The Young Turk revolution promised to improve the lot of the Armenians
by instituting liberty in the Ottoman Empire; in reality the Young
Turks desired only to make a unified empire of which they should
be masters; they tried to "Turkify" all the races under them by
persecuting those who wished to keep their own character; in 1909 they
caused the Armenians at Adana to be massacred.
When the Young Turk Government allied itself with the Central Empires,
learning organization from the Germans, it organized the destruction of
the Armenians in 1915 on scientific lines. It ordered the deportation
of these people from land which they had occupied for more than 2,000
years, and, after massacring the men and seizing the young women, it
caused the rest of the women and the children to perish of hunger,
thirst, and fatigue along the highways into which they had been driven;
it sent them to die in the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Hundreds
of thousands of Armenians were thus destroyed. When the victorious
Russian troops entered Erzerum and Trebizond they found only a few
dozens of Armenians out of the tens of thousands who had inhabited
those cities. The German authorities knew of these massacres; they made
no protest.
In Syria the Christian population was destroyed by other methods; all
the food was taken away, and then the district was isolated and the
entrance of new food supplies forbidden. Hundreds of thousands of
Syrians died of hunger. Germany knew of this crime; it did not protest.