The Soviet Union’s triumph in the Second World War—enslaving the eastern half of Europe conquered from its former Nazi allies—finally awakened the West to the Cold War waged against it since global Communism acquired Moscow as its headquarters in 1917. The simultaneous realisation was how far behind the West already was. Soviet aggression was ongoing internationally—from Greece and Iran to China and Korea and soon as far afield as Guatemala—and there was massive subversion within the Free Bloc. The Red Army had been halted in Berlin, but Moscow-run “fraternal” Communist Parties had ministers in four Western European governments into the late 1940s and the Anglosphere States had to reckon with their folly in believing until so recently that the Soviets were an ally.

American and British resources rescued the Soviets from Stalin’s nearly fatal miscalculation in jointly starting a world war with Hitler—and enabled the Soviet conquest of the East. But this generosity at no point changed the Soviet approach to the United States and the British Empire. On the contrary, the Soviets exploited the new trust and openness of these capitalist powers to escalate subversive activities intended to destroy them. Soviet spies had infiltrated America and Britain, including the Dominions,1 on a vast scale.

The severity was such in the U.S. that had President Franklin D. Roosevelt not replaced the fellow-travelling Henry Wallace with Harry Truman as his Vice President in July 1944, when FDR died months later the Soviets would have had two agents in the American Cabinet.2 The American reaction was stern and far-reaching, as it had been to the original outbreak of domestic Communist revolutionary contagion after the First World War and to the internal menace from the Axis. For all the yelps about “McCarthyism”, the combination of bureaucratic-security measures, legal repression, and the public ideological assault on Communism crippled the Soviet apparat in the U.S. by the early 1950s, making the U.S. enduring more resistant to Communism for the duration of the long struggle against its bid for world domination.

In Britain, by contrast, there was a much less serious effort to comb spies out of the State and a much weaker effort to correct public opinion in Britain about the Soviets. The failure to undo—or even understand—the scope of the damage in the late 1940s had a long-lasting impact in making Britain more vulnerable to Soviet subversion. An important part of the explanation is that the British intelligence system had already been captured by the Soviets. Kim Philby—the most infamous of “the Magnificent Five”, as the Soviets called the Cambridge spies—had been appointed head of counter-intelligence at the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) in 1944, able to protect Soviet assets within the British system, betray British assets in the Soviet system, and sabotage anti-Soviet measures domestically and abroad. Another factor was political.

A Labour government came to power in Britain in mid-1945 with a conciliatory belief “Left can speak to Left”. To the great credit of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he quickly realised this was false and fully integrated Britain into the effort to stem the Communist onslaught, but he was not comfortable rhetorically treating Communism as he had Nazism, partly because he had to manage a party with an openly pro-Soviet wing—Labour MPs like Konni Zilliacus and John Platts-Mills—who moved in a much wider milieu of Soviet sympathisers and anti-Americans. The Soviets rapidly understood the potential of this dynamic.

Before the war, the Soviets had instructed their most valuable agents—like the Magnificent Five—to distance themselves from the Communist Party and its fronts; to play the part of Establishment gentlemen. With the Five’s demise in 1951, and Labour entrenching as the second British party—tied to trades unions and student movements where Communism flourished—the Soviets turned their focus to this more natural route to influence, where its agents could be their radical selves without arousing suspicion or sanction.

Writing a little while ago about Tom Driberg, a Labour MP from the 1940s and senior party official into the 1960s who was a Soviet spy for most of that time—among other things, he participated in Soviet active measures to exculpate Guy Burgess, one of the Five and by then a defector—I pointed out:

Driberg is a representative case study of the constant influence the Soviets exerted over the Left-wing of the Labour Party … The fundamental problem is that a large part of the Western Left has always suffered from the “popular front” delusion summarised in the phrase “pas d’ennemis à gauche” ([there are] no [true] enemies to the Left). … The inability within the mainstream Left to ever quite draw a line beyond which it was impermissible to stray—to always imagine that the “excesses” of the comrades, tactically misguided as they might be, came from a good place—made the formation of a stable anti-Communist Left difficult. … Operating in this broader environment of confusion and naiveté, Driberg did not really stand out and certainly never came close to running over any tripwires that would have him ostracised.

This continued all the way to the end. There are some notorious cases. Jeremy Corbyn is one: he was able to become a Labour MP while being a public supporter of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and other terrorists in the Soviet orbit. The subsequent revelation Corbyn had been a Communist spy in the 1980s, regularly passing political intelligence to Moscow through the Czechoslovak extension of the KGB, the State Security (StB), did not prevent him becoming Labour leader from 2015 to 2020.

There is, however, a much less well-known and far more scandalous Soviet espionage case in Labour’s history. Indeed, it is one of the worst compromises in British history and in the West during the Cold War. Worse than the Profumo affair or the spy in the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and worse than Soviet agents nearly being brought into the American Cabinet, for in Britain a traitor actually made it into the Cabinet of a Labour government.

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In a recent essay on the nature of the Nazi regime, the key underlying dynamic I examined was the way its “polycratic” structure sustained a cumulative radicalisation in ideology and behaviour. The genocide of six million Jews in Europe was the escalation point reached before the Third Reich was demolished, and I went into some detail about how the Nazi system produced this horror.

HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE FÜHRER ORDER

To summarise briefly: why the Holocaust happened is straightforward—because Adolf Hitler wished it to—but how and when the decision was taken is debated. The debate turns largely on whether there was a Führer Order for the Holocaust. While no such document has ever been found, this is not surprising. There was extensive destruction of Nazi documentation, and Hitler routinely conveyed orders verbally anyway, so, if there was a Führer Order, it was almost certainly never written down in the first place. Accentuating the difficulties, the surviving records are written according to a euphemistic official Nazi discourse that leaves room for interpretation, and Hitler—like Lenin—deliberately cultivated uncertainty within the regime about his role in the worst crimes.1

Historians are broadly divided into two camps, those who argue for a moment between July and December 1941 when a Führer Order was issued, and those who argue there was no “moment”, but rather an iterative process between Hitler at the centre and various lower officials in the occupied territories, where the Führer endorsed, rather than originated, the escalatory steps of the Shoah.

In assessing the evidence historians are working with in coming to these divergent conclusions, one aspect I highlighted was:

SS operatives involved in implementing the Final Solution … have uniformly testified that their orders came directly from Hitler. There is no reason to doubt the SS men were substantially correct, that Hitler stood behind the fundamental decision for the Holocaust and every decision of significance as it escalated. But it does not settle the question of a Führer Order because none of the SS officials heard Hitler’s verbal instruction(s) personally; they all heard of Hitler’s will through [Heinrich] Himmler. And Himmler did not specify to his subordinates whether, during his increasingly frequent face-to-face meetings with Hitler from the summer of 1941 onwards, the Führer had approved or initiated genocidal measures.

This article, taking account of some new evidence, can be regarded as an extended footnote on this point.

MYSTERY SOLVED?

Last year, the London Times reported on the existence of tapes from 1977 recording the deathbed testimony of Bruno Streckenbach, and contended they were of “historical significance” in resolving the Führer Order question.

Who was Bruno Streckenbach?

In the crucial period, Streckenbach was a senior member of Himmler’s SS-police complex, one of the two most radical elements of the power cartel (the other was the Party organisation proper, out of which the SS emerged), and by the summer of 1941 the SS was the most individually powerful regime sector, the one leading in conceiving and implementing the Holocaust.

Streckenbach’s rise owed a lot to his status as an “Old Fighter” (Alter Kämpfer), meaning he had been loyal to Hitler before the Nazis took power 1933, in the “Period of Struggle” (Kampfzeit) when the cause seemed hopeless. Streckenbach became involved with extreme nationalist politics soon after the Great War. He participated in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920, the only Rightist coup attempt against the Weimar Republic other than Hitler’s 1923 “Beer Hall Putsch”. Streckenbach joined the Nazi Party and the Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung or SA) in late 1930. In late 1931, Streckenbach signed up with the Schutzstaffel (SS), a rather marginal element of the Nazi Movement at that time.

In 1933, the 31-year-old Streckenbach was made chief of the State political police (what became the Gestapo) in Hamburg, his hometown, and moved to conquered Poland in October 1939 to serve as head of the Security Police (the combined State criminal and political police) and Sicherheitsdienst or SD (the SS’s Party intelligence agency). While the incomplete integration of Party and State was a fundamental driver of Nazi regime fragmentation in general, Himmler ameliorated this factor in the security realm by personally taking over both elements in 1936 and institutionalising the merger of police and SD within the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in September 1939.

The operational chief of the RSHA was Reinhard Heydrich, a Himmler protégé and the man most directly responsible for organising the Holocaust. After a power struggle of the kind that was so common in the Nazi regime, Heydrich removed the leader of one of the RSHA’s seven principal Departments (Amt) in January 1941, and Streckenbach was called to Berlin to fill the role.

It was in this position, as head of RSHA Amt I (Administration and Personnel), that Streckenbach played his part in the Final Solution. Streckenbach left the post in February 1943. Declining the request to take a police role in Austria, Streckenbach transferred to the front as part of the Waffen-SS.

At the time of the Nuremberg Trials, Streckenbach was believed dead, but in fact he had been captured by the Red Army on 10 May 1945 at the conclusion of the Soviet reconquest of Latvia. The Germans in the besieged “Courland Pocket” did not hear of Berlin’s capitulation until that point, making them some of the last troops fighting. Streckenbach was taken to the Soviet Union and held in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp until 1955, when he was returned to West Germany.2 There were some desultory efforts by Bonn to bring legal charges against Streckenbach, but by the time there was any seriousness to the project, in the early 1970s, he was too ill to stand trial. Streckenbach died in Hamburg on 28 October 1977, aged 75.

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The New Evidence

A caveat here is that I am relying on the Times report of Streckenbach’s testimony. The tapes were discovered by Thomas Weber, a professor of history at the University of Aberdeen, and the testimony was given, over four hours, to Gerd Heidemann, who was, like so many self-described “investigative journalists”, a political oddball and lurid character in his own right.3

Streckenbach claimed he first heard about the extermination of Jews in the summer of 1941 from “an old friend called Erwin Schulz, a volunteer officer in an Einsatzgruppe”, the Times explains.

The Einsatzgruppen were mobile SS units that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union when Operation BARBAROSSA began on 22 June 1941, ostensibly as security-intelligence forces to lock down occupied territory by working with collaborators to comb out resistant (or potentially resistant) anti-Nazi elements, including race enemies, Communists, and NKVD spies. In practice, the four Einsatzgruppen immediately acted as death squads focused on murdering Jews. The Einsatzgruppen’s anti-Jewish massacres were initially relatively small-scale and targeted mostly men, before escalating into wholesale extermination of Jewish villages and towns. By mid-August 1941, genocide was definitively underway. The atrocities were sometimes carried out by inciting local pogroms and more usually in organised mass-shootings. The most infamous single atrocity in this phase—known as the Holocaust by Bullets—was the slaughter of 34,000 Jews over two days at Babi Yar, then-a ravine on the northern outskirts of Kiev.

From Streckenbach’s reported comments in the Times on his meeting with Schulz, where Schulz said he “had by that point overseen the executions of up to a hundred people in western Ukraine”,4 it can be assumed that this was early on, i.e., not later than July 1941. Schulz “was purportedly uncomfortable with the mass killings of Jews that he had witnessed”, the Times goes on:

Streckenbach said: “[Schulz] was trembling, trembling like I am now, and he says: ‘What do we do?’ And I say: ‘We can’t do anything at all. I can’t leave. You know—it was an order’.”

Streckenbach said he had then gone straight to his immediate superior: Reinhard Heydrich …

“Heydrich was very quiet, very matter-of-fact,” Streckenbach said. “He sat on this large conference table that he had, he sat on the edge, and said: ‘Be quiet now, Streckenbach. Now you listen to me very carefully. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t get involved. We can’t do anything about it. It’s the order from the Führer, for us of all people. He’s chosen the SS to carry out this order. Neither the Reichsführer [Himmler] nor I could do anything about it’.”

There are fairly glaring problems with this. Streckenbach was the spokesman for Himmler and Heydrich to lower officials from the spring of 1941, and in that role conveyed the Commissar Order to the Einsatzgruppen at Pretzsch before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, explaining that it meant they should liquidate “Jews and Soviet political commissars” on sight.5 In other words, the idea Streckenbach learned of the Einsatzgruppen atrocities through a chance encounter is ridiculous, as is the notion that Himmler and Heydrich were reluctantly obeying a Führer Order to exterminate Jews. The same view must be taken of Streckenbach’s claim “that he had only heard about the full preparations for the Holocaust at the end of the war”, given that, as the Times notes, “Streckenbach effectively [became] Himmler’s No 2 in the RHSA from [June] 1942”, after Heydrich’s assassination.

It is fair to point out that assessing the exact ranking of Nazi officials is treacherous because there was no systematic relationship between the institutional titles people held and the actual power they had conferred upon them by Hitler personally or one of the barons at Hitler’s Court—like Himmler. But the Times summary is a reasonable one for the situation at RSHA for the six months after Heydrich’s demise, when Himmler ran the RSHA directly with Streckenbach as his principal subordinate. Streckenbach himself said in 1977 he was the day-to-day administrator of the RSHA in this period, and the evidence suggests that if he exaggerates, it is not by much.6 There is simply no way someone in this position at RSHA when the mass-murder of Jews in gas chambers was at its height was unaware of what the SS was doing.7

At one point in his testimony, Streckenbach essentially concedes this point, recalling an instance where he lambasted his SS colleagues for their supposed ineptitude and half-heartedness in annihilating Jews: “You either have to do it systematically—all 15 or 16 million Jews [in the world]—or not at all, but you can’t [just] do a few hundred thousand. That was how we figured at the time. That was the order of magnitude.”

Streckenbach as a narrator of details is self-evidently to be treated with scepticism, but this does not discredit the core of his story: being told by Heydrich that the order for the Holocaust came from Hitler directly. Weber remarks to the Times that “[w]hile Streckenbach had clearly sought to portray himself in a good light, … there had been no incentive for him to lie about the issue [of a Führer Order] at the end of his life, when there was no prospect of him being prosecuted”, and this seems correct.

With that in mind, here is what Streckenbach said when asked directly about Hitler’s involvement: “This is something that interests every one of us: was Hitler the initiator, did he know, did he give the order? Personally, I have to tell you: I simply can’t imagine that any man apart from or below Hitler would have started these things on his own initiative” [emphasis added].

How it Fits With the Prior Evidence

Adolf Eichmann, the primary logistical coordinator of the Holocaust, and one of his deputies, Dieter Wisliceny, as well as Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, “all asserted after the war that the orders passed on to them to implement the ‘Final Solution’ derived from Hitler himself.” Of note, too, all of them, like Streckenbach, gave “testimony [that] is inaccurate in a number of ways and cannot be trusted with regard to detail”. Similarly, “Second- and third-tier SS leaders directly implicated in the ‘Final Solution’ were in no doubt … they were fulfilling ‘the wish of the Führer’.”8 The Einsatzgruppen officers said the same thing.

Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, assigned to the German 11th Army under Army Group South—which advanced through Bessarabia, southern Ukraine, and the Crimea—said under cross-examination at Nuremberg: “The order for the liquidation [of Jews] came from the Führer of the Reich, and it was to be carried out by the Reichsführer-SS Himmler.” Ohlendorf said Streckenbach “transmitted” this order at the training camps in Pretzsch in May 1941, and many others at the Einsatzgruppen Trial confirmed this. Walter Blume of Einsatzgruppe B—attached to Army Group Centre, moving through what had been eastern Poland, Belarus, and western Russia, heading for Moscow—was emphatic that at a 17 June 1941 meeting, at the Prince Albrecht Palace in Berlin, Heydrich had openly discussed a “Führer Order” to murder “all Jews”. Numerous Einsatzgruppen officers present testified that Heydrich had said: “Eastern Jewry was the intellectual reservoir of Bolshevism” and in the “Führer’s opinion” must be “exterminated”.9

Dr. Walther Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, responsible for the worst crimes in the early phase of the Eastern Blitzkrieg as it went through the Baltics towards Saint Petersburg behind Army Group North, noted in a report to the RSHA in October 1941 that his troops had operated “from the beginning” under “basic, general orders for cleansing operations aimed at a maximum elimination of the Jews”. This was a written report about the Holocaust, so the language is inflected with official Nazi euphemisms and explicit mentions of the Führer are scrupulously avoided, but it makes clear that the Einsatzgruppen officers at Nuremberg were not retrospectively inventing a “just following orders” defence: their real-time understanding had been that mass-murder was an order right from the top.

The Times headline said Streckenbach “reveals” that “Hitler gave [the] first order for Holocaust”. The headline of a derivative report said Streckenbach “confirms” that “Hitler ordered [the] Holocaust”. But, as can be seen, the truth is Streckenbach simply joins the list of SS officials involved in the Final Solution to testify that they were told by Himmler and/or Heydrich—and, therefore, believed—the initiating Holocaust Order came from Hitler. Which leaves us where we began: the SS officials are unquestionably correct that “Hitler’s authority … stood behind every decision of magnitude and significance” as the Holocaust escalated, but whether there was an originating Führer Order guiding this or it was a more ad hoc process where Hitler gave “verbal consent to propositions usually put to him by Himmler” remains debateable.10

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FOOTNOTES

I recently went on Sibylline’s “What Just Happened?” podcast hosted by Marco Giannangeli to discuss the proposals of Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi to disarm the Shi’a militias that answer to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which is supposed to take place by 30 September 2026, the same date the United States is set to withdraw the last of its troops from Iraq.

The discussion covers the politics in Baghdad that led up to this, whether disarmament can work, whether it would impact the Iranian hold over Iraq if it did, and the role of the United States, since President Donald Trump has very publicly bet on Al-Zaidi as a partner.

The podcast is available here.

Fifteen senior Nazis gathered in Berlin on 20 January 1942, at a villa in Wannsee, to discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. Some early post-war historiography presented the Wannsee Conference as the decision-point for the Holocaust, but in reality it was a coordination meeting about a decision already taken. While the structure and conduct of the Nazi regime is unimaginable without Adolf Hitler, the regime was not the orderly totalitarian system of popular imagination, and Wannsee was necessary to bring together its fragmented and overlapping power centres to implement a single policy. Examining the participants at Wannsee provides a window onto the structure of the Nazi regime, the process of perpetually escalating radicalism this structure sustained, and how the Holocaust decision was produced from these dynamics.

THE NATURE OF THE NAZI REGIME

The Third Reich was, above all else, a Führer cult: the premise of power in Nazi Germany was the Führerprinzip, that what the Leader wanted took precedence over all else, including written law and the bureaucratic procedure of formal State institutions. The Nazi system, however, never approached the kind of unitary, totalitarian rule seen in the Soviet Union. This was for three interlinked reasons.

First, where Communism imposed itself on Russia via a violent coup and apocalyptic destruction, giving Vladimir Lenin tabula rasa, the Nazi Revolution was democratic, and Hitler’s “charismatic authority” was grafted onto the sophisticated modern bureaucracy of the German State, creating an inherent duality in power from which further splits cascaded.1

Second, Hitler, unlike Lenin or Joseph Stalin, was a highly non-interventionist ruler, who had no interest in grand designs to “rationalise” the State structure and did not involve himself in disputes among underlings until the Darwinian wrangling had produced a clear winner. This was not just about Hitler’s personality—waking near midday, watching movies late into the night, being uninterested in complex detail, averse to dealing with paperwork, detesting chairing meetings—let alone a conscious divide-and-rule strategy. It was an inescapable and indispensable element of Hitler’s charismatic authority: the Führer post having been deified, Hitler needed to maintain the personal prestige, specifically the reputation of infallibility, to match it. He could not be lowering himself into grubby faction fights and he certainly could not be getting onto the losing side of one.2

Third, ideologically, the Nazis, unlike the Communists, were very sensitive to the charge their rule was lawless—and, in practice, Nazi Germany, even its army at the height of the savage war in the East, could be bizarrely legalistic.3 The crux was the interpretation of law. The Nazis despised strict adherence to detailed written law, but only because, apart from seeing it as a deadening rabbinic innovation, they saw it as a dangerous impediment to true law. That is to say the primordial law of nature, felt as a living essence in the blood and soul: ensuring the survival of the race and serving the Führer, the two things synonymous in the Nazi mind.4

The upshot was a system where power was both institutional-legal and personal, and the latter was always decisive. The fundamental fact of the landscape was the incomplete integration of Party and State, meaning the two retained separate and often competing interests. There were then factions within the Party and the growth of an autonomous SS-police complex as a subdivision of the “Nazi bloc” in the ruling coalition, while each of the State ministries had their own priorities. Added to that, the various regime entities had formally overlapping lines of authority and there were special Führer projects—the Four Year Plan is a classic case—that cut across Party-State lines and created yet further power-bases. It was a chaotic milieu of venomous rivalries where the only semblance of order was imposed by Hitler, or more precisely the image of Hitler, whose will these Party offices, State agencies, and hybrid institutions all claimed to be carrying out.5

As even senior ministers struggled to actually meet or communicate with Hitler, the handful of people who did—and those who controlled access to the Führer—became immensely powerful, effectively the barons at Hitler’s court. It was these baronial networks, especially as the war went on, with the growing institutional decay and collapse of any coherent policy-making process, that defined the power centres in the Reich.6 The day-to-day experience of most people in the Nazi regime was acting on their own initiative, in conformity with their own racialist beliefs and emphases, to realise the broad vision and goals Hitler embodied and propagated, such as “remove the Jews”. The combination of the fractured governmental landscape (“polycratic” is the technical term) and Hitler issuing only infrequent, “delphic” orders,7 fostered a mentality of “working towards the Führer”, where the networks and individuals within them continually fought for Hitler’s approval by trying to out-bid each other in providing the most extreme solutions, correctly judging these were the solutions Hitler wanted to the problems he had defined.8

The result was a restless dynamism wherein the most radical element of the “power cartel”, the Nazi bloc (the Party organisation proper and the SS), gained increasing influence, and its growing influence drove the system into ever greater extremism, locking in a cycle of cumulative radicalisation in regime behaviour.9 Wannsee was on the one hand a reflection of this trendline, and on the other a unique exception to the general pattern of Nazi governance, since its primary purpose—which succeeded—was to unite the entire regime coalition around one policy under the agreed leadership of one faction.

THE WANNSEE CONSPIRATORS

Those present at Wannsee were:

1. Reinhard Heydrich: Chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and Deputy of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

2. Dr. Gerhard Klopfer: Ministerial Director in the Party Chancellery.

3. Erich Neumann: State Secretary in the Office of the Four Year Plan.

4. Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger: Ministerial Director in the Reich Chancellery.

5. Heinrich Müller: Chief of the Gestapo.

6. Dr. Josef Bühler: State Secretary and Deputy Governor-General in the General Government.

7. Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: State Secretary in the Interior Ministry.

8. Otto Hofmann: Chief of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office.

9. Martin Luther: Undersecretary of State in the Foreign Ministry and principal liaison with the Party and SS.

10. Dr. Alfred Meyer: State Secretary and Deputy Reich Minister in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

11. Dr. Roland Freisler: State Secretary in the Justice Ministry.

12. Dr. Georg Leibbrandt: Head of the Political Department in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

13. Dr. Karl Eberhard Schöngarth: Commander of the Security Police (SiPo) and the Security Service (SD) in the General Government.

14. Dr. Rudolf Lange: Commander of the SiPo and SD in Latvia.

15. Adolf Eichmann: Head of the Jewish Affairs and Evacuation Section of the RSHA.

Some of these participants were individually prestigious and/or powerful, most obviously Heydrich, one of the most senior SS officials, who had convened and chaired the Wannsee meeting. The purpose of the conference did not require the presence of top officials, though. Most of the invitees were second-level officials, deputies to Party barons or State Secretaries at the principal ministries, and Heydrich’s aim was to have them, as representatives of their institutions, assent to participation in implementing the Final Solution and accept their roles in it as directed by the SS. Wannsee was a coordination meeting to identify and resolve legal and administrative problems, particularly conflicting bureaucratic jurisdictions, which, bluntly, meant the representatives surrendering any prerogatives that would impede the SS’s program. As such, it makes most sense to examine the participants in the context of the five broad sectors of the Nazi regime represented at Wannsee.

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THE SS-POLICE COMPLEX

The baron of the SS sector was Heinrich Himmler. The Wannsee Protocol bloodlessly records Heydrich, in his opening statement at the Conference, invoking Himmler’s authority as Reichsführer-SS with “lead responsibility for conducting the process of the Final Solution”. It gives little sense of the burning ideological commitment that propelled Himmler to that point, or the scale of his demonic achievement in knitting together a bureaucratic empire—containing the Nazis’ ideological vanguard, the race policy administrators, police, intelligence services, kommissars of the occupied territories, and concentration camps—that was already putting the other regime sectors in its shadow and made Himmler effectively the third man in the Third Reich.

Himmler, a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) since its re-founding in 1925, was an intellectual and impatient revolutionary. Himmler was determined to “re-awaken” Germans to the worldview of their pagan ancestors, where humans understood they were separate races in an eternal struggle and the strong unsentimentally trampled down the weak.10 To get there, to secure a thousand-year Reich, a Nordic racial elite, such as the Romans had (in the Nazi imagination), would have to be forged to guide the restoration of “the Germanic familial order” in a reordered Europe,11 and the greatest obstacle to this new world, Christianity, would have to be torn up by the roots,12 meaning the Jews who had incubated one Saint Paul—with his “Bolshevik” doctrine that laid the Roman Empire low by inciting racially inferior masses to rebel against their natural masters—would have to be destroyed, lest they produce another.13

Himmler’s January 1929 appointment as head of the Schutzstaffel (SS, “Protection Squad”), the personal bodyguard for the leader of a fringe (if growing) political party, hardly seemed the ideal starting point for turning his dreamworld into a reality. But Himmler trusted in history—and the German people—to deliver power to the Nazis, and he was an exceptional player in the bureaucratic-political game. Industrious, meticulous, and ruthless, Himmler combined ideological utopianism with a cold understanding of power politics, above all the need for unfailing loyalty to Hitler, whose favour time and again removed obstacles in Himmler’s way.14 It was this personality and political skill that enabled Himmler to transform control of a squad of 280 bouncers into the first step on the road to, within a decade, embedding his ideological mission in the most powerful European State and taking into his hands an apparatus of terror that would impose it on nearly the whole Continent.15

Himmler began by remaking the SS internally into a disciplined Nazi intellectual elite, the nucleus of his new racial aristocracy. Fostering an elitist ethos was abetted by defining the SS against the Party militia, the Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung or SA), to which the SS was officially subordinate. The SA was a chaotic mass movement, having 60,000 members at the end of 1929,16 focused on spectacle and “action” (political street fighting), and its internal culture was marked by proletarianism and populism,17 especially after coming under the leadership of Ernst Röhm, from the socialist wing of the Party, in November 1930.18 The educated idealists drawn to the Nazi Movement as Hitler’s political fortunes rose in 1929-30—university professors, scientists, doctors, civil servants, military professionals, and elements of the lower nobility—were attracted to the SS, where Himmler made racialism a matter of academic seminars and scientific inquiry, casting the violence inherent to Nazism as reasonable and defensive in a world of racial “struggle”. Wannsee was in effect one of these seminars, heavy in SS discourse defining “Jew” and framed around the necessity of “struggle … against this opponent” to protect the German people.

Back in 1931, with Röhm constraining the SS to 10% the size of the SA and the seizure of power (Machtergreifung) two years away, Himmler organising a “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” seemed a remote possibility, but he was already laying the foundations. That year, what became the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) was established, simultaneous with Himmler’s Marriage Order. Initially a genealogical race vetting mechanism for SS recruits—guiding the selective breeding of this prospective elite of the German volk—the RuSHA got seriously involved in settlement, i.e., Germanising conquered zones, in Austria in 1938.19 At Wannsee, RuSHA chief Otto Hofmann reinforced the ideological framework of the meeting and promised to press the point on unconquered countries like Hungary by sending racial “orientation” officials to prepare the ground for the Final Solution. By then, the RuSHA had already coordinated with other elements of the SS to design the racial screening programs underpinning the expulsions and colonisation of Poland,20 and contributed to the General Plan East (Generalplan Ost), the Nazi blueprint for restructuring Eastern Europe after the Soviet Revolution and the Jews were gone, which entailed destroying tens of millions of Slavs.21

Also in 1931, Himmler created an SS intelligence service, the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD), appointing as leader a recently-cashiered Naval intelligence officer, Reinhard Heydrich, a protégé, ideologically and administratively, obsessed with the purity of German blood and so hostile to Christianity that in 1941 he would even oppose “hearts and minds” propaganda showing the invading Germans re-opening churches closed by the militant godless in the Soviet Union.22 In the summer of 1932, in an important harbinger of what was coming, the SS outmanoeuvred its rivals to secure for the SD monopoly powers over Party intelligence activities—internal security, intelligence, and surveillance.

After the Machtergreifung in January 1933, Hitler moved rapidly to refashion Germany as a centralised Führer State by Nazifying or eliminating every public and private institution (the process known as Gleichschaltung, lit. “Coordination”). Dismantling Germany’s federal structure (Länder) was an immediate necessity, and key to that was gaining control of the police. It was by no means obvious that Himmler, merely head of the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei or Kripo) in the single city of Munich as of 9 March 1933, would be the man to do it. But within days, Himmler was on the move, assuming command of the Bavarian political police, which was swiftly SS-ified and used to sideline the Kripo in the rest of Bavaria by the end of the month, giving Himmler free rein to repress anti-Nazi forces in the State.

March 1933 was also the fateful moment when Himmler was vested with authority over the Weimar-era “protective custody” (Schutzhaft) system, which was used as legal cover for his capacity to arbitrarily imprison and administer the Nazi concentration camps, the first opened in Dachau in Upper Bavaria on 22 March 1933,23 by which time the murders in SS custody had already begun.24 Himmler spent the next year capturing the State political police forces seriatim and increasingly synchronised them, laying the foundations of a centralised national police force such as Germany had never had. Most momentously to this end, Prussia, containing two-thirds of Germany’s 65 million people, transferred its political police, the Secret State Police (Die Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo), to Himmler in April 1934.25

The SS had vastly expanded,26 and Himmler freed himself from SA oversight by proving his loyalty once and for all to Hitler on the Night of the Long Knives, providing the muscle to eliminate Röhm and neutralise the SA.27 The SS was declared an independent organisation answering to Hitler alone, and the SD was made the sole Party intelligence service, its rivals absorbed or dissolved. Himmler, now supreme over Party security and entrenched in the State police, was able to significantly shift policing in practice to preventive repression of political dissent, especially the Jewish “wire-pullers”, and policing in concept towards protecting the “Aryan” race from biological defects.28 But Himmler’s vision of the Party subsuming the State was now impeded by the police remaining part of the Interior Ministry.

Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, an ardent Nazi but a lawyer and career civil servant, envisioned a system not of State over Party, exactly, but an integration of the two where the institutional scaffolding of the State was reinforced and the Party exercised power through the State, rather than alongside it or above it.29 Frick held his ground for two years before he was defeated in the way so many others would be in the Nazi regime: Hitler bestowing personal favour on one of his underlings. In June 1936, Himmler was made “Chief of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior”, i.e., de jure still under Frick, controlling a unified national Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei or SiPo)—containing the Kripo and political police—which nominally remained a State institution. However, Himmler had de facto detached the police from the Interior Ministry and merged the police into the SS.

From now on, Himmler was at baronial level, answering solely and directly to the Führer. There were some efforts to demarcate the State-Party division in Himmler’s empire, notably between the Gestapo—a name now applied to the entirety of the State political police—and the Party’s intelligence service, Heydrich’s SD. They failed. For example, Heydrich set up an SD Jewish department in 1937 run by a coterie of young intellectuals, among them Adolf Eichmann, to develop a comprehensive Jewish policy, but the department soon became involved in persecution, a Gestapo function.30 Heydrich’s role at Wannsee, acting at Himmler’s behest and with Eichmann at his side, was an extension of the process that centralised Jewish policy in Heydrich’s office through the 1930s.

The announcement of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) in late September 1939, formally bringing the SiPo and SD under one roof, exemplified another feature of the Nazi system: the awarding of formal titles after Hitler’s personal favour had already created a power centre in practice. (In August 1943, the bureaucratic tangle was fully resolved by Himmler overtly supplanting Frick as Interior Minister.31) In accordance with the Führerprinzip that ran through the regime, Himmler set the “visionary” guidelines for the RSHA, while Heydrich, whose rise and protection within the Nazi system relied significantly on his personal relationship with Himmler, was its operational leader, albeit Himmler—like Hitler—intervened in the details when he wished.32 Similarly, Heinrich Müller, a professional policeman with an anti-Nazi record before the Machtergreifung, was appointed Chief of the Gestapo upon the RSHA’s foundation because he had Heydrich’s patronage.

There was nobody else who would have, and probably nobody else who could have, “brought together the police, the camp system, racial selection, settlement policy, [and] forced-labour programmes” in the way Himmler did, as Peter Longerich writes. Himmler’s ideology gave him the ambition to accumulate so many powers and provided the controlling principle to organise them into a coherent bureaucratic empire that restlessly pursued Nazi goals.33 The war in the East brought Himmler new power and prestige—it was his SS officers like Karl Schöngarth and Rudolf Lange who dominated in the occupied territories—and all it did was inspire him to press for more, sensing that the Nazi Utopia was within reach.34

To us, the Wannsee Conference represents the culminating horror of the Nazi regime, the systematisation of the program to destroy the Jewish people. For Himmler, however, it was conceived of as merely the beginning. Himmler’s dream of a Europe reordered as a Greater Germanic Reich necessitated the extermination of many other peoples, and seizing the opportunity opened up in the East required more power than the SS had at Wannsee to direct other regime sectors.35 In the event, the SS-police complex would continue to be empowered. SS control of slave labour, for instance, at the factories and elsewhere, became a lever for gaining influence over the economy. Albert Speer’s “armaments miracle” in 1944 relied directly on SS terror.36 Through the war economy, the SS spread into the connected policy areas, i.e., nearly of them, and Himmler steadily reaped official duties from others.37 But even as Reichsführer-SS’s power grew, his dream was being consumed in fire and ruin.

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THE PARTY

A case in point of the ambiguities of status in Nazi Germany is Gerhard Klopfer, who was a member of the SS (an Oberführer) yet represented the Party—a rival power centre to Himmler’s, however often they ideologically agreed—and who was personally in no sense a top-tier figure, but who represented Martin Bormann, the most shadowy of the barons.

