The Armenian Genocide: The German Role in It as Seen by Eitan Belkind & Aaron Aaronsohn

Writing from neutral Denmark in 1916 during WW I to Judge Julian Mack, a prominent American Zionist, Aaron Aaronsohn stated:

Did I not in private talks and public lectures [in the USA before WW I], warn against the German danger?
[Shmuel Katz, The Aaronsohn Saga (Jerusalem: Gefen 2007), p 73]

Aaronsohn understood that Germany [and Austria-Hungary] were making possible the Armenian massacres, which he feared would eventually be extended to the Jews. Indeed, recent research has shown how deeply involved German forces were in the massacres. But Aaronsohn was aware of German collaboration in the Ottoman Empire's genocide of the Armenians as it was happening. He submitted a report to the British entitled Pro-Armenia. Here he referred to Sarah Aaronsohn's eyewitness experiences of the massacres. His report or memorandum was distributed by the British among their officials who were involved in the war with the Ottoman Empire and with the Middle East. But curiously, the British left out two passages:
1-- Aaronsohn's criticism of the Germans for not pressuring the Ottoman government to stop the massacres; and
2-- his forecasts that the Ottoman state might do the same to other Christian subject peoples in the empire as well as to the Jews. [S Katz, p119]
Ronald Florence's account, Lawrence and Aaronsohn (New York: Viking 2007), agrees with Katz's account of Aaronsohn's attitude towards the Germans and German collaboration with the Ottoman state in the genocide. Katz is well known for his excellent, extensive biography of Ze'ev Jabotinsky. However, before writing about stirring events Katz was active in the Jewish nationalist Zionist movement led by Jabotinsky up until 1940, when he died, and later by Menahem Begin. Katz was part of the high command of the Irgun Tsva'i Le'umi, National Military Organization, an underground body that fought the British and drove them out of Israel, at least out of that part of the Land of Israel that became the State of Israel in the 1947-1949 War of Independence.

It is not clear why those two passages were omitted from the distributed version of Aaronsohn's report by British officials. But Aaronsohn clearly feared the extension of the Armenian genocide to the Jews. The expulsion of 9,000 Jews from homes in Jaffa and Tel Aviv in 1917 only confirmed this fear. Both Katz' and Florence's books make clear that the Jews in the Land of Israel at the time lived in fear. It was a fear shared by Eitan Belkind, whose eyewitness account of the genocide we have been quoting in instalments on Emet m'Tsiyon. This fear was the prime reason for formation of the NILI underground.

We now go on to the last instalment of passages from Belkind's book about the Armenian genocide. This passage shows how Belkind too saw the German attitude towards the genocide.

I sent a letter to my niece, Tsilya,who was a student in Berlin. . . . my letter [was] sent by German military mail, where I described everything that had happened to the Armenians.I got my letter back with a request never to write to her about such things again, to beware of the German military mail, because my letters might get opened by censors. , , ,
In Deir ez-Zor, I stayed with the pharmacist Arto, who now had five Armenian wives whom he married so as to save their lives. He told me that about 30 Armenian women were working in the military hospital. This had been Doctor Bekhor's way of rescuing them.
I must mention that all the time I was in Aram-Naharayim, I was unable to eat the splendid fish from the Euphrates, which I liked very much, remembering that those fish had fed off the corpses of murdered Armenians, including young children. . . .
While still in Damascus. . . I gave my records about the Armenian massacres to Yosef Lishansky.
When we returned [to the agricultural] testing station [in Atlit, Israel, near Zikhron Ya`aqov], I stayed with Sarah [Aaronsohn, sister of Aaron]. She told me that my records of Armenian massacres, which she had sent to Egypt [to the British], had made a great impression.
In my trips in the south of Syria and Iraq I saw with my own eyes the extermination of the Armenian nation. I watched the atrocious murders and saw children's heads cut off and watched the burning of innocent people whose only wrongdoing was to be Armenian. . . .
On the advice of the Germans, the Turks perpetrated brutal massacres of the Armenians by the hands of the Circassian Muslim fanatics.
Eitan Belkind's book, That's How It Was, the Story of a Member of Nili (Tel Aviv: 1977),
[ כך זה היה : סיפורו של איש ניל''י [תל אביב: משרד הבטחון 1977]

Aaronsohn seems to have been prophetic about the coming Holocaust in his remarks about the Germans.
- - - - - - - - -
Coming: More on Obama the war candidate -- his mask drops with a loud bang, More on the anti-Jewish racism of the "Peace Process," Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, the Land of Israel, archeological updates, peace follies, propaganda, etc.

