Statement by two Danish Red Cross Nurses, formerly in the service
of the German Military Mission at Erzeroum. [6] Communicated by
a Swiss Gentleman of Geneva.
In March, 1915, we learnt through an Armenian doctor, who died
later on of typhoid, that the Turkish Government was preparing for
a massacre on a grand scale. He begged us to find out from General
Passelt whether the rumour was true. We heard afterwards that the
General (a gallant officer) had his own fears of it, and asked, for
that reason, to be relieved of his post. ... We fell sick of typhoid
and ... in consequence of a number of changes in the hospital staff
... we were obliged to leave Erzeroum. Through the good offices of
the German Consul at Erzeroum, who also possessed the confidence
of the Armenians, we were engaged by the Red Cross at Erzindjan,
and worked there seven weeks.
At the beginning of June, the head of the Red Cross Mission at
Erzindjan, Staff-Surgeon A., told us that the Armenians had revolted
at Van, that measures had been taken against them which would be put
into general execution, and that the whole Armenian population of
Erzindjan and the neighbourhood would be transported to Mesopotamia,
where it would no longer find itself in a majority. There was, however,
to be no massacre, and measures were to be taken to feed the exiles and
to secure their personal safety by a military escort. Wagons loaded
with arms and bombs were reported, he said, to have been discovered
at Erzindjan, and many arrests were to be made. The Red Cross staff
were forbidden to have any relations with the exiles, and prohibited
any excursions on foot or horseback beyond a certain radius.
After that, several days' grace was given to the population of
Erzindjan for the sale of their property, which was naturally realised
at ludicrous prices. In the first week of June, [7] the first convoy
started; the rich people were allowed to hire carriages. They were
to go to Harpout. The three succeeding days, further deportations
followed; [8] many children were taken charge of by Moslem families;
later on, the authorities decided that these children must go into
exile as well.
The families of the Armenians employed in our hospital had to go with
the rest, including a woman who was ill. A protest from Dr. Neukirch,
who was attending her, had no effect except to postpone her departure
two days. A soldier attached to our staff as cobbler said to Sister
B. [9]: "I am now forty-six years old, and yet I am taken for military
service, although I have paid my exemption-tax regularly every year. I
have never done anything against the Government, and now they are
taking from me my whole family, my seventy-year-old mother, my wife
and five children, and I do not know where they are going." He was
especially affected by the thought of his little daughter, a year and
a half old; "She is so sweet. She has such pretty eyes"; he wept like
a child. The next day he came back; "I know the truth. They are all
dead." And it was only too true. Our Turkish cook came to us crying,
and told us how the Kurds had attacked the unhappy convoy at Kamakh
Boghaz, [10] had pillaged it completely, and had killed a great number
of the exiles. This must have been the 14th June.
Two young Armenian teachers, educated at the College of Harpout, whose
lives were spared, related that the convoy had been caught under a
cross-fire by the Kurds on the flanks and the Turkish irregulars in
the rear. They had thrown themselves flat on the ground and pretended
to be dead; afterwards they succeeded in finding their way back to
Erzindjan by circuitous paths, bribing some Kurds whom they met on the
way. One of them had with her her fiancé in woman's clothes. He had
been shielded by a Turkish class-mate. When they reached Erzindjan
a gendarme tried to abduct the girl, and her fiancé interfered. He
was killed, and the girls were carried off to Turkish houses, where
they were treated kindly, but had pressure put upon them to change
their religion. They conveyed this news to us through a young doctor
who attended some Armenian patients in our hospital, and was thereby
enabled to get into touch with us; he brought us an appeal from them
to take them with us to Harpout. If only they had poison, they said,
they would poison themselves. They had no information whatever as to
the fate of their companions.
The day after [11], Friday, the 11th June, a party of regular troops
(belonging to the 86th Cavalry Brigade) were sent out "to keep the
Kurds in order."
We heard subsequently from these soldiers how the defenceless
Armenians had been massacred to the last one. The butchery had
taken four hours. The women threw themselves on their knees, they
had thrown their children into the Euphrates, and so on. [12] "It
was horrible," said a nice-looking young soldier; "I could not fire,
I only pretended." For that matter, we have often heard Turks express
their disapproval and their pity. The soldiers told us that there
were ox-carts all ready to carry the corpses to the river and remove
every trace of the massacre. [13]
Next day there was a regular battue through the cornfields. (The corn
was then standing, and many Armenians had hidden in it.)