Bormann’s involvement in violent antisemitic politics went back to 1919, and he briefly joined the SA in 1925, before joining the NSDAP in 1927 and transitioning from a street fighter to a bureaucratic warrior.38 Serving at first in propaganda and finance roles, Bormann became chief of staff to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess a few months after the Machtergreifung. Getting involved in as much of the business of Hess’s office as he could, mediating Party factionalism and Party-State issues, and using the Party apparatus to drive escalating cycles of antisemitic “action”,39 Bormann was soon in Hitler’s orbit, becoming a regular at the Führer’s dining table,40 in many ways the centre of gravity in Nazi policy-making. Bormann, immensely loyal and capable, became an all-purpose fixer for Hitler, and had a status far beyond his official rank by 1935 when he started handling the Führer’s personal finances,41 and organised the construction of Hitler’s Berghof residence on the Obersalzberg. Bormann built a home for himself within the same compound in the Bavarian Alps, a physical manifestation of his proximity to power.42

In 1938, Bormann ceased to be a “guest” at Hitler’s table: he now “belonged to the inner group of courtiers”,43 and those present recognised “Bormann’s dominant position in the Court”.44 When Hess flew to Britain in May 1941, Hitler immediately abolished Hess’s post, renamed his office the Party Chancellery, and put Bormann in charge of it. Thereafter, Bormann swiftly acquired more power than Hess ever had.45 The Party Chancellery gave Bormann institutional power, overseeing the NSDAP—by then one of the two most dominant elements of the regime—and specifically directing the Party regional offices with their SS-provided apparatuses of surveillance and repression. But it was the simultaneous appointment as Secretary of the Führer, a position formalised in April 1943, which truly distinguished Bormann.

Bormann spent more time with Hitler than anybody else after 1941. A near-constant presence at the Führer’s side, including in the bunker at the last, Bormann gained Hitler’s trust in a way few others did,46 while controlling the flow of paper information and in-person access of others to Hitler, ensuring the Führer rarely heard views Bormann opposed.47 Since Hitler did not operate a decision-making process in any conventional sense, but had a “tendency to seize impulsively upon random strands of information or half-baked judgements from cronies and court favourites” that were then issued as Führer Orders,48 Bormann had the opportunity to exert enormous sway over policy, such as it was. And Bormann took the opportunity to invariably advocate the most extreme course to Hitler, often exceeding the suggestions of the Party radicals that dominated the regime at the local level.49

Bormann’s concentration of power allowed him to uncompromisingly enforce his version of Nazi orthodoxy through the Party apparatus. Fear of incurring Bormann’s disapproval for insufficient radicalism spread throughout the bureaucracy and afflicted even a figure so close to Hitler as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.50 Right down to the end, Bormann was devising anti-Jewish measures,51 and trying to eradicate Christianity.52 Bormann was certainly ultimately working towards the Führer with this latter fixation,53 though there was a tactical ambiguity. Hitler initially favoured having “the showdown” with Christianity after the war,54 but as the war went on Hitler moved closer to Bormann’s position, increasingly blaming Christian morality for Germany’s declining fortunes and seeing even short-term accommodation as dangerous.55

Bormann’s relentless persecution of the churches was a source of common ground with Himmler,56 and in general the two, being from the same ultra-radical wing of the Party, saw eye to eye.57 This was crucially true in the conquered zones, which were under Party jurisdiction and practical SS control. Bormann fought all efforts for a more “moderate”—and militarily sensible—policy towards populations in the East, backing Himmler’s insistence on sticking to the letter of Nazi ideology in dealing with “subhumans” (Untermenschen), and providing the SS with logistical and administrative muscle in places to enable the campaign of enslavement and extermination.58 Klopfer, therefore, attended Wannsee as active supporter of Heydrich’s.

THE FOUR YEAR PLAN

Erich Neumann was similar to Klopfer in not having much personal prestige, but he represented Hermann Göring, an individual for whom the word “baron” might have been invented, the avaricious and flamboyant designated successor to Hitler. This status was instantiated in a law of 30 August 1939 that also made Göring head of the six-man Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich (MCDR).59 When the war began days later, “Hitler basically ceased to be Reich Chancellor”: Nazi interaction with the State apparatus was largely delegated to the MCDR, and Hitler became physically distant from the Reich government, regularly leaving Berlin and permanently departing in 1941.60 Göring, President of the Reichstag from before the Machtergreifung and Minister-President of the all-important State of Prussia from soon afterwards, was made head of the Air Force (Luftwaffe) in 1935 and would become Reichsmarschall, the highest-ranking military officer, in July 1940.

Unsurprisingly, these formal positions derived from Göring’s personal relationship with Hitler, which went beyond the usual brotherhood of the Front Generation. Göring, often remembered justifiably as a ludicrous figure, bulging out of an all-white suit and surrounded by stolen art, had not always been so. When Göring joined the Nazi Party in 1922, he was the most famous living flying ace of the Great War, having led “the Flying Circus” after the death of “the Red Baron” Manfred von Richthofen. Göring’s membership single-handedly elevated the NSDAP’s national visibility and credibility. In 1923, after bringing some discipline to the Stormtroopers,61 Göring was a (wounded) participant in the Beer Hall Putsch, an accolade among the Nazis to rank alongside fighting in the First World War. Göring held to the NSDAP when the cause seemed hopeless in the wilderness years, then helped guide the Nazi Machtergreifung, founded the Gestapo, and was a pivotal actor on the Night of the Long Knives. The bond held to the end—Hitler would not formally dismiss Göring from anything and sentimentally insisted on his “indispensable” leadership, despite his manifest incompetence—and, indeed, it held beyond the end. At Nuremberg, Göring refused to utter a word of criticism against the Führer and as far as possible he prevented others doing so.62

It was against this background Göring was appointed Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan by Hitler in August-September 1936, tasked with accelerating rearmament and autarky. That this was to prepare for aggressive war by 1940 was the most open of secrets and the German public reacted with rapturous enthusiasm.63 It is at this moment in 1936 when the Marxist idea of the Nazi regime serving the interests of “big business” becomes untenably absurd: the “primacy of politics” was asserted, State planning prevailed, and the autonomy of the “economic establishment” as an influence on policy was sharply curtailed and ultimately terminated. The creation of the Four Year Plan complex was in essence Gleichschaltung for industry, erasing another line between State and society by bringing vital corporations into conformity with the ideological-strategic vision of National Socialism.64

Göring’s Four Year Plan Office (Vierjahresplanbehörde) spread its tendrils through the State, annexing vast swathes. Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht—one of three men acquitted at Nuremberg—had been a powerful figure steering the Nazi economy in line with international financial markets, and he was now removed. Göring briefly headed the Economics Ministry himself, before formally handing it over to the journalist Walther Funk, while Göring—following Hitler’s example and foreshadowing his own fate—ran the Ministry through favourites among Funk’s subordinates. Similarly, Göring colonised the Agriculture, Labour, and Transport Ministries from the inside out by recruiting the State Secretaries to the Four Year Plan Office. In the private sector, the pattern repeated, most prominently with Carl Krauch, a board member at the chemical giant I.G. Farben, who provided “informal” employees to Göring’s empire: their expertise and efficiency assisted Göring and Krauch’s association with Göring made him the strongman of the company.65

Göring’s operational deputy at the Four Year Plan Office was Paul Körner and Neumann was Körner’s deputy from mid-1938. Hitler, obviously, did not wait four years to begin the war, but the Office, name and all, remained as the coordinating authority for the war economy—and, as the war was the primary “policy” Hitler took an interest in, this was a very powerful institution. By the time of Wannsee, however, Göring’s prestige was seriously slipping. Hitler had been reasonably forgiving when Göring’s extravagant promises for his Luftwaffe’s offensive and defensive capabilities were falsified against Britain in late 1940. But a line was drawn when Göring overpromised and underdelivered again in late 1941 for Operation BARBAROSSA.66

Göring’s diminished status with Hitler crippled him in the unfolding power-struggle as Himmler capitalised on the SS’s new military and economic functions in the occupied East to encroach on Göring’s territory. Göring recognised the centrality of controlling slave labour to his position, both as an indicator of his standing against Himmler, and as the mechanism for recovering favour with Hitler by using it to increase military-industrial output and construct the wonder weapons Hitler placed his hopes in until nearly the end.67 Neumann’s primary intervention at Wannsee reflected Göring’s resistance in this area. Neumann insisted that Jews “presently employed in … war-essential enterprises” could not be “evacuated”—the Wannsee euphemism for annihilation—“so long as no replacement labour was available”. Heydrich granted the exemption, but it did little to alter the trajectory of events.

By the spring of 1942, the Göring-led MCDR had been sidelined, many of its responsibilities syphoned off by Bormann, and Albert Speer, another permanent fixture at Hitler’s dining table, had been appointed Armaments Minister.68 Speer was ostensibly within the Four Year Plan network under Göring’s authority, but the shift in Hitler’s favour precipitately reduced Göring’s war economy prerogatives immediately, and most of the rest drained away over the next eighteen months.69 Göring was never completely disempowered—and officially, as mentioned, not at all—but there was a steady downward spiral. Hitler’s disfavour incentivised factional attacks, and Göring increasingly spent his time fending off these attacks, which prevented him accomplishing the tasks that would restore Hitler’s favour. Demoralised by this, and by realising relatively early the cause was lost, Göring retreated into self-indulgence and reminiscences with his remaining loyalists.70

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THE STATE

Friedrich Kritzinger represented the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, at Wannsee.71 Lammers was different to the other barons because his proximity to Hitler was more a consequence than a cause of his institutional weight, and his scope for independent action and dispensing patronage was far more restricted.

The Reich Chancellery was the central administrative office of the German State, coordinating the work of the ministries, and handling communication between the ministries and Hitler. Lammers’ power at its height should not be underestimated. Sitting at the nexus of the pre-existing civilian State bureaucracy and the Führer, and acting as the bridge between the two, Lammers enjoyed unusually frequent access to Hitler, regulated the access of others, and was instrumental in the most high-functioning State in Europe serving Nazi goals. Without the capacity of the German State, and its ingrained ethos of apolitical State service as an end in itself,72 the Holocaust could not have taken place on the scale it did in so short a time. That being said, Lammers’ role was procedural, facilitating and administering for others, thus it was always narrower and more passive than the bureaucratic entrepreneurialism of the other barons. Lammers’ levers were managing the flow of business to Hitler, a margin for interpretation in translating Hitler’s will into policy, enabling or obstructing the implementation of administrative decisions, and influencing appointments in the Reich Chancellery. And over time, Lammers would lose even these.

Lammers came from within the civil service—he was a lawyer in the Interior Ministry in the interwar years—but he also had the prestige of being a veteran of the Great War (he lost his left eye on the Western Front) and joining the NSDAP (just about) before the Machtergreifung.73 Lammers was recommended to head the Reich Chancellery by Interior Minister Frick, and served in the post from the first day to the last of the Third Reich.74 Lammers’ promotion to Reichsminister in November 1937 symbolised his overtaking of Frick, whose authority had been radically diminished a year earlier when Himmler removed the police from his ministry.

As of 1938, Lammers was in a category with maybe half-a-dozen others in terms of his power, but by January 1942 this had changed. The Party was overshadowing the State: the SS had made inroads in many of the ministries Lammers coordinated and there was no individual from whom Bormann would usurp more power than Lammers. Lammers understood that Bormann’s rise—intentionally on Bormann’s part—would render him “superfluous”,75 a dynamic visible by the time of Wannsee, well-advanced by mid-1943 when Bormann formally became Hitler’s private secretary (as usual, the title following the practicality of the Führer’s favour), and completed by mid-1944. By then, Lammers’ office was “little more than a postbox and distribution agency for orders laid down by Bormann”.76

Still, at Wannsee, Lammers remained around the top tier, the primary conduit of Hitler’s orders—almost invariably given verbally—to the civilian government,77 and Kritzinger sat at the table as primus inter pares among the ministry representatives. Kritzinger later said he thought the “Jewish policy” set at Wannsee was shameful; he gave no contemporary indication of this view.78

Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, a lawyer at the Interior Ministry, represented Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick at Wannsee. Frick, a member of the Front Generation imprisoned after the Munich Putsch, was key to the Nazi consolidation of power, one of the principal architects of the legislation that dismantled the Weimar Constitution and, his own misgivings notwithstanding, the lead administrator in superimposing the Party upon the State.79 Though Frick’s ministry lost power to Himmler’s SS after 1936, it did not become irrelevant. As already mentioned, the Nazis—individually and collectively—were genuinely concerned to act legally. This gave Stuckart, not only as the embodiment of his ministry but having the personal prestige of co-authoring of the foundational 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws,80 something of a special role at Wannsee: his approval tacitly reassured the other participants that genocide was legitimate within the Nazi legal order.

It is, therefore, strange that Stuckart is sometimes presented as a dissenter at Wannsee. The basis of this is the Protocol recording Stuckart’s objections during a key section of the discussion, over what to do about “mixed” (Jewish and “Aryan”) marriages, and their Mischling (“hybrid”) offspring, a category Stuckart led in creating.81 What the Protocol actually says, though, is that Stuckart was concerned about the “practical implications” for the bureaucracy, specifically the “endless … administrative work” if the “Mischling” were to be assessed for “evacuation” according to Heydrich’s exemptions, which included some subjective considerations like “racial appearance”. Stuckart raised no objection to the principle of murdering “Mischling”—and no objection whatever to murdering “full Jews”. Stuckart merely “proposed proceeding to compulsory sterilisation” as a blanket measure for part-Jews, thus simplifying the administration and annihilating all of their bloodlines within a generation.

Martin Luther represented the Foreign Ministry of Joachim von Ribbentrop, a former star player within the regime and its international face, who was by the time of Wannsee a victim of his own success. Ribbentrop had steered the Nazi State into war, right up to personally signing the Pact with the Soviets in 1939 that ignited it. But war diminished the need for diplomacy, and the Foreign Ministry lost a lot of ground to the SS. Wannsee was an example of that, with the Foreign Ministry being given a task within an SS operation, namely to coordinate the cooperation of other States under varying degrees of German influence—Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Vichy France, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria—in the Final Solution. It was an important task in enabling the Holocaust, and it makes nonsense of the Foreign Ministry’s post-war claims of institutional innocence. Luther’s actual input at Wannsee, though, amounted to voicing a prudential concern, namely that the pace of the Final Solution be tailored to local levels of antisemitism. Ribbentrop’s once mighty ministry counted for less than the administrators of the conquered zones where the killing took place.

Roland Freisler was one of the best-known legal theorists of the Third Reich (and went on to infamy as head the People’s Court82). The Justice Minister that Freisler represented at Wannsee, Dr. Franz Schlegelberger, by contrast, was not a long-standing Nazi revolutionary, but a highly distinguished academic and practicing jurist of the old world, who only joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and had been in his job merely a year (technically as acting Minister). The Justice Ministry was responsible for applying the racial laws devised by the Interior Ministry, meaning at Wannsee there was a certain overlap of institutional interests between Freisler and Stuckart, notably on the implications of the Final Solution for “mixed” marriages. But, in contrast to Stuckart, Freisler was a passive participant at Wannsee. This was less to do with the Justice Ministry being much less powerful than even the emasculated Interior Ministry, or Freisler lacking the personal prestige of Stuckart, and more to do with Freisler being a Party radical whose eagerness to assist the SS extermination program outweighed any concern for bureaucratic turf or administrative difficulties.

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OCCUPATION ADMINISTRATIONS

The final category of officials present at Wannsee were those administering the conquered areas in the East where the killing had begun and the Final Solution under discussion would be implemented.

Dr. Joseph Bühler, a lawyer, joined the German Academy of Law run by Dr. Hans Frank in 1933.83 Bühler remained in Frank’s orbit ever-afterwards. Frank, a Front Generation Nazi and putschist in 1923, was Hitler’s personal lawyer and the Party lawyer, before becoming the chief legal ideologist of the Nazis in power. In the early phase, Frank held senior official posts and was a trusted Hitler intimate, but by 1936 it was clear his theorised vision of the Nazi regime had been defeated, and legal theory was much less relevant as the Führer prepared for war.84 Once the war began, Frank was sent to govern part of obliterated Poland, the General Government (Generalgouvernement). For Frank, becoming Governor-General was an ambivalent appointment, being both a promotion and removing Frank from proximity to Hitler, the fundamental source of Nazi power. Bühler went with Frank to Warsaw, and in 1940 he became State Secretary for the General Government and Deputy Governor-General.

After the joint Nazi-Soviet attack on Poland that initiated the Second World War, the Soviets annexed the eastern half. The Nazi half was roughly halved again,85 with the westernmost sector annexed and the eastern portion turned into a colony, the General Government, which was inevitably closely tied into the Reich proper.86 The Nazi-annexed sector was divided into four. Three of the pieces were added to pre-existing German provinces,87 and one wholly new province was created, the Warthegau.88 All the annexed territories were subject to vicious “Germanising” policies, but the Warthegau became exceptional, with more to do and subject to a particularly cruel Gauleiter (regional Party leader) and Reich Governor (a State office), Arthur Greiser, who planned to physically “cleanse” the four million Poles and 400,000 Jews in the Warthegau to make space for German settlement. The General Government was the designated dumping ground for “undesirables”.89 In pursuing this mission, the Warthegau emerged as an epicentre of radical innovations in racial policy that helped pave the way to the Holocaust, but it was ultimately in the General Government, which was unable to play the receptacle role envisioned for it, where the Holocaust itself mostly took place.90

The Nazi-conquered districts of former Poland were placed under Party rule. Radicals hand-picked by Hitler operated out of sight of the constraint of public opinion and free of any modulating influence from the State ministries. Not that the resolution of the Party-State conflict in the incorporated and occupied territories reduced governmental anarchy. The Gauleiters had an institutional rival, the SS; the Gauleiters vied with each other to fulfil the broad “Germanising” mandate Hitler had given them; and the provinces were racked internally by the customary clashes of personality and personal power—with the overall effect of contributing to the escalating radicalism as they all competed for Hitler’s favour. In addition, the Nazis in Poland were dealing with “Eastern Jews” (Ostjuden), the most supremely dehumanised population in Nazi theology and propaganda.91

Levels of antisemitic barbarity hitherto unseen swiftly took hold in Nazi-ruled former Poland. Jews were forced, including via pogroms, into ghettos, the first in Łódź (Warthegau) in December 1939,92 and compulsory labour for Jews was introduced a month later. These two measures raised the ideological baseline of radicalism to new heights and crossed a line in moving genocide from the realm of abstract ideal to concrete policy.93 The large-scale Jewish mortality intrinsic to the ghettos and helotage was consciously understood and welcomed by the Nazis.94 In parallel, an infrastructure of registration and confinement was being constructed to make all-out genocide possible. Perhaps most fatefully, the measures, from the perspective of their envisaged outcome, created “problems”—of “unproductive” Jews who could not work, housing shortages and overcrowding, disease outbreaks, and perennial difficulties providing food—for which mass-murder became a “solution”.95

Nazi policy towards Jews at this time “officially” remained “emigration” (expulsion). That policy had been set in place by Göring, who was formally tasked with coordinating a “resolution” to the Jewish Question after Kristallnacht, and he deputised Heydrich, on 24 January 1939, to lead the new Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration, where Eichmann would become a prominent official.96 While the office would fail in its stated mission of “emigration”, it was important in solidifying Heydrich’s administrative hold over Jewish policy. The office becoming a nerve-centre of the Holocaust was downstream of the commission Heydrich now had through lines of authority from Himmler and Göring, as Heydrich emphasised at Wannsee.

The bureaucracy did continue exploring “emigration” options into 1941.97 But the war in the West had largely foreclosed external migration, and the “internal” deportation plans—to empty the Warthegau into the General Government—collapsed in March 1940 when Frank said he could not handle any more and Göring backed him. Step by step, in the Nazi perception, policy was being driven into a cul-de-sac where options other than outright genocide were dwindling.98 War in the East, the planning for which began in December 1940, seemed, briefly, to offer an alternative.99 The vastness of Russia, expected to soon be in Nazi hands,100 could provide the “territorial solution” Heydrich had been advocating since June 1940.101 In itself, this was a marked change: the transfer of Jews to the arctic wastes of Russia was an implicitly genocidal scheme to neglect and work the Jews to death.102 And in the event, the invasion of the Soviet Union would prove to be a “quantum jump” on the road to anti-Jewish genocide.103

Why the Holocaust happened is not in question: because Adolf Hitler wished it to. As his biographer, Sir Ian Kershaw has put it, “No Hitler, no Holocaust”.104 How and when the decision to exterminate Europe’s Jews was made remains debated. One view is that Hitler had formulated the Holocaust plan by the time he published Mein Kampf in 1925-26, if not before, and implemented it as soon as he could. While Hitler’s remarkably consistent worldview was always latently genocidal, and a strong link clearly formed early in his mind between another war and murdering the Jews,105 few historians, even in the “intentionalist” camp, any longer believe there was a straight line from Mein Kampf to Auschwitz.106

Even if one does believe Hitler came to power with a developed plan for anti-Jewish genocide, however, the Holocaust did not begin in 1933, so there must have been a later moment when the order was given, and no written Führer Order for the Shoah has been discovered. It was either destroyed by the Nazis in the final months of the war, along with so much of the Third Reich’s documentation, or, more likely, there never was one to begin with in a system where high-level orders were routinely conveyed verbally. Reconstructing the circumstances and timing of a Führer Order for the Holocaust, therefore, relies on interpreting the surviving records, which is made more difficult by the euphemistic terminology used in the Nazi documents,107 and Hitler’s strenuous efforts—following in the footsteps of Lenin, the originator of the one-party State model Hitler emulated—to avoid personal association with his regime’s most heinous crimes.108

Some argue Hitler gave the Holocaust Order in July-August, in the period of German “euphoria” at the apparently-imminent Soviet collapse, as the apotheosis of his dream of “removing” the Jews. Others contend the order was given in or after September 1941, once the difficulties with the Nazis’ Eastern Blitzkrieg were visible, as a sort of vengeful consolation prize,109 and because of an increasingly firm ideological conviction that the war could not be won unless the Final Solution was completed first, reversing the original plan for victory in the war to create the conditions for the Final Solution.110

Still others doubt Hitler gave an order, verbal or otherwise.111 Requests and rationalisations for genocide had been sent to Berlin over the summer of 1941 by officials in destroyed Poland whose administrations were foundering, ravaged by disease and beset with shortages. The requests were early and unusually candid from the Warthegau.112 The General Government was more circumspect, with the Frank-Bühler administration initially pressing to deport Jews “further East”—to zones everyone knew were killing fields—until, in October 1941, accepting they would be responsible for murdering the Jews in place and initiating mass-shootings.113 The implication from the “structuralists” or “functionalists”, who locate the crystallisation of the Holocaust in the iterative interaction between Hitler at the centre and local initiatives from the periphery, is that there was no “moment” of decision.

The structuralist analysis is not necessarily contradicted by the research showing—after peeling back the layers of Nazi public propaganda and internal regime messaging “leading away from the Führer” on the Jewish Question—how intimately Hitler was involved in the details of anti-Jewish “action” up to the outbreak of war.114 But it does lead some historians to consider it inherently implausible that Hitler played an endorsing, rather than originating, role at the culmination point.

Similarly, it is noteworthy that SS operatives involved in implementing the Final Solution—including Eichmann, its primary logistical coordinator—have uniformly testified that their orders came directly from Hitler. There is no reason to doubt the SS men were substantially correct, that Hitler stood behind the fundamental decision for the Holocaust and every decision of significance as it escalated. But it does not settle the question of a Führer Order because none of the SS officials heard Hitler’s verbal instruction(s) personally; they all heard of Hitler’s will through Himmler. And Himmler did not specify to his subordinates whether, during his increasingly frequent face-to-face meetings with Hitler from the summer of 1941 onwards, the Führer had approved or initiated genocidal measures.115

It is uncontested that the decisive phase of the process leading to Europe-wide extermination of Jews in gas chambers began no later than 31 July 1941, with Göring’s letter to Heydrich giving him official powers over the ministries to devise a “complete solution” to the Jewish Question.116 What is contested is whether this was the written expression of a verbal Führer Order for genocide. Heydrich opening the Wannsee Conference with an invocation of the authorities bestowed by this letter, and saying the meeting was “to create clarity on fundamental questions” raised therein, can be argued to point in that direction. However, it is possible the meaning evolved over time, not unlike the way Heydrich’s Jewish emigration office morphed into part of the administrative apparatus for Jewish annihilation. Suggestive in this regard is that the letter was prepared in Heydrich’s office (probably written by Eichmann). All Göring did was sign it. It is at least possible that Göring saw this merely as confirming de facto authorities Heydrich had had since January 1939 and their extension into the soon-to-be created “reservation” for Jews beyond the Urals. Likewise, it is plausible Heydrich’s purpose was simply locking down bureaucratic turf for the still-envisioned “Russian General Government”.117

This does not, however, rule out the possibility of a Führer Order for the Holocaust at some point after July 1941: Heydrich also said at Wannsee that Jewish policy had switched from “emigration” to “evacuation” “following the appropriate prior approval by the Führer” [emphasis added], which appears to mean the change originated with Hitler, though “approval” leaves open the possibility Hitler consented to a proposal brought to him by Himmler.

By the time of Göring’s letter, the SS Einsatzgruppen units that accompanied the regular army (Wehrmacht) into the Soviet Union had been massacring Jews for six weeks under “general orders” from Berlin. In mid-August 1941, the relatively small-scale Einsatzgruppen killing operations against mostly male Jews escalated into wholesale slaughter: genocide was definitively underway, the so-called Holocaust by Bullets, and it was only possible with the Führer’s approval.118 Simultaneously in mid-August, Goebbels secured Hitler’s assent to make Jews wear the “Yellow Star”, a policy long desired by Party radicals. At that meeting, Hitler referred to the “prophecy” in his 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech—that another world war would result in “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”—and said it was coming true “with an almost uncanny certainty”.119 The “prophecy” and its message that Jews would pay the price for forcing war upon Germany, a Führer theme before BARBAROSSA,120 now became a total fixation for Hitler, repeated constantly to Nazi leaders in private, as well as in the Führer’s public speeches and official Nazi propaganda.121 For example:122

In September 1941, Hitler ordered the deportation of Jews in Germany proper, Austria, and the Czech Protectorate to the East. Hitler had heretofore resisted this policy, another idée fixe of Party activists, arguing the Jews were useful as “hostages” against the Allies, especially if the U.S. should enter the war. Hitler’s abrupt reversal signalled that Hitler was no longer willing to wait until the war was over for the final confrontation with the Jews. It was a momentous conceptual shift and by October 1941 it had effected a policy shift, whether as a result of a Führer Order or a Führer signal spurring radical initiatives from below. The deportations began on 15 October and in all of the destinations—Lodz, Riga, and Minsk—either the Jewish deportees were massacred on arrival or Jews in local ghettos were massacred to make space for the new arrivals.123

In parallel, the General Government, while being spared a new influx of German and Czech Jews, had it made plain by the centre that “their” Jews were never going to be sent “further East”,124 and began implementing their own “solution”. Genocide-scale shootings of Jews commenced in the east of the General Government,125 and authorisation was received from Himmler on 13 October to build an extermination camp, what became Belzec, in the adjacent Lublin District.126 Construction of Belzec was underway as of early November 1941, utilising equipment from Germany proper and officials reassigned from the paused euthanasia program.127 The same month, gas vans began to be used to murder Jews—experimentally in the Warthegau, on a large scale in Ukraine, and on a lesser scale in Latvia.128 Chelmno death camp, purpose-built to liquidate the Jews in the Lodz ghetto using carbon monoxide and like Belzec relying on technology and personnel assigned to it from the centre,129 became operational in the Warthegau in December 1941, three days before Germany declared war on the United States.130

For our purposes, there are two takeaways from all this. First, the threads within the Nazi matrix—ideology, i.e., the guiding antisemitic obsession of the Führer cult, the self-created logistical problems in Poland, and the new opportunities opened up, psychologically and practically, by the invasion of the Soviet Union—had very likely coalesced into a decision to annihilate European Jewry before the Wannsee Conference,131 probably by the time Heydrich sent out the first invitations to Wannsee on 29 November 1941.132 Frank certainly seemed to be under the impression a decision had already been made after visiting Berlin two weeks later.133 Which leads to the second point: Bühler was not “coming in blind” to Wannsee. Bühler not only knew the agenda; the Nazi entity he served had helped condition it and was already implementing it. Wannsee was about the mechanics of generalising the Final Solution and Bühler’s personal contribution at the Conference itself, forcefully advocating this course and that the SS’s new “efficient” methods be deployed in his province first, makes him a more consequential participant than some others, including those below, who outrank him on various metrics.

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Dr. Alfred Meyer, academically trained in law and political science, joined the NSDAP in 1928 as it was expanding into the Protestant north. Meyer became Gauleiter for Westphalia-North in 1931, answering directly to Hitler, and the High President (Oberpräsident) of the Prussian Province of Westphalia from 1938. Meyer was not in Hitler’s inner-circle, but he was not actively marginalised. For example, Meyer was one of the Gauleiters consulted by Goebbels in the summer of 1941 when the Roman Catholic Church ignited the massive anti-Nazi protest movement that halted the euthanasia program.134 A month after Operation BARBAROSSA began, Meyer was appointed Deputy and operational leader of the new Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ostministerium), the body (nominally) responsible for the civilian administration of the Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, which was headed by Alfred Rosenberg, whom Meyer represented at Wannsee.

Meyer was undoubtedly a significant second-tier Nazi official—one of the crucial “middle managers” that keep so many organisations going—but he was not quite as important as he might appear given the foregoing for three reasons. First and most obviously, Bormann’s tightening of the reins over the Party made Gauleiters much less independent figures as time went by.

Second, Rosenberg was not at the baronial level, his self-perception and reputation as a Nazi ideologist second only to Hitler notwithstanding. Rosenberg had the prestige of being an early Nazi Party member even by the standards of the Front Generation. An ethnic German born in Tsarist Estonia, Rosenberg was part of that cadre of ethno-separatist “Russian” collaborators pulled out with the German army in 1918 who played such an outsize role in the early phase of the post-war Völkisch movement in Germany. Where most faded away after 1923, Rosenberg joined the first incarnation of the NSDAP in 1919 and saw it through to the gallows at Nuremberg. This gave him the standing to be persuasive to Hitler on occasion, including possibly about the deportation of Germany proper’s Jews in late 1941.135 But Rosenberg was never entrusted with serious power. Even in the propaganda realm where Rosenberg ostensibly had authority,136 Hitler imposed rather stringent limits on Rosenberg’s hobbyhorses, finding his flamboyant assaults on Christianity tactically irksome and his paganism substantively contemptible.137 It is notable that Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), a tract often ranked with Mein Kampf as encapsulating Nazi ideology, had to be published as a private work and never received official blessing from the NSDAP.138

Third, the Ostministerium, based in Berlin, had little practical reach into the East. This was a problem internally, with Rosenberg and Meyer struggling to get the Ostministerium’s own officials to obey orders. Notoriously, the Ostministerium’s Reichskommissar for Ukraine, Erich Koch, appointed by Hitler on Göring’s recommendation, openly defied Rosenberg’s instructions to try to win over Ukrainians, brutally exploiting a population he regarded as subhuman and challenging Rosenberg’s ideological bona fides into the bargain. It was even more of a problem in dealing with the SS, which had an officially overlapping competency for Eastern policy, especially towards Soviet Jews, and held power on the ground. Inflaming the institutional rivalry, Himmler found dealing with Rosenberg personally exasperating, and unlike the Wehrmacht that Himmler also found vexing, Rosenberg had no legions to compel an accommodation.139 Meanwhile, the Ostministerium had to compete with Göring’s Four Year Office on economic “policy”—the cataloguing and distribution of material, agricultural, and human plunder—and in time Rosenberg’s network was eclipsed by Speer’s apparatus on this front.

All that said, the Ostministerium was an actor in the East and Rosenberg had access to Hitler. In the drive for unity at Wannsee, it would have been senseless to exclude the Ostministerium.

What is slightly mysterious is why the Ostministerium had two representatives present at Wannsee. The probable answer is that Dr. Georg Leibbrandt, like Meyer an academic, but unlike Meyer a specialist in Soviet nationalities, had expertise directly relevant to the Conference, and had met Heydrich (with Meyer) in early October 1941.140 Leibbrandt had studied and fostered relations with German populations in the Soviet Union, which he visited three times in the 1920s, and his work drew international recognition.141 The other potential factor, from the other side, was that Leibbrandt was closer to Rosenberg than Meyer, despite being formally subordinate. Sharing Rosenberg’s basic biography—Leibbrandt was an ethnic German born in Tsarist Ukraine and German collaborator during the First World War—Leibbrandt had quickly become Rosenberg’s political adviser after joining the NSDAP in late 1933,142 and was promoted from within to lead the Political Department at the Ostministerium, one of its three main sections (economics and administration-legal were the others). Meyer, by contrast, had only worked with Rosenberg for six months before Wannsee.

As a last example of the overlapping structure of the Nazi system, two members of the SS faction at Wannsee also held positions in the occupation administrations, namely the SD-police chiefs in the General Government (Schöngarth) and Latvia (Lange).

FINAL NOTE

It may be wondered why the Wehrmacht—often considered the third pillar, alongside Party and State, in the regime, and one certainly deeply involved in the Holocaust—was not present at Wannsee. Part of the answer is that the status of the German Army as a separate power centre was radically eroded by the late 1930s after the catastrophic miscalculation of the General Staff in 1935, inaugurating a Führer Oath designed to tether Hitler to the designs of the military leadership and accomplishing the reverse.143 The direct answer over Wannsee is simply that it was a coordination meeting among the SS and civilian agencies with responsibilities for Jewish policy.

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FOOTNOTES

Eden is based on what is called “the Galapagos Affair” in Germany, a strange episode in the early 1930s when eight idealistic Germans gathered on one of the idyllic Ecuadorian islands made famous by Charles Darwin and descended into a slightly mysterious abyss.

