Killing Orders: Talat Pasha's Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide by Taner Akçam (review)

Taner Akçam, one of the major historians of the Armenian Genocide, is a professor of History and the Kaloosdian/Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Akçam has published a number of important books on the topic, including The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (2012), which was a co-winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award, presented by the Middle-East Studies Association in 2012.

In the present volume, he challenges the ongoing Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide by validating an important collection of primary documents, The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and Massacres of Armenians (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920).¹ Naim Effendi, an Ottoman bureaucrat based in the Aleppo Deportation Office during the Armenian Genocide, assembled these documents, and sold them to Aram Andonian, an Armenian journalist in November 1919. The collection, which is known as the Naim-Andonian Documents, includes among other items, telegrams sent by Talat Pasha, the Minister of the Interior and the most powerful of the triumvirate that ruled Turkey from 1915 to 1918. His explicit orders to various governors, army commanders, and leaders of "special organizations" were to deport and destroy the Armenian population of Anatolia under their authority. Confirming the authenticity of the documents, and Talat's unambiguous intent to murder the Armenians, further supports the fact that Turkey perpetrated genocide against the Armenians.²

The importance of these documents has not been lost on Turkish officials or on Turkish and non-Turkish historians who wish to deny the Armenian Genocide. In effect, the deniers have argued that the Naim-Andonian documents are fakes and of no historical significance, since no confirming evidence can be found in the Turkish archives. But the absence of evidence pertaining to the genocide in the Turkish archives is no accident.

The provenance of the Naim-Andonian collection, as well as other crucial materials pertinent to the Armenian Genocide, traces back to the trials of the perpetrators that took place following the end of the First World War and the defeat of the Ottomans in 1918. These documents were publicly available in the Turkish archives until 1922. All primary evidence from the trials pertaining to the genocide, however, was either hidden or destroyed, and disappeared from the archives following the rise of Mustafa Kemal and the withdrawal of the Allies who had been occupying Turkey. It was the Allies' victory that had made the trials possible in the first place, but it was their withdrawal that enabled the disappearance or destruction of this incriminating evidence. The absence of these documents from the Turkish archives has been the principal argument by those who deny the veracity of the Armenian Genocide. Yet this lack of documentation was a purposeful attempt to conceal the genocide, and it is Akçam's signal contribution to verify the authenticity of the Naim-Andonian collection.

Moreover, the importance of the documents becomes even more apparent when one realizes that the denial of the Armenian Genocide did not begin after the completion of the mass-murder, but was a primary feature of the murder itself. Talat and other Turkish leaders had to devise a scheme to destroy the Armenians while hiding their crimes from their German allies, and American and other neutral observers—including the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Sr.³ Their solution was to create a two-track system of orders concerning the Armenians. One track was secret and consisted of Talat's and other perpetrators' telegrams transmitting their actual murderous orders to their subordinates throughout Anatolia. The other was accessible to public scrutiny, and contained a flurry of anodyne directives in order to give the impression that the deportations occurred in a gentle and humane manner, and that the government was concerned with the...