Jews Caught Up in the Armenian Genocide -- Part 3

The roads were strewn with the corpses of murdered Armenians.

That's how the previous instalment of Eitan Belkind's account of the Armenian genocide [part 2] ended. Belkind traveled north on the road to Urfa and "witnessed several mass exterminations of the Armenians." [Urfa was the Biblical Ur of the Chaldees, now in southeastern Turkey. Nowadays, the Biblical Ur Kasdim, אור כסדים Ur of the Chaldees, is usually mistakenly identified with the Ur in southern Mesopotamia dug up by Woolley. In fact, several ancient cities in the region have Ur as part of their name]. In another passage, Belkind describes Jews caught up in the Armenian genocide.

. . . I went to the sheikh's tent and was very happy to find my friend Jacob Baker. . . I told him [speaking French for security] about these things that happened to me in Urfa and about Armenian pogroms that I saw on my way and he told me about his work in Mosul. We sat talking late in the night, when suddenly the child whom we mistook for a Bedouin told us in French that he and his mother are Armenians and the chief of the tribe had saved them from extermination. His mother became the sheikh's wife and he helped welcoming guests. The child went on and told us that the chief of the other tribe had a Jewish wife taken from a family of the city of Caesarea in Anatolia. Her husband had been killed and the sheikh took her.

We were shocked upon hearing this and asked the boy whether we could meet the woman. In spite of the danger, the child got into the tent where the Jewess was. Everyone in the tent was asleep and the woman managed to get out unnoticed. She was 25 and very beautiful. She told us her surname was Biram, a typical Turkish name. Her family lived in the Armenian quarter of the city and when they were taking the Armenians, they also took this woman with her husband and child despite all their protests. Her husband and child had been killed but she was rescued by the Arab sheikh who took her as his wife. We promised to take care of her.
[grammatical and spelling corrections made by Eliyahu to the translated quotes from Eitan Belkind's book, That's How It Was, the Story of a Member of Nili (Tel Aviv: 1977; in Hebrew; translation by the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute).
כך זה היה : סיפורו של
איש ניל''י [תל אביב:
משרד הבטחון [

As we have commented before, what Belkind is describing is genocide. Here he shows that Jews too were caught up in the Armenian genocide. It was apparently convenient to take this family since they lived in the Armenian quarter of their town. Their protests did them no good. The Jewish and Armenian women were grateful to be saved even at the cost of becoming an Arab sheik's subservient wives. The next instalment will indicate how Imperial Germany felt about the mass murder of their fellow Christians. Aaron Aaronsohn also mentions the German attitude and participation in the genocide, as quoted by Ronald Florence in Lawrence and Aaronsohn.
Can we have less silly chatter from academics that there was no Armenian genocide??
- - - - - - - - -
Coming: more on Jews caught up in the Armenian genocide, peace follies, propaganda, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, etc., How Israel should have handled the hostage-takings, etc.

Activist Zionists & the Armenian Genocide in WW I -- Part One

During the recent controversy over a congressional resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide during WW I, certain Jews spoke against the resolution and/or against agreeing that there was such a genocide. Moreover, there are certain Jewish historians and Middle East specialists, in the US, Israel, and France, who argue that there was not an Armenian genocide. Some of these writers are rabid Islamophiles for whom Muslims, whether Turks or Arabs, can do no wrong. These cannot be considered friends of the Jewish people. Others may think that they are helping Israel or the Jews keep good relations with Turkey by rejecting the real history.