The film introduces us to Friedrich Ritter (played by Jude Law), a doctor turned philosopher, who went out to the Galapagos Islands, specifically Floreana Island, in 1931, intending to isolate himself from the influence of the modern world, which he sees as on the brink of collapse, to write a manifesto that will allow humanity’s renewal. Ritter blends this apocalypticism with Nietzscheanism, vegetarianism, and a commitment to “true democracy”. He is, in short, a dreadful man. He has, however, acquired a devotee, Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby), who is certainly not his wife—marriage, like all other bourgeois values and institutions, having been declared repressive by Ritter’s philosophy—though she fulfils many of the same functions. Between urging Ritter to finish the manifesto she views as cosmically significant, Strauch tries to cure her multiple sclerosis via meditation.

Ritter’s antics have, unknown to him, become a media sensation in Germany, where the impact of the Great Depression, and the growing popularity of and street violence between the Nazis and Communists, have made his apocalyptic ravings seem less absurd. Heinz Wittmer (played by Daniel Brühl), a 41-year-old Great War veteran,1 is among those inspired by reading about Ritter in the newspapers, and resolves to move to the island with his new wife, Margret (Sydney Sweeney), who is a bit younger than him (28), and his 12-year-old son, Harry (Jonathan Tittel), from a previous marriage. Heinz shares in Ritter’s sense that modernity is to be escaped and admires what Ritter has done, in making a new beginning and becoming (apparently) self-sufficient. But Heinz does not share Ritter’s ideology: the Wittmers remain devoutly Christian and deeply practical people. Heinz, for instance, believes the Galapagos environment will be healthier for Harry, who suffers with several chronic conditions.

Ritter is displeased at having his solitude interrupted by the Wittmers, but believes they will soon succumb to the hardships of island life and leave. Unfortunately for him, the Wittmers prove to be unexpectedly capable settlers—and then things get much worse. Two months after the Wittmers’ arrival, a ship anchors off the beach, a record player set upon the sand blaring stirring music, and a woman is carried ashore on the shoulders of two men. After this theatrical entrance, the woman, announcing herself as “Baroness” Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet (Ana de Armas), declares she will soon build a massive hotel called “Hacienda Paradiso”, and proceeds to have sex in the sea with the two men who had carried her, Robert Philippson (Toby Wallace) and Rudolf or “Rudy” Lorenz (Felix Kammerer).

The Baroness is in some ways more ideologically aligned with Ritter, being a libertine individualist who rejects bourgeois morality (she has a dog named “Marquis de Sade”) and seeing the island as a place of real freedom. But she resembles Heinz Wittmer in having been drawn to the island by Ritter’s “celebrity”, while having rather different ideals. The Baroness’s hope is to exploit the island’s fame to enhance her own status and leverage that to transform the island into a lucrative tourist trap. Whatever irritation Ritter felt at the Wittmers’ conventionalism is soon eclipsed by the carry-on from the new trio, the ostentatious polyamory being the least of it.

Carnage begins immediately as the Baroness clashes directly with the other settlers and tries to set them against each other. The Baroness, a complete sociopath, rather than taking any care for her own survival, intrudes on the others, bathing in their drinking water and stealing from their scarce food supplies. She then produces a document she says is from the Governor of the Galapagos Islands, giving her ownership of thousands of acres on the island, and starts acting as if she is the ruler.2 The Baroness’s party have brought firearms, which are used to enforce her writ, and the introduction of violence starts to spiral. The overarching narrative is the escalating war between the three “families”, but the Baroness sows chaos within them, too. In her own camp, Lorenz is increasingly bullied and marginalised, and Ritter’s choices in responding to the Baroness’s encroachments trespass his own ideals and lead to Strauch becoming disillusioned with him. The denouement in 1934 brings these trendlines together with lethal consequences.

Unlike Colonia Dignidad in Chile, where the fascination is the lurid details of how badly a group of German colonists in Latin America behaved, the fascination surrounding the Floreana imbroglio is precisely that all this time later the exact details of what happened are elusive. This is necessarily so because there were few witnesses at the key moments and those who survived had every incentive to shade their testimony to avoid murder charges. The Ecuadorian police records and journalistic investigations are shaped by this factor, as are the most important sources, the competing memoirs, which sold well over subsequent decades and embedded the Galapagos Affair in Germany’s popular culture. The scriptwriters for Eden have clearly immersed themselves in this material and produced a narrative that, as well as being very entertaining—part gritty survival drama, part psychological thriller—is, with one notable exception, a highly plausible rendering of the real-life evidence.

NOTES

The scandal surrounding the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, which has ground on for two years, is coming to a head.

From the moment the scandal erupted in late October 2024, three interlinked elements have been visible: Khan was accused of sexually attacking a female underling multiple times over nearly a year, of using his power within the ICC to try to suppress her complaint via inducements and intimidation, and of applying for the ICC arrest warrants against Israel’s leaders in May 2024 as part of the cover-up.

To say the case is heavily politicised is merely to reiterate that it involves an “international law” institution, and so far from trying to disentangle the issues, Khan used the tangle as his main line of defence. Khan and his surrogates have whispered to the media from the earliest days that the whole thing is an Israeli smear campaign and the accuser is a MOSSAD agent. This conspiratorial defence has not gone well.

The victim turned out to be a Malaysian Muslim woman who shares Khan’s politics, which Khan tried to exploit. Khan initially tried to prevent the victim raising the complaint by rushing to issue the warrants, in blatant violation of the ICC’s own rules of procedure and against the advice even of most ICC staff, then telling her she must keep quiet or it would derail the anti-Israel lawfare campaign they both favoured. Once the warrants were issued and the complaint was officially lodged, Khan continued with the same emotional blackmail to pressure her into withdrawing the allegations, among other things approaching “her several times in the office crying” and at least once saying, “Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants”.

When Qatar hired private investigators to find a Jewish or Israeli connection to the victim that could be used to discredit her, they not only failed to find such a connection: their activities were leaked to the media, disclosing that the Qatari hired guns believed their paymaster had “arms around” Khan and that Khan had made a “deal” with Doha to issue warrants, in exchange for which the Qataris would “look after” him.

Further evidence has also come to light that suggest sexual predation and misuse of power are patterns in Khan’s behaviour. A second female subordinate has come forward to allege she was sexually abused by Khan in a remarkably similar manner to the first accuser. And Khan publicly collaborating with the political warfare against Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, as preparation for issuing an arrest warrant against him, was too much for even the ICC to stomach.

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Khan was suspended on 8 June by the ICC’s Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties (ASP), the executive committee of the ICC’s oversight body, and ten days later he was suspended from the Bar Standards Board, the British regulator for court lawyers. While the ASP committee stressed that its decision was “not an indication of the final outcome”, there are reasons to doubt this. Apart from being an unprecedented step, it comes after the ICC has tried everything it can to protect Khan.

When the initial complaint was made, the ICC buried it for six months, only beginning a serious disciplinary proceeding in October 2024 after a Twitter account started publishing details of the case and the media took it up. A damning investigation of Khan by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), documenting his “nonconsensual sexual contact” with the female aide, was countered by a panel of three ICC judges, who submitted a brief to the ASP committee in March of this year claiming the U.N. report findings “do not establish any misconduct or breach of duty”.

The ASP committee has decided to overrule the ICC judges and recommend the ASP fire Khan after completing their own investigation, which draws on the U.N. report, “the underlying evidence”, and “written submissions”. The New York Times has obtained the report of the ASP committee synthesising the evidence, which concludes:

• Khan “committed sexual harassment when he engaged in sexual activity with a junior member of his staff”;

• Khan “later sought to dissuade his accuser from pursuing her allegations of misconduct against him”;

• Khan at first refused to “clearly” deny sexual contact “with his subordinate, though he was given 30 opportunities to do so, telling an investigating U.N. team that ‘the main issue’ for him was the possibility that his accuser might have made recordings implicating him”;

• Only once no recordings surfaced did Khan begin to plainly denying the sexual assault allegations, denials the ASP judged to be “devoid of credibility”.

The actual conclusion of the ASP Bureau report is strange, though. It says Khan’s behaviour was “extremely harmful” to the proper functioning of the ICC, but that behaviour is described as engaging in “a consensual sexual relationship rendered inappropriate by a power imbalance”. (The corollary is the report sidestepping the question of whether Khan retaliated against other ICC staff who provided evidence he had raped his subordinate.)

Khan’s lawyer understandably protested the recommendation of dismissal on the basis of a charge so different from the one originally brought. Khan must also be perplexed at the ASP’s premise that “inappropriate” behaviour is grounds for dismissal because the Prosecutor’s office is supposed to be occupied by “a person of high moral character”; it never has been yet.

The full ASP will vote on whether to remove Khan from office on 24 July. A finding of misconduct requires a two-thirds majority, and that is hardly foreordained.

Working against Khan, most Western governments are resolved to remove him, and his standing in the global antizionist movement, which includes a significant number of the governments voting on his fate, recently took a hit. Khan’s concern about his declining status within the antizionist movement after HAMAS’s 7 October 2023 pogrom was another factor motivating him to rush the warrants in 2024.1 In May, however, Khan made the mistake of admitting in a public interview that the evidence does not sustain the central antizionist axiom, that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza.

In Khan’s favour, the African States, in particular,2 and most of what we once called “the Third World”, which has an overwhelming majority in the ASP, have staunchly defended him all along, regarding the investigation against him as the work of sinister forces and repeatedly trying to terminate it. It is unclear if the ASP Bureau’s findings or even Khan’s faux pas on antizionist orthodoxy will have much impact on this bloc.

Whichever way the vote goes at the end of the month, it will do serious damage to the prestige and legitimacy of the ICC. Either the ICC will affirm to one and all it is happy to have a sex predator as its Prosecutor, or Khan will be removed and every decision he has made since 2021 will be called into question. It is the perfect opportunity for the Trump administration to take the next step in its campaign against the ICC by sanctioning the whole institution.

NOTES

In the historiography for the first few decades after the Second World War, the 20 January 1942 Wannsee Conference was often portrayed as the moment when the Nazis took the decision to implement the “Final Solution”, that is the extermination of European Jewry. In fact, that decision had been taken and implementation had begun between July and December 1941.

The exterminatory phase of the Shoah began with the Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army into the Soviet Union rounding up and shooting Jews in the occupied areas. This was the so-called Holocaust by Bullets, the most infamous incident of which was the massacre at Babi Yar. By September 1941, the Nazi killer brigades in the occupied East were systematically slaughtering Jews in the villages and towns of Ukraine, and experiments had begun, principally organised by Schutzstaffel (SS) official Walther Rauff, with using carbon monoxide to murder Jews in mobile gas vans. On 8 December 1941, the first death camp, Chelmno, became operational.

The Wannsee Conference was a coordination meeting to bring the ministries of the fractious Nazi State into harmony as the Holocaust was expanded into a Continent-wide, industrialised genocide, aimed at creating a Jew-free Europe, hence the meeting discussed murdering Jews in countries not conquered by the Nazis, including Britain. It was in the months after Wannsee that Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide), which had been experimented with from late August 1941, came into use at the stationary death camps, and by mid-1942 it was being used in the large-scale extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Wannsee meeting was called by the SS, the ascendant element of the Nazi government. It was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Director of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA). The organiser of the conference—the man who prepared the paperwork, arranged the food and drink, etc.—was Adolf Eichmann, at the time a relatively junior SS officer working under Heydrich.

The Wannsee Conference lasted no more than two hours, and probably more like ninety minutes, but we cannot be sure because it was wilfully organised as a secret gathering, knowledge of it kept from all but the most senior Nazi officials, limiting the number of witnesses, and very little was committed to paper about Wannsee, so historians have few sources to work with.

Some details of the meeting were extracted from Eichmann during his trial in Israel in 1961, but caution has to be exercised regarding these for two obvious reasons: (1) Eichmann was speaking from memory nearly two decades after the event; and (2) Eichmann was speaking in a context where he had major incentives to be misleading if not outright untruthful, because he was trying (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to minimise his guilt and avoid the death penalty.

By Eichmann’s account, stenographic notes were taken at Wannsee, but he then edited them to remove “vulgarisms” and make the text reflect (the more euphemistic) National Socialist “official language”, notably “evacuated” and “treated accordingly” to mean extermination of Jews. The original notes were destroyed and Heydrich then reviewed Eichmann’s amended text, ordering further changes. Thirty copies of the final cleaned-up version of the minutes were made and distributed within the Nazi State to a very tight circle of officials.

This Wannsee Protocol (Das Wannsee-Protokoll) produced by Eichmann is the only contemporary official record of the Wannsee Conference produced by the Nazi regime, and the sole surviving copy is Number 16, the one belonging to Martin Luther, the Undersecretary (Unterstaatssekretär) in the German Foreign Office. The probable reason Luther’s papers survived is because he was in no position to burn them as the Allies closed in and in the panic nobody else thought to do it. Luther was arrested in February 1943 and imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died on 13 May 1945, it seems genuinely of natural causes, after plotting an internal coup to replace Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

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The Wannsee Protocol was discovered in late 1946 by Kenneth Duke, a member of the American staff for the International Military Tribunal (IMT) or Nuremberg Trials, who was responsible for microfilming documents that could serve in evidence, and who went on to a career focused on the Nazi Foreign Office archives, among other things. In March 1947, Duke handed the Protocol on to Dr. Robert Kempner, a German-born Jewish refugee, the deputy of the American chief prosecutor at the IMT, Robert H. Jackson, and himself the U.S. prosecutor in the Ministries Trial, the eleventh of twelve “Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings” or “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials”, held before U.S. military courts in 1947-48. It was at this moment that the only other primary evidence about the Wannsee Conference was gathered. Kempner interrogated several of the attendees who were in Allied custody and at the Ministries Trial he grilled several others about Wannsee.

Kempner most extensively questioned Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, who had been State Secretary in the Reich Chancellery and died before the trial. The Reich Chancellery was the central administrative office of the German State, as distinct from the Nazi Party machinery (the two were never fully integrated), coordinating the work of the ministries and handling communication between the ministries and Hitler. As such, Kritzinger occupied a position immediately below one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, Chief of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers, the effective head of the pre-Nazi civilian State bureaucracy and the bridge between it and the Führer, which also made him one of the gatekeepers to Hitler.

Others Kempner questioned in one way or another were:

• Otto Hofmann, an SS-Gruppenführer, head of the Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt or RuSHA).

• Josef Bühler, State Secretary for the General Government (Generalgouvernement), i.e., the part of conquered Poland perhaps most associated with the Holocaust, and Deputy to Governor-General Hans Frank. Bühler tried to deny he had understood that Wannsee was about organising the physical annihilation of the Jewish people, but the demonstration of his guilt, not least by the Protocol where he is recorded asking that wholesale extermination be carried out in his district first, was quite important in showing that all parts of the Nazi apparatus—the Party, civilian administrative State, and the military—were active participants in a genocide that became a national project for the Germans. Bühler was subsequently extradited to Poland, by then under Soviet Communist rule, where he was executed in August 1948.

• Wilhelm Stuckart, State Secretary of the Interior Ministry. Stuckart, a lawyer who co-authored the Nuremberg Race Laws that deprived Kempner of his German citizenship in 1935.

A translation of the Wannsee Protocol is given below.

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30 Copies [Made]

16th Copy

Discussion Protocol [or “Minutes of the Meeting” (Besprechungsprotokoll)]

I.

The following took part in the discussion held on 20 January 1942 in Berlin, at Am Grossen Wannsee No. 56/58, concerning the Final Solution of the Jewish Question [die Endlösung der Judenfrage]:

• Gauleiter Dr. [Alfred] Meyer and Reichsamtsleiter Dr. [Georg] Leibbrandt: Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories

• State Secretary [Staatssekretär] Dr. Stuckart: Reich Ministry of the Interior

• State Secretary [Erich] Neumann: Plenipotentiary [or “Commissioner”] for the Four-Year Plan [Beauftragter für den Vierjahresplan]

• State Secretary Dr. [Roland] Freisler: Reich Ministry of Justice

• State Secretary Dr. [Josef] Bühler: Office of the Governor-General

• Undersecretary [Martin] Luther: Foreign Office

• SS-Oberführer [Gerhard] Klopfer: Party Chancellery [Partei-Kanzlei]

• Ministerial Director [Friedrich Wilhelm] Kritzinger: Reich Chancellery

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• SS-Gruppenführer [Otto] Hofmann: Race and Settlement Main Office

• SS-Gruppenführer [and head of the Gestapo, Heinrich] Müller: Reich Main Security Office [Reichssicherheitshauptamt]

• SS-Obersturmbannführer [Adolf] Eichmann

• SS-Oberführer Dr. [Karl Eberhard] Schöngarth, Commander of the Security Police and the SD in the General Government: Security Police [Sicherheitspolizei] and SD [Sicherheitsdienst]

• SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. [Rudolf] Lange, Commander of the Security Police and the SD for the General District [Generalbezirk] of Latvia, as representative of the Commander of the Security Police and the SD for the Reich Commissariat Ostland [“Eastern Land” (Baltics and Belarus)]: Security Police and SD

II.

The Chief of the Security Police and of the SD, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, communicated at the outset his appointment by the Reich Marshal [Hermann Göring] as Plenipotentiary for the Preparation of the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question [referring to a letter Göring wrote to Heydrich on 31 July 1941] and pointed out that this meeting had been convened in order to create clarity on fundamental questions. The wish of the Reich Marshal to have transmitted to him a draft concerning the organisational, substantive, and material matters with regard to the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question requires the prior coordination of all central agencies directly involved in these questions with a view to the harmonising their actions.

— — PAGE 3 — —

Lead responsibility for conducting the process of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question lay, without regard to geographical boundaries, centrally with the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police [i.e., Heinrich Himmler].

The Chief of the Security Police and the SD then gave a brief retrospective account of the struggle conducted thus far against this opponent. The most essential elements were:

a) the pushing back [zurückdrängung] of the Jews from the individual spheres of life of the German people,

b) the pushing back of the Jews from the living space [lebensraum] of the German people.

In the execution of these efforts, the acceleration of the emigration of the Jews from the territory of the Reich was, as the only possible provisional solution, undertaken in an intensified and systematic manner.

By order of the Reich Marshal, a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established in January 1939, the direction of which was entrusted to the Chief of the Security Police and the SD. It had, in particular, these tasks:

a) to take all measures for the preparation of an increased emigration of the Jews,

b) to direct the stream of emigration,

c) to accelerate the carrying out of emigration in individual cases.

The objective of the task was to cleanse [säubern] the German living space of Jews by legal means.

— — PAGE 4 — —

All authorities were clear about the disadvantages that such a forcing of emigration brought with it. However, in view of the absence of other possible solutions, it had to be accepted for the time being.

The emigration work was, in the period that followed, not only a German problem, but also a problem with which the authorities of the destination countries had to concern themselves. The financial difficulties, such as increases in the vorzeigegelder [“presentation fees”, money Jews fleeing Germany had to demonstrate possessing before countries would take them in] and landing fees on the part of the various foreign governments, lack of ship space, continually tightened immigration restrictions or prohibitions, extraordinarily hindered the emigration efforts. Despite these difficulties, since the Machtübernahme [(Nazi) Seizure of Power] up to the cut-off date of 31 October 1941, a total of approximately 537,000 Jews were caused to emigrate. Of these:

• from 30 January 1933 from the Altreich [“Old Reich”, Germany proper]: approx. 360,000

• from 15 March 1938 from the Ostmark [“Eastern March”, Austria]: approx. 147,000

• from 15 March 1939 from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: approx. 30,000

The financing of emigration was carried out by the Jews themselves or by Jewish-political organisations. In order to avoid the verproletarisierten Juden [“proletarianised Jews”, those stripped of property, reduced to poverty] remaining behind, the principle was followed that the wealthy Jews had to finance the emigration of the propertyless Jews; for this purpose, an appropriate levy or emigration tax was prescribed, graduated according to wealth, which was used to meet the financial obligations arising in the course of the emigration of propertyless Jews.

— — PAGE 5 — —

In addition to the Reichsmark revenues, foreign currency had been required for presentation and landing fees. In order to preserve the German foreign-currency reserve, the Jewish financial institutions abroad were induced by the Jewish organisations within the country to take care of the procurement of corresponding foreign-currency funds. In this way, by means of gifts from these foreign Jews, a total of approximately 9,500,000 dollars had been made available up to 30 October 1941.

In the meantime, the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police [Himmler], in view of the dangers of emigration during wartime and in view of the possibilities of the East, has prohibited the emigration of Jews.

III.

In place of emigration, there has now emerged as a further possible solution, following the appropriate prior approval by the Führer, the evacuation of the Jews to the East.

However, these actions are to be spoken of merely as provisional possibilities [or “makeshift expedients” (ausweichmöglichkeiten)]; nevertheless, practical experience is already being gathered here which is of significant importance with regard to the coming Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

In the course of this Final Solution of the European Jewish Question, approximately 11 million Jews come under consideration, who are distributed among the individual countries as follows:

— — PAGE 6 — —

A

• Altreich [Germany proper]: 131,800

• Ostmark [Austria]: 43,700

• Ostgebiete [Eastern Territories]: 420,000

• General Government: 2,284,000

• Bialystok [Nazi District in Poland]: 400,000

• Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: 74,200

• Estonia: Jew-free [judenfrei]

• Latvia: 3,500

• Lithuania: 34,000

• Belgium: 43,000

• Denmark: 5,600

• France / Occupied Territory: 165,000

  • Unoccupied Territory: 700,000

• Greece: 69,600

• Netherlands: 160,800

• Norway: 1,300

B

• Bulgaria: 48,000

• England: 330,000

• Finland: 2,300

• Ireland: 4,000

• Italy including Sardinia: 58,000

  • Albania: 200

• Croatia: 40,000

• Portugal: 3,000

• Romania including Bessarabia: 342,000

• Sweden: 8,000

• Switzerland: 18,000

• Serbia: 10,000

• Slovakia: 88,000

• Spain: 6,000

• Turkey (European part): 55,500

• Hungary: 742,800

• USSR: 5,000,000

  • Ukraine: 2,994,684

  • White Russia excluding Bialystok: 446,484

Total: More than 11,000,000

— — PAGE 7 — —

In the case of the stated numbers of Jews in the various foreign States, however, these concern only Glaubensjuden [Jews by religion/faith], since the definitions of Jews according to racial principles are still lacking there in part. The treatment of the problem in the individual countries will, in view of the general attitude and conception, encounter certain difficulties, especially in Hungary and Romania. Thus, for example, even today in Romania a Jew can obtain, in exchange for money, appropriate documents which officially certify him as having a foreign nationality.

The influence of the Jews upon all spheres in the USSR is known. In the European territory there [i.e., European Russia] live approximately 5 million Jews; in the Asian region, [there are] scarcely a quarter of a million Jews.

The occupational classification of the Jews residing in the European territory of the USSR was approximately as follows:

• In agriculture: 9.1 %

• as urban workers: 14.8 %

• In trade: 20.0 %

• employed as State workers: 23.4 %

• in the private professions – medicine, press, theatre, etc.: 32.7 %

Under appropriate direction, the Jews are now, in the course of the Final Solution, to be brought in a suitable manner to labour deployment in the East. In large labour columns [arbeitskolonnen], with separation of the sexes, the Jews fit for work will be led into these territories while building roads, whereby without doubt a large part will fall away through natural diminution [or “natural reduction” (natürliche Verminderung)].

— — PAGE 8 — —

The eventual final remaining stock [of Jews] will, since this will undoubtedly concern the most resistant part, have to be treated accordingly, because this element, representing a natural selection [natürliche Auslese], would, if released, become the nucleus [lit. “germ cell” (Keimzelle)] of a new Jewish revival. (See the experience of history.)

In the course of the practical implementation of the Final Solution, Europe is to be combed through from west to east. The territory of the Reich, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be dealt with first, if only due to the housing question and other socio-political necessities.

The evacuated Jews will first be brought, train by train, into so-called transit ghettos [Durchgangsghettos], in order from there to be transported further to the East.

An important prerequisite, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich further explained, for carrying out the evacuation at all, is the precise determination of the circle of persons under consideration.

The intention is not to evacuate Jews over the age of 65, but rather to transfer them to an old-age ghetto [Altersghetto]—for which Theresienstadt is envisaged.

In addition to these age groups—of the approximately 280,000 Jews present in the Old Reich and the Ostmark [Austria] on 31 October 1941, about 30 per cent are over 65 years of age—the Jewish old-age ghettos will furthermore receive severely war-damaged [i.e., disabled] Jews and Jews with war decorations (Iron Cross, First Class). With this

— — PAGE 9 — —

expedient solution, many interventions will be eliminated at a stroke.

The beginning of the individual larger evacuation operations [Evakuierungsaktionen] will depend to a great extent upon military developments. With regard to the handling of the Final Solution in the European territories occupied and influenced by us, it was proposed that the relevant officials of the Foreign Office should confer with the competent officials of the Security Police and the SD.

In Slovakia and Croatia the matter is no longer all too difficult, since the most essential core questions in this respect have already there been brought toward a solution. In Romania, the government has in the meantime likewise appointed a Plenipotentiary for Jewish Affairs [Judenbeauftragten]. For the regulation of the question in Hungary, it is necessary, in the near future, to impose upon the Hungarian Government an adviser for Jewish affairs.

With regard to the initiation of preparations for the regulation of the problem in Italy, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich considers a connection with the Chief of Police in these matters to be appropriate.

In occupied and unoccupied [i.e., Vichy] France, the registration of the Jews for evacuation will in all probability be able to proceed without great difficulties.

Undersecretary Luther stated in this connection that, in the event of an in-depth treatment of this problem in certain countries, such as the Nordic States, difficulties would arise, and that it is therefore advisable for the time being to postpone these countries.

— — PAGE 10 — —

In view of the small numbers of Jews involved here, this postponement does not in any case constitute a significant restriction.

The Foreign Office foresees no great difficulties for southeastern and western Europe.

SS-Gruppenführer Hofmann intends to send along to Hungary, for general orientation, an official of the Race and Settlement Main Office when the matter is taken in hand there by the Chief of the Security Police and the SD. It was determined that this official of the Race and Settlement Main Office, who is not to become actively involved, should temporarily be assigned officially as an assistant to the Police Attaché.

In the course of the Final Solution measures, the Nuremberg Laws are, so to speak, to form the basis, whereby a prerequisite for the complete clearing up of the problem is also the solution to the questions of mixed marriages and persons of mixed ancestry.

The Chief of the Security Police and the SD, with reference to a letter from the Chief of the Reich Chancellery [i.e., Hans Lammers], discusses first, in theoretical terms, the following points:

1) Treatment of first-degree Mischlinge [lit. “mixling” or “hybrids”].

First-degree Mischlinge [i.e., half-Jews] are, with regard to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, placed on an equal footing with Jews.

— — PAGE 11 — —

The following are exempted from this treatment:

a) First-degree Mischlinge who are married to persons of German blood, from whose marriage children (second-degree Mischlinge) have resulted. These second-degree Mischlinge are, in essence, placed on an equal footing with Germans.

b) First-degree Mischlinge for whom exemption permits have hitherto been granted by the highest authorities of the Party and the State in any sphere of life whatsoever. Each individual case must be reviewed, whereby it is not excluded that the decision may once again be rendered to the disadvantage of the Mischling.

The prerequisites for an exemption permit must always be fundamental merits of the Mischling in question himself. (Not merits of the parent or spouse of German blood.)

The first-degree Mischling who is to be exempted from evacuation will be sterilised—in order to prevent offspring and to clear up the Mischling problem definitively. The sterilisation takes place voluntarily. However, it is a prerequisite for remaining in the Reich. The sterilised “Mischling” is thereafter freed from all restrictive regulations to which he has hitherto been subject.

2) Treatment of second-degree Mischlinge.

As a matter of principle, second-degree Mischlinge are assigned to the persons of German blood, with the exception of the following cases, in which second-degree Mischlinge are placed on an equal footing with Jews:

— — PAGE 12 — —

a) Origin of the second-degree Mischling from a bastard marriage [Bastardehe, i.e., where both partners are Mischlinge].

b) Particularly unfavourable racial appearance of the second-degree Mischling, which already outwardly marks him as among the Jews.

c) Particularly poor police and political assessment of the second-degree Mischling, which permits recognition that he feels and behaves like a Jew.

However, even in these cases exceptions are not to be made if the second-degree Mischling is married to a person of German blood.

3) Marriages between full Jews and persons of German blood.

Here it must be decided from individual case to individual case whether the Jewish party is to be evacuated, or whether, taking into consideration the effects of such a measure upon the German relatives of this mixed marriage, he is to be transferred to an old-age ghetto.

4) Marriages between first-degree Mischlinge and persons of German blood.

a) Without children.

If no children have resulted from the marriage, the first-degree Mischling is to be evacuated or transferred to an old-age ghetto. (The same treatment as in marriages between full Jews and persons of German blood, point 3.)

— — PAGE 13 — —

b) With children.

If children have resulted from the marriage (second-degree Mischlinge), they are, if they are placed on an equal footing with Jews, to be evacuated together with the first-degree Mischling or transferred to a ghetto. Insofar as these children are placed on an equal footing with Germans (the normal cases), they are to be exempted from evacuation, and thereby the first-degree Mischling as well.

5) Marriages between first-degree Mischlinge and first-degree Mischlinge or Jews.

In these marriages (including the children), all parties are treated as Jews and therefore evacuated or transferred to an old-age ghetto.

6) Marriages between first-degree Mischlinge and second-degree Mischlinge.

Both parties to the marriage are, without regard to whether children are present or not, to be evacuated or transferred to an old-age ghetto, since any children would, in racial terms, as a rule exhibit a stronger Jewish blood admixture [Bluteinschlag] than second-degree Jewish Mischlinge.

SS-Gruppenführer Hofmann takes the position that extensive use must be made of sterilisation, especially since the Mischling

— — PAGE 14 — —

placed before the choice of whether he is to be evacuated or sterilised, would prefer to undergo sterilisation.

State Secretary Dr. Stuckart stated that the practical implications of carrying out the solution possibilities just communicated for the clearing up of the mixed-marriage and Mischling questions in this form would be an endless amount of administrative work. In order, on the other hand, to take account of the biological facts in all cases as well, State Secretary Dr. Stuckart proposed proceeding to compulsory sterilisation.

For the simplification of the mixed-marriage problem, furthermore, possibilities would have to be considered with the aim that the legislator might, for example, say: “These marriages are dissolved.”

With regard to the question of the effect of the evacuation of the Jews upon economic life, State Secretary Neumann declared that the Jews presently employed in labour deployment in war-essential enterprises could not at present be evacuated so long as no replacement labour was available.

SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich pointed out that these Jews would in any case not be evacuated under the guidelines approved by him for carrying out the evacuation actions currently in progress.

State Secretary Dr. Bühler stated that the General Government would welcome it if the Final Solution of this question were begun in the General Government, because, for one thing, the transport problem does not play a predominant role here

— — PAGE 15 — —

and reasons relating to labour deployment would not hinder the course of this action. Jews would have to be removed from the territory of the General Government as quickly as possible, because it is precisely here that the Jew represents an eminent danger as a carrier of disease, and because, on the other hand, through continued illicit trade, he permanently brings the economic structure of the country into disorder. Of the approximately two and a half million Jews under consideration, moreover, the majority of cases are unfit for work [arbeitsunfähig].

State Secretary Dr. Bühler further stated that responsibility for the conduct of the solution of the Jewish Question in the General Government lies with the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, and that his work would be supported by the authorities of the General Government. He had only one request: to solve the Jewish Question in this territory as quickly as possible.

In conclusion, the various kinds of possible solutions were discussed, whereby both Gauleiter Dr. Meyer and State Secretary Dr. Bühler took the position that certain preparatory work in the course of the Final Solution should be carried out immediately in the territories concerning themselves, though disturbance of the population would have to be avoided.

With the request of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD to the participants in the meeting that they provide him with appropriate support in carrying out the solution work, the meeting was closed.

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Almost twenty years ago, on 30 June 2006, Usama bin Laden released a eulogy for Ahmad al-Khalayleh, the Jordanian jihadist universally known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of the Islamic State movement. A translation of the eulogy is given below.

Zarqawi had established the nucleus of IS with Bin Laden’s seed funding in Taliban Afghanistan in late 1999 and moved to Iraq with his cadres in early 2002, linking up with the well-developed and increasingly emboldened jihadist underground, a year before the Anglo-American invasion that felled Saddam Husayn. In October 2004, after eighteen months of combat with the Coalition where it was quite clear the Zarqawists had some connection to Al-Qaeda, Zarqawi resolved all doubt by publicly swearing an oath of allegiance to Bin Laden and renaming his organisation Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM). It was as emir of AQM that Zarqawi perished on 7 June 2006 and as such that Bin Laden eulogised him three weeks later.

The alliance forged by Bin Laden and Zarqawi between their jihadist currents would, a lot of murk and ambiguity notwithstanding, outlast both of them, but ultimately the theological and strategic tensions that had been visible at their first meeting just before the turn of the millennium proved too much of a strain. The relationship collapsed in 2014 and in many ways the story of the jihadist movement since then has been the struggle for supremacy between two poles that have steadily widened as they defined themselves against one another.

Eulogy for the Martyr of the Umma and the Emir of the Martyrdom-Seekers: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi1

Praise be to God, then praise be to God, praise be to God who said: “Think not that those killed in the path of God [sabil Allah] are dead. Rather, they live with their Lord, being provided for, rejoicing in what God has given them from His bounty, and receiving glad tidings about those who have not yet joined them but have been left behind: no fear shall be upon them, nor shall they grieve” [Qur’an 3:169-170].

Prayers and peace be upon our Prophet Muhammad, who said: “By the One in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, I would love to raid in the path of God and be killed, then raid and be killed, then raid and be killed” [hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari].

As for what follows:

Our Islamic umma [community] has been struck with crushing grief by the loss of its fearless knight [or “bold horseman” (farisuha al-miqdam)], the lion of jihad, and the man of resolve and sound judgement: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ahmad al-Khalayleh, following his killing in a sinful [or “wicked” (atheema)] American airstrike. To God we belong and to Him we return. We ask God to honour him with what he wished for, thus accepting him among the martyrs, granting him abundant reward and recompense, and beautifying consolation for his family and relatives.

O Muslims, indeed the grief is immense, and the situation is grave. We urge you toward what is beautiful, namely patience, and we encourage you toward what is abundant, namely reward [al-ajr].

[Arabic poetry, indicated henceforth by italics]

Thus let the calamity be immense and the matter grievous [/] for there is no excuse for an eye whose tears have not flowed

A youth who died amid striking and stabbing [/] a death that stands in place of victory since victory escaped him

Our precious Islamic umma: although the separation from the beloved ones, Abu Musab and his companions, has saddened us, it has gladdened us that their souls were poured out in these tremendous epics [al-malahim] while they were defending the shari’a of Islam. And although we have been afflicted by the loss of a knight [fursan] from among our greatest knights and an emir from among our greatest emirs, it has gladdened us that we have found in him a symbol and everlasting example for the generations of our glorious umma [to come]. The mujahideen shall remember him, supplicate for him, and praise him in poetry and prose, secretly and openly. We shall praise him according to what we knew.

