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Ottoman Armenian casualties refers to the number of deaths of Ottoman Armenians between 1914 and 1923, during which the Armenian genocide occurred. Most estimates of related Armenian deaths between 1915 and 1918 range from 600,000 to 1.5 million.

Prewar estimates

There is no agreement among historians how many Armenians lived in the empire prior to the genocide. The official census reported 1.1 million Armenians living in the empire in 1912. This is considered an underestimate, and the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople reported 2.1 million Armenians.

Majority of historians estimate that between 1.5 to 2 million Armenians lived inside the Ottoman empire in 1914. Of these, the Ottoman empire expelled approximately 0.8 to 1.2 million Armenians from its territories.

Armenian casualties from 1915 to 1917–18

Ottoman and Turkish estimates

The statistics provided by Djemal

Map of Armenian casualties
The destruction of Armenians in Ottoman Empire in 1914-17 The data in this map is from Talaat Pasha's own report on the Armenian genocide, as found and translated by the historian Ara Sarafian from the Ottoman Archives of Istanbul.

The official Ottoman statistics compiled for the period between 1915 and 1917–18 were of 800,000 killed. This figure originates from Djemal's bureau. The results were published in the official Ottoman gazette.

It was allegedly the result of a commission formed by the interior minister Mustafa Arif. It is said that they relied on reports and statistics they had compiled in a period of two months; on March 14, 1919, the results were made public by Djemal. This same figure was mentioned in Rauf Orbay's own memoirs. The initial results apparently represented those who were "massacred" during the deportation, without any indication as to the total number of people who perished. Mustafa Kemal, during a conversation with Major General Harbord, the chief of the American Military Mission to Armenia, in September 1919, repeated the same number. The figure of 800,000 excludes Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army liquidated in the early stages of the genocide, as well as the number of women and male and female children assimilated into Turkish families.

However, following the dissolution of the military tribunal, those figures were reinterpreted. The Turkish author Taner Akçam refers to a Turkish military estimate published by Lt. Col. Nihat in 1928, in which the figure of 800,000 no longer represented those "massacred" or "killed", but simply those who perished. Then the historian Bayur in a famous work wrote: "800,000 Armenians and 200,000 Greeks died as a result of deportations or died in labor brigades." Bayur concluded: "According to our official sources, these numbers are correct."

The Remaining Documents of Talaat Pasha

According to documents that once belonged to Talaat Pasha, more than 970,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916. In 1983, Talaat's widow, Hayriye Talaat Bafralı, gave the documents and records to Turkish journalist Murat Bardakçı, who published them in a book titled The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha (also known as "Talat Pasha's Black Book"). According to the documents, the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before 1915 stood at 1,256,000. It was presumed, however, in a footnote by Talaat Pasha himself, that the Armenian population was undercounted by thirty percent. Furthermore, the population of Protestant Armenians was not taken into account. Therefore, according to the historian Ara Sarafian, the population of Armenians should have been approximately 1,700,000 prior to the start of the war. However, that number had plunged to 284,157 two years later in 1917.

Other Ottoman sources

While the official figures were of 800,000 killed, there were many unofficial numbers presented during the war by some Ottoman authorities—Talat, for instance, presented the figure of 300,000—but there is no indication as to how those figures were obtained. This figure is currently the one used often by the Turkish government officials.

Ottoman allies estimates

Germany

German sources gave the highest estimates of Armenian losses during the war even though they were the Ottoman Empire's ally. Some speculate that it was due to their access to murder sites. German major Endres, who served in the Turkish army, estimated the number of Armenian deaths as 1.2 million. The same figure was mentioned during the Yozgat trial, and before the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal and is often cited elsewhere.

Austria-Hungary

The Austrian consul at Trabzon and Samsun, Dr. Kwatkiowski on March 13, 1918, reported to Vienna, restricting himself to the six eastern provinces, Trabzon and Samsun district, that of the million deported, most died, while Austria-Hungary's Adrianople (Edirne) consul Dr. Nadamlenzki reported that for the entire Ottoman Empire 1.5 million had already been deported. The Austrian Vice Marshal Joseph Pomiankowski estimated the Armenian losses at about a million.