From that time on, convoys of exiles were continually arriving, all on
their way to the slaughter; we have no doubt about their fate, after
the unanimous testimony which we have received from many different
quarters. Later, our Greek driver told us that the victims had their
hands tied behind their backs, and were thrown down from the cliffs
into the river. This method was employed when the numbers were too
great to dispose of them in any other fashion. It was also easier work
for the murderers. Sister B. and I, of course, began at once to think
what we could do, and we decided to travel with one of these convoys
to Harpout. We did not know yet that the massacre on the road had been
ordered by the Government, and we also thought that we could check the
brutality of the gendarmes and stave off the assaults of the Kurds,
since we speak Kurdish and have some influence over the tribesmen....
We then telegraphed to the Consul at Erzeroum, telling him that we
had been dismissed from the hospital, and urging him, in the interests
of Germany, to come to Erzindjan. He wired back: "Impossible to leave
my post. Wait for Austrians, who are due to pass here the 22nd June."
On the evening of the 17th June, we went out for a walk with Mr. C.,
the druggist of the Red Cross Staff. He was as much horrified as we
were at the cruelties that were being perpetrated.... On our walk
we met a gendarme, who told us that, ten minutes' distance away, a
large convoy of exiles from Baibourt had halted. He narrated to us,
with appalling vividness, how one by one the men had been massacred
and cast into the depths of the gorge. [14]
He told how, at each village, the women had been violated; how he
himself had desired to take a girl, but had been told that already she
was no longer a maid; how children had had their brains battered out
when they cried or hindered the march. "There were the naked bodies
of three girls; I buried them to do a good deed," was the remark with
which he concluded his story.
The following morning, at a very early hour, we heard the procession
of exiles passing in front of our house, along the high road leading
in to Erzindjan. We followed them and kept up with them as far as
the town, about an hour's walk. Mr. G. came with us. It was a very
large gang--only two or three of them men, all the rest women and
children. Many of the women looked demented. They cried out: "Spare us,
we will become Moslems or Germans or whatever you will; only spare
us. We are being taken to Kamakh Boghaz to have our throats cut,"
and they made an expressive gesture. Others kept silence, and marched
patiently on with a few bundles on their backs and their children in
their arms. Others begged us to save their children. Many Turks arrived
on the scene to carry off children and girls, with or without their
parents' consent. There was no time for reflection, for the crowd
was being moved on continually by the mounted gendarmes brandishing
their whips. On the outskirts of the town, the road to Kamakh Boghaz
branches off from the main highway. At this point the scene turned
into a regular slave market; for our part, we took a family of six
children, from three to fourteen years old, who clutched hold of
us, and another little girl as well. We entrusted the latter to our
Turkish cook, who was on the spot. She wanted to take the child to the
kitchen of Dr. A.'s private house, and keep her there until we could
come and fetch her; but the doctor's adjutant, Riza Bey, gave the
woman a beating and threw the child out into the street. Meanwhile,
with cries of agony, the gang of sufferers continued its march, while
we returned to the hospital with our six children. Dr. A. gave us
permission to keep them in our room until we had packed our belongings;
they were given food and soon became calmer. "Now we are saved," they
had cried when we took them. They refused to let go of our hands. The
smallest, the son of a rich citizen of Baibourt, lay huddled up in
his mother's cloak; his face was swollen with crying and he seemed
inconsolable. Once he rushed to the window and pointed to a gendarme:
"That's the man who killed my father." The children handed over to us
their money, 475 piastres (about £4), which their parents had given
them with the idea that the children would not be searched.
We then rode into the town to obtain permission for these children to
travel with us. We were told that the high authorities were in session
to decide the fate of the convoy which had just arrived. Nevertheless,
Sister B. succeeded in getting word with someone she knew, who gave
her the authorisation to take the children with her, and offered to
give them false names in the passport. This satisfied us, and, after
returning to the hospital, we left the same evening with baggage and
children and all, and installed ourselves in a hotel at Erzindjan. The
Turkish orderlies at the hospital were very friendly, and said:
"You have done a good deed in taking these children." We could get
nothing but one small room for the eight of us. During the night there
was a frightful knocking at our door, and we were asked whether there
were two German ladies in the room. Then all became quiet again, to
the great relief of our little ones. Their first question had been,
would we prevent them from being made Mohammedans? And was our cross
(the nurses' Red Cross) the same as theirs? After that they were
comforted. We left them in the room, and went ourselves to take our tea
in the hotel café. We noticed that some discharged hospital patients
of ours, who had always shown themselves full of gratitude towards
us, behaved as if they no longer recognised us. The proprietor of
the hotel began to hold forth, and everyone listened to what he was
saying: "The death of these women and children has been decreed at
Constantinople." The Hodja (Turkish priest) of our hospital came in,
too, and said to us, among other things: "If God has no pity on them,
why must you have pity? The Armenians have committed atrocities at
Van. That happened because their religion is ekzik (inferior). The
Moslems should not have followed their example, but should have
carried out the massacre with greater humanity." We always gave the
same answer--that they ought to discover the guilty and do justice
upon them, but that the massacre of women and children was, and always
will remain, a crime.
