dw.com (04.05.2018)
The German Reich provided the Ottoman Empire with the weapons to carry out the Armenian genocide, a new report claims. Prussian officers also laid the “ideological foundations” for the massacre, according to the author.
Turkish forces mainly used German rifles and other weapons to carry out the 1915-16 genocide of the Armenian people, a new report has found.
Mauser, Germany’s main manufacturer of small arms in both world wars, supplied the Ottoman Empire with millions of rifles and handguns, which were used in the genocide with the active support of German officers. Historians have estimated that between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the two-year genocide.
“German officers who served in Turkish-Ottoman military staff actively helped carry out individual murders,” according to the report by Global Net — Stop the Arms Trade (GN-STAT). “The majority of the aggressors were armed with Mauser rifles or carbines, the officers with Mauser pistols.” Many German officers witnessed and wrote about the massacres in letters to their families.
