1915 in the Ottoman Empire and the Fragility of Truth

The incidents of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire which took place against the background of WWI years must be studied and discussed through a series of analytical tools. The points below are suggestions for an intelligent discussion and appraisal.

1. The Study of History

No event of the past can be understood by looking at just one thread of history, the dominant narrative. In many cases we need to look at history more holistically. It cannot be denied that considering the situation of a specific group of people in isolation through a single narrative, only often nurtures an isolated study of history at the expense of the whole truth of the matter.

Different narratives constructed through the employment of different orders, create radically different interpretations. The weight of a narrative therefore depends on the efficiency of the combined usage of orders built on a scholarly logic. If this is not in place, the narrative cannot stand the test of time and does not retain validity after effective scrutiny. As a result, it fails vis a vis competing interpretations and has a value no more than that of an article of faith or the statement of a mere conviction. As such, it is very close to propaganda.

2. Propaganda and Its Place in History

Armenian “atrocities” (which was later labelled as “genocide”), was the wartime propaganda of a century ago. It used a different name at the time but had the same general meaning as Lemkin’s term. Various communities living in the empire were instigated and agitated against the state within which they were citizens. That paved the way for acts of terror that need to be distinguished from popular uprisings. The central administration of the Ottoman Empire, the Sublime Porte, and its efforts to counter these activities cannot be regarded as simply repression. The first duty of all states, as Sir Maurice Hankey said, of is to the peace and security of its citizens.

It is impossible not to have sympathy for the relocation of a group of people and their detachment from their land and houses. That said, the propaganda of a century should not prevent us from dealing with this tragic event historically, as events are usually judged by historians, through an examination of cause and effect or cause and consequence. After hundreds of years of largely peaceful and harmonious co-existence why did such a relocation take place, as one of the countless tragedies of the WWI? The line of those responsible for the cause of this event is long and the Ottomans rank last, as responders rather than instigators. After all, the Ottoman Empire’s dragging into anarchy was a long-standing war strategy of the Powers who wished to provoke its break-down – a process which had started even before the Balkan Wars.

3. Murdering of 1.5 m Armenians” and Two Major Sources of Propaganda: Morgenthau and Bryce

a. James Bryce

To provide an answer to the assertion that the Ottoman State involved itself in the “murdering of 1.5 m Armenians”, it should be stated that this is the product of a lie based on hearsay, characterized in Ambassador Morgenthau’s book, which he did not even write himself. It is the no. 2 source of war propaganda after James Bryce’s books whose notoriously racist ideas are often disguised in liberal morality.

J. Bryce’s first WWI propaganda work was the “Reports on German Atrocities in Many Places in Belgium, Civilians, Women, May 13, 1915” which was followed by his “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” (encl.)

Bryce’s first work is seen today as nothing more than a sham:

As a credible legal enquiry, however, the report left much to be desired. Many of the 1,200 depositions that the investigation heard (from Belgian refugees and Allied soldiers stationed in Belgium) were not taken under oath. Little attempt was made to verify some of the more fantastic testimonies. The enquiry's other main source, captured German war diaries, contained no evidence of the horrific crimes against women and children that were published in the report in May 1915. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

Also see: Jameson Ryley, “The Historian Who Sold Out: James Bryce and the Bryce Report”, Ioawa Historical Review, Vol 1, Issue 2 (2008).

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=iowa-historical-review

What must be thought of  his “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” then?

The British Parliamentary Blue Book on “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” (Misc 31 Cmnd 8325, HMSO 1916) is accepted as the largest single source of information on what happened to the Turkish Armenians in 1915-16.

But in reality, it can hardly provide a focus of controversy between those who claim that it provides evidence of “atrocities”, and those who maintain that because the Blue Book was wartime propaganda, its contents are not to be trusted. While the Blue Book is so central to the question of whether the massacre and deportation of the Armenians was the result of a deliberate policy of extermination, or the unintended consequence of measures taken against the threat of foreign invasion and civil unrest, could one pay attention to who had penned it down and how?

b. Henry Morgenthau

The book titled “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” by Mr. Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador in İstanbul from 1913 to 1916, when cross checked day by day with his diary, reveals the fact that it is tailored to deceive and distorts the truth of what happened during this era.