Then we went to the Mutessarif himself, with whom we had not
succeeded in obtaining an interview before. The man looked like the
devil incarnate, and his behaviour bore out his appearance. In a
bellowing voice he shouted at us: "Women have no business to meddle
with politics, but ought to respect the Government!" We told him
that we should have acted in precisely the same way if the victims
had been Mohammedans, and that politics had nothing to do with our
conduct. He answered that we had been expelled from the hospital,
and that we should get the same treatment from him; that he would not
stand us, and that he would certainly not permit us to go to Harpout
to fetch our belongings, but would send us to Sivas. Worst of all,
he forbade us to take the children away, and at once sent a gendarme
to carry them off from our room.
On our way back to the hotel we actually met them, but they were
hurried past us so quickly that we had not even a chance to return
them their money. Afterwards we asked Dr. Lindenberg to see that this
money was restored to them; but, to find out where they were, he had
to make enquiries of a Turkish officer, and just at the moment of our
departure, when we had been told that they had already been killed,
and when we had no longer any chance of making further search for
them, the aforementioned Riza Bey came and asked us for this money,
on the ground that he wanted to return it to the children! We had
already decided to spend it on relieving other Armenians.
At Erzindjan we were now looked askance at. They would no longer let us
stay at the hotel, but took us to a deserted Armenian house. The whole
of this extensive quarter of the town seemed dead. People came and
went at will to loot the contents of the houses; in some of the houses
the families of Moslem refugees were already installed. We had now a
roof over our heads, but no one would go to get us food. However,
we managed to send a note to Dr. A., who kindly allowed us to
return to the hospital. The following day the Mutessarif sent a
springless baggage cart, in which we were to do the seven days'
journey to Sivas. We gave him to understand that we would not have
the conveyance, and, upon the representations of Dr. A., they sent
us a travelling carriage, with the threat to have us arrested if
we did not start at once. This was on Monday, the 21st June, and we
should have liked to wait for the Austrians, who were due to arrive
on the Tuesday morning, and continue the journey in their company;
but Dr. A. declared that he could no longer give us protection, and
so we started out. Dr. Lindenberg did us the kindness of escorting
us as far as Rifahia. [15] During the first days of our journey
we saw five corpses. One was a woman's, and still had clothes on;
the others were naked, one of them headless. There were two Turkish
officers on the road with us who were really Armenians, as we were
told by the gendarme attached to us. They preserved their incognito
towards us, and maintained a very great reserve, but always took care
not to get separated from us. On the fourth day they did not put in an
appearance. When we enquired after them, we were given to understand
that the less we concerned ourselves about them the better it would
be for us. On the road, we broke our journey near a Greek village. A
savage-looking man was standing by the roadside. He began to talk with
us, and told us he was stationed there to kill all the Armenians that
passed, and that he had already killed 250. He explained that they
all deserved their fate, for they were all Anarchists--not Liberals or
Socialists, but Anarchists. He told the gendarmes that he had received
orders by telephone to kill our two travelling companions. So these two
men with their Armenian drivers must have perished there. We could not
restrain ourselves from arguing with this assassin, but when he went
off our Greek driver warned us: "Don't say a word, if you do ..."--and
he made the gesture of taking aim. The rumour had, in fact, got about
that we were Armenians, which was as good as to say condemned to death.
One day we met a convoy of exiles, who had said good-bye to their
prosperous villages and were at that moment on their way to Kamakh
Boghaz. We had to draw up a long time by the roadside while they
marched past. The scene will never be forgotten by either of us: a
very small number of elderly men, a large number of women--vigorous
figures with energetic features--a crowd of pretty children, some of
them fair and blue-eyed, one little girl smiling at the strangeness
of all she was seeing, but on all the other faces the solemnity of
death. There was no noise; it was all quiet, and they marched along
in an orderly way, the children generally riding on the ox-carts;
and so they passed, some of them greeting us on the way--all these
poor people, who are now standing at the throne of God, and whose
cry goes up before Him. An old woman was made to get down from her
donkey--she could no longer keep the saddle. Was she killed on the
spot? Our hearts had become as cold as ice.
The gendarme attached to us told us then that he had escorted a convoy
of 3,000 women and children from Mamahatoun (near Erzeroum) to Kamakh
Boghaz. "Hep gildi, bildi," he said: "All gone, all dead." We asked
him: "Why condemn them to this frightful torment; why not kill them
in their villages?" Answer: "It is best as it is. They ought to be
made to suffer; and, besides, there would be no place left for us
Moslems with all these corpses about. They will make a stench!"