The allies and neutral parties

Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the British Foreign Office during World War I, estimated a death toll of 600,000 from a population of 1,800,000 Armenians who lived in Anatolia but excluded most of 1916 and the following years, as Robert Melson writes:

Toynbee's description and analysis stop with the winter of 1915 and the spring of 1916, by which time the bulk of the Armenian population has been killed or deported. As valuable as it is, this work cannot take into account what subsequently happened to the deportees in 1916, nor can it take into account the Armenians who were deported from some of the major urban areas after 1916.

The King Crane Commission

The King Crane Commission estimated a million for wartime losses, but also stated that the Hamidian massacres had been included. Whether or not the Armenian casualties were being deliberately understated to increase the Armenian population to support Armenian independence is still a matter of debate. The Armenian wartime losses of a million, the Adana massacres, and Hamidian massacres had been combined for the sake of what the commission at one point called "justice," in what appears to have been an attempt to maximize the population count. The Armenian estimates showed the same tendency. At times, they were even reduced to 500,000 when the high Armenian death count endangered the possibility of an Armenian state including Ottoman territory, and in other instances raised to over a million. The United States figures for the period between 1915 and 1917 vary widely, but most figures approach a million or more.

League of Nations

The League of Nations estimated a million dead, but the list of refugees in the Caucasus and Russian Armenia who were not from Ottoman Empire was not clearly defined, which suggests that the list of 400,000 to 420,000 Ottoman Armenians may have included Armenians who were not really Ottoman Armenian. This would explain why other estimates projected the casualties over the million given by the League.

Armenian casualties, 1917–18 to 1923

While the Ottoman official statistics covered 1917–18, and some of German figures, most other figures excluded them. Another problem remains, as to the availability of the sources for what followed 1917. More recent scholars have called this period the second phase of the Armenian genocide. Melson, for instance, provide' a rough estimate of 500,000. On the other hand, those estimates have no archival grounds, for this reason some researchers considers any such figures could be near to the actual casualty figures or far from it.

Armenian casualties outside of the Ottoman borders during Ottoman invasion

Few commissions were formed though, such as the investigations for Kars and Alexandropol. The Alexandropol investigation by its nature is seen as the most serious such endeavor. It presented 60,000 as directed killed, in a total of 150,000 victims which condition would have ultimately led to their death sentences. But the investigation apparently came to an end abruptly. The Germans on the other hand, not presenting any numbers, have reported Russian Armenia condition, in what they considered as an Ottoman attempt to destroy it. Without taking in account the Ottoman excursion of what was considered as Persian Armenia. An American source states that when the Ottomans invaded Northern Iran between 1915 and 1918, which was historically part of the Kingdom of Armenia forming the provinces of Parskahayk and the eastern part of Vaspurakan, they killed about 80,000 Armenians, and when they invaded the Russian-controlled Transcaucasia between 1918 and 1923 they killed about 175,000 Armenians.

Ottoman Armenian casualties

Most of the victims could be counted in Cilicia, as well as the Eastern zone, and in Smyrna (İzmir) during what was reported as massacres and what followed with the burning of the Armenian and Greek quarters of the city (see Great Fire of Smyrna). While the total of casualties in this category is estimated to tens of thousands to over hundred of thousand, the number of victims is not well established.

Recent estimates

According to Armenian-American historian Richard G. Hovannisian, the range of the death toll is between 600,000 to 2 million. However, recent scholarship give figures of around 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians that were deported in 1915–1916. It's estimated that only 200,000 of these were still alive by the end of 1916.

Denialist and Turkish-affiliated estimates

Justin McCarthy's figures are often cited, particularly in works that support the Turkish government's claims that the Armenian massacres do not constitute genocide. Although a Western academic, McCarthy's statistics on Armenian casualties and fatalities are derived from his statistics of Armenian population, which, in turn, were derived from Ottoman records (by applying correction values). Some scholars (including Aviel Roshwald) consider his figures to be an Ottoman source rather than a Western one. "

McCarthy calculated an estimate of the pre-war Armenian population, then subtracted his estimate of survivors, arriving at a figure of a little less than 600,000 for Armenian casualties for the period 1914 to 1922. As in the cases of his population, his statistics are controversial. In a more recent essay, he projected that if the Armenian records of 1913 were accurate, 250,000 more deaths should be added, for a total of 850,000. McCarthy is also criticized for overestimating the number of survivors. Frédéric Paulin goes as far as comparing his methodology with Rassinier's method in calculating the European Jewry losses during World War II.