During his 780 days of diplomatic mission in Istanbul between 1913 and 1916, Morgenthau did not even travel 10 miles out of the city to any village, except for a few sailing trips on the Bosphorus and horse riding in the Belgrade Forest. The only voyage he took was by ship to Greece and Egypt in March 1914 and from there to the Palestine Holy Lands and cities, ending in Beirut.

From there he boarded his assigned yacht - (gun boat) Scorpion to travel to Mersin, Adana, Rhodes, İzmir and finally Istanbul in 40 days. It was like a cruise holiday and he never travelled on a horse or a car in the lands or the cities of the Ottoman Empire. He did not travel eastbound and did not visit the eastern regions of Anatolia at all. He was an observer from afar who never saw what he described and presented as fact.

His book titled “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” is based solely on what he heard and was told by those who wished him to believe something he wished to believe. It is obvious that the stories in the book are fictious, rather than reality, inventions of the mind of Mr. Arshag Schimavonian, the dragoman (interpreter) of the US Embassy in Istanbul who acted as the Ambassador Morgenthau’s advisor and right hand man, together with his secretary Mr. Hagop Andonian. They were both very anti-Turkish. Their stories were ingeniously converted to a novel style history book by Mr. Burton J. Hendrick, a Pulitzer Prize winner, who actually is the ghost writer of the book. The book titled as “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” was used  to justify the US’ entry into the war. This is a truth, countlessly repeated in various books and other sources.

4. Other Sources of WW1 Propaganda

It was not only H. Morgenthau who had been instructed to prepare propaganda material. W. Wilson also instructed the US Ambassador James W. Gerard in Germany (My Four Years in Germany, NY: Grossat&Dunlap, 1917) as well as the US Ambassador in Belgium Brand Whitlock (Belgium: A Personal Narrative, NY: D. Appleton&Co, 1919)  to author similar books in order to shape the public opinion for the US’ nearing entry into war. All these books were introduced through journal serials to add on their impact.

Thomas Gaffney former US Consul General in Dresden and Munich (1905- 1913; 1913-1914) wrote in his book (Archive.org., Breaking the Silence, NY: Horace Liveright, 1930, p.11, https://archive.org/details):

Brand Whitlock, Wilson’s envoy in Brussels, although entrusted with the protection of German interests, made no disguise of his sympathies with the Allies as soon as he discovered the President felt that way. After we entered the conflict to his great joy, as he readily admits, he published a book on his experiences in Belgium, which is on the same order as “Morgenthau’s Story” and Gerards’s notorious publication, a series of lies, fabrications, and misrepresentations of the most contemptible character. The book is never quoted by responsible historians and is classified with the works of Gerard, Morgenthau, and Beck as among the worst examples of the literature of war frenzy and hysteria.

Is this the way in which H. Morgenthau has been perceived today? Because of the overwhelming attemps to rewrite the history rather than admitting the facts, regretfully not.

5. Johannes Lepsius and his "Deutschland und Armenien 1914-1918 Sammlung Diplomatischer Aktenstücke" (Germany and Armenia 1914-1918 Collective Diplomatic Documents)

Hans Barth, a comtemporary of Lepsius described the attitude of this Philarmenian Protestant theologian and missionary as such:…a savage, blind and pitiless grudge towards everything Turkish, a pathological mercy, tolerance towards the Armenian and disregard without a criticism of the political, moral and social causes of the Armenian events and putting forward arbitrary and phony incidents of savagery, Hans Barth, Türke Wehre Dich, Rengersche Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1898, p. 14-15).

Although Lepsius insistently painted a picture of dutiful Armenians in the countryside, who provided the backbone of the economy and toiled in silent perdition, while bureaucrats orchestrated a mass murder of the peasantry, his arguments received little attention. Most of the letters of protest that the Foreign Office received came from small, rural Protest communities of less than 2.000 people.

Yet, Lepsius continued his agitation with courting agrarian circles as he was also courting anti-semites. He was eager to exploit the dissatisfaction of people as he knew that particularly among small farmers political antisemitism often went hand in hand in the depression years of the early 1890s.