Be that as it may, while the genocide was going on Jews in Israel and elsewhere were witnesses to the events and sent this information to the world outside of the Ottoman Empire. These included Aaron and Sarah Aaronsohn, and Eitan Belkind. The genocidal events so terrified them and their friends that they set up the NILI group to spy on the Ottoman war effort and send info to the British. This reversed the policy of most Zionists in Israel who were content to be loyal Ottoman subjects, participating in its institutions, before WW I. Aaron Aaronsohn was so desirous to help the Armenians, that he sought out Armenian political leaders in France after the war during the Versailles Conference to give them advice. He advised them, correctly I believe, to declare independence at that time, even though they were in a weak military position.

Aaronsohn and Belkind left testimonies that have been published of the massacres and persecutions. First Eitan Belkind's accounts from a book in Hebrew, apparently translated under the auspices of the Armenian Museum in Jerusalem. Here are translated quotes from Eitan Belkind's book, That's How It Was, the Story of a Member of Nili (Tel Aviv: 1977),
[ כך זה היה : סיפורו של איש ניל''י [תל אביב: משרד הבטחון 1977

Belkind belonged to a locust eradication team appointed by the Ottoman government, which gave him the opportunity to travel about fighting the locusts.

. . . On the second day of our journey, we saw a corpse floating in the Euphrates. We were surprised but the soldier accompanying us reassured us that this was a body of an Armenian. We found out that there was a camp nearby, on the other side of the Euphrates where Armenians deported from Armenia were being held. Our friend Shirinyan turned white and asked to cross the Euphrates and go to the Armenian camp.

We found several hundred people in the camp living in small handmade huts. The territory was clean; the huts were built on one line . We passed by huts and looked inside. We say women and children. In one of the huts, Shirinyan found one of his aunts, who told him that all men had been killed; only women and children remained. Shirinyan had no idea what had happened to his nation. Shocked he began to cry on his aunt's shoulder. . . We went on the further we traveled the more more floating corpses of Armenians we saw. . .

Deir ez-Zor [Dayr az-Zur] was a military center, so it had a military hospital lead by a Jewish doctor Bekhor and Jewish pharmacist Arto. There we found out that Ahmad Bey was the commander of Circassian troops mobilized for exterminating. . . The doctor and the pharmacist invited us to their roomy house, told us that all Armenian men had been killed on the way from their homes in Anatolia, and the beautiful women and girls were left to the mercy of Bedouin. . .

At night before departure, we heard terrible, heart-rending female screams. The Armenian camp was one kilometer from our house. The screaming continued all night. We asked what was happening; they told us that children were being taken from their mothers to continue their education. However, in the morning when we set off and crossed the bridge across the Euphrates, I was shocked to see the river red with blood and beheaded corpses of children floating on the water. The scene was horrible, as there was nothing we could do.
[to be continued]

Now, is there anyone who can honestly claim that Belkind is not describing genocide? Note the massacre of children. Yet there are many throughout the world, not only Turks or other Muslims, who seek to deny the true character of these massacres. To be sure, some of the beautiful women were taken for sexual purposes. Nonetheless, that does not change the genocidal character of these events.

We should be proud to state that Zionist activists left accounts of the genocide and sought to help the Armenians at that time.

By the way, among those opposing the congressional resolution acknowledging the reality of the Armenian genocide was the US State Department, as well as its head, Condoleezza Rice, no friends of the Jews. The State Dept's hostility to the right of Jews to live in parts of the Land of Israel under Jordanian or Egyptian control before the Six Day War of 1967 is anti-Jewish racist in character and unsupported by international law, except as international law is deliberately misrepresented by the USA, UK, other governments, and the UN.
- - - - - - - -
see earlier post on related matters.
- - - - - - - -
Coming: Zionist Activists and the Armenian Genocide, Part Two; Jews in Israel, Jerusalem, Hebron; peace follies; the anti-Jewish racism of the "peace process" and the drive against Jewish settlements; propaganda; part of the British press descends into the Nazi cesspool [Johan Hari, et al.], etc.

Professor Biger's Turkophilic Fantasies -- More Distortion of History

UPDATING 7-22-2008, see bottom

Gid`on Biger is indeed an expert on the internal adminstrative boundaries in the Land of Israel during the Ottoman period [see previous post]. However, he has an unfortunate proclivity to apologize for Muslim misdeeds. Hence, he has been taken to the bosom of a Turkish apologist website, "Tall Armenian Tale." Remarks that he made several years ago at an Israeli-Turkish conference of historians at Tel Aviv University were recorded and summarized by Abraham Rabinovich, for many years a correspondent of the Jerusalem Post.

