Mailbag: Forgetting genocide caused Holocaust

Last week the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 23 to 22 to pass the Armenian Genocide Resolution (“Genocide bill moves through committee,” March 5).

Several of those on the committee who opposed the resolution couldn’t understand why they should bother debating something that happened nearly 100 years ago, as if Armenian history were not important enough to be recorded with dignity. Those same representatives would never have dared suggest that the Holocaust should be erased from history, and I wonder why they don’t fathom the connecting relationship of those two genocides.

Why did the Jewish Holocaust happen? Could it be that Adolf Hitler learned from the first genocide of the 20th century, an event Turkey denies was intended to exterminate its Armenian population?

When Hitler was planning his annihilation of Poland in 1939, he knew Turkey had never been held accountable for what their Ottoman forefathers had perpetrated against its Armenian populace during World War I. Hitler said at the outset of World War II, “The destruction of Poland has priority. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”

World War I started in 1914 and ended in 1918. Hitler was a decorated corporal in the German Army in Flanders, and like many Germans at the time, he couldn’t believe Germany had lost the war.

In addition to focusing on the war itself, the world media was also focused on the death marches of the Ottoman Armenians who were deported from their ancestral homes in Turkey to the barren deserts of Ottoman Syria. They were commonly written about as the Starving Armenians.

When the war ended in 1918, the United States displayed its greatest humanitarian event by leading the world in funding and saving the lives of those Armenians who survived, mostly orphans. My mother was one of those orphans.

Then, in 1921, Turkish Minister of Interior Talaat Pasha, who was the architect of the Armenian deportations, was assassinated in Berlin by an Armenian survivor. The survivor gained worldwide notoriety, and his trial was the subject of worldwide attention, particularly when the survivor was acquitted by the German jury.