For he was easy in companionship so long as he was not wronged [/] and if he sensed fear among the people, he charged forth without reproach

Abu Musab departed with his head held high, mighty of soul, free and proud, noble and loyal. He would never accept humiliation in his deen [lifeway, i.e., Islam], nor would he ever sleep upon oppression, nor would he flatter anyone or compromise regarding the truth. Stern against the disbelievers [or “infidels” (kafireen)], merciful toward the believers, inciting toward fighting, and waging jihad in the path of the deen.

Among his statements, may God have mercy on him, was: “There is no good in a life where our honour is violated, the dignity of our sisters is trampled, and the slaves of the Cross rule over us.”

Another of his statements: “We fight in Iraq and our eyes are upon Jerusalem, which shall not be regained except through a Qur’an that guides and a sword that grants victory.”2

He, may God have mercy on him, was the focus [or “object” (mahall)] of the love of his friends and the esteem of his enemies, the fair-minded among them, who testified for him and praised him, and there is no wonder in that.

He departed pure of garments; there did not remain a garden [/] on the morning he was laid to rest that did not wish to be his grave

Upon you be the peace of God always, for indeed I [/] have seen that the noble, free man has no lifespan [i.e., limit to his legacy]

Abu Musab followed the example of our Prophet Muhammad, and took as his example others who passed before him from among our leaders: Musab [ibn Umayr], Umar [ibn al-Khattab], Ali [ibn Abi Talib or Imam Ali], and Ja’far [ibn Abi Talib], may God be pleased with them all. Thus he plunged into the depths of war with a smile, so God raised his rank, elevated his remembrance, and he became an example for those after him.

The coward’s love of self led him survival [/] and the brave man’s love of war led him to war

And what difference is there between mankind [i.e., other men] and him [/] when he feared what is fearful and regards what is difficult as difficult?

Abu Musab, may the mercy of God be upon him, departed after God had granted fath [opening, conquest]. He established a base for defending the deen and for recovering Palestine, by God’s permission, and exacted revenge there on behalf of the oppressed [mustad’afeen], inflicting heavy losses upon the Americans, the allies of the Jews. He confounded them, killed their men, shattered their edifice [lit. “structure” (bunyanahum)], exhausted their wealth, disrupted their unity, and humiliated their arrogance, until those both near and far, the obedient and the disobedient, dared to challenge them. So it was that he entered history through its widest gates and ennobled it, and took the world by the hand toward the path of honour and made it known to it, through determination, decisiveness, and a proud refusal [to submit]. As a result, his biography was immortalised alongside the biographies of the eminent nobles.3

Do not weep except for a lion who has departed [/] bravely in the raging wars

Leave me in the wars that I may die honourably [/] for an honourable death is better than my life

Abu Musab taught humanity practical lessons in how freedom is seized. For freedom is not granted to the submissive beneath the domes of democracy. He taught humanity rebellion against idolatrous rulers [tamarud ala al-tughat], in an age in which the greatest taghut, the Pharaoh of the age, Bush and his companions, hold sway, trampling upon all values and covenants. In the invasion of Iraq and the prison of Guantanamo, you have a lesson. They terrorised the people, humiliated them with fire and iron, and treated presidents as though they were slaves.4

The Pharaoh of the age came to Iraq not caring about the objections and demonstrations of mankind, who said to him: “No to the shedding of red blood for the sake of black oil”. But he was contemptuous of the entire world and advanced into Iraq arrogantly, swaggering on account of his troops and equipment, imagining that the lions of the wilds [asad al-shara] had been transformed [into something weak], and that the men of Islam had receded after the Arab rulers, the kings and presidents, had given him every sign of obedience and loyalty, humiliation and submission. Each one of them was placing his hand upon his head, wondering when his turn would come to be placed in his grave.

The enemy attacked Iraq, then began oppressing the people mercilessly and demolishing villages utterly. The roar of aircraft filled the horizons and deafened the ears, while the explosions of gunpowder spread death and offended the nostrils. The mountains were shaking and swaying from the intensity of the bombardment, until hearts were in throats. Those possessing courage and understanding sought refuge in their homes; they were not stirred by words, and their feet would not carry them because of the severity of the terror. Falsehood raised its head high, the munafiqeen [hypocrites] broke their covenants and stood in the trench of the Christians and Jews. The Muslims became like scattered sheep on a rainy night in a land filled with predators.

It was under the shadow of that gloomy atmosphere—where you saw the semblances of leaders but no leaders, the semblances of ulema but no ulema, and the semblances of men but no men, except those upon whom God had mercy—in those difficult, earth-shaking circumstances, that there appeared the knight of Islam, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Like a lion stretching out upon its forelegs [/] bold-hearted, a lion of great stature and power

He appeared with a small band of believers. They were seventeen men, not seventeen armies.5 They bound themselves together, pledged themselves to one another, and made a covenant with God Most High that they would support His deen or perish in its defence, [as] men, and [real] men are few.

The people are a thousand, of whom [only] one is like a man [/] while one man may equal a thousand when a matter becomes serious

Whom were they going to fight? Those equal to them in number, or twice their number?! Never [or “by no means” (kalla)]. Or even ten times their number?! Never. Rather, they [the enemy] were waves like the sea, waves of equipment and soldiers of evil. But whoever magnifies God’s right in his heart and is granted tawhid [monotheism], the firm mountains will sway while he does not sway. So our knight dismounted, carrying the banner [or “standard” or “flag” (al-raya)], and resolved upon fighting until the end: either he would taste what Ja’far tasted, or he would taste victory.6

He planted his foot firmly in the swamp of death [/] and said to it: “Beneath your sole is al-hashr [“the gathering” (of mankind on Judgment Day)].”

So they plunged into the depths of war and began striking, with a small number of Kalashnikovs, a small number of anti-tank mines, and a small number of bazooka launchers. Abu Musab had previously come with some of his brothers to the jihad against the Russians [i.e., Soviets, in Afghanistan in the 1980s7], so he competed with his brothers [in racing to the battlefield] until he overtook those who had gone before him, and when he spoke he excelled over the other speakers. Through his coming, and that of his brothers, to the land of Afghanistan, they gained experience [lit. “inoculation” (ta’tim)] in battling a superpower, and the myth of the [invincibility of] great powers vanished from their minds. They transferred the great, surging boldness and the immense morale from Afghanistan to Baghdad, igniting the fuse of jihad. The energies of the youth erupted in every place, from the Upper Euphrates to its lower reaches, and to God belongs all praise and favour.

This is our knight about whom we are speaking. He accomplished all of that, after God granted him success, with his own modest means alone. There was not behind him an international alliance, nor a regional coalition, nor a global organisation. That is the bounty of God; He gives it to whom He wills, and God is All-Encompassing, All-Knowing.

The soul of Isam made Isam a leader [/] and taught him to charge into battle and boldly advance

Yes, this is the knight of Islam about whom we speak, who stood in the face of the Pharaoh of the age, in the face of American imperialism [al-imbiriyaliyya al-amrikiyya], after the international organisations failed, after the regional groupings failed, after the entire world failed to stop that brutal, exceedingly unjust aggression.8

A striker of heads, striking heads in the heat of battle [/] agile when the heavily-armoured horse becomes burdened

Perceptive in obtaining praise from every place [/] even if the lions concealed it between their fangs

Here we ask God to grant the best reward to our bold knight, and to bestow the best reward upon everyone who offered us condolences and comfort regarding our great knight, may God have mercy on him. We mention specifically al-Emir al-Mu’mineen [“the Commander of the Faithful” or “the Prince of the Believers”], [Taliban leader] Mullah Muhammad Umar, and we ask God Most High to grant him and his mujahid brothers victory over the infidels.9

Then I say to whoever accuses the knight of our umma of killing some segments of the Iraqi population: if someone comes to you claiming that a man gouged out his eye, wait until you see the accused, for perhaps the claimant himself gouged out his own eye!

In recent weeks, there has been increased clarity on this matter. The [Iraqi Sunni Arab parliamentary] deputy Mohammed al-Dayni has spoken about the scale of the oppression and torture being practised against the Muslims in Iraqi prisons. Likewise, leaders of the Association of Muslim Scholars [Hay’at Ulema al-Muslimeen] has previously spoken about the war of extermination to which the sons of Islam in Iraq are being subjected.

Abu Musab, may the mercy of God be upon him, had clear instructions: that he should concentrate his fighting upon the invading occupiers, primarily the Americans, and that he should leave alone anyone who desired neutrality. As for whoever insisted on standing and fighting in the trench of the Crusaders against the Muslims, he was to kill them, whoever they may be, regardless of their madhhab [school of Islamic jurisprudence] or tribe, because supporting infidels against Muslims is a nullifier from among the Ten Nullifiers of Islam [Nawaqid al-Islam], as is established among the people of knowledge [ahl al-ilm, i.e., the consensus of the ulema].

Next, I say to Bush: you must hand over the body of the hero to his family. Do not be excessive in your rejoicing, for the banner has not fallen, praise be to God. Rather, it has passed from one lion to another lion from among the lions of Islam, and we shall continue, by God’s permission, fighting you and your allies in every place—in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Somalia and Sudan—until we drain your wealth, kill your men, and you return defeated to your own lands, just as we defeated you before, by God’s grace, in Somalia.10

Likewise, I say to your proxy [or “agent” (wakil)] in Jordan: enough of your despotism [or “arbitrary rule” (istibdad)]. You prevented Abu Musab from entering his homeland alive, so do not now stand between him and that. The one most deserving of leaving Jordan is you, to the Hijaz, for that is your land and the land of your forefathers before Britain installed your grandfather, Abdullah the First, as its agent [amila] over Jordan. What frightens you about Al-Zarqawi, may God have mercy upon him, even from beyond the grave, is that you know that if the Muslims are left to their own devices concerning his funeral, then, by God’s permission, it will be a great funeral, a demonstration of the extent of the Muslims’ sympathy with their mujahideen sons.11

In conclusion, I say: Abu Musab, may God have mercy upon him, brings honour not only to his tribe, his homeland, and his umma, but humanity as a whole, because he embodied for it the meanings of honour and proud refusal [of surrender], sacrifice and self-ransom [al-tadhiya wal-fed’a12]. Indeed, his life story is valuable material for [use as] a contemporary model. If the world were to study his fragrant biography, its sons would learn how faith in God [iman bi Allah] makes men, so that they resist the people of injustice and misguidance [or “oppression and error” (al-zulm wal-dalal)].

It is incumbent on every educator, writer, and novelist worthy of the name to draw from his biography that which may give sustenance to the rising generation and the next generations. Similarly, it is incumbent on every free poet to compose poetry regarding this falcon. If I were among the knights of poetry, I would greatly multiply the rhymes in lamenting him, and thereby compete with Tamadur [bint Amr, a.k.a. Al-Khansa] in lamenting Sakhr. But there is no harm in my borrowing verses from the poetry of the poet of the contemporary Islamic da’wa [proselytism], [the Islamist propagandist on Al-Jazeera satellite channel] Shaykh Yusuf Abu Hilala:

The earth choked with the blood of the sacrifices, and the fields of struggle blazed,

And from the barren desolate wastelands there springs forth the source of pure water,

Shining proudly with the banners of al-aqeeda [the creed] and true acts of heroism,

Declaring: if giving becomes scarce, then we are the sacrifices for the deen.

***

Victory belongs to those dyeing their bodies with the blood of wounds,

Who refuse to sell away their lands in willing surrender,

And those who disdain the life of humiliation and violation.

***

A few moments whose terror would overwhelm the raging winds,

Hamdan plunges down through them like a falcon with clipped wings,

After he had stormed into death while bombardment had engulfed the surrounding regions.

***

I bent over kissing his bleeding wound, and my own wounds reopened,

Tears flowed upon my cheek, so I said: “O my soul and my comfort,

Would that you had mercy upon our hearts and turned away from this departing.”

***

Then the shrouded hero answered me, mocking my suggestion:

“Wipe away your tears; there is no comfort for me in your noble tears.

This is the path if your love is sincere, so carry my weapon.”

May God have mercy on Abu Musab, and may God have mercy on everyone who carried weapons for jihad in the path of God. The last of our supplications is that all praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and prayers and peace be upon our Prophet Muhammad and upon his family and all his companions.

Shaykh Usama bin Muhammad bin Laden

4 Jumada al-Thani 1427 AH

30 June/Haziran 2006 AD

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FOOTNOTES

Read the article over at UnHerd.

A translation is given below of the main editorial in the 548th edition of Islamic State’s Al-Naba newsletter, published on 21 May 2026. The article, entitled, “Our Throats Before Islam”,1 i.e., that the jihadists will sacrifice their lives to defend the faith, is an interesting example of a recurring motif in IS propaganda, namely using Islamic history to justify atrocities and incite Muslims to violence against non-jihadist Muslims and non-Muslims.

The Naba article draws on the Islamic Tradition—the early biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, the hadith that record the sayings and actions of the Prophet and the lives of the Companions (Sahaba), select legal rulings—and a smattering of Qur’an verses to build an argument that presents IS’s ideology as the only legitimate interpretation of Islam, one which places jihad and the killing of Jews, Christians, and hypocritical Muslims above all other obligations.

This has always been IS’s method, to arrange the sacred history accepted by the mainstream of Islam to buttress radical conclusions. IS are not alone among Islamists in doing this. There is much less discussion of ideological warfare in the West these days when it comes to countering jihadism, and this is perhaps for the best given how badly those efforts have gone. But should interest revive, challenging the certainty about history that underlies the jihadist project would be an area to focus on.

In the case of this Al-Naba article, the immediate problem is that the Tradition, which largely interprets the Qur’an, since the text of the Qur’an is far from self-evident in its meaning (as the Qur’an itself acknowledges2), dates from about two-hundred years after Muhammad’s death (albeit we do not know exactly when Muhammad died) and was generated in the context of consolidating an Imperial creed to explain a world transformed by the Arab conquests. In Christian terms, this would be like constructing the life of Jesus by relying on the Gnostic Gospels that were written to make theological arguments around two centuries after Christ’s death, thus have little historical grounding in the realities of first-century Judea. Making it better known simply that there is a question mark over this history, even without the detail, might introduce just enough doubt to halt a potential jihadist recruit.

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If the question is the first (known) shark attack on a human being, archaeology has the answer: a man in Japan, whose 3,000-year-old skeleton has nearly 800 wounds.1 If the question is the first human representation of a shark attack, the current answer is a Greek vase dating to c. 725 BC, discovered in Ischia, Italy, which shows a man being assailed by a large fish that is probably a shark. The scope of this article is narrower, focusing on the earliest written accounts of shark attacks. However, this does allow a somewhat broader inquiry into how people have perceived sharks over time, albeit not all people, since the literary sources come entirely from Europe.2

It is possible—even likely—that the first written record of a shark attack appears in the work of the Father of History himself, Herodotus, two-and-a-half millennia ago.3 In 492 BC, Mardonius, the son-in-law of the Persian King Darius I, led an expedition to Greece, nominally to punish Athens and Eretria for supporting the Ionian Revolt, but “the Persians were really aiming at the conquest of as many Greek States as they could manage”, Herodotus tells us. The Persian fleet “was approaching the headland” of Mount Athos, Herodotus goes on, when “a violent northerly gale swept down”, and “the damage suffered by their ships was terrible”. “It is said” 300 ships were destroyed and 20,000 men killed, “dashed onto the rocks or drowned because they did not know how to swim, or else [they] perished of hypothermia”. Herodotus then reports: “Some of these casualties were due to the presence in the waters off Athos of an immense number of savage beasts which devoured the Persians”.4 It is overwhelmingly probable this refers to sharks, but we cannot be absolutely sure.

There is no serious doubt that when naturalists in the Classical period, such as Aristotle and as Pliny the Elder, wrote of “dogfish” or similar they were referring to sharks.5 The Greeks were a maritime people and the Mediterranean became a Roman lake: they saw sharks regularly. The tumult of the Roman Empire’s fragmentation reduced Europeans’ ocean-going capacity and the advent of Islam restricted their access: to even live on the coastline of Italy, let alone venture onto the Mediterranean Sea, was to be at high risk of being carried off by slave-seeking Arab pirates. Thus, in the Medieval era, confined basically to the Continent and fishing mostly in rivers, Europeans largely did not encounter sharks.

An exception to this rule was recorded around 1350. At that time, Europe had significantly recovered from the Roman collapse,6 and the brief period of counter-attack we call the Crusades,7 though it had failed in its objective of restoring Jerusalem and the Holy Land to Christendom, had succeeded in creating some more room to move in the Mediterranean. In this environment,8 Ludolf von Sudheim, a German Roman Catholic priest and a historian of the then-recently lost Crusader States, had been able to tour the Islamic-ruled eastern Mediterranean—the Land of Israel, the broader Levant, and Egypt—between 1336 and 1341.9 Ludolf’s chronicle of his travels discussed, inter alia, the various dangers of maritime journeys in small vessels: the sea itself; “pirates or corsairs”, especially around “Barbary” (the Muslim polities of North Africa); the “rocks and shoals”. Ludolf then mentions the “perils from great fish”:

About these you should know that there is in the sea a certain fish which the Greeks call Troya marina, which means sea-swine, which is greatly to be feared by small ships, for this same fish seldom or never does any mischief to great ships unless pressed by hunger. Indeed, if the sailors give it bread, it departs, and is satisfied; but if it will not depart, then it may be terrified and put to flight by the sight of a man’s angry and terrible face. However, the man must exceedingly careful when he is thus looking at the fish not to be afraid of it, but to stare at it with a bold and terrible countenance; for if the fish sees that the man is afraid it will not depart, but bites and tears the ship as much as it can. …

An exceedingly notable sailor has told me that when he was a youth he fell into peril with this in a small ship. There was with him in the ship a youth who thought himself exceeding brave and fierce, so that when the fish met him he … lowered himself down by a rope from the ship to the water to look at the fish with an angry face, as is the custom. But when he saw the fish he was straightway affrighted and shouted to his comrades to pull him up by the rope, and the fish, seeing the man’s fright, leaped out of the water as he was being drawn up, and with one bite took off half the man from his belly downwards[.]

The story is second-hand, and about events many years earlier. The tall tales of seamen are also notorious, particularly when it comes to the size of fish they encounter. Still, it could be true, and if it is, it is difficult to think what the creature could be other than a shark. But considerable ambiguity remains.

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As the Ludolf case shows, even the vocabulary for sharks faded in Europe through the Middle Ages. The change came with the Age of Discovery, specifically the conquest of the Americas.10

In 1561, Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar whose campaign to defend Native Americans and indict the conduct of the Spanish Conquistadors provides a lot of the raw material for the Black Legend that endures to this day, completed a book that describes a scene where a Spanish overlord uses an Indian to dive for pearls.11 The danger to the Indians, Las Casas says, came from three types of animal: lagartos or crocodiles; tiburones that could “tear to pieces” even horses, seemingly meaning smaller sharks, such as tiger sharks and bull sharks; and marrajos that could “swallow [a man whole] on the first gulp”, i.e., larger sharks, the description matching closely the great white shark and probably the mako shark, too.12 From Las Casas:

On one occasion, it happened that an Indian, upon diving, saw a marrajo close to him, and came up fleeing up out of the water [onto the canoe]; the Spanish executioner argued with him asking why he came up so quickly without bringing anything; the Indian said that there was a great fish and that he feared it would kill him; the Spaniard forced him to return to diving and … beat the Indian with a stick. The sad Indian dove, and the marrajo, that was waiting for him, charged him and swallowed him.

It seems that at the beginning the Indian fought with the fish, and there was a swirl in the water for a while; the Spaniard understood that the fish had attacked the Indian, and seeing that the Indian was not returning, he killed a small dog that they had in the boat, and put it on a hook with a heavy chain, which they commonly carry for these fishes, and threw it in the water; and later the marrajo took it, for it was not satisfied, and the hook set in such way that it could not escape; the Spaniard feeling that the fish was hooked, gave it enough line, and slowly returned towards the beach in his canoe or boat.

Jumping to the land, he called for people to help him, they landed the beast, giving blows with axes and rocks or whatever they had, and killed it, opening its belly they found the unfortunate Indian and took him out, the Indian gave two or three gasps and he died there

There is no reason to doubt that pearl divers in the New World were menaced by sharks, but this story has the feel of myth about it, and the fact it appears without any rooted detail—names, time, place—in a work with a propagandistic purpose should increase the suspicion about its veracity.

Two decades on, in 1580, an officer sailing between Portugal and India wrote of seeing one of his crewmen fall overboard. The Early Modern equivalent of a lifebuoy, a wooden block tied to a rope, was thrown to the man:

Our crew began to bring in the man, who had managed to catch the block, but, when he was no more than half the range of a musket away, there appeared from beneath the surface a big monster known as tiburon; it rushed at the man and cut him to pieces right before our eyes. It was certainly a terrible death.

This is often said to be the first account of a shark attack in English, and it may be. There is, however, a problem in determining whether it was written in English, or translated into English. The word tiburón, borrowed by the Spanish from the Carib Indians or Kalinago of northern South America and used, as explained above, to designate the smaller man-eating sharks,13 was also used by the English for about a century, until the late sixteenth century, i.e., the time when this was written. The English would switch to the word xoc from the Mayans in Mexico, which ultimately evolved into “shark”.14 As such, either case—originally English or a translation—is plausible, and this uncertainty is merely one complication with this source, which is of very murky provenance: there is no precise date, the author is anonymous, and nobody knows where the text first appeared.

Regardless, something like the modern view of sharks, the mingled fascination and dread, seems to have been in place by the end of the sixteenth century. For example, in 1593, the English privateer—an entirely different thing to a pirate—Admiral Sir Richard Hawkins wrote:

The Sharke or Tiberune, is a fish like unto those which wee call dog-fishes, but that hee is far greater, I have seene of them eight or nine foot long; his head is flat and broad, and his mouth in the middle … [H]is skinne is rough, like to the fish which we call a rough hound, and russet, with reddish spots, saving that under the belly hee is all white: hee is much hated of sea-faring men, who have a certaine foolish superstition with them, and say that the ship hath seldome good successe, that is much accompanied with them. It is the most ravenous fishe knowne in the sea; for he swallowth all that hee findeth.15

An intermittently-famous shark attack in the United States dates from 1642 in what was then-New Amsterdam, a settlement on Manhattan Island that would become New York City:

It was a dark and stormy night when good Antony Van Corlaer arrived at the creek [Harlem River] which separates the island of Manna-hata from the mainland. The wind was high, the elements in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass [Van Corlaer was a trumpeter] across the water. For a short time, he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand, took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most valorously that he would swim across in spite of the devil, and daringly plunged into the stream. Scarce had he buffeted halfway over when he was observed to struggle violently battling with the spirit of the waters. Instinctively, he put his trumpet in his mouth and, giving a vehement blast, sank forever to the bottom.16

An “old Dutch burgher,” renowned for his honesty, witnessed Van Corlaer’s demise and told of how he had seen the “dvyvel” (devil) in the shape of a huge fish “seize the sturdy Antony by the leg and drag him beneath the waves”.17

The episode is listed in databases of shark attacks and appears in history books on the same subject, referred to as one of, if not the, earliest such incidents in the Colonial Americas. But it is a legend, originating in an 1809 book, A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, published under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a pseudonym for Washington Irving. Irving, one of the most famous writers of his day, admired by contemporaries like Lord Byron and Charles Dickens, was an author of fiction: his History was satire and Van Corlaer never existed.18 Irving is remembered now, if at all, for the “Rip Van Winkle” short stories.

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A genuine report from two years earlier was written by Father Thomas Copley, a Jesuit missionary in Maryland, or “the Colony of Saint Mary”, as he referred to it. The representatives of the Society of Jesus wrote litterae annuae (annual letters) to Rome, explaining the progress of their ministries, and in 1640 Copley incorporated in his letter the story of a man who had been inclining to faith, then backed away from conversion and resumed a life of sin, even blasphemy. “[H]e was accustomed to smoke [the prayer-beads he had obtained] in his pipe with tobacco, after grinding them to powder, often boasting that he was eating up his ‘Ave Marias’,” wrote Copley:

But the divine vengeance did not let the wicked crime go long unpunished; for scarcely a year having passed, on the returning vigil of the day on which he had abandoned his purpose of embracing the Catholic faith, a more sacrilegious playfulness possessed him … [I]n the afternoon, when he had betaken himself to the river for the purpose of swimming, scarcely had he touched the water when a huge fish having suddenly seized the wicked man, before he could retreat to the bank, tore away, at a bite, a large portion of his thigh, by the pain of which most merited laceration, the unhappy wretch was in a short time hurried away from the living—the divine justice bringing it about that he, who a little while before boasted that he had eaten up his “Ave Maria beads,” should see his own flesh devoured, even while he was yet living.19

Modern researchers have argued that the evidence points to the attack taking place in August 1640 and the perpetrator being a bull shark, based partly on that species being a seasonal summer visitor to the Chesapeake Bay down to the present. The inference is reasonable, but not conclusive.

The difficulty with the sources examined so far is that we cannot be totally sure they refer to sharks and/or the reliability of the sources themselves is in doubt, with the contents being dubious or the authenticity being in question or both. The first unambiguously recorded shark attack on a human dates to 1749. The victim was Brook Watson, a British boy born in Plymouth in 1735.

Watson was orphaned when he was 6-years-old, in 1741, and sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the American colonies—Boston, Massachusetts, to be precise. Watson, inspired by his uncle, a trader in the West Indies, decided on a life at sea, and at the age of 14, he was given the job of cabin boy aboard a merchant ship. It was during downtime from this commission, while swimming in Havana Harbour off Cuba, that Watson was attacked by a shark.

As Watson later recounted, while his shipmates noticed the attack by his “voracious assailant” quickly, their rescue efforts were wrong-footed because he was pulled under the water and surfaced “at about 100 yards distance”. Then he was attacked and dragged under again. Watson was finally saved from the water as the shark closed in for a third attack, but the chances of saving his life were very low: “all the flesh was stripped off the calf from the bone downwards” on one leg and the “foot … divided from the [other] leg”, Watson wrote.20 Yet, despite such injuries, and the medical technology of the mid-eighteenth century, Watson survived. A surgeon managed to stop the bleeding, and Watson made it through the subsequent gauntlet of amputation and infections.21 Fitted with a wooden leg, Watson was back at work within three months, and went on to have a colourful life as a founder of Lloyd’s of London, a Loyalist during the American rebellion, and a politician in Britain. He died ennobled as Sir Brook Watson at the ripe old age of 72 in 1807.

The sourcing is not perfect. Watson’s account was written in April 1778 for a newspaper to promote the painting (see above), Watson and the Shark, by Anglo-American artist John Singleton Copley, which shows the moment of Watson’s rescue just before the shark closed in for its third and probably fatal attack. Twenty-nine years is time enough for memory to be unreliable about the details, and the promotional purpose of the account leaves open the possibility of elaboration. Nonetheless, the basics of the story are confirmed beyond question. Watson and his contemporaries had the concept and lexicography of a shark pinned down specifically,22 all were agreed a shark is what had attacked Watson, and there is the impressive physical evidence of Watson’s missing leg.23

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FOOTNOTES

The Supreme Leader (Rahbar-e Mo’azzam) of the Islamic Revolution, Ali Khamenei, was killed on 28 February, the first day of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran. On 8 March, his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was hastily upgraded to “ayatollah” in regime messaging and appointed as replacement Rahbar. Almost immediately, stories began to circulate that Mojtaba, who has not been seen in public since his elevation, was seriously injured and not in command of the regime. This has been the dominant media narrative for the last two months, but there are reasons to doubt its veracity.

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In December 2025, Netflix put out a documentary directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, Cover-Up, about the life and work of Seymour Hersh, the famous or notorious American investigative journalist.

No effort is made to conceal that the makers of Cover-Up are consecrated, long-term fans of Hersh. Indeed, part of the “story” of the documentary is that these devotees—Poitras, who has wanted to make a film about Hersh since 2005, and Obenhaus, who has been a collaborator with Hersh on three “investigative documentaries”—are finally being granted access to the great man and his archives, and he regrets agreeing to it. Hersh’s prickly demeanour is on display the first time we see him in the present day. Agitated about Poitras and Obenhaus seeing his files and exposing the names of his sources, Hersh says: “I barely trust you guys”. By later in the film, Hersh is having a meltdown and declaring: “I’d like to quit”.

This subplot aside, the film is structured as a series of case studies, shown to us using archive footage and present-day interviews, wherein Hersh, through guile and tenacity, exposes the truth about American wrongdoing, leading to a global media coverage and punishment of the villains.

To Poitras’s credit, Cover-Up is not the complete hagiography she produced in Citizenfour (2014), about Edward Snowden, the systems administrator at the National Security Agency (NSA) who enabled the most sustained assault on Western intelligence and defected to Russia in 2013. But the basic formula remains the same: the United States is presented—using genuine misdeeds, half-truths, and pure imagination—as a murderous rogue State, against which Poitras’s subject is a lone voice of truth and resistance, omitting where possible and spinning where not awkward elements in their biography to sustain this illusion.

An important element of this is bookending Cover-Up with stories Hersh reported on in 1968 and 2004. The first story, Vietnam, is self-evident, the natural starting-point since it is what made Hersh’s name. The second, Iraq, is potentially explicable in narrative flow and audience terms: it was objectively the biggest moment in Hersh’s career since Vietnam and it is probably the story he is best-known for among the younger Netflix-viewing segment of his largely liberal and Left-wing fan base, so it is a way of finishing on a high note. It is, however, somewhat jarring in a documentary that is otherwise essentially chronological—we get up to Hersh’s activities in the 2020s, and then it suddenly cuts back two decades. But the effect on the flow of the narrative is the least of it. What is most striking is what this arrangement conceals from the narrative.

The very brief section on the 2010s and 2020s alludes to the disquiet Hersh’s writings in this period have caused even among his admirers without getting into details. One such admirer wrote fifteen years ago of “Hersh’s recent turn away from the investigative reporting that made him famous into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories”, and this is now a widespread view of Hersh on the Left. Hastily changing the subject to Iraq, where Hersh is on the “right” side according to the politics of his supporters, prevents the issue of Hersh’s missteps narratively metastasising into questions that could complicate the image of Hersh the rest of the documentary has cultivated, and avoids concluding on downbeat note of Hersh “in decline”. Most importantly, since the film stresses Hersh’s consistency, it prevents the emergence of the dangerous question that would have torpedoed the entire enterprise: What if there was no “recent turn” and Hersh was like this all along?

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From Cover-Up’s opening moments, in the vignettes it uses to set the scene for Vietnam, we get a sense of its approach.

Footage is played from a press conference with President Lyndon Johnson in November 1967, where he says the U.S. is making incremental progress in Indochina. The intent is clearly to show LBJ and the American government as delusional at best, and probably dishonest. But LBJ was correct. The U.S. prevailed militarily in Vietnam, then for political reasons abandoned what it had secured under the cover of a fake “peace” agreement, a recurring tendency in American policy.

A document is then shown, with the section reading, “Pentagon acknowledges that civilian areas in N[orth] Vietnam have been damaged during [bombing] raids”, highlighted. In combination with the clip of Hersh lamenting the “open murder in Vietnam”, it is meant to convey that the U.S. intentionally killed civilians in Vietnam, but that is not what it says. There are civilian casualties in war; even the invention of precision weapons has not changed that fact of life. But there were fewer civilians killed in the Vietnam War—which was spread over three countries (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) and nearly twenty years—than in Korea over three years. The two conflicts were strategically identical, with the U.S. defending an imperfect Southern republic from conquest by a Soviet colony to the North; it is objectively strange that the one waged more scrupulously is the one commonly regarded as inherently criminal. The kind of decontextualised propaganda Cover-Up engages in is a large part of the answer for why this is so.

The story Hersh reported on that made him famous was the My Lai massacre, a gruesome atrocity by a U.S. Army unit in a Vietnamese village on 16 March 1968. Perhaps 400 civilians were murdered, most of them women and children and old people. During the three-hour rampage, many other crimes, including rape and mutilation, were committed.

As Hersh tells it, he had just quit his job at the Associated Press—after a fight with the editor, of course—and received a telephone call from a friend with a source in the military, giving him a tip that there was an “atrocity in Vietnam that they’re covering up”. Discovering that the leader of the offending platoon, Lieutenant William Calley, was under house arrest on a barracks in Utah, Hersh went down there. While speaking to the commanding officer, Hersh could see Calley’s charge sheet on the desk and copied it down. Hersh then spoke to Calley, who claimed he had done nothing wrong: he had acted under orders and civilians had been killed incidentally in a fire-fight. Calley said his Captain, Ernest Medina, could vouch for him, and called him on the telephone, intending to get him to speak to Hersh. Instead, Medina said he did not know what Calley was talking about and slammed the receiver down, by Hersh’s account. Calley was ultimately convicted and imprisoned.

What surely leaps out from this story is that the U.S. military was already in the process of punishing the perpetrators at My Lai. Indeed, Hersh’s article in November 1969 in the Dispatch News Service, the one that changed his life, was made possible by the leaking of documents from this judicial procedure and by the testimony of officials involved in the investigation, which had been underway since March 1969 and Calley was charged in September 1969. So when Hersh says in the film, “After my story came out, the Army did an investigation” [emphasis added], he restates the fundamental lie on which his career has been built. Hersh did not alter the course of justice. What Hersh did was make the massacre public knowledge, transforming it into a global story the Soviet Union could utilise in political warfare to reinforce its onslaught against South Vietnam and the American troops trying to protect it.1

Hersh sees no problem with this: he advocates in Cover-Up for total press immunity from secrecy laws so it can publish anything it wants and boasts that while the Pentagon wanted to handle My Lai internally, “I broke that game up”. Fine. Most journalists would say Hersh was simply describing the job here. But Hersh’s “right” to do this, and whatever supposed benefits there were to the U.S. public knowing about My Lai, are clean different things to the claim that Hersh’s reporting was the only reason justice was done. Moreover, the gravamen of the My Lai saga is not the disclosure. It is what happened next, Hersh’s attempt to impose a larger meaning on it, which gets to the heart of the Hershian method—and which is most journalistically questionable.