Prof. Gideon Biger of Tel Aviv University said that Israeli and other Jewish historians have been distinctly ungenerous to the Turks in making them out to be "the big bad wolf."

Acts of villainy attributed to the Turks during the World War I in fact constituted moderate, even civilized, behavior in the context of war, he said.

WHEN fighting broke out in 1914, there were 85,000 Jews in Palestine, most of whom had arrived in the decades after 1882. Most did not adopt Ottoman citizenship, preferring to retain citizenship of their home country, with the protection that offered.

With the outbreak of war, some of these home countries — like Britain, France and Russia — became enemies of Turkey. Their nationals were given a choice of becoming Ottoman subjects or leaving the Ottoman Empire. If they became subjects, they would be liable to draft but, as a gesture, the Turks said they would defer draft for a year.

About 15,000 foreign Jews who refused to take Ottoman citizenship were forced to leave the country. Noting that Israeli history books refer to this as "the cruel deportation," Biger said that no country behaved more gently to citizens of enemy states during a war. [report of lecture by Abraham Rabinovich]

What Biger doesn't ask is why Jewish immigrants into the Land of Israel --which did not exist as a political or administrative-territorial entity under any name under the Mamluk and Ottoman empires-- preferred "to retain citizenship of their home country, with the protection that offered," rather than take on Ottoman subjecthood. We say subjecthood, since the Ottoman Empire had subjects not citizens. Actually, Biger errs. The bulk of the immigrants were Russian Jews. The Russian Empire provided minimal "protection" --if at all-- to their Jewish subjects in the Ottoman Empire. The Russian Empire hated Jews and the Russian Jews generally hated that empire. The tsar's empire did not "protect" or represent the Russian Jews in Jerusalem, for example, except minimally and sporadically perhaps. The Russian tsars wanted to renew Greek Orthodox domination of the Land, as embodied in the Byzantine Empire before the Arab conquest, and in the future to be embodied in Russian leadership or domination. For this purpose, Jews in the Holy Land were seen as a hindrance.

It is reasonable to conclude that most Russian Jews in the Land of Israel would have been happy to take on Ottoman subjecthood ["nationality"] if it had been better than, an improvement over, Russian subjecthood. The Russian Empire was notorious before WW1 for persecution and harassment of Jews, particularly in areas of thick Jewish settlement, Russian Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine [in outlying, non-Slavic, areas like Bukhara, Russian rule was an improvement for the Jews over previous Muslim oppression]. Actually, one of the ways in which the Russian Empire oppressed Jews early in the 19th century was to impose on them a practice copied from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans for hundreds of years confiscated children from the Christian natives in the Balkans, Serbs, Greeks, Rumanians [then called Vlakhs or Wallachs] in a system called devshirme and forced them to convert to Islam and serve in the army or other state agencies. The comparable Russian practice was called the Cantonist policy, which was in fact milder than devshirme, since it gave the Jewish child recruits a chance to return to their families if they had not converted after 25 years of service. The policy was discontinued in the mid-19th century. Given the loathing of most Jews in the Russian Empire for their oppressors, Jews from Russia in Israel would have gladly taken up Ottoman subjecthood, if it had been an improvement. Indeed, during the Crimean War against Russia, the local Ottoman officials in Jerusalem enlisted local rabbis of both the Sefardim and the Ashkenazim [many of them from the Russian Empire] to lead prayers for an Ottoman victory in the war [actually, French and British forces defended the Ottoman Empire against Russia] at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.

The question that we would ask Biger is: Why did so many non-Muslim natives of the empire, Christians as well as Jews (especially Christians), take on the protection and citizenship [sometimes called then "nationality"] of Western powers? Their purpose was to avoid the disabilities, the social and juridical inferiority imposed on non-Muslims under Muslim dominion.
Moreover, the historian George Clark tells us of the Ottomans:

It has often been said that their empire was an army of occupation and not a political power.
[G Clark, The Seventeenth Century ( 1st ed. 1929; 5th printing: New York: Oxford Univ Press 1961), p 172].