In 1991, Levon Marashlian (arriving at a figure of 1.2 million) argued that McCarthy's approach suffers from a fatal methodological flaw: in basing his results on inaccurate records. Marashlian maintains there was a reciprocal undercounting on the Ottoman's government's part on the one hand, and underreporting by Armenians, on the other.

Notes

1. ^ Morris, Benny; Ze’evi, Dror (2019). The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924. Harvard University Press. p. 486. ISBN 978-0-674-91645-6.
2. Bijak, Jakub; Lubman, Sarah (2016). "The Disputed Numbers: In Search of the Demographic Basis for Studies of Armenian Population Losses, 1915–1923". The Armenian Genocide Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 26–43. ISBN 978-1-137-56163-3.
3. Morris, Benny; Ze'evi, Dror (2019). The Thirty-Year Genocide. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard University Press. p. 486. ISBN 978-0-674-91645-6. Most historians estimate that on the eve of WWI, there were 1.5-2 million Armenians in the empire, mostly in Anatolia, and that between 800,000 and 1.2 million of them were deported.
4. Ottoman Gazette Takvimi Vekâyi No. 3909, July 21, 1920, pp. 3, 4. Cited published in Alemdar, March 15, 1919
5. Rauf Orbay, Rauf Orbay'ın Hatıraları, (Vol. 3), Yakın Tarihimiz, İstanbul, 1962 p. 179, he refers to what Mustafa Kemal told him about the Armenians.
6. Yakm Tarihimiz, 3, (1962), p. 179, cited in Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, Providence, RI: Berghan Books, 1995, p. 234
7. Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, Türk İnkılabı Tarihi, Vol. III, Sec. IV, p. 787
8. Sarafian, Ara (13 March 2009). "Talaat Pasha's Black Book documents his campaign of race extermination, 1915–17" (PDF). Armenian Cause Foundation. The Armenian Reporter.
9. Tavernise, Sabrina "Nearly a Million Genocide Victims, Covered in a Cloak of Amnesia". The New York Times, 8 March 2009.
10. Carl Franz Endres, Die Türkei. Munich, CH Beck, 1918, p. 161
11. Cited in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 1997, Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series, Genocide Study Project, H. F. Guggenheim Foundation.
12. Gérard Chaliand, Le Crime de silence : le génocide des Arméniens: Tribunal permanent des peuples, ; pref. de Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Flammarion, 1984.
13. Austrian Foreign Ministry Archives 12 Türkei/380, ZI.17/pol and 12 Türkei/463, Z.94/P.
14. Joseph Pomiankowski, Der Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches, Graz, Austria, 1969, p. 160(originally printed in 1928)
15. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs By Viscount Bryce, London 1916
16. Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, University Of Chicago Press, October 15, 1992, p. 147
17. Harry N. Howard, The King-Crane Commission: An American Inquiry in the Middle East, Khayats, 1963 p. 212 includes them all, but The King-Crane Commission Report, August 28, 1919 is more contradictory: in one instance, it considered the million lost as the outcome of the war (as if excluding the other massacres) and there is no way to know whether or not it was a mistake.
18. A. P. Hacobian, Armenia and the War: An Armenian's Point of View with an Appeal to Britain and the Coming Peace Conference, George H. Doran Company, New York. 1918. He presents as range from 500,000 to 800,000, and presents the cases of the possibility of the construction of an Armenia. How far those politically motivated figures influenced commission reports of mortality, such as those of the King Crane is not well known, apparently it was considered due to Mr. Aharonian and Boghos Nubar presentation of the cases, in this regard, it is relevant to read the British views on the problem of Kurdistan, and on Boghos Nubar Pasha, in December 1919, see United Kingdom, Foreign Office, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939. Edited by E. L. Woodward and Rohan Butler. First Series ( London, H. M. S. O., 1952), IV, 920-24. Later cited as British Documents, 1919-1939.
