The Armenian Genocide and the Destruction of Ottoman Armenian Society

24. The First World War and the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in late 1914 as an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Its eastern front became a major theater of conflict against the Russian Empire.

Ottoman leaders increasingly treated Armenian populations as a potential security threat, drawing upon suspicions of disloyalty and the existence of Armenian volunteers fighting with Russian forces.

These accusations were generalized against an entire population and used to justify policies of collective persecution.

25. The Armenian Genocide of 1915–1916

Beginning in 1915, the Ottoman government carried out a systematic campaign of deportation, mass killing, and destruction against its Armenian population.

On April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.

The date later became the principal day of Armenian Genocide remembrance.

Across the empire, Armenian men were disarmed, detained, subjected to forced labor, or killed.

Women, children, and elderly people were deported from their communities.

Deportation convoys were subjected to attacks, starvation, disease, sexual violence, abduction, and extreme deprivation.

Large numbers of deportees died on routes leading toward the Syrian desert and in concentration and detention areas.

The genocide destroyed much of the Armenian population and communal infrastructure of the Ottoman Empire.

The death toll is commonly estimated at approximately one million to 1.5 million Armenians, with 1.5 million widely cited in Armenian remembrance and many historical accounts.

The Armenian Genocide is extensively documented through diplomatic correspondence, survivor testimony, missionary accounts, Ottoman records, contemporary reporting, and later historical research.

The government of Turkey disputes the characterization of these events as genocide, but the overwhelming scholarly consensus among genocide specialists recognizes the organized destruction of Ottoman Armenians as genocide.

26. The Genocide and the Future of Armenian Independence

The Armenian Genocide profoundly altered the prospects for Armenian statehood.

It destroyed much of the Armenian population of the Ottoman eastern provinces and displaced survivors throughout the Middle East and beyond.

The human catastrophe also transformed the political significance of independence.

For many Armenian survivors and leaders, the creation of a sovereign state became inseparable from the need for physical security, national survival, and refuge.

However, the state established in 1918 emerged primarily in eastern Armenia, under conditions shaped by the collapse of Russian imperial authority and the advance of Ottoman forces.

The First Republic was therefore both a restoration of political sovereignty and an emergency response to existential danger.