For the same reasons, the same could be said about the early, pre-Crusades Arab empires. For related reasons, I would accept in some ways Biger's defense of the Ottoman state. The oppression of non-Muslims as dhimmis that so many wanted to escape was carried out not only by the Ottoman state but by local Muslims. Indeed, sometimes the Ottoman state protected dhimmis from oppression and persecution by local Muslims that went beyond the commands of Muslim law [shari`ah]. When the Ottoman state was strong it could supply such protection. But when it was weak local Muslim notables and strongmen felt that they could act without restraint. This was why many or most Jewish immigrants did not seek Ottoman subjecthood, Professor Biger, especially after it became possible to take on a Western citizenship or "nationality."

The Turkish apologist website then goes on to falsify Ottoman imperial history:

Here's the deal: after centuries of prosperity, practically all the minorities of the Ottoman Empire decided to take advantage of the weakened Ottoman Empire and stabbed their nation in the back. Years later, groups from Armenians to Greeks to Assyrians would dishonorably present the reaction to their treachery as "genocide."

It's too funny --"after centuries of prosperity." So the oppressed dhimmi subject peoples "stabbed their nation in the back." Their "nation" or their state? As if they owed something to the Ottoman Empire. It should be needless to say that the above is asinine but in the 21st century no knowledge or understanding --on the part of the uneducated or the university- educated alike-- can be taken for granted. That is, historical knowledge is so meager among ordinary people and "intellectuals" and academics, even regarding events within living memory, like the Holocaust, like Palestinian Arab collaboration in the Holocaust, that one cannot take it for granted that people know anything.

Be that as it may, after blaming Jews for not taking Ottoman subjecthood, Prof Biger gets to another related issue.

THE MOST emotion-laden grievance against the Turks [on the part of Jews in Israel] involved their crackdown on the Nili spy ring, founded by a group of young Jews in Zichron Ya'acov to help the Allied war effort [during World War 1]. The ringleader, Aaron Aaronson, managed to escape but the Turks hanged other members of the ring and tortured Aaronson's sister, Sara, who finally shot herself.

The known facts are correct, said Biger, but the prevailing Jewish attitude is too narrow.

The only people punished by the Turks, he noted, were those actually involved in the ring — and only after a military trial. There was no collective punishment against the Jews of Palestine or even of Zichron Ya'acov. "No house was burned and anyone can visit today the original house of the Aaronson family. The woman who committed suicide was actually a spy who received the 'usual treatment' of spies during war."
[Abraham Rabinovich, "The Secret Crescent Cause"]

Yes, many other countries have executed spies. The United States executed --during peacetime-- the Rosenbergs, husband and wife, who indeed spied for the Soviet Union (the wife's activity was marginal). The press of the time charged the Rosenbergs with giving the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Communist USSR during WW2, while the USA and USSR were allies. In fact, Harry Hopkins, a White House advisor of FDR, has been accused of seeing to the transport to the USSR of cartons of documents produced by the Manhattan Project to produce the atomic bomb, in addition to having heavy water shipped there. Furthermore, certain atomic scientists who actually worked on the bomb and knew much more about it than Rosenberg did, and gave information about it to the USSR, were sentenced to only light terms [i.e., Klaus Fuchs]. So even the USA executed spies. By executing members of the NILI, the Ottoman government was doing nothing exceptional, as Biger says. However, he does not ask WHY the NILI group spied for the British on the Ottoman Empire.

In fact, they were well aware of the Armenian genocide. Sarah Aaronsohn had seen how the Armenians were being herded toward their death, suffering abuse, as she watched from her train window on a trip from Kusta [the Hebrew name; it was then called Constantinople in the West, now Istanbul] in 1915. Jews in the NILI group spied for Britain out of fear that the Armenian massacre might be applied to Jews in Israel. The Jews had no special loyalty to Russia, the UK's ally in the war. The NILI group were well aware of the Armenian genocide. Zionists and other Jews outside of Israel were well aware of the Armenian genocide and worried that it might be extended to the Jews. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Max Nordau and Prof. A.S. Yahuda wrote during WW I about the concern for the survival of the Jews in Israel during the war. The Turkish/Ottoman apologist quoted above supplies the name of another Zionist writer on this matter, Alfred Boehm, through a quote from an Ottoman Jewish subject of that time. I am not familiar with Boehm's writings.