19. Boghos Nubar, the head of the Armenian delegation at the Paris Peace conference, wrote in The Times on 30 January 1919, that "over a million out of a total Armenian population… have lost their lives in and through the war." Apparently, when it was noted that a possibility of an Armenia as wanted by the Armenian delegation was impossible, the Armenian delegation changed its tactic, as to not minimise the number of victims, but rather use them and indirectly accuse the allies, and expect that they might consider Armenia as reparation for the losses.
20. The extent of the Armenian tragedy is described in Fridtjof Nansen's book: "Armenia and the Near East" translated from (l'Arménie et le Proche Orient, Paris, 1923). Nansen concludes his work: "Woe to the Armenians, that they were ever drawn into European politics! It would have been better for them if the name of Armenia had never been uttered by any European diplomatist."
21. See: League of Nations: Assembly: Fifth Committee published reports: Armenian and Russian Refugee Problems; Report... Geneva: np, 1926. Settlement of Armenian Refugees; Report... Geneva: Imprimerie Kundig, 1926. Transfer of Armenian Refugees to the Caucasus and Creation of an Armenian National Home in That Region; Report... Geneva: np, 1924.
22. In his book: Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, University Of Chicago Press, October 15, 1992
23. Soviet Archival records: CGAKA, f. 109, op. 3, d. 241, 1. 12. / Politarxiv MID SSSR., inv. No. 53351, 1.14. and Arxiv vnesnej politiki SSSR, f. 132, op. 4, p. 6, d. 14, 1. 52.
24. Military attaché Otto von Lossow reported that the Turkish government was also attempting "the total extermination of the Armenians in Transcaucasia also" (German Foreign Ministry Archives. A. A. Türkei 183/51, A20698, May 15, 1918. His first report.) He also report: "Talàt's government party wants to destroy all Armenians, not only in Turkey, but also outside Turkey."(Deutsches Zentralarchiv (Potsdam) Bestand Reichskanzlei No. 2458/9, Blatt 202, June 3, 1918 report, p. 2.)
25. "Turkey's Dead 1900-1923". hawaii.edu.
26. See: Stanley Elphinstone Kerr, The Lions of Marash: Personal Experiences with American Near East Relief, 1919-1922 (New York: State University of New York, 1973); Susan E. Kerr, Letters of Stanley E. Kerr: Volunteer Work with the "Near East Relief" among Armenians in Marash, 1919-1920, Edited and with a Historical Introduction to the Turkish-Armenian Conflict (Diss., History Honors Program, Oberlin College, 1980)
27. see George Horton, The Blight of Asia, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1926; Dobkin, Marjorie Housepian, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City, Kent State U Press, 1988.
28. Hovannisian, Richard G. (1999). Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. Wayne State University Press. p. 15. ISBN 0-8143-2777-X.
29. Roshwald, Aviel, Ethnic nationalism & the fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914-1923, Routledge, 2001, p. 91.
30. Justin McCarthy, The End of Ottoman Anatolia, in Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire, New York Univ. Press (1983).
31. Justin McCarthy, "The Population of the Ottoman Armenians", The Armenians in the Late Ottoman Period, Turkish Historical Society For The Council Of Culture, Arts And Publications Of The Grand National Assembly Of Turkey, Ankara (2001), pp. 65-86
32. Frédéric Paulin, Négationnisme et théorie des populations stables : le cas du génocide arménien, in Hervé Lebras (dir.), L'Invention des populations. Biologie, Idéologie et politique, Editions Odile Jacob, 2000.
33. Levon Marashlian, Politics and Demography: Armenians, Turks and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire Archived 2006-01-07 at the Wayback Machine Zoryan Institute (1991); ISBN 0-916431-30-4

• Armenian genocide
• 1910s in the Ottoman Empire
• Demographics of the Ottoman Empire
• Turkish War of Independence
• 20th century in Armenia
• Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
• World War I casualties