Lepsius chose Der Reichsbote to begin his campaign for the Armenians in the summer of 1896 and continued to use it to launch attacks on the government. This paper had long been an organ of Prussian conservatives, who had called for the revocation of Jewish emancipation in the 1860s and been determined supporters of the Bund der Landwirte and political anti-semitism throughout the 1890s.

A student of Franz Delitzsch and a graduate of his Institutum Judaicum in Leipzig, which trained Protestant theologians for missionary work among Jews, Wilhelm Faber published Lepsius’ Armenien und Europa: Eine Anklageschrift (Berlin: Faber, 1896), along with a host of other books on the conversion of Jews and Muslims to Christianity.

German Jews had long harbored reservations about the Protestant study of Judaism as a reverse form of antisemitism, and Faber’s proselytizing brand of philosemitism was deeply unpopular among Jews in Central Europe, where these missionaries were most active. The Kölnische Zeitung zeroed in on this subtext of the campaign and mused that some of those who wanted “a crusade in the name of Armenia” would have no problem converting or expelling Jews from Europe or taking Christendom back to the Middle Ages…. the Berliner Tageblatt had little patience for the Philarmenian campaign, especially when antisemites like Paul Förster shared the stage with Lepsius at rallies….It is hard to imagine Lepsius was unaware of the company he was keeping or the audience he would be reaching through his efforts…. (footnote 585) After the First World War he fully embraced anti-semitism: “...the Jewish peopled survived the Middle Ages and modern times as a parasite on the backs of the Germanic people” Document Nr. 1555.

(Gummer, The Politics of... p. 211-212, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu ).

Against such a background, Lepsius started his compilation of documents with the following conditions of him as he stated in the book. 1) I must be authorized by the Foreign Office and the Embassy to see all the documents 2) Selection of the documents to be published must be completely left to my discretion .

(Lepsius VI  https://archive.org/stream ). Acceptance of Lepsius’ conditions meant basically the following: neither the content he transferred from the documents were cross checked, nor were these examined before a group of historians.

Acting on his convictions, Lepsius never included reports that might serve to provide an objective account of the events regardless of how important were the persons who had penned down these reports. Lois Mosel, Special Agent of the Kaiser for the Caucasus, and Felix Guse, the Chief of Staff of the IIIrd Army are only two of these. As such the compilation of “Collective Diplomatic Documents” were completed with no reference to reports stating issues i.e. (Mosel) as to how well the Armenians were organized and almost all of them received arms and funds from the Tsarist Russia, majority of them had assumed belligerent role on the side of the Russians, and those who had not joined in the Russian forces were attacking the post/dispatch units of the Ottomans and robbing huge sums of money and what ever the Sublime Porte would do, it would have no effect on gaining the support of the Armenians.

(M. Çolak, Critic of Resources.., Belleten, vol. LXVI, no. 247 , 2002k http://dunyasavasi.ttk.gov.tr ;  Politisches Archiv des Auswärtiges Amt (PA-AA), Berlin, Der Weltkrieg Nr. 11d. Die armenische Bewegung, 22 März 1915).

6. The Importance of Archival Work and How It Has Been Left Unfulfilled

Turkey has followed a fairly transparent policy to date to include the proposal for the establishment of a joint history commission. No Armenian representative has accepted these initiatives. Instead, “denialism” is a word coined to prevent historical analysis and to repress any alternative view. While the proposal of collaborative effort proved to be an effort in vain, no joint archival research was accepted. And while the Ottoman archives are open to all researchers, the archives in Armenia are closed with the exception of acceptance of selected persons who are authorized to engage in a monitored research of limited documents.

http://www.mfa.gov.tr/

http://www.mfa.gov.tr

https://papers.ssrn.com

https://metu.academia.edu/

https://drpatwalsh.com/

Going through the resources pointed out in the links above, it could be seen in part as to how this discussion is channeled into a narrow outlook as a result of the prevailing attitude. Yet, the ocean of available literature still lacks an adequate number of objective researches.

