In the awful annals of the 20th century, two instances of genocide stand out. One of them, the Jewish Holocaust of 1942–1945, has spawned an enormous amount of literature. The other—the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916—has been largely ignored, except by the Armenians themselves. The irony is that their fate was almost a prototype of the mass murder of Jews in Europe. “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler asked rhetorically the members of his inner circle at the Berghof shortly before attacking Poland.
The numbers are still disputed, and estimates vary from at least 664,000 to as many as 1.2 million Armenians killed or starved to death by the Turks and their Kurdish helpers. Survivors of the massacre ended up scattered throughout the Middle East and in other parts of the world. Other Christian communities also suffered horribly in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. The bloodshed of 1915–1922 destroyed ancient Christian groups and cultures that had survived since Roman times, such as the Jacobites, Nestorians, and Chaldaeans.
The tragedy of Christian communities under Turkish rule, as Gladstone saw it at the time of the Bulgarian atrocities some four decades earlier, was not “a question of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race… Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view.”
The persecution of Christians culminated in their final expulsion from the newly founded Republic of Turkey in the early 1920s under Mustafa Kemal known as Ataturk, the same man who abolished the caliphate and separated the mosque and state. The fact that the final ethnic cleansing was carried out under the banner of resurgent Turkish nationalism, rather than Ottoman imperialism or Islamic intolerance, mattered but little to the victims. The end result was the same: churches demolished, and communities that used to worship in them dispersed or dead.