire (somewhere between 1.2 million and 1.5 million people by various western estimates) were killed by Turks. Armenians were rounded up and marched out into the deserts of Anatolia for one clear purpose. They were kidnapped, raped, starved, dehydrated, burned alive, tortured, drowned. This was, according to the Armenians and many outside observers, the first genocide of the 20th century.

Or was it? For decades now, Turkey has steadfastly refused to acknowledge that a genocide occurred. The official explanation from Ankara is that the Armenians were casualties of civil conflict they created by joining forces with...