7. The Need for a Holistic Study of the Period in Concern

The Ottoman Empire’s entry into the WW1 along the side of the Central Powers was a last minute decision. The Sublime Porte viewed Britain as its natural ally since the Crimean War. This was to the extent of sending hundreds of sailors to London to receive two war vessels contracted to British companies as late as July 1914. This was a story of betrayal both towards the Ottoman Empire as the vessels were not handed over then and to the UK by pushing the Sublime Porte into a last-ditch alliance with Germany, in an existential crisis that was imposed upon Istanbul by an unprecedented Tsarist-British alliance and the catastrophe of world war.

Any researcher of the WWI history should know that s/he is not studying four years of war, but rather an epoch of conflict. Take the Allied occupation of lstanbul, for instance, which lasted from 1918 to 1923. Why did this invasion take place? Why was İstanbul the only occupied capital once the war “ended”? Why was the Canadian Prime Minister Mr. Mackenzie King furious against the jingoes, as he defined them, who were still enthusiastic about fighting against the Turks?

Context is all important in history, for true understanding, and its removal reduces history to the level of an ahistorical social science. It is not coincidence that many of the historians who promote the anti-history method are indeed social scientists at heart.

8. The Holocaust and Armenian “genocide” and How They Are Forcefully Linked

The comparing of the Holocaust of unarmed and unbelligerent Jews and the relocation of Armenians, in a warzone comprised of armed insurgents harassing behind enemy lines and alongside the Russian forces, is incomprehensible. While the Nuremberg Trials documented thousands of orders for the extermination of Jews, one single order of the Ottoman Empire for the carrying out of a similar plan against the Armenians has not been found.

As for the sentence “who remembers the Armenians after all” allegedly said by Hitler, the quote first appeared in a 1942 book by Louis Lochner, the AP’s Berlin bureau chief during World War II.

There was so much doubt over the authenticity of the document presented to Louis Lochner of the Associated Press containing the quote, that it was discarded as evidence at Nuremberg. The original document containing it was submitted to the Nuremberg Tribunal but withdrawn as evidence in accordance with Rule 10. The document was obviously a forgery since the original German was incorrect in a number of grammatical ways and it had unusual vocabulary. The typewriter used was not a German one, having no capacity for accents and suspicious spaces existed within the composition.

The Nuremberg Tribunal rejected the document as evidence against the Nazis in favour of two other official versions found in German military records. Neither of these, which have detailed notes of the address, contain the Armenian reference. One is authored by Admiral Hermann Boehm, Commander of the High Seas Fleet. In addition, an account by General Halder was used to prove consistency with the other two accounts used as evidence and this again makes no mention of the Armenians. This strongly suggests that the Armenian reference was added later by someone who wished to associate Hitler with the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire. https://www.historyireland.com

None of this has unfortunately deterred various historians, lawyers and media commentators using the Hitler forgery ever since. It is a staple of today’s “cut and paste” journalists.

9. The Lausanne Treaty

The most authoritative document on the ending of the prolonged, or in other words, unended WW1 on Turkey is the Lausanne Treaty of July 24, 1923. This Treaty, let alone mentioning a mass atrocity - genocide, does not even refer to the Armenians. Such a fact only suffices to underscore that the Armenian “genocide” emerged as an invented story at later decades.

The Article 59 of the Lausanne Treaty provides the final verdict on all these disasters and the war crimes committed by stating “the Greek army or administration” as the responsible of these grave atrocities and the outcomes of the war. Greece suffered another blow, which was unjust this time, as the Allies managed to escape from assuming their considerable share in the last crime of the Great War, although they had armed and instigated Athens and taken on an active role in enthusing the Greeks to attack on Turkey on May 15, 1919.

