Ottoman Genocide Begins: One Million Armenians Perish

Ottoman police knocked on doors across Constantinople on the night of April 24, 1915, arresting 235 Armenian intellectuals, clergy, physicians, and community leaders. By dawn, the Armenian community in the imperial capital had been decapitated of its leadership. The arrested men were deported to prison camps in the Anatolian interior, where most were executed within months. That night marked the beginning of a systematic campaign to eliminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, a campaign now recognized as the first genocide of the twentieth century. The killings had political and demographic logic. The Ottoman government, led by the Committee of Union and Progress under the "Three Pashas," Enver, Talat, and Cemal, viewed the Armenian Christian minority as a security threat during World War I, particularly given Russia's proximity and the existence of Armenian volunteer units in the Russian army. The wartime crisis provided cover for a policy that went far beyond military necessity. Beginning in May 1915, Armenian civilians across eastern Anatolia were ordered to assemble, stripped of possessions, and marched into the Syrian desert on death marches designed to kill through exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. The scale was staggering. An estimated 1 to 1.5 million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1923 through mass shootings, forced marches, deliberate starvation, drowning, and burning. Women and children were frequently separated from men, with males executed and females subjected to forced conversion, sexual violence, and enslavement. The killing was not random but administratively organized, with deportation orders issued through official channels, special killing squads formed from released convicts, and property confiscation managed through legal mechanisms. The Republic of Turkey has consistently rejected the genocide designation, arguing that the deaths resulted from wartime chaos, disease, and intercommunal violence rather than a deliberate extermination policy. More than thirty countries, including the United States as of 2019, have formally recognized the Armenian Genocide. April 24 is commemorated worldwide as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, and the events of 1915 directly influenced Raphael Lemkin's coining of the word "genocide" in 1944.