We spent a night at Enderessi, one day's journey from Shabin
Kara-Hissar. As usual, we had been given for our lodging an empty
Armenian house. On the wall there was a pencil scrawl in Turkish:
"Our dwelling is on the mountains, we have no longer any need of a
roof to cover us; we have already drained the bitter cup of death,
we have no more need of a judge."
The ground floor rooms of the house were still tenanted by the women
and children. The gendarmes told us that they would be exiled next
morning, but they did not know that yet; they did not know what
had become of the men of the house; they were restless, but not
yet desperate.
Just after I had gone to sleep, I was awakened by shots in our
immediate neighbourhood. The reports followed one another rapidly,
and I distinctly heard the words of command. I realised at once what
was happening, and actually experienced a feeling of relief at the idea
that these poor creatures were now beyond the reach of human cruelty.
Next morning our people told us that ten Armenians had been shot--that
was the firing that we had heard--and that the Turkish civilians of
the place were now being sent out to chase the fugitives. Indeed, we
saw them starting off on horseback with guns. At the roadside were
two armed men standing under a tree and dividing between them the
clothes of a dead Armenian. They were just holding up a pair of blue
cloth trousers. We passed a place covered with clotted blood, though
the corpses had been removed. It was the 250 road-making soldiers,
of whom our gendarme had told us.
Once we met a large number of these labourers, who had so far been
allowed to do their work in peace. They had been sorted into three
gangs--Moslems, Greeks and Armenians. There were several officers
with the latter. Our young Hassan exclaimed: "They are all going
to be butchered." We continued our journey, and the road mounted
a hill. Then our driver pointed with his whip towards the valley,
and we saw that the Armenian gang was being made to stand out on the
high road. There were about 400 of them, and they were being made to
line up on the edge of a slope. We know what happened after that.
Two days before we reached Sivas, we again saw the same sight. The
soldiers' bayonets glittered in the sun.
At another place there were ten gendarmes shooting them down, while
Turkish workmen were finishing off the victims with knives and
stones. Here ten Armenians had succeeded in getting away.
Later on, in the Mission Hospital at Sivas, we came across one of
the men who had escaped. He told us that about 100 Armenians had been
slaughtered there. Our informant himself had received a terrible wound
in the nape of the neck and had fainted. Afterwards he had recovered
consciousness and had dragged himself in two days to Sivas.
Twelve hours' distance from Sivas, we spent the night in a government
building. For hours a gendarme, sitting in front of our door,
crooned to himself over and over again: "Ermenleri hep kesdiler--the
Armenians have all been killed!" In the next room they were talking
on the telephone. We made out that they were giving instructions as
to how the Armenians were to be arrested. They were talking chiefly
about a certain Ohannes, whom they had not succeeded in finding yet.
One night we slept in an Armenian house where the women had just
heard that the men of the family had been condemned to death. It was
frightful to hear their cries of anguish. "Cannot your Emperor help
us?" they cried. The gendarme saw the despair on our faces, and said:
"Their crying bothers you; I will forbid them to cry." However,
he let himself be mollified. He had taken particular pleasure in
pointing out to us all the horrors that we encountered, and he said to
young Hassan: "First we kill the Armenians, then the Greeks, then the
Kurds." He would certainly have been delighted to add: "And then the
foreigners!" Our Greek driver was the victim of a still more ghastly
joke: "Look, down there in the ditch; there are Greeks there too!"
At last we reached Sivas. We had to wait an hour in front of the
Government Building before the examination of our papers was completed
and we were given permission to go to the Americans. There, too,
all was trouble and sorrow.
On the 1st July we left Sivas, and reached Kaisaria on the 4th. We had
been given permission to go to Talas, after depositing our baggage
at the Jesuit School; but when we wanted to go on from Kaisaria,
we were refused leave and taken back to the Jesuit School, where
a gendarme was posted in front of our door. However, the American
Missionaries succeeded in getting us set at liberty.
We then returned to Talas, where we passed several days full of
commotion, for there, as well as at Kaisaria, there were many arrests
being made. The poor Armenians never knew what the morrow would
bring, and then came the terrifying news that all Armenians had been
cleared out of Sivas. What happened there and in the villages of the
surrounding districts will be reported by the American Mission.
When we discovered that they meant to keep us there--for they had
prevented us from joining the Austrians for the journey--we telegraphed
to the German Embassy, and so obtained permission to start. There is
nothing to tell about this part of our journey, except that the locusts
had in places destroyed all the fruit and vegetables, so that the Turks
are already beginning to have some experience of the Divine punishment.