10. Legal Background And the Definition of the Crime of “genocide”:

  • “Genocide” is a very strictly described legal concept and refers to clearly defined crimes, which can only be established by a competent court as defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
  • Existence of concrete evidence, a verdict of a relevant court and an intent to destroy are among prerequisites of the crime of genocide.
  • As in the case of the Holocaust and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Srebrenica, only an international court with expertise could assess the existence of this crime. 
  • In this regard, defining the events of 1915 as genocide is contrary to the law, since there is no such verdict with regard to the events of 1915. 
  • In its judgement of 3 February 2015 in the Croatia v. Serbia case, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) revealed that the 1948 Genocide Convention cannot be retroactively applied to the events took place before the date of its entry into force.
  • Moreover, there is no academic or political consensus on the events of 1915.
  • The judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (Perinçek vs. Switzerland, 2015, Articles 173 and 231; and Mercan vs. Switzerland, 2017) as well as the decision of French Constitutional Court on the events of 1915 clearly stated that it is a subject of legitimate debate.
  • The U.S. jurisdiction in its recent decisions on Davoyan and Bakalian case, as well as the Movsesian case, dismissed plaintiffs’ demands for restitution and favored Turkey’s position vis a vis the 1915 events by underlining the fact that the issue at stake is political in nature and time barred, thus the Court cannot render a verdict on a controversial historical events. These decisions are testament to the fact that the place to resolve historical controversies is neither parliaments nor foreign Courts.

Therefore,

  • The debate on the events that occurred in 1915 belongs to the realm of history, not politics. 
  • Politicization of history neither benefits the academic search for truth nor helps the nascent efforts for normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia.
  • Parliamentary decisions or political statements delivered on the basis of a one-sided, controversial account of history only serve to the propaganda of ultra-nationalist hard-liners and protracts the long-yearned reconciliation between the two nations.
  • The position of Turkey has always been sound and clear, one that is based on empathy and dialogue. 
  • Turkey’s efforts are aimed at reaching a shared narrative that will be based on a just and objective memory.
  • In 2005, Turkey proposed the establishment of a fact-finding joint historical commission between Turkey and Armenia, that would study 1915 events. So far, no answer from the Armenian side has been received.
  • We show respect to and commemorate Armenians who lost their lives during World War I and offer condolences to their descendants. The deceased Armenians are officially remembered at religious ceremonies in Turkey. We label it as a historical and humane duty to uphold the memory of Ottoman Armenians and Armenian cultural heritage.
  • Turkey’s constructive efforts have not been matched by similar efforts from the Armenian side. We invite third parties, parliamentarians and their governments, those willing to contribute, to;
  • ~give no credit to the allegations which call for the recognition of the events of 1915 as genocide, since there is no competent court decision on this matter;
  • ~acknowledge and support Turkey’s constructive efforts;
  • ~display responsible attitude by standing against initiatives exploiting a historical controversy for political ends;
  • ~put pressure on the government of Armenia to engage in dialogue rather than running a systematic war of propaganda;
  • ~encourage organizations of diaspora Armenians to relinquish their ossified hard-line positions and opt for a more constructive approach instead.

12. Conclusion and the Way Ahead

Thanks to the archive.org, today, an intelligent person who truly wants to know what happened in the past can do that. Many of the references available there are waiting for considerate researchers who would be willing to gain their own opinion. Yet, surrounded by means of reaching information, today, one may remain indeed more ignorant compared to those times when the books and information were only reachable to a few committed researchers.

And who will shed a tear for the millions of Muslims massacred in the Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasia and the Middle East and North Africa throughout a century? William St. Clair’s That Greece Might Still Be Free (pp. 120, 141, 143 and 182) may serve as an eye opener vis a vis the beginning of a century of massacres against the Muslims in all these regions. https://archive.org/details/bııb gb NphFnF2RRKUC

We still don’t have an answer to the most important question as to why there is such a prejudice and labelling. Without an answer to this, it must be understandable that a whole Turkish nation cannot be left defenseless against defamatory attacks of some who had swapped their independent analysis of events with a tragic admission of an intellectual tutelage of those who used to rule and shape the world by military might and often, by proxy.

We still don’t have an answer to the most important question as to why there is such a prejudice and labelling. Without an answer to this, it must be understandable that a whole Turkish nation cannot be left defenseless against defamatory attacks of some who had swapped their independent analysis of events with a tragic admission of an intellectual tutelage of those who used to rule and shape the world by military might and often, by proxy.

We must understand that attempting to build our contemporary reality on false assumptions of the past is not only wrong, it is very unconstructive too. The future world of peace and harmony is paved by the truth. The truth is not only the objective but also the means of peace. Alas, alongside the allegations of Armenian “genocide”, only an unexplainable and mutually reinforcing hostility has been nurtured. This helps a lie to live much longer than it deserves which, in fact, should no longer stand in the way of young minds of the many young and admirable countries with an infinite potential for the future.