There is “always another level”, Hersh says early in Cover-Up. “There had to be more”, he says of My Lai. This kind of thinking manifestly lends itself to poor journalism—to starting with a story and back-filling the evidence by credulously citing sources who say what you want to hear—and it is intrinsically vulnerable to degenerating into conspiracy theories, if every story must be bigger than it appears and sources saying it is will be believed.

Despite saying that Calley told him a tissue of lies in their meeting, Hersh decided to believe Calley’s claim he obeyed superior orders in My Lai, saying on a contemporary television program: “It raises the very real question: Were there really orders to shoot everything in the village? And if so, is this being done all the time?” Hersh moved swiftly from “just asking questions” to grand assertions that the Pentagon was lying when it said My Lai was an aberrational incident that said nothing at all about the U.S. Army. Hersh justifies this by saying he “kept on finding people” who told him a tale of an American “descent into madness” in Vietnam. In practice, what Hersh meant is he spoke to several of the My Lai killers who were keen to make the blame institutional, not personal.

One of these people was Michael Terry, whose hysterical comment to Hersh for his My Lai article—it was a “Nazi-type thing”—is highlighted in Cover-Up. What is omitted is that Hersh described Terry as a “witness”; only later was Terry forced, under the weight of evidence, to confess he was one of the killers. Another was Paul Meadlo, whose mother provided the quote that gave Hersh his headline: “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer.” Mrs. Meadlo had an obvious incentive to blame the Army, rather than accept she raised a bad man, and it was ideologically convenient for Hersh, so he acted as stenographer for this dubious assessment of the situation.

Two weeks after the article, Hersh coaxed Meadlo himself into an interview with Mike Wallace on CBS Radio, where he disclaimed any real responsibility by insisting Calley had forced him to shoot civilians. Cover-Up eschews the context that would have helped here. Calley’s orders, if we assume they were real, also applied to helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who stopped the My Lai atrocity by threatening to shoot his own colleagues. Thompson played the part that was in his character, and Meadlo played the part in his.

All this gave Hersh what he needed to transform My Lai into an indictment of America tout court: “We’ve been sort of committed to a program of almost at random murder, rape, et cetera [in Vietnam]”, said Hersh in a contemporary television interview shown by Cover-Up. “I think everybody just looked the other way, including the reporters who obviously must have heard about it, some of them.”

To build the argument that My Lai was not an isolated incident, Hersh ignores the hard evidence that acquitted Captain Medina and thus the U.S. Army command of any responsibility for the massacre, and foregrounds the fashionable speculation that the “body count” metric was not being used as a rough guide to who was winning the war, but as an encouragement to U.S. Army units to go around murdering civilians to meet quotas.2 More tangibly, Hersh drew attention to a second massacre on the same day, in the same area, which at least has the benefit of being true. U.S. forces killed about ninety civilians in My Khe, a couple of miles from My Lai. But again Cover-Up lives up to its name and we are denied context.

The impression is allowed to stand that two anti-civilian massacres in one day by the Americans in Vietnam was the norm. So, do we find a systematic pattern of atrocities by U.S. troops in 1968 and 1969? We do not. There is one murky incident on the U.S. side that killed a dozen civilians but probably was not a war crime, and two massacres by the U.S.-allied South Koreans, where the worst that can be said of the U.S. is that it did not pressure its ally sufficiently to punish these crimes.3

What further distorts the picture is that the enemy in Vietnam is virtually omitted from Cover-Up. It would be unfair to expect a biographical documentary to give a comprehensive history of the Vietnam War, but it could have given some sense of the nature of the conflict. As it is, those relying on Cover-Up could be forgiven for thinking there were no opposing combatants in Vietnam and the U.S. had waged a senseless genocidal war on civilians.4 Even if the documentary was to omit the generally atrocious campaign of the Communists,5 it might have given a modicum of perspective by referencing the slaughter of 5,000 or more people by the Communists at Huế a month before My Lai, an exterminatory operation carried out as a matter of policy, centrally planned and ordered from Hanoi.

Speaking of Hanoi, at the end of this section it is noted that Hersh went to the city for several weeks in 1972, but this is used merely a segue, since it was after this trip that Hersh was hired by the New York Times. It seems a shame this was not delved into. An interesting episode in itself, it could have been a mechanism to examine the enemy in Vietnam and Hersh’s views of same.

There is a short section giving a potted family history. Hersh’s parents are Jews from Poland and Lithuania, who got to the U.S. in the 1920s. Almost all their relatives who remained in the Old World were wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust. Then it is on to Watergate, his first Times story.

We begin with a recording of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, which the makers of Cover-Up obviously think makes Hersh look good because Nixon says Hersh is “probably a Communist agent” and Kissinger grovellingly assents (“Exactly. Exactly.”), when Hersh self-evidently was not. What caught my attention in the clip is that Nixon’s anger was because he believed Hersh was inventing a story out of “whole cloth”, and my prior is to assume Nixon was correct—or as good as. It could be that Hersh was being manipulated by “sources” using him in the venerable Washington way to wage bureaucratic-political warfare via fabricated “leaks” in the press. As Hersh himself said in a clip shown from the 1970s, “I give service to leaks”. The thought that followed was, “Like Woodward and Bernstein”, and, amusingly, within seconds Bob Woodward, the slave to his sources par excellence, was on screen giving the mythologised version of his Watergate reportage.

Hersh’s main contribution was a January 1973 report in the New York Times that four of the five Watergate burglars were still being paid. It does not seem to have moved the needle on the legal process investigating Watergate and it would be a stretch to connect it to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. Nonetheless, it was genuinely impactful in reigniting the press clamour for stories about Watergate after a couple of quiet months since Nixon’s landslide re-election in November 1972.

There is a digression on Hersh’s methodology, and he candidly describes it as: “Amazing people talking to me”. How this investigative journalism differs from access journalism one might wonder, and one will continue to wonder because the question is not even posed. “Amazing” is an apt enough description for many of Hersh’s sources, though. “Incredible” would work, too, and this aspect looms larger and larger in the Hersh canon, as we shall see.

In late 1974, Hersh had two “scoops”. The first was a yarn contributing to the rich mythology that Kissinger was behind the military coup in Chile in 1973, a point of doctrine for Leftists who cannot accept that Salvador Allende undid himself by destroying the economy and democracy. Hersh is still a believer in the ‘American economic imperialism’ fantasy of General Augusto Pinochet’s rise, saying Allende was overthrown because he “nationalised copper mines that were owned by people who were big supporters of Nixon financially”. The second was a report on Operation CHAOS, a CIA operation that in Hersh’s outraged telling involved “spying on American kids!” What the Agency had been doing was investigating Soviet infiltration of the student and activist movements, a counterpart to the FBI’s much-maligned COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program).

The ostensible crime in the CHAOS operation is that the CIA is only supposed to gather “foreign” intelligence. The difficulty was that Communists recognised no borders and served an apparatus headquartered in Moscow, which is not exactly a “domestic” issue. Regardless, in the post-Nixon witch-hunt atmosphere about really all authority, but especially the intelligence services, the critics got their way. Hersh is given a lot of credit for these developments in the film. Cover-Up suggests, if not quite says, Hersh’s reporting caused the creation of the Rockefeller Commission into CIA “abuses” that led on to the even more politicised and vindictive Church Committee in the Senate. The 1970s Congressional reforms neutered the CIA under various forms of “oversight” and established “the wall” between the CIA and FBI, with 9/11 as the result. It goes without saying that Cover-Up has no comment on the lack of a public inquest into the KGB.6

When Hersh enumerates the anti-constitutional actions the CIA apparently engaged in, he lists “foreign assassinations, domestic spying, [and] mind control”. One of these things is obviously not like the others, and it was not a passing slip from Hersh. The “mind control” reference is to Project MKULTRA and Cover-Up expands on this considerably in a segment that doubles as a critique of James Angleton, the controversial CIA counter-intelligence chief, with whom Hersh clashed. Hersh says MKULTRA was about “trying to make a Manchurian candidate” and “reprogram somebody to be an assassin”. The reality of MKULTRA is rather more mundane, but it was exposed with the most sensationalist slant by the Congressional Committees, along with many other CIA programs: some “red team” exercises, some exploratory, some operationalised, and all of them fodder for the conspiracy theorists ever since.

There is a moment during this part of the film where Hersh drops in an extraordinary claim about the death in 1953 of Frank Olson, a CIA officer involved in MKULTRA in its early days: “I have every reason to believe that was an organised CIA hit”. This is just left hanging; he is not asked why he thinks this or how he knows. Perhaps the evidence of suicide is too banal to countenance when there is “always another level”.

The take-home message Cover-Up wants from this section is that Hersh fearlessly confronting the rogue spies was the cause of the removal from office of Angleton, Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, and CIA Director William Colby. It is usually the Duke of Wellington who is credited with the line, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.” As Hersh reveals in his memoir, Colby was the source for the reporting on the “Family Jewels” document that compiled CIA operations judged retrospectively untoward. In other words, the story was, once again, of the American State self-correcting, and Hersh using the documentation of this self-correction to misrepresent America as a republic where systemic criminality goes unpunished.

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Hersh rounded out his stint at the New York Times by working with Jeff Gerth to write about corporations, a subject he cheerfully admits he “knew nothing about it”. This curtain-raises a section where some criticism of Hersh gets an airing.

In 1997, four years after signing the contract, Hersh published a book on John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot, which as the title suggests was not an admiring look at the 35th President. Hersh portrayed JFK as distracted from his duties by an uncontainable sex life, with this moral corruption entangling him in financial corruption with the mafia and the private recklessness leading to public policy recklessness, particularly foreign policy disasters like the Bay of Pigs. Even those who believe Hersh discovered real new material acknowledge that it was a “bad book”, filled with hearsay nonsense from people who could not know the things they claimed to know. Cover-Up does not focus on the book, though, but how it was put together, which brought Hersh as close as he has been to career destruction.

In the summer of 1995, Hersh signed an agreement with a source, Lawrence X. Cusack, for a tranche of Kennedy documents, among them letters testifying that Kennedy had had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, and a year later, to generate hype and publicity ahead of the book’s publication, Hersh (and Obenhaus7) made a deal with NBC News to produce a documentary based on the documents and interviews with some of the Kennedy-era Secret Service men Hersh had tracked down for the book. Filming started—then abruptly stopped. The documents were fake, as NBC (and ABC, which had been given some of them) realised almost immediately upon viewing them. This is elided in Cover-Up, but the documents were blatantly forged. One letter dated 1961 had a ZIP code, when ZIP codes were introduced in 1963. Another letter from Kennedy was written on a typewriter invented eight years after Kennedy was murdered.

In Cover-Up, Max Friedman, a research assistant of Hersh’s, offers the defence that, while Hersh had “maybe talked to too many people about these [forged] papers” and started including material from them into his manuscript, he took the fake stuff out before he published the book. Small mercies. Hersh himself at the time said in an interview that he felt like a “dupe”, yet he was also “relieved because it cleared up a whole number of impossible to reconcile issues”. Hersh does not seem to realise the gravity of this confession: he had discovered glaring contradictions in his sources, but he did not have an acute enough sense of the historical method—and did have too much of a story he wanted to tell—to see what these contradictions meant. In the present day, Hersh says: “The fact that they [the documents] weren’t true, that’s just part of the process”. But it was not part of his process, the key point Cover-Up obfuscates. It was NBC and ABC who detected the forgery Hersh was desperate to believe.

For all the deficiencies of Cover-Up’s handling of Hersh’s “Marilyn papers” fiasco, it is the section containing my favourite moment of the whole film. Amy Davidson Sorkin, a fact-checker at the New Yorker, where some of Hersh’s best-known work has been published,8 is brought in and wonderfully remarks: “It was definitely a cautionary tale for journalism, but also for Sy and his strengths, and his things that maybe are not necessarily strengths”. I don’t think she was trying to be laugh-out-loud funny, but she accomplishes it all the same.

In February 2023, Hersh published his first article on Substack, which asserted, on the word of an “unnamed source”, that the U.S. Navy sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022, and that the administration of President Joe Biden began planning the operation in December 2021, three months before Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. Moscow was initially suspected; evidence pointing to a Kyiv false-flag emerged as early as March 2023 and has grown since then. What there has never been any evidence for is U.S. responsibility, the accusations of the Russian government and Hersh’s source notwithstanding.9 Asked about this in Cover-Up, Hersh looks and sounds confused, and gets very defensive. “Even if there’s nine sources, sometimes it’s much better just to make it one”, Hersh says, giving some half-baked “security” reason. A clearly flabbergasted Poitras asks Hersh how he can say this: What if the single source is wrong? “Then”, says Hersh, “I’ve got twenty years of working with the guy that I’ve been wrong on.” Hold that thought. (It is just after this Hersh says he wants to quit.)

If the Ukraine section contains the sole moment where Hersh is challenged in the film, it should also be noted that it is yet another instance where context is removed. Cover-Up chose the Hersh story on Ukraine where genuine uncertainty remains. It omitted the flagrantly false Hersh story two months later, citing “one knowledgeable American intelligence official”, to accuse Kyiv of buying fuel from Russia and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of stealing “untold millions” of American dollars in a complex corruption scheme

Ninety-odd minutes in, we get to Syria. Hersh pronounces himself “shocked” at how quickly Bashar al-Asad fell (weren’t we all). Hersh says, obliquely, “I wrote stories for the London Review [of Books]. There were reports that Asad nerve gassed his own people. I saw him two or three or four times, and I didn’t think he was capable of doing what he did, period. And let’s call that wrong. Let’s call that very much wrong.” Asked if this was “an example of getting too close to power”, Hersh says: “Of course”. Hersh goes on: “The human rights people were all over him. I never thought he was Mother Teresa, but I thought he was okay. But if I have made a claim in prior interviews to be perfect, I would now withdraw it. That’s all. I wasn’t perfect.” And with that, after just about one minute, the Syria file closes, and we move on to Iraq in 2004.

When Hersh spoke about the LRB pieces, the magazine cover image of one—“Whose Sarin?”, from December 2013—flashes up on-screen (see above), but it would be easy to miss the headline at the very top of the page, and even if viewers do see it, unless they already have the background knowledge, it is going to be meaningless. For those who do not know: Hersh heavily implied, channelling his “sources”, four months after chemical weapons of mass destruction were used to kill hundreds of people in Damascus, that the Syrian insurgency had gassed itself and its supportive population. In April 2014, the LRB published another Hersh article, this one more forthright in claiming that Syria’s insurgents—with the connivance of Turkey—had carried out the poison gas attack to provoke Western intervention against Asad, and President Barack Obama had faltered on his “red line” in August 2013 because he knew the intelligence picture was more complex than he let on in public.

This was not a one-off mistake. This was two five-thousand-plus-word articles over four months. How did this happen? Who were the sources (in outline, obviously; not their names)? Why did he believe these sources over the public U.S. intelligence assessment and the copious open-source evidence—photographs, videos, testimony—from the “first YouTube war”? Did he vet the sources in a way that differs from what he usually does? We do not even discover what he thinks now in any serious sense. Does he at this point accept his sources were wrong? If so, does he think they lied or were mistaken? And does he wish for the LRB articles to be retracted?

These questions are never asked, and this whole “critical” section—which lasts about fourteen minutes—is like this. We get no genuine answers from Hersh or insight into what has led him astray, which seems to be the point: to go through the motions of self-criticism for the sake of form, but not to actually leave any black marks against Hersh’s name. The Syria segment is only the most egregious, and likely the most effective. It would be staggering if even half the viewers of this documentary have any idea what is going on during that minute.

The Iraq story is Abu Ghraib, and it is almost precisely My Lai redo. In early May 2004, Hersh reported for the New Yorker on the revolting torments inflicted by a group of U.S. Military Police (MPs) on detainees at a prison in Iraq. The story was based on the documents produced by the U.S. military investigation that had begun in January 2004, specifically the Pentagon’s Taguba Report,10 reports from the Army Criminal Investigation Division, and the sworn statements of witnesses. The U.S. was already in the process of delivering justice. All Hersh did was make this public so the enemy could make use of it—the enemy in this case being the Islamic State movement. Within the month, Hersh was trying to work up these gruesome individual acts, the kind of thing that happens in every war, into a charge of institutional and systematic criminality against the United States.

Cover-Up relates how the dissident Hersh pressured the Establishment CBS 60 Minutes show into running their story on the Abu Ghraib crimes on 28 April 2004. CBS had initially acceded to a Pentagon request to delay publication and Hersh threatened to scoop them. The attempt to present Abu Ghraib as resulting from intentional U.S. policy—by linking it to the “torture” techniques authorised against Al-Qaeda captives after 9/11—is oddly elliptical and weak. The reason is presumably that if Cover-Up had zoomed in on the details, it would have been quite plain that what happened at Abu Ghraib was recreational cruelty led by a couple of determined sadists, unconnected to any effort to elicit information. The film managed to get Antonio Taguba himself on for an interview, where all he says is how “angry” he was about what happened and that there was some suspicion he had leaked his report.

The most time in this ten-minute section on Iraq goes to Camille Lo Sapio, the “anonymous source” who responded to Hersh’s radio appeal—he literally gave out his mobile telephone number—and provided him with the photographs the criminal MPs had taken of their handiwork. Hersh claims there would have been “no story” without the photographs, which is implausible, though doubtless in a decreasingly literate age such as ours pictures helped spread and sustain the story. Hersh’s claim, apparently sourced from an officer in the Iraqi Army, that people were rounded up at random and sent to be tortured at Abu Ghraib is simply false, as his claim that “children were being [sexually] assaulted” at the prison. There is no evidence of this in the thousands of photographs, and none of the reports, official or journalistic, contain even rumours of such a thing.

Throughout the Iraq portion of Cover-Up, there were clips played of Americans on radio and television phone-in shows being angry at Hersh for his Abu Ghraib reporting. The message is how brave Hersh is to stand for truth against the tide of jingoism, and this is the theme of the last few minutes, harking back to the My Lai days, an apparent nod to the near-perfect symmetry between the two stories.11 We see radio stations playing “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley”, a country song from 1971 suggesting that Calley had been betrayed while fighting for his country. Hersh expresses some displeasure at the length of Calley’s prison sentence. And then Poitras asks why, in the face of all this opposition, he carries on. Hersh says: “You just can’t have a country that does it and looks the other way. If there’s any mantra to what I did, that’s it.” We close out with a message on-screen reading: “Dedicated to all those killed and denied justice, and those who resist, past and future.”

I mentioned several times above in the various case studies that what was most wrong with the presentation was not anything said, but the stripping of context, and one can apply that as a meta-criticism. Of all of the defects in Cover-Up—the slant and distortion, the half-truths and untruths—the most serious problem with it is what is not present. One can argue it is disreputable to do a film about Hersh’s life and work that all-but avoids the last fifteen years, when even some of the old comrades have questioned in public whether Hersh still has both oars in the water. It is straightforward malpractice to make space (barely) for the Syria and Ukraine cases in a survey of this period, and leave out Hersh’s May 2015 article in the London Review of Books questioning the “official narrative” of the U.S. raid that killed Usama bin Laden four years earlier.

With “a retired senior [U.S.] intelligence official” as his “major” source, some “information from inside Pakistan”, and two “longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command” providing splashes of colour, Hersh contended that Bin Laden’s demise was an act of theatre disguising the “premeditated murder” of “an unarmed elderly civilian”, as his primary source puts it. The raid was not the result of a decade of U.S. intelligence work and the Navy SEALs on the night did not have to dodge Pakistani defences, wrote Hersh. Rather, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—the controllers of the jihadist insurgency in Afghanistan—had sold out Al-Qaeda’s leader, who was living on the dime of the Saudi Kingdom he had affected to war against for a quarter-century. Usually, when the ISI wants to trade in one of its jihadist assets for American favour, it simply arrests them and hands them over. For reasons Hersh felt need not concern us, the ISI decided in 2011 that its interests would be best-served by enabling an American raid that made it look incompetent, on a location a stone’s throw from its premier military academy so the whole world would know Aabpara harboured Bin Laden.

The Bin Laden piece was undoubtedly Hersh’s most impactful story in this most recent phase of his career. It was all over the American networks, made it to the BBC in Britain, and as far away as the ABC in Australia. But the mainstream press that usually receives Hersh missives with reverence reacted harshly to this one. It was at this time former doting disciples started writing of Hersh going “off the rails”. The outraged confusion of Hersh’s die-hard supporters among the radical “anti-imperialists” to this press treatment of their hero was wholly justified, because Hersh had done nothing out of the ordinary in using cranky “sources” to concoct a deranged anti-American fable. What had changed was the political consensus of Hersh’s target audience. With Obama as President, not Nixon or George W. Bush, dubious and conspiratorial accusations of criminality against the U.S. government were much less welcome on the American Left.12 This was the cause of such pushback as there was on the Syria stories, and Biden was in office over Ukraine, a cause in any case ubiquitously popular beyond the fringes.

Had Cover-Up included the Bin Laden raid imbroglio, one could easily see it presenting just such a defence, of Hersh holding to his principles while all around him surrendered to partisan exigency, and pointing concretely to the New Yorker, which took a pass on the Bin Laden piece,13 despite repeatedly publishing Hersh in the mid-2000s when he used exactly the same methods and standards to foretell an imminent American war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The magazine’s vaunted fact-checkers waived through claims no more outlandish and no more sourced than those in the 2015 article, including that Vice President Dick Cheney and the dreaded “neoconservatives” were planning to initiate the Iran war with a false-flag and that the Bush administration was considering using “tactical nuclear weapons” on Iran. Tellingly, as late as 2012, Hersh was publishing unsubstantiated claims in the New Yorker about shady U.S. policies towards Iran—that dated back to the Bush administration.

One can just as easily see why Cover-Up drew a veil over the entire business. It is greatly to the credit of Poitras and Obenhaus that they avoid this narrative of a Hersh “decline”, which is basically a mechanism for those who like his work on Vietnam and Iraq especially, and Watergate, Kissinger, and the CIA, to keep all of that, and firewall it off from the later work they do not like. The Iran stories of the 2000s, written in the same period and venue as the Abu Ghraib pieces, make nonsense of this idea. But the premise of total Hershian continuity in method and motives needs very careful curation if the resultant picture is to be a positive one. Syria and Ukraine as two isolated missteps ten years apart is bearable. The preposterous Abbottabad raid story is not. It could contaminate Hersh’s oeuvre on its own, and defending it on business-as-usual grounds would almost certainly create more scepticism about all of Hersh’s other work than it would converts to his Bin Laden tale.

Equally unbearable would be giving any sense of the true range of Hersh’s reporting disasters. In 2008, Hersh claimed (in the New Yorker) that Israel’s Operation ORCHARD had not demolished a nuclear-weapons site in Syria months earlier (he was hazy on what was hit and speculative on why). Hersh’s 1991 book said inter alia that Israel targeted Soviet cities with nuclear weapons and passed U.S. intelligence to Moscow, these contradictory claims sourced to Ari Ben-Menashe, a con man who “lies like people breathe”, according to none other than Hersh. Hersh’s 1986 book claimed the poor Soviets had been viciously smeared for massacring the 270 civilians aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007. Hersh’s false accusation in 1983 that Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai was a CIA agent ended up in court. Hersh was author of “the longest correction ever published” in 1981 for the New York Times, confessing his error in claiming former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry had been involved in coup-plotting against Allende. It is not simply that the more errors Cover-Up had shown, the less reliable Hersh would seem. It is that when the errors are stacked together, it discloses something more than ineptitude: the errors all go in one direction.

At the present time, criticism of the use of “anonymous sources” tends to either insinuate or explicitly claim that those sources do not exist, and the journalist in question is a fabricator, telling a story they want to tell and pretending it was told to them by others. The problem with Hersh is narrowly distinct. Arthur Schlesinger’s remark during the public debate about the Kennedy book, that Hersh is “the most gullible investigative reporter perhaps in American history”, is often quoted by critics, and rightly so. But it is important to give the second half of that quote: “He will believe anything so long as it discredits John Kennedy.”14 Mutatis mutandis, this is the Hersh method distilled. Hersh’s is a willed gullibility. Hersh’s sources do the fabricating and he believes them, or affects to, if what they tell him supports the ideological narrative he is constructing. Any connections to reality in the articles generated by this methodology are accidental.

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FOOTNOTES

The 545th edition of Al-Naba, the Islamic State’s weekly newsletter, was published on 30 April 2026, and had as its main editorial a polemic against Al-Qaeda for allying with the tribal-separatist Tuaregs in Mali. A translation of the editorial is given below.

The trigger for the editorial is the major advances made in northern Mali, starting on 25 April, by Al-Qaeda’s Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JNIM), in partnership with the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA1). While unmentioned by Al-Naba, part of what enabled this rapid shift in fortunes is that when the moment came, the Russian forces that the Malian junta had brought in to replace the French and Western counter-terrorism mission folded without much of a fight, though they remain nominally in place as the insurgents move on the capital, Bamako.

The Islamic State is unimpressed with this development, noting among other things that it has happened once before and ended in tears, a reference to the events of 2012-13, when a Tuareg rebellion combined with the jihadists to conquer northern Mali, before the alliance broke down, paving the way for France to reverse their gains. Conceivably this could happen again, which would certainly embarrass Al-Qaeda, but for IS the focus of the Naba editorial is on the ideological dimension.

It was ostensibly differences in ideology, between Al-Qaeda’s transnational Islamic vision and the Tuaregs’ ethno-nationalism, which caused the schism last time: what changed in the interim to make an alliance possible again? IS’s answer is that Al-Qaeda has moved away from pure Islam to appease tribal separatists. IS mocks Al-Qaeda for not only adopting into its fold secularists, nationalists, and democrats—a bad enough violation of jihadist principle—but adopting specific people it had condemned as enemies and apostates until it suddenly switched its messaging to calling them “brothers” last week. For IS, this is a replay of Syria and many other theatres, merely the latest evidence that Al-Qaeda’s methodological approach and doctrine are bankrupt.

What is perhaps most interesting is what is not in the editorial: any reference to the Islamic State in the Sahel capitalising on the chaos, reportedly taking over abandoned Russian camps in Labbezanga and Tessi, and for a time taking some sort of control in Menaka city. The likely reason for this is that IS’s position in Mali remains fluid and fragile. IS tends to keep quiet about its operational advances until it assesses that it is able to defend them, at which point it publicly celebrates its successes.

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Base Oscillations! (Dhabadhabat Qa’idiyya!)

“It [the Islamic State] was broadcasting to the umma the methodology of separation [al-mufasala], while others were issuing amorphous methodologies that produced jahiliyya monstrosities with a jihadist colouring, such as secular administration, national emirates, and other ambiguous constructs all striving for the same end.”

This quotation from the last Al-Furqan speech was neither a false accusation nor speculating about the unseen without knowledge, but rather it was a careful reading of the movements of Al-Qaeda and its sisters, especially in Africa. What recently occurred in the Mali arena was not surprising, nor was it born of contingency. Rather, its indications and signs had been reaching the mujahideen one after another. It came as the product of a frenzied jahiliyya [pre-Islamic ignorance, pagan] mobilisation between the militia of Al-Qaeda and its sisters, striving in pursuit of “the same end” that the Syrian and Afghan governments achieved under the umbrella of the “international system”, whose “speck” Al-Qaeda sees in Syria while it turns a blind eye to the “log” in Afghanistan!2

Anyone following Al-Qaeda’s statements in Mali over the past two years will have noticed clearly the obvious change in its discourse and its inclination towards courting the “international community”! And its striving for holding dialogues and [reaching] understandings with parties that used to be labelled, in “traditional jihadist convention”, as enemies and apostates! If these statements had come out in earlier phases, the dervishes of Al-Qaeda would have busied themselves with rationalisations and patching them up with [claims of] “poor translation and Arabisation”, just as they did for a long time with the statements of the Taliban, until the tear grew too wide for them, so they returned years later to acknowledge them! Indeed, even worse than them, but in the statements of the “General Command”!

Al-Qaeda members spent years denying the existence of these relationships and alliances with the apostate Azawadi fronts, especially in their joint war against the Islamic State, before Al-Qaeda announced as glad tidings this alliance with “their brothers in the Azawad Liberation Front”, as it described them, whereupon its supporters began circulating the news of this alliance with all pride and admiration, after having expended every effort in denying it previously, and now they are expending their effort in legitimising it.

In truth, Al-Qaeda’s problem is not this alliance, “denied” previously and “praised” today, for it is not the first and will not be the last. They will have no difficulty in justifying it, just as they did before with similar alliances in Yemen, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere, which proved the failure and the invalidity of their justifications.

The real problem lies in the nature of the project that brought together Al-Qaeda and their apostate nationalist, patriotic brothers in Mali?!

The “Azawad Liberation Front”, with its old and new components, is a separatist, nationalist, patriotic, democratic front whose highest objective is: “the independence of the Azawad region” and obtaining “self-rule” [hukm dhati] recognised internationally or regionally, and it has not departed from this objective since the outbreak of its jahili conflict decades ago up until this very moment.

Rather, it [the FLA] used to see the presence of Al-Qaeda in northern Mali as sabotaging its efforts aimed at obtaining that purely nationalist objective, especially since its success requires international and regional support and endorsement, and especially since it had tried an alliance with these jihadists in the past, but it ended on the pretext of the divergence [ikhtilaf] of the two projects. So the question now posed is: What change has occurred in these two projects for them to agree and come together again?!

Has the apostate Azawadi front abandoned its nationalist project and its historical dream for the sake of Al-Qaeda? Or has Al-Qaeda abandoned its global jihad project for the sake of this ethno-tribal nationalism from which its current leader [Iyad Ag Ghali (Abu al-Fadl)] descends?! Have the secularists changed, or have the jihadists changed?! Or have the two sides dissolved into a new amorphous mixture of the kind Al-Qaeda’s members have become addicted to plunging into, especially after the “Arab Spring” episode, which revealed what had been hidden in the trajectory of Al-Qaeda, its methodological [or ideological: manhajiyya] turbulence and fluctuations, concealed by the bright beginnings [i.e., 9/11] and exposed by the searing trials?

Some of the leaders of this apostate Azawadi front disavowed this alliance in their statements to media outlets, saying: “If they wish to merge with us, then they must withdraw from the global Al-Qaeda organisation”, while other leaders justified their alliance by [reference to] the bond of the tribe and “cousinage”,3 and said that “the core of the organisation [i.e., JNIM], its main body and the majority of its elements, are from the Azawad of northern Mali, and they share the same political motives in opposing the Malian regime”.

So will this alliance between the two sides stop at this point? Or will it develop into a “severing of ties” [or “disengagement”: fakk irtibat] in which the bond of the tribe overcomes the bond of the deen [lifeway, Islam], proceeding according to the principle of “Azawad for the Azawadis!” on the model of “Syria for the Syrians”?! And will Al-Qaeda accept this severing of ties, if it occurs, and consider it “an interest, flexibility, and political maturity”, which it affirms and blesses? Or will it wait to see whether it serves its interest, and then remain silent about it and compromise with it, as it did with Al-Jolani at the beginning?!4 Or will it wait until it is certain that it has been sidelined, and then disown it and turn against it, and thereafter lecture about creed [or doctrine: aqeeda] and shari’a?

Or will this alliance end with the two sides fighting and turning against one another, as happened previously, thereby revealing the invalidity of the justifications that Al-Qaeda’s members marshalled behind this alliance, and causing the evaporation, once again, of Al-Qaeda’s hypotheses and illusions, the likes of which it previously advanced in Syria, and today disavows and attributes solely to Al-Jolani?!

The glaring contradictions in the Qaedaist methodology [al-manhajiyya al-qa’idiyya] are too numerous to enumerate in the present space and to track their fluctuations. One of the latest of these contradictions is the differentiation between the Afghan government and the Syrian government, despite both coming about in similar circumstances. Al-Qaeda sees in the “first” an Islamic model, while it has come to see in the “second” something else that it is still too cowardly to name openly, and instead whispers about behind the statements of its “General Command”, which have exhausted its followers and drawn them into an endless whirl of delusions and improvised patchings, in contrast to the Prophetic methodology [of the Islamic State], which is founded upon certainty, firmness, and clarity, not upon vacillation, instability, softness, and methodological vagueness.

Among the examples of Al-Qaeda’s vagueness: its differentiation between the apostate governments before and after the revolutions! Another among them: its drifting, obscure position regarding the apostate armies, which Al-Qaeda divides into “honourable” and “dishonourable”! A distinction is made between their soldiers and their officers, sometimes it pardons their soldiers and calls upon the youth to “not flee from compulsory conscription into them”! This and other oddities and suspicious things on this issue will inevitably be uncovered in the coming trials, for the truth is not veiled by the clouds of falsehood.

Thus continues the saga of turbulence and wandering in the Qaedaist methodology, which nothing will halt except a sincere return to the Prophetic methodology, and a complete disavowal of factionalism [or partisanship: al-hizbiyya] and the veneration of its figures, whom they have made a judge and a standard by which they adjust their stances, such that their leaders have become an authority over the shari’a!! And the mistakes of the past have become a guide [or evidence: dalilan] and a driver for their continuation, instead of correcting them and desisting from them. “God has full power over His affairs, but most men know not” [Qur’an 12:21].

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FOOTNOTES

It is by now conventional wisdom across ideological lines in the West that it was official policy in Imperial Russia to promote antisemitism as part of a (doomed) strategy to deflect popular resentment away from the Tsarist government and suppress the Revolutionary movement.1 This belief became widespread in Western Europe and the Americas shortly after the pogroms which erupted in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by socialist terrorist-revolutionaries in March 1881, and has been a constant ever since.2 The narrative’s endurance, not only at the popular level but in scholarship, is remarkable because it is a “distortion of the evidence” so severe it amounts to a “conspiracy theory”.3

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The Arabic word deen (دين)1 is often translated as “religion”, and it does refer to Islam, but this is not the same thing.