As Mustafa Kemal Ataturk pointed out, however, there was one exception among the different millets [subject ethno-religious groups with autonomy as dhimmi peoples]: Ottoman Jews remained loyal. In an emotional encounter, one summed it up:

"So now the unethical genocide industry has gotten wind of this episode. Creepy Zionists like Alfred Boehm have written books making ugly statements such as, If Palestine had not been freed by the English at the end of 1917, the Jewish Yishuv (settlement) [Yishuv= the Jewish population in Israel] would have been exterminated by Djemal."

Jamal Pasha was part of the triumvirate ruling the Ottoman Empire during WW I. He and his friends took power in 1908 through the Young Turk movement, formally known as the Committee for Unity and Progress. Nasser's Free Officers were much like the Young Turks when they took over in 1952. They too were seen as "progressives," "reformers," "uncorruptible," etc.

Getting back to the threat to the Yishuv in Israel. Jabotinsky discussed the threat in an article in Yiddish entitled "Activism," which he published in 1915 in Copenhagen in neutral Denmark [in Di Tribune, 10 October 1915]. This article was influential at the time, although it is barely remembered today. It may never have been published in English, although I am personally aware that the bulk of it was translated into English. Jabotinsky in 1915 was well aware of the Armenian genocide but believed that Jewish influence in the capitals of the Ottomans' major allies, Berlin, Vienna and Budapest, would prevent the Committee of Unity and Progress, the Ittihad government, from bringing upon the Jews in Israel the same fate as the Armenians were suffering.

Prof Yahuda was concerned about the fate of the Jews in Israel from the very beginning of WW I. He wrote [in German] to Oscar S Straus, a prominent Jewish leader in New York. Straus answered him [in English] on 23 October 1914:

I am in receipt of your letter of October 5th in regard to the condition of the Jews in Palestine, and a foreshadowing of what may happen to them should war break out between Turkey and Russia.

Straus wrote on 30 October 1914 to Nordau, who had also written to him of his concerns:

I also communicated with the German Ambassador, informing him that should Turkey enter the war on the German side and a massacre occur in Palestine, the civilized world would hold Germany, the dominant power, responsible.

A.S. Yahuda's background is of interest. He was born in Israel in 1877 (d. 1951) of a family that had come from Iraq. He was educated in Israel and later went to study in Europe, eventually becoming a professor at the Higher School of Jewish Studies in Berlin [Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums], and later at the University of Madrid. His book on parallels between the Biblical accounts of Egypt and archeological findings there --The Accuracy of the Bible-- seems to have been a major influence on Immanuel Velikovsky and his citation of Egyptian documents confirming the story of the Exodus [in Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, etc]. Yahuda also purchased personal papers of Isaac Newton, the famous physicist. These papers demonstrate Newton's interest in the Bible and the Jewish role in history, papers that the British universities were not interested in purchasing from Newton's family. These papers are now in Jerusalem at the Hebrew National and University Library.
The letters quoted above are in Yahuda's article in Hebrew, "The Effort to Defend the Jewish Population in Israel during the First World War," in A.R. Mal'akhy [ed.], Yisrael (New York: Shulsinger Bros, 1949-50), pp 73-84.

Prof. Biger is technically correct in most of what he said, but he avoids the conditions of those times that are necessary for understanding the Ottoman state's actions as well as those of the Jews in the NILI.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
UPDATING 7-22-2008 Eyewitness Testimony by a NILI Member on the Armenian Massaces
Here & here & here
- - - - - - - - - - - -
UPDATING 3-28-2017 How Professor A S Yahuda saved Isaac Newton's papers and unpublished writings on the Bible, on ancient chronology, prophecy and so forth [here]
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Coming: More on Hebron, more on peace follies, more on Jews in Jerusalem, etc.