The war is over. How will we live in the 2020s? This a decision to be made by the responsible people of various greatly permissive societies in which both the right and wrong have an equal chance to thrive.

ENCL 1.

The Year 1915 in the Ottoman Empire and the Work of the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House


James Bryce’s “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916”, (London: G.P.Putnam’s Sons for HMSO, 1916) is the no: 1 baseless source of the Armenian claims regarding the incidents of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire.

Bryce was first a staunch advocate of “Teutonic Freedom” (Keith G. Robbins, “Lord Bryce and the First World War”, The Historical Journal, Vol.10, No.2 (1967), p.255), then was forced to change his views when he was 77 years old and work for “Report of the Committee an Alleged German Outrages, Presided by, James Bryce, (NY: Macmillan and Co., 1915) which became his first book wartime propaganda.

Britain had set up the War Propaganda Bureau (WPB) at Wellington House for the sole purpose of promoting lies and misinformation on Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The Allies were in full co-operation with missionaries in Anatolia and their diplomatic missions in Istanbul conjured a so called Armenian genocide based on gossip, hear-say and erroneous information. The real purpose behind this exercise was to create and strengthen an image in the minds of Allied armies and nations that Turks were evil, horrible and untrustworthy.

Jameson Ryley’s article in The Iowa Historical Review, “The Historian Who Sold Out: James Bryce and the Bryce Report” reaffirms the fact that Bryce was a mere propagandist.

(https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=iowa-historical-review).

Quite astonishingly, “his days as a student at the University of Heidelberg gave him a long-life admiration of German historical and legal scholarship. He became a believer in “Teutonic freedom”, an ill-defined concept that was held to bind Germany, Britain, and the United States together. For him, the United States, the British Empire and Germany were natural friends”.

(Robbins, Keith G. (1967). “Lord Bryce and the First World War”, The Historical Journal. 10 (2): 255–278).

Thus, Bryce was an early example of European fascism too (Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind, Romanes Lecture, 1902) Bryce later shelved his “Teutonic” views as seen in “Essays and Addresses in War Time 1918”, (https://archive.org/details/) where he rigorously discussed “War and Human Progress” (pp.72-103), trying to vindicate himself that it was in fact not war but peace required for the human progress.

The birth of the propaganda of “Treatment of Armenians” which was later transformed into Armenian “genocide”, has such a vicious origin, an origin which had attempted to instrumentalize almost all nations of the former Ottoman Empire.

ENCL 2.

The Holocaust and Armenian “genocide” and How They Are Forcefully Linked

While the Nuremberg Trials documented thousands of orders for the extermination of Jews, one single order of the Ottoman Empire for the carrying out of a similar plan against the Armenians has not been found.

As for the sentence “who remembers the Armenians after all” allegedly said by Hitler, the quote first appeared in a 1942 book by Louis Lochner, the AP’s Berlin bureau chief during World War II.

There was so much doubt over the authenticity of the document presented to Louis Lochner of the Associated Press containing the quote, that it was discarded as evidence at Nuremberg. The original document containing it was submitted to the Nuremberg Tribunal but withdrawn as evidence in accordance with Rule 10. The document was obviously a forgery since the original German was incorrect in a number of grammatical ways and it had unusual vocabulary. The typewriter used was not a German one, having no capacity for accents and suspicious spaces existed within the composition.

The Nuremberg Tribunal rejected the document as evidence against the Nazis in favour of two other official versions found in German military records. Neither of these, which have detailed notes of the address, contain the Armenian reference. One is authored by Admiral Hermann Boehm, Commander of the High Seas Fleet. In addition, an account by General Halder was used to prove consistency with the other two accounts used as evidence and this again makes no mention of the Armenians. This strongly suggests that the Armenian reference was added later by someone who wished to associate Hitler with the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire. https://www.historyireland.com/volume-23/who-remembers-the-armenians/

Besides these, translator Carlos Porter, who found the original documentation in the German archives regarding the “Hitler quote” stated that the document was clearly not written by an individual who had a fluent German and also did not use a typewriter compatible with the German language.