CHRISTIANITY AND “RELIGION”

The word “religion” derives from the Latin religio, meaning that which binds man to the heavens.2 In the pagan Roman Empire, this was about practice, not belief: “The focus of the term was on public, communal behaviour towards the gods of the state”.3 “Sacrificial offerings, the chastity of virgins, [and] the whole range of priesthoods” counted as religiones,4 and the purpose of offering these sacrifices and rites was to ensure the protection of cities from the wrath of the gods.5

Christians would adopt the word religio, but, as happened with much of the Classical inheritance, turned it to an entirely new meaning.6 The Church was the sole religio for Christians with God, and the State was seen as a separate realm. Jesus had said, “Render … unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”,7 and Christians set out into the world with this understanding.8 The early history of Christianity, as a tiny sect suffering official persecution for three centuries, was the context for this, but the view did not change after Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire. In the 420s AD, a century after the first Christian Emperor, Augustine contrasted the eternal and unchanging dimension of religion, the City of God, with the saeculum, a word initially denoting the span of human life that had come to mean the limits of living memory. Mortality defined the saeculum, a realm where the saecularia (secular things) were in constant flux as memory faded from one generation to the next, and in time death would take all things—men, the cities, the Empire itself.9

Christendom would split shortly after the millennium, with the Orthodox East and Latin West departing on variant courses. Yet in both there remained the unique duality of Church and State. Whether in harmony or discord, with one or other dominant, they were two separate institutions.10 The Papal Revolution would remake Latin Christendom to embed Augustine’s distinction between religio and the saeculum society-wide,11 and in the sixteenth century a second bout of revolution and schism would convulse the West that further sharpened the distinction. “By the end of the seventeenth century, it was … more and more common [for Western Christians] to confine religio and the religiones to the realm of the inner self”,12 to define the public space as “secular”. Especially in the wake of the French Revolution that accentuated the trends of the prior two upheavals, Western notions travelled East and ultimately far beyond Christendom.

It may seem obvious to many that an exhausted Continent after the Wars of Religion would want to remove religion from politics, to make it a private matter rather than an issue States fought over, but, as Brent Nongbri has so well put it, “the isolation of something called ‘religion’ as a sphere of life” that can be “separated from politics … is not a universal feature of human history. In fact, in the broad view of human cultures, it is a strikingly odd way of conceiving the world.”13

“Religion” and the “secular” do not exist objectively, irrespective of culture and geography: the worldview wherein reality can be divided this way is a historically contingent creation of Christian theology, institutionalised in the Latin West by the medieval Papacy.14 The illusion to the contrary results from the remarkable success of the West in its period of global preponderance at repackaging the distinctive assumptions of Latin Christendom as the common property of mankind.15

ISLAM AND THE DEEN

“Islam is not merely a system of belief and worship, a compartment of life … distinct from other compartments which are the concern of nonreligious authorities”, the late Bernard Lewis once explained. Islam “is the whole of life, and its rules include [among other things] civil, criminal, and even what we would call constitutional law.” Reflecting this, deen “conveys much more” to Muslims than “religion” does to Christians.16

The difference begins with the etymology. Deen is clearly related to the Hebrew word din (דין), and has cognates in other Semitic languages, Aramaic and Syriac among them, which derive from a root meaning “law” or “judgment”. The interaction in Arabic, by way of dayn (“debt which falls due on a given date”), led to deen denoting “custom”.17 (Some have argued deen is a Persian loanword, but this is not convincing.18) “What ties these terms together”, notes Nongbri, “is that they refer to social transactions, a far cry from the sort of private, internal, apolitical sense of ‘faith’ or ‘religion’.”19

“Deen” in the sense of “custom” would lead to the idea of “direction” (huda), as in a guide, the guide being God, and the direction being the suitable one for each person—linking back to the Semitic root of “judgment”. This is the framework for the Qur’anic term Yawm al-Deen (the Day of Judgment), when God will give direction to each human being, and the emergence of “deen” to signify “the corpus of obligatory prescriptions given by God, to which one must submit”, in the words of Louis Gardet.20 The close association between deen and islam (submission) was present early, in the phase when the Arab creed was an indeterminate Biblical monotheism. For the Ishmaelites or Hagarenes, as the Arab conquerors were known, the true expression of allegiance to God (the deen) was submission to Him (islam).21 The outlook would remain when what was by then an Imperial creed crystallised into a more exclusivist format—when, so to speak, “Islam” became a proper noun—around the ninth century AD.

The transition from the early creed—what the Qur’an calls Millat Ibrahim (the Way of Abraham)22—to Islam as we know it involved the generation of a Tradition that further “defined the obligations and prescriptions laid down by God” encompassed in the word deen, Gardet explains, and, while there was some contest about the details, these included: faith in Him; correct practice in daily living and worship, significantly following the example of the Prophet Muhammad and the Companions (Sahaba); and upholding the Holy Law (Shari’a), which regulates both the private and public spheres.23

As in Christianity, the historical context shaped Muslim understanding.24 In contrast to Moses, who was prevented from entering his Promised Land,25 and Jesus, who was crucified, the Prophet Muhammad was victorious in his lifetime. Muhammad was “the Seal of the Prophets”,26 and he was Head of State, with all that implied of enforcing the law, administering justice, making war, and making peace.

It should be emphasised, Muhammad and his Successors (Caliphs) did not create or give laws: Islam recognises no human role in legislation for God is the true sovereign of the umma (Islamic community) and the duty of His temporal deputies is merely to uphold God’s Holy Law.27 This is why, when the Tradition describes Muhammad putting his enemies to death, it reads to Christians as if they were enemies of Muhammad’s government and Islam, but the Tradition makes no such distinction. This complete fusion of what Christians consider “religion” and “politics” is what explains Islam’s pitiless treatment of apostates: to abandon the faith was not to make a personal choice; it was to defect from the umma, thus apostasy carried (and still carries) the connotation of treason,28 which until very recently all were agreed was a capital offence.

From this perspective, there is one sense in which “deen” conveys less than “religion”. “Religion” is intimately bound to the Church in Christianity, a whole apparatus with its own history, hierarchy, and sacramental role. There is no equivalent in Islam: the mosque is a building for worship and study, not an institution, and the imam, the “one who is in front”, is a functionary, not an ordained figure.29 (Shi’ism’s apparent exception to this rule is a very recent innovation.30) In classical Islam, therefore, to speak of “Mosque and State” is meaningless. Consequently, deen lacks the implied institutional meaning that “religion” has, and the languages of Islamdom—Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—were devoid of the pairs of words that signify the two realms: “religious” and “secular”, “sacred” and “profane”, “spiritual” and “temporal”, “ecclesiastical” and “lay”. It was not a deficiency in these very rich languages. Rather, the concept of the rival spheres did not exist, so no vocabulary was needed to describe them.31

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SECULARISM AND ISLAM

Unlike in Christendom, where the pattern was countries containing religions, in Islamdom there was the deen containing countries. In Europe, the territorial unit—England, say—was the primary identity and the subjects could (eventually) have different beliefs about God. In the Middle East, there was some variation in political affiliation by territory—occasionally a local dynasty arose—and they were certainly aware of ethnic and cultural differences, but identity was defined by creed.32 There were Muslims, the umma with the Caliph at its head, and non-Muslims. That this classification was the only one that mattered can be seen in, for example, nineteenth-century Ottoman newspapers, which carried items such as: “There was an accident on the bridge, and one unbeliever was injured.”33 There was no polemical point being made; it simply reflected the Muslim assumption about the basic division in humanity.

Islamdom’s first experience with secularism was in the form of the French Revolution,34 which aroused some curiosity as it presented itself as non-Christian. The contemporary impact was minimal, but the long-term consequences, in inspiring reformers and transmitting the idea of nationalism, was very great.35 The first serious steps toward Westernisation, that is remoulding Islam along Christian lines, happened in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Sultan was forced by the British to (nominally) abolish the jizya (non-Muslim poll tax) and slavery, and justified it in most Protestant terms by explaining that the words of the Qur’anic text did not really mean what they had for twelve centuries. Muhammad, it turned out, was an abolitionist all along.36 There were subsequent reforms of this kind, but discussing and internalising the justifications for them was hampered by an elemental problem.

Even as the notion of “secularism” began to filter into Islamdom, there were no words to describe it, and the vocabulary that did develop remains stamped with its alien origins. The Turks, interfacing for Islamdom with Christendom, were the first to encounter secularism, in the French Revolutionary period, and were then the first to apply it in the 1920s, creating a Republic that officially disestablished Islam. The word for “secular” in the Turkish Constitution is laik, a word obviously borrowed from the French laïque. The Persians also took in laik and adopted “secular” unadorned (سکولار). As Arabic is both a Muslim and Christian language, there was a word to hand for “secular”, “temporal”, etc.: alamani (lit. “worldly”). The word’s etymology and Christian roots would be occluded, and it would be revocalised as ilmani, but for many Muslims this did little to hide its foreignness.37

The turning point was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s decision, having directly remade Turkey as a Western nation-State, to abolish the Caliphate in 1924. This removed the linchpin of the umma, forcing upon the rest of Islamdom fundamental questions of legitimacy, allegiance, and identity, and did so at just the moment Western power and influence was at its height in the region.

Some, like the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen), tried to bar the road, arguing that Islamdom had been brought low by too much “modernisation”, a thin disguise for Westernisation, which had taken Muslims very far from the authentic Islam that was the answer to the crisis. But the Brethren were contesting the laws of gravity in the circumstances. Most Muslim governments and intellectual elites took the opposite view, and in so doing—in arguing the disaster resulted from insufficient modernisation—they implicitly blamed Islamic rule for the backwardness. A brief liberal era dawned under Western tutelage and then Arab nationalism—hostile to the West but committed to Westernisation, a construct largely of Christian Arab intellectuals—swept all before it, until it, too, failed, symbolised in the defeat of the Arab war on Israel in 1967. After this, on the seventh day of the Six-Day War as some say, the long debate about what went wrong intensified in Islamdom and the Islamist prescription for how to put it right found more of an audience.

Islamism in its various forms—Sunni and Shi’a, Ikhwani and jihadi-Salafist, political and terroristic—shares the same core “objective of undoing the secularizing reforms …, abolishing the imported codes of law and the social customs that came with them, and returning to the Holy Law of Islam and an Islamic political order”.38 This was the central point in the writings and speeches of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-79, the first major victory of the Islamists, which has had an enormous impact in shifting the regional balance of sentiment and power against the modernisers/Westernisers.

Khomeini set out his vision in a manifesto a decade before the fall of the Shah. The argument, and charge, dominating the book is that Westerners and more particularly Westernisers, since Islamist ire has always been focused most intently on the internal enemy,39 have sought to limit the scope of Islam’s role in Muslim society, to negate the deen and shunt the scholars charged with upholding it off to the side, leaving them, like Christian clerics, to administer their houses of worship and speak only on matters of personal spirituality. It was this trend Khomeini was determined to reverse:

Do not allow the true nature of Islam to remain hidden, or people will imagine that Islam is like Christianity …, a collection of injunctions pertaining to man’s relation to God, and the mosques will be equated with the church. … God, Exalted and Almighty, by means of the Most Noble Messenger, sent … laws and practices for all human affairs and laid injunctions for man extending from even before the embryo is formed until after he is placed in the tomb. In just the same way that there are laws setting forth the duties of worship for man, so too there are laws, practices, and norms for the affairs of society and government. … All the voluminous books that have been compiled from the earliest times on different areas of law, such as judicial procedure, social transactions, penal law, retribution, international relations, regulations pertaining to peace and war, private and public law—taken together, these contain a mere sample of the laws and injunctions of Islam. There is not a single topic in human life for which Islam has not provided instructions and established a norm.40

Khomeini went on:

[Foreign “imperialists”] have tried with their propaganda and insinuations to present Islam as a petty, limited affair, and to restrict the functions of the fuqaha [jurists] and ulema [scholars, theologians] to insignificant matters. … The propaganda institutions of imperialism have whispered to tempt and persuade us to separate the deen from politics, that the ruhaniyat [Shi’a ulema] must not interfere in social matters, and that the fuqaha do not have the duty of overseeing the destiny of the community of Islam. Unfortunately, some people have believed them and fallen under their influence, with the result that we see.41

The irony is Khomeinism accentuated, rather than reversed, the Christianisation of Islam. The Revolution in its iconography was inflected with Marxism (a Christian heresy)—notably acting in the name of the “oppressed” (mostazafeen)—and in power the Khomeinists have created something unprecedented in the history of Islam, rule by men who can only be described as “clergy” in the Christian sense.42 All indications are that most Iranians have decided clerical entanglement in politics has gone too far and would like to try the secular remedy Christians adopted when they came to the same view.

The situation in Turkey is murky, though there are some signs of similar dynamics to those in Iran. In the Arab world, the trendline is much clearer. The polarisation since the 1970s has rendered the popular understanding of ilmani more as “godlessness” or atheism, even “immorality”, while those identifying with the word have become fewer and harder-edged in their attitude towards Islam.43 The attempt for a time to switch to “civil State” as a more genuinely neutral alternative has not been very effective, partly because it was closely associated with Egypt’s “Arab spring” experiment, which saw the Muslim Brotherhood elected and then removed in a bloody military coup, a sequence that satisfied nobody. The deeper problem is one that lexicography cannot paper over. What was apparent in the early 2000s, that secularism was “in a bad way in the Middle East”,44 that there was an increasingly “widespread Muslim rejection” of the concept,45 on ideological and utilitarian grounds, for being both alien and ineffective in reversing the socio-political decline, is even more true two decades later.

It is no accident, as the comrades used to say, that the most virulent form of Islamism since Khomeinism, the Islamic State (IS), emerged in the Arab world. When IS speaks of al-ilmaniyyun (the secularists), it uses the term virtually interchangeably with kufr (infidels, unbelievers) and murtadeen (apostates), and includes them on the list of subversives and traitors, with democrats and nationalists, who import and imitate Western ways that undermine Islamic society and the shari’a. The centrality of this belief in IS’s worldview is demonstrated in the movement’s reaction to the Gaza war. IS has exploited the increased space for antisemitism and Islamic militancy since 2023, especially in Europe and her daughters,46 but it has refused to embrace the populist and popular Palestine Cause as such, repeatedly condemning HAMAS and its allies and supporters as “nationalist” deviants, warring against Israel for the sake of the territory in former Mandate Palestine, rather than waging a jihad for the deen that targets Jews as part of a global campaign against infidels.

Marking ten years since the proclamation of the caliphate in 2024, the IS spokesman began his speech by saying IS’s greatest achievement was to have established a polity where Muslims were “governed by the deen of their Lord”, itemising the comprehensive system of State institutions that “spread virtue and suppressed vice”, and “demolished the idols of jahiliyya [pre-Islamic ignorance], patriotism, and nationalism”. The core of IS’s project, consistent with the Islamist movement since the 1920s, is to cleanse Islamdom of alien accretions,47 particularly those from Christendom and specifically secularism, and thereby restore the popular understanding of Islam to its (imagined) pure and pristine origins, thus enabling the restoration of the all-encompassing deen to govern the life of believers and the society they live in, namely a unified Islamic State for all Muslims.

IS’s methods provoke overwhelming revulsion in the Muslim world; the caliphal vision in principle rather less so. “The Islamic State … draws on, and draws strength from, ideas that have a broad resonance”, writes Shadi Hamid. “[Muslims] may not agree with the group’s interpretation of the caliphate, but the notion of a caliphate is a powerful one, even among more secular-minded Muslims” [italics original].48

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ISLAM AND EUROPE

If secularism has not fared well in Muslim lands, what of Muslims in secular lands? The question of Muslim populations in Europe is a novel and recent one, emerging after the Second World War.49 What was not new was the source of the frictions encountered by the Muslim newcomers, which echoed the problems experienced by Jews, Christendom’s only minority for much of its existence. Muslims, after all, were being normal in their expectations of the writ of the divine. It was Christendom that had the strange perceptions on this front.

Christians had long used the term Ioudaismos as if it was a Jewish counterpart to Christianity, but what it had signified at those times when Jews used it was the Jewish way of life, the totality of what it meant to be Jewish: the language, customs, culture, and practices of a nation (ethnos) bound to one another and to a sacred territory centred on Jerusalem.50 The Christian offer of salvation by dissolving this distinctiveness and joining a universal brotherhood was more successful in the guise of the French Revolution, which provided a model that spread across Europe in the nineteenth century: Jews who set aside the Mosaic Law and other attributes of peoplehood could individually become citizens who followed the religion of “Judaism”.51 The backlash to this, Jews advocating a return to Ioudaismos in full, including a renewed drive to restore the Children of Israel to their homeland, would become known as “Zionism”.

Muslim migrants in the late twentieth century entered a Europe that in its own estimation had moved beyond tolerance—an inherently intolerant concept, suggesting a dominant group is putting up with certain things from minorities—to acceptance and equality. Works like James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough in the late nineteenth century had embedded the framework of “world religions”,52 a secular veneer on the Christian presumption that its values are universal, and “religious freedom” was the order of the day in the West, not least as a counterpoint to the half of Europe lost to the Soviet Union. Yet, as Tom Holland has written, this was exactly the problem: the notion “that all religions were essentially the same”, and that secularism “was neutral between all religions”, was a conceit “only those who believed in the foundation myths of secularism”, those who are products of Christendom, could believe.53 Western secularists in their own minds were treating all equally by asking, crucially without admitting what they were doing, the same price of acceptance from everybody: that they force their creed into the Christian mould.54 But the cost was not equal for all. Muslims felt the demand to undergo this Procrustean process as deeply traumatic—and understandably resisted it.55

The tension with Jews traditionally was between their particularism and the universalist aspirations of Christian States. The issue looked similar with Muslims in the early phase, when their numbers were small, the question being merely “integration”, i.e., getting the newcomers to accept Christianised perceptions of identity. The analogy with the Jews broke down fairly quickly, however, because the faultline with Muslims was not just their wish to retain their distinctiveness, but their rival universalism. Islam is a proselytising, “triumphalist” creed; its ideal is for all of humanity to see its truth. As Muslim numbers increased, and the second and third generations proved more “radical” than the first,56 the question of who should accommodate to whom became a live one.

The Muslim role in Western politics is increasing, in part through the Islamist alliance with the far-Left—the unholy alliance of the Black and the Red, as the Shah called this revolutionary force which toppled him—and more broadly as European Muslims gain proficiency in navigating a democracy. The “Muslim vote” is no longer ignorable in many countries, and between elections Muslims have availed themselves of all the usual means of influencing policy: forming organised elites to engage the State, communal mobilisation, turning economic power to political ends, sectional lobbying, securing representation across civil society, and the rest of it. This increasing Muslim assertiveness comes as Western hegemony fades, and with it the illusion that Christian assumptions are the norms of mankind.57 The loss of Western self-confidence that caused this retreat abroad infuses the approach domestically, a policy of the pre-emptive cringe.58

“Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had.” When Bernard Lewis said that nearly twenty years ago, the West had already been living under a de facto Islamic blasphemy law for some time. Left-wing anti-religious iconoclasm, once a powerful force in Western politics, has been replaced with a concern for Islamic sensitivities that extends even to a suffocating ambiguity about the morality of massacring the Charlie Hebdo staff. In the collision between the post-1945 Western taboo on antisemitism, and the prevalence of antisemitism among Muslims, it is the former that has given way. If some Muslims have the sense that it will be “third time lucky”, that demography and migration will accomplish what was thwarted at Tours and Vienna, one must grant that they have come by the perception honestly.

Such an outcome is by no means certain. There are countervailing indicators. Some younger Muslims have gone as far as joining with their non-Muslim counterparts in defining themselves primarily by Left-wing politics, including the social liberalism. Muslims rejecting Islam, even implicitly, is a fringe phenomenon and likely to remain so, but it is an interesting data point. The most remarkable thing is how many Muslims have internalised the idea of “the secular”, reshaping their identity from being part of an umma following the deen to being citizens of European countries who have a “religion”. Perhaps this will become the dominant perception of the faith and resolve the “integration” question. While it seems unlikely in the lifetime of anybody reading this given Islam’s exceptional resistance to secularisation, it remains a possibility. Another option, if neither side can reshape the other in its image, is the perpetuation of some version of the status quo, with Islam as an undigested component of Western societies, the stresses and strains of the relationship in various phases more and less visible and severe.

CONCLUSION

The main point I hope to have carried is that to translate deen as “religion” is an error. “Religion” is inadequate and misleading, projecting Christian assumptions onto a phenomenon born of a civilisation where such assumptions do not apply. A better one-word translation of deen would be “lifeway”.

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FOOTNOTES

The argument over whether what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 constitutes genocide is the subject of a forthcoming post. Putting that article together has proven to be partly an engagement with the changing state of academic and public opinion in the West, which has now overwhelming settled on the conclusion that genocide is the correct description. A brief sketch of this intellectual history seemed interesting enough for a standalone piece.

THE EARLY HISTORY

Politics has loomed large over this subject from the beginning. There was significant Entente propaganda related to the Armenian massacres during the First World War. Britain was particularly prominent in this: one intelligence operative, Arnold Toynbee, produced The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (a.k.a. “The Blue Book”) in 1916,1 which expressed the genuine British outrage at the calamities inflicted on the Ottoman Christians, but also had an eye on drawing the United States into the war.2 This was among the reasons Entente propaganda also often blamed Germany as much as the nationalist Ottoman government of the Young Turks or Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).3 The attempt to prosecute accused CUP war criminals in 1919-20 was by the virulently anti-CUP post-war Turkish government that operated under Allied occupation and had political incentives to produce “legal” findings that vindicated Allied wartime propaganda,4 an objective made easier by the procedures in no way resembling fair trials.5 Toynbee’s work and the newspaper reports of the Constantinople trials are still cited as primary sources.

The other main public works around this time were memoirs, from diplomats (most prominently, the U.S. Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Henry Morgenthau6), missionaries, Armenian survivors, and other eyewitnesses—or alleged eyewitnesses. Because another important phenomenon after the Great War was Armenian revolutionaries and activists fabricating luridly incriminating documentary testimony to influence Western opinion and policy towards Turkey, including the infamous Naim-Andonian Documents that contain forged telegrams purportedly from Ottoman Interior Minister Talat Pasha explicitly ordering the annihilation of the Armenians.7 Once the political contestation over the post-war settlement had ended in the early 1920s, there was a precipitate fading of interest as Europe retreated into itself and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk worked to embed his secular revolution in Turkey.

There was some revival of interest in the 1940s, again for political reasons, when activists and statesmen, in the shadow of the Holocaust, were pushing to encode genocide in “international law”.8 Indeed, Raphael Lemkin, coiner of the word “genocide” in 1944, was influenced by the Armenian case and saw it plainly as an example, though this is complicated because what Lemkin meant by genocide and the actual definition in the Genocide Convention are clean different things. The Convention was precise in defining genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such”. Lemkin’s concept of genocide was far more amorphous, incorporating not only violence against property, such as churches and libraries, which he termed “cultural genocide”, but social processes like assimilation.9

THE COLD WAR

Aggressive Soviet designs against Turkey from the late 1940s into the 1950s prompted further interest in the Armenian Question. Moscow had prevailed in the Second World War, conquering much of Eastern Europe from its former Nazi ally, and then set about conquests further afield. The Soviets tried military means in places like Iran, Greece, and Korea, and political means elsewhere, notably in Turkey.

The Soviets wanted to “revise”—read: control—the situation on the Turkish Straits, the Dardanelles and Bosporus, and the Armenians were Moscow’s chosen lever. In 1946, the Soviets initiated a global active measures campaign to present the “Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic” as the fulfilment of Armenian national aspirations, mobilising a massive wave of “repatriation” (nerkaght),10 then made territorial claims in eastern Turkey by proclaiming these were “Armenian historical lands” that should be added to Soviet Armenia and re-populated with Armenians.11 It was against this backdrop that a rare book on 1915 was published in Turkey, The Armenians in History and the Armenian Question (1950), by one of the few surviving prominent CUP officials, Esat Uras, effectively arguing the Russians were at it again in using the Armenians to try to dismember the Turkish State.12

Turkey joining NATO in 1952 forced Moscow Centre to adjust its methods of political warfare, turning away from the Armenian heartlands to the diaspora. The Soviets landed on the nascent Armenian genocide-recognition campaign as a mechanism to instrumentalise the Armenian diaspora, especially in the United States.13 It is impossible to imagine that the Cold War context, where Turkey was “a valued associate of the United States”, had no influence on the general aversion of Western elites to discussing the Armenian massacres up to the 1960s, and the view of academic historians who dealt with 1915 that it was as an “unrelieved tragedy”, which came about because of the Ottoman belief the State faced an existential crisis due to the internal Armenian rebellion in alliance with the invading Russians, a belief “doubtless greatly exaggerated, but [with] enough basis in fact” that nobody could say they would not have done the same to “save themselves” in similar circumstances.14

As previously explained:

[The Soviets encouraging the genocide-recognition movement] created some minor initial difficulties within Soviet Armenia, but the Soviet Revolution’s official theology had adapted to incorporate the “national liberation movements” within the Third World Strategy, and it was easy enough to channel Armenian national sentiment into this program. Space was made for Soviet Armenian publications arguing that 1915 was genocide, and these books, translated into English and other Western languages, circulated in Armenian émigré activist circles. These works were foundational to the movement that would in time pressure Western legislatures to recognise Turkey as guilty of genocide, and in parallel emerged Armenian terrorist organisations that targeted Turkish diplomats and civilians in the name of revenge for the genocide and forcing Ankara to abandon its policy of “denial”.

There were two main terrorist groups: the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG), later rebranded the Armenian Revolutionary Army (ARA), the “deniable” terrorist wing of the Dashnaks,15 one of the nationalist-socialist revolutionary groups that led the 1914-15 rebellion in the Ottoman Empire, which had moved into alignment with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), an outright KGB creature.16 It was the activities of these terrorists in particular and ASALA specifically, in the early 1970s, the success of their “propaganda of the deed” amid the chic for the “guerrilla” or fedayeen embodied in the Soviet-dependent Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), that brought the Armenian massacres back into the international discussion in a serious way.

The heightened interest, and focusing of resources, paved the way for the genocide-recognition movement to gain a foothold in academia—and, of course, triggered the counter-campaign by the Turkish government,17 to smother a too-long-delayed confrontation with the truth or to combat a scandalous libel, as one prefers.

Two of the prime movers in setting up the Western academic infrastructure of Armenian genocide-recognition were Richard G. Hovannisian and Vahakn Dadrian, both Armenian-Americans. Hovannisian was born in California in 1932 to a father who survived the deportations. Dadrian was born in Constantinople in 1926 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1947. Both were involved in Armenian diaspora politics, a milieu where the institutions—from youth groups up to lobby organisations like the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA)—are affiliated with the Dashnaks. It was moving in such circles Hovannisian met his academic mentor, Simon Vratsian, the last Prime Minister of the short-lived, Dashnak-led First Armenian Republic (1918-20), and Dadrian became closely associated with the Zoryan Institute, which is not a Dashnak institution, exactly, but it did have among its founders Gerard Libaridian, a hereditary member of the Dashnak Party.

A lot of the Armenian literature on 1915 available in the early 1970s was either the Soviet historiography itself, by authors like E. K. Sarkissian and R. G. Sahakian, or was derivative of these works and shaped by their methods. What Hovannisian and Dadrian wanted to do was create an academic corpus making the genocide case in a format respectable by Western standards. The dynamics in the Armenian diaspora would assist in this. As Libaridian later noted, there was a significant Armenian cultural upwelling from the 1970s onwards, which overall sharpened a collective identity, but it was a minefield trying to focus on specifics. The one issue that united everyone—the church, religious dissidents, the Dashnaks, the anti-Dashnak nationalists, the Communists who believed Soviet Armenia was the sole legitimate vehicle of national aspirations—was advocating for recognition of the genocide. Libaridian found this somewhat stifling: he had wanted the Zoryan Institute to look to the future as well as the past, to focus on issues like Armenian-Turkish reconciliation, but he was in a tiny minority. 1915 was “the beginning and end of everything” for Zoryan’s donors, researchers, and students, and he ultimately departed.

There was resistance to Hovannisian, Dadrian, and their allies at first. The reaction of some scholars who engaged the emerging genocide-recognition literature was downright contemptuous, seeing the dismal failures in handling sources and so on as inevitable in what was so obviously a political-activist project dressed up as scholarship.18 Specialists working in the Ottoman archives were similarly dismissive, contending that inter alia the Hovannisian-Dadrian theories fell to pieces on impact with the historical records that “manifest numerous efforts [by the Ottoman government] to investigate and correct a situation in which [peoples of all ethnicities and faiths] were being killed by a combination of revolts, bandit attacks, massacres and counter massacres, and famine and disease, compounded by destructive and brutal foreign invasions”, where everyone, “Muslim and non-Muslim alike, had their victims and criminals”.19 It is instructive of the atmosphere in this debate that the response to author of this assessment, Jewish-American scholar Stanford Shaw, a professor of Turkish history based at UCLA, was to publicly vilify him for months before Armenian terrorists bombed his home in California in October 1977.20

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THE TIDE TURNS

The initial resistance notwithstanding, the balance of academic opinion was to shift remarkably quickly. The reputational and physical threats played their part. Another factor was the academic neglect of prior decades, which provided an institutional blank slate on which Dadrian in particular could instantiate the basic contours of Armenian Genocide Studies that still powerfully influence the research agenda to this day.21 For instance, Dadrian responded to the earlier criticism by acknowledging that the Ottoman documents show a policy wherein “the deportees were to be protected, fed, and safely transported, and sanctions would be applied to those officials who mistreated the deportees or allowed them to be mistreated by others”, but he developed an argument that behind this “beguiling appearance of benevolence” were mechanisms of deception, a “two-track” system that hid the real orders for genocide.22 This argument is now part of the furniture in Armenian Genocide Studies, often rehearsed using the exact same sources and interpretations as Dadrian.23

Another contingent factor was that the Armenian genocide-recognition movement had become seriously organised in the 1960s, simultaneous with Jewish activism to undo the repression of the memory of the Holocaust at Nuremberg, and throughout the 1980s the movement in its academic form would converge with scholars of Jewish history and Holocaust-awareness,24 notably Israel Charny and Robert Melson, to enshrine the Armenian massacres in the broader Genocide Studies field as “the first holocaust”. These scholars cited one another in building up a foundational literature, and their sense of moral mission, of uncovering a hidden truth and righting a long-standing injustice,25 was attractive to the young just entering academia and more established scholars, and to scholars from disciplines as broad as history, the law, the political and social sciences, sociology, psychology, even medicine and English literature.26

The Armenian genocide-recognition movement also benefited from being part of the zeitgeist. It was in the 1980s that the trend of national and ethnic groups campaigning to have their past or present suffering classified as genocide really took off,27 and these political campaigns fed into an increasing academic fashion for regarding the Convention definition of “genocide” as too narrow and restrictive.28 The push came from other angles, too, notably those who wanted to criminalise war itself as genocide,29 a push that has not been abandoned. “Genocide” coming to be used very loosely in everyday language cannot be blamed on popular misunderstanding, since by now there are academic arguments for describing as “genocide” events where there is no bloodshed at all.30 Whether one calls it a paradox or just cynicism, the underlying effort has been to disassociate “genocide” from the Holocaust to make it more widely available, even as the word’s value to the various claimants derives entirely from the association, and the Armenians were far from alone in tacitly acknowledging this by framing their case in terms of its apparent similarities to the Holocaust.31

By the early 1990s, the Armenian genocide-recognition movement had prevailed in sentiment in academia,32 and its institutional dominance was essentially complete by the end of the decade, though Ottoman history has been a slight holdout.33 A signifier of this was the passage of a resolution in 1997 recognising the Armenian genocide by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), an organisation much better known now than it was then. Another indicator was the publication of a book of essays edited by Hovannisian in 1999, where he decried the “uneasiness of civil libertarians” with “legislative and judicial prohibitions on denial” that the Armenian massacres were genocide.34 “The Armenian Genocide is not a hypothesis but a certainty”, wrote another contributor: to contest this is to victimise the “traumatised” and generally become “an accomplice to the prolongation of the effects of the genocide”, which must be stopped, by the courts if necessary; “the freedom of the historian” is not a relevant consideration in this picture.35

One could mark the change in just a few years. In 1994, Armenian activists in France sued Bernard Lewis for “negationism” because he had expressed the view that what happened to the Armenians in 1915 and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews were different. During the trial, few academics or journalists actively defended the effort to prosecute Lewis for thought crimes; they mostly kept quiet, and there was even a smattering of articles worrying about the free speech implications.36 By the 2010s, mainstream academic journals were publishing articles saying that any appearance of debate on the Armenian genocide was “manufactured” by bad actors equivalent to tobacco industry lobbyists creating doubt about the link between smoking and lung cancer,37 and several more European States had passed laws making it a criminal offence for one side in an historical debate to express themselves.38

THE BROADER ACADEMIC CONTEXT

The process for establishing and reinforcing an academic orthodoxy is by now tolerably well-known: the citation cascade, asymmetric scepticism and burdens of proof in peer-review depending on whether the author supports the hegemonic view or dissents from it,39 a handful of books from the dominant faction becoming curricula references, the visible consensus deterring dissidents even wanting to enter the field, those dissidents who try to enter experiencing difficulties with hiring boards, and the dissidents already in the system getting gradually squeezed out by the decisions on promotion and tenure, the sources and allocation of grant money, the escalating social pressure and reputational cost of non-conformity, and, not to put too fine a point on it, death.40

To know of this process does not in itself prove or even suggest the consensus in any one field is wrong. It works very well to keep flat-earthers out of physics and creationists out of biology. By this stage, however, it would also be naïve to take for granted that an academic consensus generated by so very human a process represents reality.

To throw the issue into some relief we can look at Science, where (unlike history) there is generally (at least in theory) only one correct answer to a question, and still the issue of consensus and the evidentiary metrics it rests on arises. Parapsychology or “psi”—telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis—is a real thing by the standard evidence criteria of Science, having to its name a dozen meta-analyses validating hundreds of studies with statistically significant effects.41 Yet all of Science is not currently preoccupied with rewriting the laws of physics to take account of this because what everyone (except the factional devotees of psi) understands is that “psi is a control condition for science, an unwitting jester in the court of academia”: the actual revelation from these studies is that “the published literature [of Science as a whole] provides only a contorted reflection of the true state of affairs” and that “the academic system is broken [because] our standard scientific methods allow one to prove the impossible”.42

The brokenness can be seen from the other direction, where there is a consensus in Science that a phenomenon is real. A phenomenon can be validated by numerous converging lines of evidence from scholars in a wide range of disciplines applying their various techniques—with the consensus so solid that research has moved beyond arguments about validity to mapping the technical details of its functioning—and it is no guarantee that the phenomenon in question does, in fact, exist. For example, until recently, 5-HTTLPR was considered by scholars in genetics (molecular, human, and several other subfields), psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, neuroimaging, and psychopharmacology to be an important genetic factor in causing depression, and then it was not. This is not intrinsically a problem: self-correction is what Science is about, after all. No, the problem was, as Scott Alexander explained:

We “figured out” how 5-HTTLPR exerted its effects, what parts of the brain it was active in, what sorts of things it interacted with, how its effects were enhanced or suppressed by the effects of other imaginary depression genes. This isn’t just an explorer coming back from the Orient and claiming there are unicorns there. It’s the explorer describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot.

