Armenian Genocide Dbq

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The Armenian Genocide
By:Diona Mehmeti

Due to the decline in the Ottoman Empire’s power and influence they sided with Germany and Austria in WWI as a final hope to regain what they had lost. The Ottoman Empire was mostly Muslim but had a small Christian population, the Armenians. A very nationalistic group in the Ottoman Empire known as the Young Turks began to want the empire to be “modernized and be cleansed”. They believed that in order to make the Ottoman Empire pure, that they must get rid of the Armenians. Because everyone was fixated on WWI at the time, they saw it as the perfect opportunity to eradicate them. Due to the massive scale, methodical process, and intense government involvement shown in the following documents, this was …show more content…

In document 2 the Turkish Minister said that “however criminal the measures may be'' they must kill all Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. He even admits that the government had decided to destroy all Armenians .The fact that a Turkish Minister is saying this only strengthens the idea that this genocide was backed by the government and that it wasnt a civil war. Since the government has both influence on its citizens and control of the law, they can easily make what they are doing seem socially acceptable. Next in the document Adolf Hitler says, “After all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?”. Hitler is known to have been the leader behind the Holocaust and he admits that he took inspiration from the Armenian Genocide to conduct his own plan for the Jewish people. In document 8 we can directly see the use of military soldiers to enact the killing of Armenians. This is a prime example of the use of soldiers by the government in a genocide. It also shows us the government using the law to their advantage. If anyone else had done something like this, especially in public, they would be tried for their crimes but because the victims are Armenian, it is seen as …show more content…

We see that the Ottoman government is deliberately trying to eradicate all traces of the Armenians even though Turkey denies it to this day. We see this in the way they deliberately took women and children from orphan asylums and “deported” them only for them to never reach their destination. These crimes were so egregious that even their allies at the time thought it was deplorable. A German doctor pleaded for the aid of the Red Cross to the US Secretary of State. Document 7 continues to show the intense conditions in which the Armenians had been subjected to. It further shows us the Ottoman Empire was willing to deprive people of their basic human rights simply for being