Who Organized the Armenian Genocide?

Deportation Column of Armenian Women and
Children en route to Mesopotamia, 1915

Beginning in April 1915, the Ottoman authorities rounded up tens of thousands of Armenian men and had them shot. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian women and children were deported. Many Turkish historians have contended that these actions were a justified, or at least explicable, response to a serious threat to national security. They cite in particular the Armenian "revolt" that began in the heavily Armenian city of Van in mountainous Anatolia on 20 April 1915. In fact, the "revolt" was a desperate response to the persecution already underway—by 19 April, 50,000 Armenians had already been killed in Van province, and tens of thousands were being deported from neighboring Erzerum, another largely Armenian community.

Young Turks Leadership Declares
Revolution, 1908

According to the Armenian National Institute, the decision to carry out the extermination of Armenians within the old Ottoman Empire was initially made by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), popularly known as the Young Turks. The three dominant figures in the movement (known as the Three Pashas) were Mehmet Talaat, Minister of the Interior and eventually Grand Vizier, Ismail Enver, Minister of War, and Ahmed Jemal, Minister of Marine and Military Governor of Syria. 

Talaat Pasha (1874–1921)

Of the three Pashas, the minister most energized and most involved in prosecuting the anti-Armenian policy was Talaat Pasha. He had been the leading advocate for the Turkification of the Ottoman Empire from the birth of the CUP. As Interior Minister he had control of all the provincial officers and agents of the nation. A trained telegrapher, Talaat was able to keep his communications secret by circumventing normal governmental procedures. With the eventual defeat of Turkey in the war, Talaat fled to Berlin. Back home he was tried for war crimes by the new government, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He evaded execution because Germany refused to extradite him. However, he was discovered by an Armenian who had lost his family in the deportations and shot dead in Berlin in 1921.

Behaeddin Shakir (1874–1922)

The actual implementation of the extermination effort was placed in the hands of a secret group known as the Special Organization. They were in control of a vast network of administrators, military units, police, and propagandizers who were charged with planning, managing, and covering-up the massacres, deportations, and planned starvations. The bureaucratic genius in charge of the Special Organization was a physician/politician by the name Behaeddin Shakir. If Talaat could be considered the Heinrich Himmler of the Armenian Genocide, then Shakir might be thought of as the Adolph Eichmann. In one surviving document, Shakir inquired of a subordinate: “Are the Armenians being dispatched from there being liquidated? Are these troublesome people you say you’ve expelled and dispersed being exterminated or just deported? Answer explicitly.” In April 1922, Shakir, along with a former subordinate, Cemal Azmi, were killed on a Berlin Street, by Armenian assassins.

Sources: The Near East Relief Historical Society, Armenian National Institute