As Alexander went on to note, this was a case that exemplified why minimising the “replication crisis” was misguided: the problem was not people overstating effects or the context-dependency of same. “The problem is more like ‘you can get an entire field with hundreds of studies analyzing the behavior of something that doesn’t exist’.” The fallout from 5-HTTLPR has virtually demolished candidate genes as a field.

Nor is Science immune to a false consensus driven by politics and self-interest. The ideological capture of the academic apparatus and medical bodies determining the “treatments” for children who believe they are transgender is now clear for all to see. A particularly tragic and larger-scale case is research into Alzheimer’s disease. Sharon Begley reported in 2019: “for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis [that the build-up of beta-protein amyloid plaques cause Alzheimer’s] suppressed research on alternative ideas: They influenced what studies got published in top journals, which scientists got funded, who got tenure, and who got speaking slots at reputation-buffing scientific conferences.” Undoubtedly, there were some malign actors,43 but in the main “the amyloid camp was neither organized nor nefarious”, Begley wrote. “Those who championed the amyloid hypothesis truly believed it, and thought that focusing money and attention on it rather than competing ideas was the surest way to an effective drug.”

If this is the situation in so “hard” a subject as medical Science, one’s wariness—not nihilistic distrust, but scepticism—should be set higher in general for the findings of “softer” subjects like history, the humanities, and social sciences, and higher still for politicised fields therein.

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Post has been updated about the Soviet “repatriation” campaign, the Dashnaks’ Cold War alignment, and the attack on Shaw

^FOOTNOTES

I have a piece out in the Manara Magazine of the the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum (MENAF), co-authored with Robert Clark.

The Armenian revolutionary movement in the Ottoman Empire, which began in the late nineteenth century with the intention of creating a national polity in eastern Anatolia, produced many heroes. Armenians among themselves still celebrate many of them to this day, such as: Andranik Ozanian, Aram Manukian, Garegin Pastermadjian (Armen Garo), Garegin Nzhdeh, Drastamat Kanayan (Dro), Arshak Gavafian (Keri), Kevork Chavush, and Hrayr Dzhoghk. These men worked to inculcate the Armenian national idea and led the armed campaign that sought to make it a reality, culminating in the uprising on the eve of Ottoman entry into the First World War, which not only the Armenians could foresee was the death knell for the Empire. Their names have been occluded to varying degrees by shifting political tides.

Armenian activists and publications from 1914-15 into the 1920s were entirely forthright in celebrating the successes of the nationalist revolutionaries who fought the Ottomans and generally did not disguise that this was done in direct alliance with Russia and the Entente.1 What curtailed this kind of thing was the remnants of the brief Armenian Republic falling under Soviet rule in 1920. The Soviets denounced the wartime rebels and “the Dashnak Republic” as “bourgeois nationalists”. There were changes in the 1950s after Turkey joined NATO and particularly by the 1960s. Moscow saw the utility of the campaign to have the 1915-16 Armenian massacres recognised as genocide in instrumentalising the Armenian diaspora for political warfare against Turkey, specifically the influential Armenian community in the United States.2 This created some minor initial difficulties within Soviet Armenia, but the Soviet Revolution’s official theology had adapted to incorporate the “national liberation movements” within the Third World Strategy, and it was easy enough to channel Armenian national sentiment into this program.

Space was made for Soviet Armenian publications arguing that 1915 was genocide, and these books, translated into English and other Western languages, circulated in Armenian émigré activist circles. These works were foundational to the movement that would in time pressure Western legislatures to recognise Turkey as guilty of genocide, and in parallel emerged Armenian terrorist organisations that targeted Turkish diplomats and civilians in the name of revenge for the genocide and forcing Ankara to abandon its policy of “denial”.3 The confrontational atmosphere and broad popularity of the “guerrillas” revived the Armenian willingness to incorporate the insurgents into the story of 1915, albeit often reframing their role as resisting genocide.4

Academics have been somewhat more hesitant to complicate the genocide debate by giving full recognition to the achievements of the Ottoman-Armenian revolutionaries in developing their movement from the 1890s, the consistency and efficacy of their provocation strategy over two decades, the scale of the rebellion they managed in 1914-15, and their political versatility in securing external support.5 This is a shame because it is a very interesting story in its own right, and foreshadows so many things.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE ARMENIAN NATIONAL MOVEMENT

The organised Armenian national movement in the Ottoman Empire began in the 1860s, but it really took off in the 1870s against the backdrop of the “Great Eastern Crisis”.

A Christian revolt spread through the Ottoman Balkans starting in 1875, most importantly to Bulgaria, where the fierce government reaction electrified opinion in Christendom, leading to one of the first modern international “human rights” campaigns.6 In 1877, Russia stepped in and, after the traditional period of military calamity, overwhelmed the Ottomans. The Russian-dictated peace in the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878 so alarmed the other European powers—especially Britain, which had propped up the Ottoman Empire through most of the nineteenth century, in no small part as a bulwark against Russia—that the Congress of Berlin was convened to revise the terms.

In the superseding July 1878 Treaty of Berlin, Britain, having signalled a willingness to go to war to prevent Russia reaching its theological-strategic dream of capturing the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, and the Straits, managed to whittle down the Russian victory.7 London could not prevent the Ottomans losing control of Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia in the west, but it did secure the return of Macedonia to the Ottomans. Similarly, while the Russian annexation of territory containing Batum, Kars, and Ardahan—all cities with important Armenian minorities—was a fait accompli, Britain reversed Russia’s plans for the rest of the east. Russia was to have occupied the so-called Six Provinces in eastern Anatolia where the Ottoman-Christian population was most-heavily concentrated over the widest area,8 nominally only long enough to oversee “reforms”.9 The British and Ottomans understandably doubted the Russians would ever leave.

Britain instead settled for a clause on the Armenian Question in the Berlin Treaty that obliged “the Sublime Porte … to carry out, without further delay, the ameliorations and reforms demanded by local requirements in the Provinces inhabited by the Armenians”. Crucially, the Great Powers arrogated to themselves a right to “superintend [the reforms’] application”. Britain was the centre of humanitarian agitation about the “Bulgarian horrors” and demands for a morality-driven foreign policy. The clause appeared to satisfy British strategic and moral concerns, but it would provide the Russians much greater satisfaction.

The Ottoman Empire was used to being subject to European political and ideological influence,10 and to Ottoman-Christians being an important conduit. Almost as soon as the Ottomans got seriously enmeshed in the European State system they had to content with the destructive reverberations of the French Revolution, notably nationalism. Ottoman-Christians, with their conceptual and linguistic links to the West, were the most vulnerable to this Enlightenment contagion, and the Greeks were early victims. However, the Armenians were initially less affected,11 and well into the nineteenth century were known as “the loyal community”.12 The direct European interference in Ottoman internal affairs after 1878 was new, and this change cannot be disentangled from the reconfiguration of relations between the Ottoman State and its Armenian subjects over subsequent decades.

The nascent Armenian national movement burgeoned in an internationalised context, its political aspirations integrally tied to European patronage.13 The Bulgarian example—of Christian revolutionary organisations instigating a rebellion and international outrage at the Ottoman response leading to a Russian intervention that secured independence—inspired emulators among the Armenians.14 The difference was that as the Armenian revolutionary committees formed over the next decade, there was already a framework in place for their armed provocations to induce Russian intervention (and, as we shall see, this tacit cooperation that existed from the beginning would become ever-more direct over time). The 1878 treaty, which tried to square the sincere British commitments to Ottoman territorial integrity and improving the humanitarian situation for Ottoman-Armenians, had created a set-up where Russia could use the latter as a pretext to undermine the former.15

This did not go unnoticed. The Porte would come to see the Armenian national movement and the “international law” instruments surrounding it as a stalking horse for secession and foreign annexation of Ottoman territory. At a popular level, the corollary was increasing Muslim resentment towards Armenians and other Christians as a “fifth column”: a disloyal and threatening vector for foreign schemes against the Empire.

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ARMENIAN “NATIONAL LIBERATION” WARFARE

The first underground Armenian revolutionary entity, established in 1885, was the Armenakan Party, whose main leader was in France.16 The party was more liberal ideologically, ambiguous about violence; and failed to establish a broad base of support or much practical influence outside of Van. The two primary Armenian revolutionary committees were the Hunchaks and Dashnaks, founded in 1887 and 1890, respectively.17 These groups are sometimes called “Armenian Narodniks” and for good reason: ideologically, both combined nationalism and socialism in the manner of the Russian Narodniki terrorist-revolutionaries; not-coincidentally, both operated in an international milieu where the Narodniki were powerful; and both were created abroad and had among their leaders Armenians who had either been born in the Russian Empire or lived there most of their lives. The Hunchaks were founded in Switzerland, specifically in Geneva by men in close proximity to exiled Narodniki,18 and the Dashnaks originate in Russia itself. There was schism and factionalism, as so often occurs with extremist groups,19 but broadly they pushed in the same direction.

The Hunchaks were overtly devoted to independence—and ultimately to irredentism, wishing to conquer “Ottoman Armenia” first, and then expand this State to include Russian- and Persian-Armenians. The Hunchaks sought to indoctrinate Ottoman-Armenian “peasants and workers” with nationalist-socialist propaganda; to stir up protests and other forms of disobedience, such as refusals to pay tax; and to “elevate the spirit of the people” via terrorism, which was always framed as “self-defence”.20 The Dashnaks spoke more ambiguously of “freedom”, defined in Marxian terms, and tended to frame their objectives in an Ottoman context, even officially expressing wariness about external support.21 In theory, this made the Dashnaks the “moderates”, willing to engage the Ottoman government and settle matters internally with concessions on national rights and autonomy. In practice, the distinction eroded by the 1900s, if not before, with both committees conducting their campaigns through a combination of a legal political party and terrorism, exactly as the Narodniks did in Russia, with the difference that the Armenian revolutionaries acted with an eye towards inducing European Great Power intervention.

In May 1893, the British Consul in Erzurum, Robert W. Graves, met a captured Armenian from one of the committees, who echoed the Russian terrorist-revolutionaries precisely in his explanation that socialist ethics meant the ends justified the means and the worse the situation was for Armenians, the better the chances were for revolution. “He was paid for this work by funds from abroad”, Graves cabled to the ambassador in Constantinople, “and the attention of the movement was, he declared, to cause such disturbances in the country as should attract attention to the oppressed condition of his fellow-countrymen and compel the interference of foreign powers.” Graves met many more Armenian revolutionaries and reflected later in his memoirs: “They were quite cynical when remonstrated with on the wickedness of deliberately provoking the massacre of their unfortunate fellow-countrymen … without any assurance that the lot of the survivors would be any happier, saying calmly that the sacrifice was a necessary one and the victims would be ‘Martyrs to the National Cause’.”22

A report commissioned by the British ambassador to the Porte, Sir Philip Currie, noted in March 1894 that “the immediate aim of the [Armenian] revolutionaries is to incite disorder, to cause inhumane reprisals, and thus to provoke the intervention of the Powers in the name of humanity.” Interestingly, the report—without knowing it—documented another similarity with the Narodniks: the Armenian revolutionaries’ support base was semi-educated young men, while the mass of Ottoman-Armenians were indifferent at best. The secular and religious leaders of the Ottoman-Armenian population had opposed revolutionary doctrines emanating from the West for nearly a century,23 evidently with some success.

Also in 1894, the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople, Khoren Ashekian, powerfully condemned the Armenian nationalists for sowing communal strife that could only lead to disaster for Armenians when the inevitable Turkish backlash arrived and the revolutionaries’ false belief the Russians would save them was exposed. The Hunchaks responded by trying to assassinate Ashekian, twice,24 setting the template for the Armenian committees’ behaviour and that of the many revolutionary movements to come, always at least as concerned with eradicating dissent in the community they claimed to represent as combatting the State.

Cyrus Hamlin, an American Protestant missionary to the Ottoman-Armenians since the 1840s and one of the founders of the elite Robert College in Constantinople, spoke to a Hunchak leader in December 1893, who explained that the Armenian revolutionaries planned to take their “opportunity to kill Turks and Kurds, set fire to their villages and then make their escape into the mountains”, whereupon “enraged Muslims will … fall upon the defenceless Armenians and slaughter them with such barbarity that Russia will enter in the name of humanity and Christian civilisation and take possession [of eastern Anatolia].” When Hamlin denounced this as immoral, the Hunchak responded: “It appears so to you, no doubt; but we Armenians have determined to be free. Europe listened to the Bulgarian horrors and made Bulgaria free. She will listen to our cry when it goes up in shrieks and blood of millions of women and children.”25

The Hunchaks, the leading Armenian revolutionary element in the first phase, had a strategy of provocation encoded in their founding program, Article 6 of which read: “The time for the general revolution will be when a foreign power attacks Turkey externally. The party shall [at that time] revolt internally.”26 As the above shows, this was not an abstraction: it was what the Armenian terrorists across all of the committees at ground level understood themselves to be doing. Sometimes it did not work at all, as with the arson attack in then-Ottoman-ruled Thessaloniki in 1890, which the Hunchaks were almost certainly behind. A third of the city burned down, but there were no indiscriminate reprisals on Ottoman-Armenians.27 And, as the Armenian committees were soon to discover, though not to learn from, the tactic might work insofar as it provoked massacres, without bringing a decisive, Bulgarian-level European intervention.

In August 1894, Hunchak fedayi (guerrillas), consciously seeking Great Power intervention, ignited an Armenian rebellion at Sasun that spread across eastern Anatolia.28 In a foreshadowing of 1915, the official repressive measures were accompanied by horrific massacres of Armenian civilians, many carried out by the “Hamidiye”, the Cossack-modelled irregular units of Kurdish tribesmen created in 1891 to protect the eastern frontier.29 European sentiment was duly aroused and in May 1895 the Great Powers presented a Reform package to Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876-1909), which he was obliged to sign in October. But the measures were not binding and were never implemented. Nonetheless, the political effect of Great Power intervention on the back of Armenian provocations was quite profound, even in the short-term, epitomising and exacerbating the confrontational communal-political trends in the Ottoman Empire. It was taken as confirmation of the Muslims’ darkest fears, with a concomitant escalation of repression that made 1896 a year that lives in infamy for Armenians even now, and yet it was also seen as strategic vindication by the Armenian revolutionaries.30

The magnitude of the Armenian revolutionary challenge was evident in Armenian rebels contesting control of the cities, notably Zeytun (now Süleymanlı) and Van, up to a late stage in the crisis in 1896. Even after urban fighting ended, Armenian revolutionaries staged a terrorist “spectacular”, a classic “propaganda of the deed”, by occupying the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople on 26 August 1896. It was indicative of intra-Armenian dynamics that the perpetrators at this stage were the Dashnaks: the Hunchaks had been enduringly wounded, physically and politically, by the 1894-96 events, and the Dashnaks would become the leading element of the national movement. European diplomats arranged safe-passage for the terrorists to France and the European press reported on their cause sympathetically, not least because the bank seizure touched-off a wave of pogroms against Armenian civilians in the capital that killed thousands before the Ottoman government could stop them.

The Porte tried to draw a line under all this with an inquiry to, inter alia, reassure Ottoman-Armenians of the State’s good intentions and to quiet foreign criticism. It backfired, predictably and absolutely, uncovering official failings and misdeeds the Armenian revolutionaries could use in their propaganda and focusing unprecedented international critical attention on the Ottoman government.31

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In July 1897, a Dashnak-led, Hunchak-supported contingent of Armenian fedayeen—the Russian-born Dashnak Sargis Mehrabyan is perhaps the best-known—invaded the Ottoman Empire from Iran and assaulted the encampment of the Kurdish Mazrik tribe on the Khanasor plain in Van Province. The raid was billed as revenge for the anti-Armenian atrocities in Van a year earlier, which the tribe was allegedly primarily responsible for. About 250 Kurds were massacred, many savagely mutilated. The Dashnaks insisted—and European reports of the event took their word—that those killed were all adult males; some accounts say women and children were among the dead.32

In March-April 1904, another Armenian revolt rocked Sasun. Hundreds of Dashnaks, led by Andranik, infiltrated the area from Russia, distributed weapons to local rebels, and began attacking Muslim villages, seemingly with the intention of provoking reprisals that could trigger European intervention. The Ottomans suppressed the revolt—the most prominent Dashnak martyr was Hrayr Dzhoghk—and thousands of Armenian civilians were reportedly massacred yet again, though the British Consul visited the area soon afterwards and said that, on the evidence he had seen, “it would be difficult to sustain charges of massacre and atrocities”.33

An Armenian revolt in Muş, west of Lake Van, in the summer of 1905, was relatively swiftly overcome, apparently with 5,000 fatalities all around.34

All through this period, less visible to foreign newspaper-readers, there was relentless Armenian subversion and guerrilla activity. A glimpse of this phenomenon can be seen in the life of Kevork Chavush, a Dashnak fedayi commander in the Sasun area. Working to raise nationalist consciousness among Armenians and create tensions with the State—over land, taxes, any flash-point he could find—Chavush was known as “the man with the dagger who was always ready to punish those who molested the defenceless people”. An example of what this meant was Chavush’s assassins, after the suppression of the 1904 revolt, stabbing a Kurdish chief to death in his home, along with his wife and children. Chavush was killed in a clash with Ottoman troops in 1907. Such deliberately terrorising assassinations were standard fare from the Armenian fedayeen.35

The nationalist coup in mid-1908 (“The Young Turk Revolution”), which brought the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) to power, changed the situation for a time. The CUP, though indelibly associated with the anti-Armenian atrocities of 1915, had worked with the Armenian revolutionaries in opposition and took a liberal approach to the Armenian Question in government. The CUP equalised rights for Christians, creating increased legal space for Armenian political activism, granting Armenians permission to bear arms, and brought Christians into the Ottoman army, while taking measures to reduce the Kurdish threat to the Armenians by disbanding the Hamidiye, imprisoning renegade commanders, and appointing local administrators committed to disciplining the Kurds.36

In response, the Armenian committees officially called off the terrorism campaign, until the cooperation with the CUP broke down in early 1912.37 The official stance did not always reflect ground reality in the provinces, and in 1911, as relations with the CUP frayed, there was a “politics by day, terrorism by night” dimension to the Dashnaks.38 In the meantime, the Armenian-CUP cooperation itself created new sources of trouble, namely blocs of opponents on either side. Some Armenians favoured the old ways of subsidiarity and among Muslims the CUP policies were broadly opposed for favouring minorities.39 These ultras made themselves felt, most notably in March-April 1909, with a failed Islamist and monarchist counter-coup in Constantinople, and an Armenian uprising in Adana incited by the local bishop, Moushegh Seropian, which spiralled into communal violence throughout Cilicia that is said to have killed up to 20,000 people.40

Chavush and people like him made a lot of effort to arm Armenian civilians in eastern Anatolia, and the stated justification was a good one: self-defence against the marauding Kurdish tribes, whose menace continued despite the political changes at the centre in the 1908-12 period, not least because—as we will get to—the Kurds could acquire arms from outside.41 As in many similar situations of instability and civil strife, this individually rational solution contributed to the overarching problem it was meant to solve. The Ottomans never formally lost the Six Provinces, as they did with the Balkans, but Ottoman State collapse at the periphery was the same at either end of the Empire. The de facto rulers in the east were the Kurdish tribal chiefs, some of whose nomadic militias were implicitly allied to the State, but pinpointing who was on who’s “side” in the Russo-Ottoman borderlands is damnably difficult. Kurdish tribal leaders and sub-leaders regularly fought against Ottoman gendarmes and troops. Armenian committees fought against the Ottoman government and sometimes fought with Ottoman State forces against the Kurds. The Ottoman government intermittently paid and even armed the Dashnaks to destabilise neighbouring rivals. The one constant was Kurdish attacks on Christians, a blend of ideological sectarianism and sheer banditry.42

THE RUSSIAN DIMENSION

It was in these troubled waters that the Russians were fishing by the late 1890s, a policy of meddling in the internal politics of the Ottoman Empire, specifically in the Six Provinces, that continued uninterrupted through the outbreak of the First World War up to late 1917 and in certain respects continued after the Bolshevik coup. The Russian dimension to events in eastern Anatolia in this period is so pervasive that, as Sean McMeekin has written, it is a “serious distortion of the truth to tell the story of the Armenian tragedy of 1915 without reference (or with only passing reference) to Russia. It is akin to writing about, say, the ‘bloodbath in Budapest’ during the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956 without reference to the Soviet Union.”43

The Tsardom had a habit of working with all sides to a conflict, and seeing conflict itself as advantageous, not any specific outcome.44 In eastern Anatolia, that meant Russia being the primary armourer of the Kurds and the Armenians. As Russia had no intention of assisting any of its clients to achieve particular purposes, only a modest outlay was needed to sustain a positive feedback loop of omnidirectional chaos that weakened Ottoman State power and authority. Ottoman troops were tied down in counter-insurgency operations, while support to the Kurds—so extensive there were Kurdish language institutes in Saint Petersburg—enabled depredations against the Armenians that increased Armenian calls for Russian protection.45 Into the bargain, the Ottoman government was often blamed by foreign States and humanitarian activists for Kurdish outrages, damaging the Porte politically, and the Armenian revolutionaries felt themselves ever-more reliant on Petersburg.46

Russian ambitions went beyond hiving off the “Armenian Provinces”. It was hoped in Petersburg to dismember the whole Ottoman Empire and annex large chunks, including the capital. It was in the wake of the 1894-96 Armenian uprisings and massacres that “Russia first began serious logistical research into the possibility of staging an amphibious operation at the Bosphorus”, and the Russians intensified the development of these plans after the violence in 1909. A Russian operational plan from this period envisioned “agents from the Christian population”—Macedonians and Bulgarians in Europe, Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia—preparing the way for a Russian invasion by cutting off rail lines to Constantinople, whereupon native Christians would “burn down all the wooden bridges spanning the Golden Horn and set fire to Stambul”.47

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The long Ottoman decline that began in the late seventeenth century culminated with the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and the importance of this episode in shaping what happened in 1915 can hardly be overstated. Coming a year after Italy had taken Libya, it accentuated the general Ottoman sense of existential dread—that the Empire was defenceless against foreign enemies—and it was singularly unnerving, bringing the frontier dangerously close to the capital, and removing the Balkan territories that had “for long [been] the centre of gravity of the Ottoman Empire”.48 The Russian role, more reactive than enthusiastic it is true, was nonetheless key in organising the Balkan coalition that attacked the Ottomans.49

The impact of the Balkan defeat on the Ottomans heading into 1915 had at least three elements.

First, the public messaging cast a long shadow. The Russians led in lauding the outcome as a victory for Christendom, eliminating the final Islamic toehold in Europe. On the one hand, it drove home to the Ottomans that they were at their lowest ebb, in no condition to handle minor Christian States, never mind the Great Powers. On the other hand, it stoked an Ottoman Muslim thirst for anti-Christian revenge.

Second and related, the arrival in the Ottoman Empire of half-a-million Muslim refugees (Muhacir), uprooted after centuries of colonial settlement and bearing horror stories of massacres and worse, inflamed sectarian sentiment further. This was personal for some in the elite, since quite a number of the CUP leaders originated in the Balkans, including the Bulgarian-born Talat Pasha, the Party chairman and Ottoman Interior Minister (as well as Grand Vizier after February 1917). Muhacir atrocity narratives mobilised anti-Christian violence even before 1915 and in the events of 1915 a significant number of the perpetrators were the Muhacir, who had, by happenstance and some degree of design, been placed in the Christian areas.50

Third, the immediate-run Russian diplomacy and covert action that fused the Balkan events with the Armenian Question in everyone’s mind.

The Balkan Wars seemed to herald the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. In late 1912, Russia tried to organise the Kurdish tribes in the east into a unified force that could finish the job.51 Kurdish unity cannot be accomplished by any human force and it is an open question if God Himself would fare any better. Fortunately for Russia, it had maintained a diverse portfolio of clients in eastern Anatolia, and the Armenian option proved much more fruitful.

In December 1912, as the Ottoman Empire seemingly fought for its life against Russia’s allies in the Balkans, Armenian committee violence flared to life. Arshak Vramian, one of the Dashnak terrorists at the Ottoman Bank in 1896 and by this time an American citizen, told the French Vice-Consul in Van: “It does not matter if the Armenians are killed instead of living as they are living! We are determined to restart the revolutionary action we had suspended for four years”.52 Vramian had specified that he meant assassinations and the Mayor of Van, Bedros Kapamajian, an Armenian, was duly murdered.53

The same month, Russia put the Armenian Question back on the international agenda, coinciding, though not coincident, with a diplomatic-agitation mission to Europe by Boghos Nubar, a prominent Ottoman-Armenian activist. Nubar set himself up as head of the Armenian National Delegation in Paris and sent letters on behalf of the Armenian Catholicos to Russian diplomats imploring Petersburg to pressure the Porte into granting Armenian autonomy. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov seized on this to secure British and French backing for new Reform talks, while hinting broadly that Russian occupation of eastern Anatolia was inevitable. The tell as to the real source of Russia’s angst at that time was the raising of petitions calling for Ottoman-Armenians to be given Russian citizenship (a Russian Imperial tactic not-unfamiliar at the present time). The Ottoman government had generated a plan to resettle the Muhacir displaced from the Balkans in the Six Provinces and Petersburg wanted to thwart it “because the policy would have reduced Russian influence in the region”.54

The success of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) in particular in the Balkans provided an inspirational model, and the Armenian revolutionaries went all-in on terrorism as the means to accomplish their goals in 1913. The Dashnaks and Hunchaks refashioned their structures in eastern Anatolia along IMRO-style paramilitary lines. The Armenian guerrillas smuggled weapons into the Ottoman Empire on an unprecedented scale in early 1913 from Iran and Russia, where the Okhranka, the Tsar’s secret police, ensured that border guards looked the other way. The Armenian committees’ ostensibly principled “anti-imperialism” was all-but openly cast aside: Dashnaks met Russian officials and made clear their view of Russian imperialism as an emancipatory force. This sentiment spread wildly among the Armenian population. Aleksandr Olferiev, the Russian Vice-Consul in Van, reported gleefully in March 1913 that the “mood of Armenians” throughout the province, previously somewhat ambiguous, was now “one of complete Russophilia … the Dashnaks are completely on our side.” The next month, Olferiev documented that Van had become “an armed camp”: “all the Armenian merchants are stockpiling guns in their stores”.55

Russian delight was slightly disrupted by the Kurdish tribes, who, sharing in the common belief of the Ottoman State’s imminent demise, were emboldened to ravage the Christians on a major scale. Peterburg rather cynically protested to Constantinople on 29 May 1913, and was then unpleasantly surprised when, ten days later, the arriving Ottoman troops in Van were joined by 500 Dashnaks in putting the Kurds to flight. Armed revolt scuppered for now, the Russians redoubled their political warfare. Despite the complexity on the ground, with its clear evidence the Ottoman government was trying to protect the Armenian population even when it meant sending troops needed for a war that was closing in on its capital, the Russians escalated the international campaign accusing the Porte of atrocities against the Armenians and demanding Reforms “according to the 1895 draft”.56

A Reform treaty, over German objections, was forced on the Ottomans in February 1914: notably, it was signed solely by Russia on behalf of the European Great Powers. The terms would have infringed Ottoman sovereignty in the Six Provinces by creating a system of European inspectorates that not only judged the reforms’ progress but administered them. Germany was able to help the Ottomans slow-roll the implementation process—and the Great War ultimately prevented the inspectors, who had been appointed, taking up their posts.57 However, the sequence of events leading up to the treaty, its terms, and the repeated, menacing remarks of Sazonov during negotiations—threatening a Russian invasion if there was one more massacre of Armenians—“confirmed for the Porte that the whole Armenian reform issue was just a Trojan horse for Russian imperialism”.58

AND THE WAR CAME

It was not foreordained that the Ottoman Empire would join the First World War on the side of the Central Powers—or at all. Britain had tried to keep the Ottomans out of it, and many in the Ottoman government, more acutely aware than ever of the Empire’s weakness, favoured neutrality. However, the Ottomans had been moving closer to Germany for some time and the longstanding Ottoman-British alliance decisively broke down simultaneous with the outbreak of war in Europe.

During Kaiser Wilhelm II’s grand tour of the Ottoman Empire in 1898, he had ostentatiously declared himself protector of all the world’s Muslims. The Kaiser was genuinely, personally drawn to Islam and the rumour Germany now had a Muslim Emperor spread widely in the Middle East. Strategically, the Kaiser was thinking at this stage of working through the Caliph to raise a global jihad that would trigger rebellion among Britain’s Muslim subjects—and the Kaiser would, by 1914, have the same idea for Russia.59 German money and weapons flooded into the Ottoman Empire, German military personnel were increasingly prevalent throughout the Ottoman army, and German diplomats became influential over Ottoman State administration and decision-making. The construction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, which began in 1903 and would weaken Britain’s naval strength, symbolised this entanglement. One could be forgiven for thinking in mid-1914 that the Ottoman government had already gone over to the Germans.

In this context, it is debateable whether Britain “requisitioning” two fully-paid-for Ottoman dreadnoughts at British shipyards on 29 July 1914—the event often pointed to by Turks as determining Ottoman policy in the First World War—was cause, catalyst, and/or pretext.60 For one thing, the Ottomans had, as Britain feared, offered to send one of the ships to Germany.61 For another, when the Porte was officially informed of the requisition on 3 August, it had already, a day earlier, signed a secret treaty with Germany promising to come into the war on the Central Powers’ side if Russia got involved. Austria joined the treaty on 5 August—the same day the Ottomans publicly declared neutrality. Ten days later, a German Admiral, Wilhelm Souchon, was made commander-in-chief of the Ottoman fleet. By this time, Ottoman and German subversive missionaries had been dispatched to the Persian Gulf (then-under British control) and to Iran and Afghanistan (surrounding British India) to encourage them to jihad against the Entente. As we shall see, the Ottomans were effectively at war with Russia by September. The Ottomans then closed the Dardanelles to Allied shipping on 1 October.62 Whatever one’s interpretation of the causality, the result was the supremacy over the Ottoman State of a CUP cadre closely bound to the German General Staff.

Overcoming the neutrality faction in the Ottoman government was accomplished by the German-allied Ottoman War Minister, Enver Pasha, conspiring with Admiral Souchon to launch a naval raid against Russia in the Black Sea on 29 October 1914. The Russians had already begun their invasion by the time they declared war on the Ottomans on 2 November. Britain and France followed with war declarations against the Porte on 5 November. The Ottoman Sultan-Caliph proclaimed a jihad against the Entente on 11 November, and three days later the proclamation was read out in Constantinople by the ulema, along with five fatwas, lavishly paid for by Germany, declaring it a duty for Muslims to wage war on the Christian enemies of Islam, except Austrians, Germans, and Americans. Theologically, this made no sense, and in practice the distinctions were difficult to hold on to. The fatwas could easily be read as sanctioning violence against Christian civilians even in neutral European countries, and the popular interpretation—manifested within days—was that the call was for war against Christians, full stop.63 It is impossible to believe that this holy warmongering was not a factor in what happened in 1915.

The British Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, was greatly saddened by this turn of events, lamenting, “The Turkish Empire has committed suicide, and dug with its own hands its grave”.64 The CUP government had entered the war hoping to reverse the Empire’s decline, but soon confronted Asquith’s prescience, buffeted by the interlinked twin existential crises for the Ottoman State of external invasion and internal Armenian rebellion, which began before the war and escalated once it was underway, led by the Armenian terrorist-revolutionary committees that openly collaborated with the Entente, especially Russia, and drew on various forms of popular participation from an Armenian civilian population that in the main saw Ottoman dissolution as liberation. It was in these circumstances that the Armenian calamity took place.

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The Armenian Volunteers

The Dashnaks’ eighth World Congress—bringing together the organisation’s branches from Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and the United States—met in in late July 1914 in Erzurum,65 and concluded on 2 August 1914 with a public decision that Armenians should do their duty as citizens of their individual States, not get involved in foreign intrigue. The Ottoman-Armenian delegation cited this decision in refusing the reported offer of CUP representatives at the Congress to grant autonomy to “Turkish Armenia” in exchange for the Dashnaks helping to foment rebellion inside Russia. Turks are not shying at shadows in questioning the sincerity of this, and suspecting a Russian-coordinated rebellion against the Ottoman State was already in the works.66

In 1923, shortly after it was all over—the rebellion, the deportations, the massacres, the rise and fall of an Armenian Republic, and the Sovietization of what was left—the Dashnak leader and first Prime Minister of the Republic, Hovhannes Kajaznuni, bluntly stated:

At the beginning of the Fall of 1914, when Turkey had not yet entered the war …, Armenian revolutionary bands began to be formed in Transcaucasia with great enthusiasm … Contrary to the decision taken during their general meeting at Erzurum only a few weeks before, the A.R.F. [Dashnaks] had active participation in the formation of the bands and their future military action against Turkey. … We had no doubt the war would end with the complete victory of the Allies; Turkey would be defeated and dismembered, and its Armenian population would at last be liberated.

We had embraced Russia whole-heartedly without any compunction. Without any positive basis of fact, we believed that the Tsarist government would grant us a more-or-less broad self-government in the Caucasus and in the Armenian vilayets liberated from Turkey as a reward for our loyalty, our efforts, and assistance. … [W]e had lost our sense of reality and were carried away with our dreams. … We overestimated the ability of the Armenian people, its political and military power, and overestimated the extent and importance of the services our people rendered to the Russians. … The Turks knew what they ought to do and did it.67

This view was echoed by Kapriel Papazian, head of the Ramgavar Party:

[T]he answer given the Turks [in refusing to help ignite rebellion inside Russia] was based on a resolution adopted by the [Erzurum] convention. The fact remains, however, that the leaders of the Turkish Armenian section of the [Dashnaks] did not carry out their promise of loyalty to the Turkish cause when the Turks entered the war. … They were swayed in their actions by the interests of the Russian government, and disregarded, entirely, the political dangers that the war had created for the Armenians in Turkey. Prudence was thrown to the winds; even the decision of their own convention of Erzurum was forgotten, and a call was sent for Armenian volunteers to fight the Turks on the Caucasian front.68

As indicated in those quotations, the sentiment of the committees was general among Armenians. One of the leading historian-advocates of Armenian genocide-recognition has written of this time: “Although most Armenians maintained a correct [outward] attitude-vis-a-vis the Ottoman government …[,] the manifestations of loyalty were insincere, for the sympathy of most Armenians throughout the world was with the Entente”.69

It was in this heady atmosphere, with Russian deliverance and national liberation seemingly at hand, that many Armenians reacted to the Ottoman general mobilisation order on 3 August 1914, the day after the secret treaty with Germany, with open defiance, and the line between draft resistance and rebellion was a fine one. Thousands of Armenians conscripted into the Ottoman army deserted: some formed armed bands that clashed with the State; some, with the assistance of the Dashnaks, crossed the border into Russia, heading for Tiflis, where the Chief of Staff of the Russian Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, already had an operations room to enlist Armenian volunteers. Many more Armenian civilians similarly voted with their feet and moved to Russia, a migration flow that would reach 200,000 by late 1915.70 Veteran Ottoman-Armenian revolutionaries, the deserters, and civilian volunteers were merged into Russian military units with Iranian-Armenians and Russian-Armenians, both from the Russian Caucasus “proper” and the slice of the Ottoman east Russia annexed in 1878.

One of the prominent Ottoman-Armenian representatives at the Erzurum Congress, Garegin Pastermadjian (Armen Garo), had signed-up with the Russians by mid-September 1914. Pastermadjian, a Dashnak terrorist at the Ottoman Bank in 1896 and a deputy in the Ottoman Parliament during the reconciliation period with the CUP, would command of one of the Armenian volunteer units that invaded the Ottoman Empire as part of the Russian army six weeks later.71 The commander of another of these units arrived about the same time, Arshak Gavafian (Keri), a roving Ottoman-Armenian insurgent, who had inter alia fled Sasun in 1904 and engaged in the Iranian “Constitutional Revolution” the next year.72 The dazzling Ottoman-Armenian Dashnak General Andranik, another unit leader, whose most recent round with the Porte was fighting alongside the Bulgarian rebels, arrived in Tiflis much earlier, on 2 August 1914, and was soon joined by Garegin Nzhdeh, another participant in the Balkan Wars, and Hampartsum Arakelyan, editor of Mshak, the leading Armenian-language newspaper in the Caucasus.73 Another of the unit commander’s present from early on, Drastamat Kanayan (Dro), had a very similar life trajectory to Nzhdeh: both were technically Russian-born but spent most of their lives involved in Ottoman affairs and lived long enough to collaborate with the Nazis in the next war.

The prestige of these men and many others proved magnetic in bringing Armenians, Ottoman or otherwise, into Russian ranks.74 By the end of August 1914, the Russian train-and-equip program for Armenian volunteers was so swamped Yudenich had to ask the Stavka for 25,000 more rifles. “The Russian army, then, actively sought to arm Ottoman Armenians [inside the Ottoman Empire] even before Turkey entered the war, with the full cooperation of the Dashnaks, General Andranik, and Armenian leaders in Tiflis. So, too, was the Russian Foreign Office involved, and at the very highest level.”75 We will come to this dimension of the Russian operation in more detail momentarily.

As participants in the enterprise make clear, the organisation of the Armenian volunteers into formal units was complete by mid-September 1914, and these units were attached to Russian army all along the line in the Caucasus. Other Armenians were trained by Russian intelligence for reconnaissance and sabotage missions.76 The Russian army had five Dashnak Armenian volunteer druzhinas when it invaded the Ottoman Empire in November 1914 and a sixth legion led by Hunchaks was soon added. There were also multiple smaller irregular volunteer detachments.77

The number of Armenian volunteers is, as with so many historical numbers, highly politicised and fundamentally unknowable. There were not less than 6,000 spread through the six druzhinas, and that increased considerably in short order. One of the Russians’ key Dashnak collaborators reported that “20,000 Armenian volunteers … responded to the call” to “take up arms against the Turks”.78 The British estimated the Russians had nearly 45,000 Armenian volunteers by the end of October 1914.79 Another Armenian volunteer said their number was 20,000 just “at the front” in Van by mid-1915.80 Armenian political leader Boghos Nubar puts the figure around 50,000,81 and Russian historians give the same figure, estimating that 11,500 of them were Ottoman-Armenians spread across twenty-three Russian units.82

Taner Akçam, a leading historian arguing the Ottomans committed genocide in 1915-16, has claimed that the Russians’ Armenian volunteers had a “far greater” psychological than military importance, in their impact on the “imagination” of the Ottoman leaders towards their Armenian subjects.83 Contemporary Ottoman, Armenian, and Russian sources all disagree with this, describing the Armenian volunteers as highly-motivated and proficient, playing a significant role in the initial military disasters for the Ottoman army in eastern Anatolia.84 It was in recognition of this Armenian contribution to Russian arms that Tsar Nicholas II made a personal visit to the Armenian Cathedral in Tiflis on 13 December 1914, where he was publicly hailed by Alexander Khatisian, the president of the Armenian National Bureau, who made a speech saying: “Armenians from all countries are hurrying to enter the ranks of the glorious Russian Army, and with their blood, to serve the victory of the Russian Army … Let the Russian flag wave freely over the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. … Let the Armenian people of Turkey, who have suffered for the faith of Christ, receive resurrection for a new, free life under the protection of Russia.”85 If there was “imagination” in the Ottoman government’s view of Armenian dynamics, it seems to have been shared by some significant portion of the Armenians themselves and the Russian Emperor.

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The Armenian Rebellion

The Ottoman government’s sense that an Armenian rebellion was in the works had been building over about a year by the summer of 1914, and not without reason.

Some consular reports suggest the Ottoman State’s crackdown on the Kurds in mid-1913 worked for a time to increase public security in the east.86 Other foreign dispatches in the same period suggest the lawlessness was worse than it had been for years. Regardless, the Ottoman government did not believe the ongoing stockpiling of weapons by the Armenian committees was for “self-defence”, not least because the government itself was increasing the amount of arms given to Armenians for that purpose.87 The Ottomans believed the committees’ strategy remained one of preparing for a rebellion in tandem with Russian intervention, which had been delayed by the diplomatic contingencies of mid-1913. It was a view not without foundation.

In mid-1913, the Armenian committees—the Dashnaks, the Hunchaks, and the Armenakan Party—had met in Van and agreed to form a united front, coordinating their revolutionary activity. As so often in insurgent alliances, the most ideologically radical and operationally violent element dominated, namely the Dashnaks (though the Hunchaks had been radicalising on their own). Similarly commonplace was the Dashnaks’ utilisation of this alliance to extend a shadow governance capacity—“taxing” Armenians in Van, for example—which normalised the population cooperating with the insurgents and gave the insurgents access to increasing resources that were used to provide goods and services, a feedback loop that progressively solidified the insurgents’ de facto control and legitimacy.88 Captain Molyneux-Seel, a British official at the Consulate in Van, argued in May 1913 that the committees’ alliance resulted from a meeting Van Dashnak leader Arshak Vramian had “with the Russian authorities” in Tiflis, and a month earlier Molyneux-Seel had reported to London: “[The Armenians have] thrown off any pretence of loyalty they may once have shown, and openly welcome the prospect of a Russian occupation of the Armenian Vilayets.”89

In January 1914, the British Vice-Consul in Van, Ian M. Smith, reported that the Armenian revolutionaries’ “secret importation of arms”, mostly from Russia, was on such a vast scale it was ceasing to be secret: “I have seen Armenians openly carrying these arms in the country districts … In Van it is said that the Armenians are now better armed than the Kurds”. Smith also noted the political dynamics pushing towards confrontation: within the alliance of Armenian committees, the Dashnaks were unquestionably supreme “owing to the more active and extreme policy it pursues”. This included the Dashnaks imposing themselves—and purging Armenian moderates—throughout Van province.90 Van would prove the seismic hinge point, but not yet.

In March 1914, a month after the Ottomans had signed the reform treaty with Russia, a rebellion erupted in Bitlis, just west of Van. It was led by Kurds, specifically a mullah named Selim Efendi al-Hizani. Mullah Selim and the 300 Kurdish chieftains who joined him nominally wanted the restoration of the shari’a and considered the CUP impious, but the Christian economic predominance in the east and the CUP disarming the Kurds had at least as much to do with it. The rebellion was put down by 2 April. The CUP regime at one level breathed a sigh of relief that the Kurds had targeted the government, rather than the Armenians, which would have created dire consequences for relations with the Great Powers at that moment. The warning was taken, though, with measures put in place such as “granting the local governors wider latitude to declare martial law and request military reinforcements, [and] Minister of the Interior Talat ordered that special attention be paid to protecting Christians from future attacks”.91

On the other hand, the Ottoman government was alarmed by the clear Russian fingerprints on the Bitlis uprising, despite ostensibly-friendlier diplomatic relations of late. Mullah Selim was defeated so rapidly because he had jumped the gun: if he had waited, several Kurdish powerbrokers who were actually in Russia would have returned with the weapons transfers they had been arranging. As it was, all the Kurdish chiefs could do was offer words of support, but it showed that Russia had not given up on its Kurdish assets, the disappointing realisation a year earlier that the Kurds could not be brought under a collective Russian-directed leadership structure notwithstanding.92 Ensuring nobody missed what had happened, Selim took shelter in the Russian Consulate and Petersburg refused to hand him over (he was still there when open war began in November). The Porte, therefore, tried to win the Kurds over by granting “financial subsidies, making leading Kurds senators, and pressing the Kurds of Istanbul to use their influence over their brethren in Anatolia”. It was yet another treatment that made the illness worse—and complicated the policy of protecting Christians—but the Ottomans were short of options, unlike the Russians, who could play the Kurdish and Armenian cards simultaneously in “eroding Ottoman control of Eastern Anatolia”, and it was working.93

Just over two weeks later, on 19 April 1914, Talat warned the provincial authorities in Adana and Aleppo that the Armenians in Zeytun and the region around Alexandretta (İskenderun) were smuggling in weapons and preparing for a rebellion. Then there was a lull and some in the Ottoman government began to think—or to hope—that their fears had been misplaced.94 In July, worrying signs reappeared, such as shipments of Russian weapons into the heavily-Armenian Eleşkirt Valley,95 and in the shadow of the Great War commencing the direst Ottoman fears started to manifest.

* * * *

There is a tendency, acknowledged even by those who strongly support recognising the 1915 events as genocide, for scholars to ignore the wartime Armenian rebellion in the Ottoman Empire because to mention it is perceived as giving ammunition to the “Turkish” argument that the deportations were just that, a security measure against a rebellious population with incidental, not intentional, fatalities.96 The unspoken issue is that any claim of genocide is inherently to make an analogy with the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry, and the Armenian rebellion greatly complicates such a parallel. It is a fact nonetheless.

The real debate is to some extent about the scale of the Armenian rebellion and most fundamentally about the connection between the Armenian volunteers and the Ottoman-Armenian insurgencies. One side sees a firm dividing line between the Russian-controlled “external” volunteers and “internal” rebel activity that was geographically local and had an indigenous impetus. The other side sees two prongs of a holistic Russian strategy. Armenian leaders contemporaneously largely took the latter view, as can be seen from Kajaznuni and Papazian above. Another example is Boghos Nubar, who said the invasion of the volunteers with the Russians was supposed to be the mechanism for igniting Ottoman-Armenian rebellion, that the volunteers would provide an example to their Ottoman “compatriots … in a common action to acquire the rights of autonomy”, as he put it.97 Russian officials said the same thing.98

From early August 1914, Armenian draft resistance was widespread in Zeytun, a city where Armenian nationalist unrest went all the way back to 1862, with recent rounds in 1895-96 and 1909. The committees soon appeared to organise Armenian demands that they be excused service in the Ottoman army and allowed to set up their own volunteer unit that would “defend” the city, i.e., administer it autonomously. This would have been refused at any time, but the language of “volunteers” at that moment, with what the Russians were doing in the Caucasus, naturally spooked the Ottoman government. The committees exacerbated Ottoman dread by reacting to the refusal with an armed revolt in Zeytun on 30 August 1914. The court house was attacked, Ottoman officers (and some of their families) were killed, and telegraph lines brought down. The guerrillas were scattered quickly, but not crushed. A low-level insurgency persisted in Zeytun up to December.99

The archives show that it was right around this time the Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov told the Tiflis command to begin arming “Armenians and Assyrian Christians” inside the Ottoman Empire so that they could act behind the lines for Russia as soon as war began, and Sazonov was insistent that the Armenians be ordered not to “undertake anything without our instructions”. General Yudenich, the man on the spot, more familiar with eastern Anatolia and aware of Russian limitations, wrote back on 29 August, in a memo entitled, “On the Arming of Ottoman Armenians”, that, if Russia embarked on this course of pushing the Armenians into rebellion without much greater resources devoted to it, it would leave the Armenians “to defend themselves exclusively under their own power” and in all likelihood this would result in the Ottomans “annihilating the Armenians”. Yet Yudenich then recommended smuggling “at least 20,000 rifles and accompanying ammunition” to Ottoman-Armenians, ostensibly so they could defend themselves. Interpretations differ on whether this is proof of Yudenich’s prescience about the Ottomans’ genocidal ambitions, or proof of Russian-instigated Armenian treachery that made the deportations inevitable.100

The Armenian committees at the time had no illusions about what a dangerous game they were playing with the lives of Ottoman-Armenians by allying with the Russians and plotting to rebel against the Ottoman government once war broke out, but after two decades of their provocation strategy this was more of an inducement than a deterrent. Aram Turabian, one of the Dashnaks’ chief propagandist-recruiters abroad (based in Paris), stated bluntly that the Armenian revolutionaries “knew very well to what they were exposing the innocent inhabitants of the regions of Armenia under Turkish rule; but in the history of a people there are moments when … it becomes necessary to sacrifice … a part of the present generation to safeguard the future”.101

The Russian plans to stoke internal Ottoman disorder via the Armenians were theoretically covert, but it was more of an open secret, given the integral connection with the overt Armenian volunteers program and the scale of what Saint Petersburg was up to.

In the first week of September 1914, the Ottoman ambassador in Tehran reported that the Russians were arming Armenians in Iran and the Caucasus, and the Russian Consul in Tabriz was recruiting more Armenians by promising to reward those who supported the Russian war effort with an Armenian State on conquered Ottoman land. Around the same time, Ottoman spies in Petersburg reported: “The Russian Government aims to win the support of the Armenians so as to provoke a revolt in Eastern Anatolia any time it chooses.” Ottoman military, police, and intelligence sources in eastern Anatolia all converged on the view that an Armenian rebellion awaiting the green light from Russia was being prepared. On 16 September, the Tsar issued a statement telling Armenians that “the hour of liberty” had “finally sounded”. The next day, the commander of the all-important Ottoman Third Army in eastern Anatolia notified his troops, “Russians, with the assistance of Armenians from Caucasia, have incited our Armenians with promises of independence”, and called for vigilance and counter-measures to interdict the flow of Russian weaponry to Armenian rebels.102

A military report on 24 September, after clashes between Third Army troops and Armenian rebels in Van city, once again took note of Russian weapons and ammunition pouring over the border.103 In Hopa, on 5 October 1914, the Ottomans confronted Armenian guerrillas estimated to number 800, all armed with Russian weapons. To the south, at Erzurum, Ottoman troops fought Armenian çete (armed bands).104 In early October, the Third Army informed the Ottoman General Staff that Russian-born Armenians who had experience in the Russian army were infiltrating the Empire with maps, money, weapons. On 20 October, a counter-insurgency raid in Hasankale (Pasinler) discovered Russian rifles in Armenian homes. Three days later, the Third Army reported the movement of large numbers of Armenian armed guerrillas in Muş, Bitlis, Van, and Erivan.105

What the Russians were doing with the Armenians was not unique. Foreign powers using disaffected nations within multinational Empires had been standard practice in European statecraft since Napoleon unleashed nationalism on the Continent a century earlier, and the Ottomans had learned to play this game, too. The pointed omission of Russia’s subversive activities from the Ottoman war declaration in November 1914 was a tacit acknowledgement the Porte did not have a leg to stand on with such complaints: since August, it had been enlisting Russian deserters in its army, and instrumentalising Russian Muslims through the Special Organisation (S.O., Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa) to instigate revolt in the Caucasus.106

This was not, as is sometimes claimed, because the CUP had pan-Turanist and/or pan-Islamic goals.107 Those elements of the Party had been repressed by 1913, and the Ottomans entered the war with rather modest aims: restoring sovereignty, specifically by ending the Capitulations; securing territorial integrity on the 1914 borders, with the only exception being the goal to recover Batumi, Kars, and Ardahan lost to Russia in 1878; and more generally weakening Russia as far as possible.108 The S.O. was deployed to stir-up trouble behind the Russian lines in pursuit of these objectives, not without success.109 (Within this framework, there is some truth to the argument—often made simultaneous with the pan-Islamism/Turanism one, bizarrely—that the CUP was pushing towards the creation of a demographically contiguous nation-State in Anatolia to present the world a fait accompli in the aftermath of the doomed Empire, though how consciously is unclear.110)

The bottom line is that the Ottomans and Russia were in all serious senses at war from September 1914 through their various agents and proxies.111 As part of this undeclared Russo-Ottoman war, eastern Anatolia was engulfed by violence for two months before the Russian invasion. The Russians were not the puppet-masters of every insurgent action in eastern Anatolia in September-October 1914, nor did they try to be. The Russians provided the support system to the principle elements of the violence, the communal civil war and the Armenian “national liberation struggle”, as they had for years, and were content for it to cascade into a downward spiral. In the chaos, many residents reasonably concluded that remaining unarmed bordered on suicidal, and, humans being what they are, many militias formed initially for local self-defence swelled to a point where they were capable of predating on their neighbours and did just that.112 With Russian weapons available to all, Armenian guerrillas attacked the State and looted and massacred Muslim villages, and Kurdish irregulars nominally loyal to the State, Turkish and Kurdish gangs, and Muslim villagers raided and massacred Armenian settlements.113 The blurring of motives and allegiances, offense and defence, hardly mattered to the Russians. What counted was that this all amounted to “a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions” for the Ottoman Third Army, which was waiting to meet the Russian invaders while barely holding on to its fragile supply-lines.114

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The Formal Outbreak of the Russian-Ottoman War

The Russian invasion of the Ottoman Empire on 1-2 November 1914, the Bergmann Offensive,115 targeted the Erzurum-Sarikamish Road, with a strong supporting attack towards Oltu and supplementary assaults on Karakose and Dogubayazit. The Armenian volunteer formations fighting with the Russian Army were particularly visible in the brief seizure of Dogubayazit. Ottoman losses were moderate and by the end of November, the front stabilised with Russia occupying a strip fifteen miles deep in the Ottoman Empire.116 Internally, however, the “situation went from bad to worse”.117

Leaving his post on the night hostilities began, Aleksandr Adamov, the Russian Consul in Erzurum, where the Ottoman Third Army was headquartered, sent a final dispatch to Petersburg saying that the Ottoman-Armenians of Erzurum and “all cities surrounding it, including Erzincan, Sivas, Mana Hatun, and Kayseri, not to mention in the villages and rural areas, … are awaiting with impatience the arrival of Russian troops who will free them from the Turkish yoke”. The Dashnaks in Erzurum, once close to the German Consul, had “turned fully Russophile” and “hidden their weapons in secret storage caches”, wrote Adamov: when “the Russians are right on their doorstep” they will rise in rebellion. Perhaps Adamov’s expansive vision of the assets Russia had inside a country it was about to invade were mistaken—the phenomenon is not unknown Russian history—but Sazonov took it seriously enough to send Adamov’s memo straight to the Stavka.118 And there were indications Adamov had not been wholly delusional.

While Zeytun was more-or-less brought under Ottoman government control in the first week of December 1914, by then Armenian guerrilla activity had become commonplace all over eastern Anatolia, from sabotage operations, notably cutting telegraph wires, to (attempted) assassinations of Ottoman officials, the bombing of police stations, and brigandage on the roads. Most of this was concentrated near the front, in Erzurum, Bitlis, and Van, where two Armenian districts, Karçekan and Gevaş, were reported as being in full-fledged revolt on 21 December.119 But there were armed Armenian attacks on infrastructure, services like mail delivery, and Ottoman gendarmes and troops as far behind the lines as Muş, Suşehri, Aleppo, and Dörtyol,120 and, in January-February 1915, Armenian guerrilla warfare would spread west and escalate, to Erzincan, Sivas, and Cilicia, among other places.121

The gathering momentum of the Armenian insurgency in early 1915 was especially alarming because the military picture had drastically turned against the Ottomans. Enver had ordered a major push against the Russians on 22 December, which had started well, with the Ottomans invading Iran up to Qotur and troops (led by a German officer) re-taking Ardahan on 27 December, but the detachment was too small to hold it.122 Russian reports praise the Armenian volunteers’ contribution to stemming the Ottoman offensive at this point.123 By the first days of the New Year, the Ottoman army had been surrounded and defeated at Sarikamish, and in the retreat over the next ten days probably 50,000 Ottoman soldiers were killed, half in combat and the rest frozen to death and struck down by disease in the mountain passes. Many of the 20,000 or so wounded died of typhus in the hospitals and thousands were taken captive. The Ottomans lost about two-thirds of the 120,000 troops Enver sent into battle.

The Ottomans absorbed this calamity with the additional misery that once the snows faded the Russians would begin a new offensive. What the Ottomans did not and could not know was that the Sarikamish offensive had achieved one vital thing: it derailed Sazonov’s plans to initiate a general Ottoman-Armenian uprising. Sazonov’s deputy cabled Tiflis on 17 December 1914, reminding Yudenich that “any order for an Armenian uprising must only be given after receiving prior agreement with the Foreign Ministry”, and subsequent cable traffic was finalising arrangements for such an order. Then came the Ottoman onslaught, in the wake of which the Russians somewhat got cold feet about an Armenian rebellion. Again, the Ottomans could not know this, nor the Armenians for that matter,124 and the signals from Russia seemed designed to actively mislead about their intentions.

Russkoe Slovo, one of the largest mass-circulation Russian newspapers, published a letter from an Armenian lawyer named Calkus on 24 January 1915 reading: “In Turkey’s eyes, … we were guilty of treason. Armenians confess to this treason without any further ado. … The Armenian is a traitor to Turkey because Turkey is not his mother but his stepmother. A growing number of Armenians are volunteering in the ranks of the Russian army. They are streaming toward Russia from the far corners of the world … They believe in Russia and Russia’s mission.” An Armenian deputy, the Kadet Mikayel Papadjanian, stated in the Russian Duma on 28 January 1915: “The Armenian population of Turkish Armenia joyously greeted our victorious [Russian] army. Armenians helped wherever and however they could, and prepared a hearty welcome for the Russians.”125

In mid-February 1915, a delegation of Ottoman-Armenian revolutionaries from Zeytun arrived in Tiflis saying they had 15,000 men ready to “pounce on Turkish [army] communications” if the Russians gave them arms and ammunition. Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, the formal overall commander of the forces that had beaten the Ottomans at Sarikamish, met the Armenian rebel leaders personally. Vorontsov-Dashkov disclaimed any ability to help—Zeytun was too far from Russian positions, he said—but offered to put the Zeytun rebels in touch with Britain and France. One can say that Ottoman government fears about this—and they did very quickly learn about it—were to that extent overblown. However, the Armenians merely getting from Cilicia to Tiflis must have required significant Russian logistical support. Moreover, “Simply by meeting with the Zeytun Armenians[,] … Vorontsov-Dashkov had committed a deeply provocative act.” And it was no idle thing to connect Ottoman-Armenian rebels with the Anglo-French Allies.126

Back in November 1914, Boghos Nubar had offered Britain and France support in the Zeytun area: “Armenians in Cilicia are ready to enlist as volunteers to support a landing in Iskenderun, Mersin, or Adana. … [T]hey will rebel against the Turks if they are supplied with arms and ammunition.”127 By February 1915, the British and French were bombarding the Dardanelles, in visible preparation for an assault on the Ottoman capital, and after ditching their own plan to open a second front around Alexandretta—they settled for some British shelling of the coast—were engaged in a conspiracy with Ottoman-Armenian rebels to do it for them. Britain had made contact with Armenians in Cilicia, whom it planned to arm as “part of a scheme for the occupation of Alexandretta”, as a War Office cable of 4 March 1915 records. By that time, Britain had already arranged via Mikayel Varandian for the Armenian committees abroad to send 20,000 of their men—half from America, half in the Balkans—to Cyprus to be organised into an invading force to join the internal rising in Cilicia.128 Around this time, Armenians were seen coming ashore at Dörtyol, in Cilicia, from a British warship.129

In the event, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, convinced the British Cabinet to abandon the plans for a southern front using the Armenians to focus on a knock-out blow in Constantinople, but the Armenians in Cilicia had already gone ahead with their rebellion, quite possibly with Russian encouragement—it was a Russian request to London for a diversionary operation on 1 January, when the fighting at Sarikamish appeared to be going the Ottomans’ way, which set the British and French on the fateful road that ended at Gallipoli,130 and during the preparations the Russians had remained engaged in the Anglo-Armenian discussions through their London Embassy.131 Led by the Hunchaks, the armoury of the gendarmes in Zeytun was raided on 24 February 1915, and, in the emerging pattern of these revolts, numerous gendarmes were killed and the telegraph poles were destroyed.132 In early March, armed Armenian deserters tried to take over Zeytun and throughout the month armed combat continued, at one point with the rebels occupying an Armenian monastery for five days and killing ten soldiers from inside.133

In early April 1915, with the Ottomans having lost hundreds of soldiers in Zeytun and still struggling to pacify it,134 the commander of the Fourth Army took the decision to deport the Armenians to Konya, nearly 350 miles northwest, to eliminate the social basis for rebellion on this crucial military supply route. Despite stern instructions for the protection of Armenians and swift punishment of Muslims who violated these orders, the process was badly organised and Armenian deportees suffered: they lacked provisions and the soldiers reacted with inadequate vigour when Muslims attacked the convoy in various locations. This was the first instance of Armenian deportation and the lack of preparation testifies to its contingent and reactive nature. Of note, too, though Talat formally signed-off on it, the initiative came from the local military authorities; it remained an isolated case for some time; and the Armenians were relocated further into Anatolia.135 It is not the fact pattern one would expect if the CUP went into the war with a premeditated plan for the genocidal clearance of Armenians from Anatolia.

The Van Rebellion

Throughout the spring of 1915, as the attritional grind set in in the east, “Russian soldiers, guided by Armenians, raided Muslim villages in the Caucasus, Van, and Bitlis. Louis Mosel, a German officer, reported that in the Caucasus, ‘a large part of the population is fleeing death at the hands of Russians and their Armenian collaborators’.” The Germans tried asking the Armenian Patriarch to restrain his flock, but he said there was no point in him trying and Armenian historians agree he had been overshadowed by the Dashnaks in Constantinople “secretly encouraging the volunteer movement in the Caucasus”.136 Even in retrospect, Armenians present could be remarkably blasé about the anti-Muslim atrocities, for instance writing in passing that the rebels “disposed of about sixty Turks” living in one village.137 Inevitably, Muslims who survived the outrages of the Russians and the Armenians, whether volunteers or rebels, and were displaced into the interior, then revenged themselves on innocent Armenians.

Throughout the Ottoman east in early 1915, an especially inflamed form of the situation in preceding years played out as “national liberation” warfare and foreign invasion mingled with sectarian-communal violence, and the ever-marauding Kurdish tribes were under less State oversight than ever. Such was the situation around Van,138 close the Russian border and so long the centre of gravity for Armenian nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, where the Armenian revolutionary movement would fatefully reach the height of its success.

There is no doubt there had been massacres of Armenians in Van province in the early months of 1915, and this has led to a narrative wherein the Armenian rebellion that seized Van city in April 1915 was “a kind of preventive ‘Warsaw Uprising’.”139 The evidence adduced for this comes from some Central Powers officials, specifically Joseph Pomiankowski, the military attaché at Austrian Embassy, who described the Van uprising in precisely such terms, as “a desperate effort by Armenians, who witnessed the beginning of the murders and understood that their turn would come”, and German liaison officer, General Friedrich Posselt (“Posselt Pascha”), as well as some missionaries, notably two American Protestants, Clarence Ussher and Stanley E. Kerr, who claimed that 55,000 Armenians had been massacred by the time the Armenians in Van rose.140

The evidence is highly problematic. Pomiankowski, for example, was based in Constantinople and speaking years later. Posselt was stationed in Erzurum, and his testimony from that narrow vantage point differs sharply from the conclusion of General Otto Liman von Sanders, the overall head of the German military mission attached to the Ottoman Army from 1913 to 1918, who had access to all reports—German and Ottoman—from all over the Empire.141 The missionary testimony is self-evidently parti pris and formulaic. Nobody can take Kerr’s fatality figure seriously and in the case of Ussher, a British official had remarked as long before as 1905, “I myself know by experience that Dr. Ussher’s statements are unreliable”. An American diplomat added that Ussher was “most unreliable, and given to gross exaggeration owing to his innate dislike of Turks and his inordinate fanaticism”.142

The “Defence of Van” narrative does not just struggle for evidence on its own account: it is contradicted by the evidence of the local context, the actual course of the rebellion, and the broader context of the First World War.

Even without the admission of one of the Dashnaks on the council that administered Van under rebel rule that activity began in October 1914,143 the protracted build-up of arms by the Armenian committees in Van would cast doubt on the claims of a spontaneous “defensive” rising. The reality is that the military picture was the other way around by the end of February 1915: the Ottoman administration in Van was losing in the contest with the Armenian guerrillas. Across Van province, government buildings were being occupied and Muslim villages attacked and sometimes massacred. Quite a number of what the missionaries describe as Armenian massacres were Ottoman soldiers fighting rebels in areas like Havasor, Timar, and Başkale, where indiscriminate attacks and horrific excesses against Armenian civilians did indeed take place, and even more so Muslim villagers exacting “revenge”. But this was in a situation not of the Ottoman government’s making, where an escalating Armenian rebellion in Van was sufficient to tie down an Ottoman division by March-April that was intended for Iran (the Ottoman foothold in Iran grabbed in December was lost in April because of this) and in the districts of Çatak and Saray the State did not regain control until the autumn.144

Four of the Russians’ Armenian volunteer legions had been quickly grouped into the “Van detachment”, so named since it drew significantly on Ottoman-Armenians from that region, and focused its attention there.145 The Russians army had gotten bogged down before it could reach Van, though, so resorted to infiltrating armed Armenian bands trained in Tiflis—before war officially broke out and on a larger scale afterwards. As mentioned above, Ottoman intelligence had detected these movements, and the communications between the Armenians and Russians requesting weapons and supplies was rough enough that the Ottomans intercepted much of it.146 As the Armenian rebellion in Van crested and closed in on the provincial capital, the Ottomans tried to abort it via a decapitation strike: they succeeded in killing Arshak Vramian on 17 April, but the most important leader, Aram Manukian, an experienced Dashnak terrorist leader and one of the founders of the Armenian Republic in 1918, escaped. Manukian was able to impose a unified command over the insurgency and bring it into Van city, which fell to the rebellion on 20 April.147

The Armenian rebels were well-armed, able to draw on caches stored over eighteen months and more, and disciplined and organised enough, reinforced with rebels who flooded in from elsewhere in the province, to hold off three Ottoman police divisions, the First Expeditionary Force, and the Kurdish militiamen wielding heavy weapons, including cannons, for a month. The Armenian rebels in control of Van swiftly dispatched runners to the Russians, whose cause they believed their actions were helping.148 One of the letters approved by Manukian for Yudenich said that the Armenians of Van were “expecting Russian help every day”. The Russians were so proud of the letter they sent it to the Allies—though eliminated the word “Russian”, downplaying any sense of political coordination and portraying the Armenian appeal as a humanitarian one to the Entente generally. The Russians reached Van on 17 May in the form of a Cossack contingent guided by thousands of Ottoman-Armenian deserters, forcing the Ottoman garrison to retreat.149

On 20 May, the Russians’ Armenian volunteers, led by Sargis Mehrabyan, arrived in Van, followed shortly by the regular Russian army, who were greeted by cheering Armenian crowds. The commanding Russian General was given the keys to the city, and the Russian occupiers appointed Manukian head of the defence council administering the city.150 For the Armenians, this was deliverance: there was a joyous “night of orgy, a saturnalia”, sacking, looting, and burning Ottoman buildings.151 For the Muslims, the slaughter was unmerciful.152

While interpretation of the Van events has become the epicentre of controversy over 1915, this was not really so at the time. The Ottoman government, of course, saw this as the Armenian rebels acting as a fifth column in a premeditated operation to enable the advance of their Russian masters by seizing and handing over a city. German officials, some friendly to the Armenians, saw it the same way,153 as did the Armenians’ great champion, U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who wrote to Washington of “an Armenian insurrection to help the Russians [that] had broken out at Van”.154 And the Armenians themselves agreed. The “idea that Van had been delivered to the Russians by the Armenian rebels” was not regarded contemporaneously as an accusation: “Armenian newspapers in the Caucasus boasted openly about this throughout 1915”.155

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When the camera is pulled back to survey the whole picture, one can understand why the Ottomans saw this as their nightmares becoming a reality. So soon after the insurrection in Zeytun, Van seemed to ratify the Ottoman perception that a generalised Russian-orchestrated Armenian rebellion was underway.156 In combination with the almost-exactly-simultaneous landing of Allied troops at Gallipoli on 25 April, how could there be any doubt Van’s fall was the first domino in a pre-planned Entente operation? The stated British and French intent was to conquer Constantinople, and thereby the Ottoman Empire, to open up a direct supply line to Russia—which was closing in, with its Armenian collaborators, from the east.157

It was while being attacked on two fronts, with the fate of the Empire at stake and the invaders having recruited an enemy within so far as the Ottoman government was concerned, that the arrest of the Armenian leadership in Constantinople was ordered on 24 April 1915, the event Armenians mark as the beginning of the genocide. The Tehcir (Relocation) Law, passed by the Ottoman Parliament on 27 May and publicly published on 1 June, ordered the deportation of the Armenian population from the militarily sensitive areas, starting with the Six Provinces in the east. The ferocious debate that continues more than a century later about whether this was a desperate exigency measure in the midst of an existential security crisis, with inherently tragic human consequences, or official cover for a long-planned policy of annihilation, will be taken up in a subsequent post.

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FOOTNOTES