As on the gates of “Hell” of Dante, the following should be written at the entrance of these accursed encampments: “You who enter, leave all hopes.”
—August Bernau to Consul Jesse Jackson in Aleppo
The U.S. diplomatic narratives and dispatches coming from all sectors of Turkey affirm the scope of the Armenian Genocide; and they galvanized Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s moral mission to start relief efforts back home. The city of Aleppo, today in northwestern Syria, was a major site on the deportation map. It was not only a killing station but a transfer point, where those who had survived deportation from points north could find refuge—if they were lucky. The reports from Jesse Jackson in Aleppo in 1915–16, like Leslie Davis’s, comprised a primary source of evidence for Ambassador Morgenthau, and eventually for the State Department and the press back home. Being in Aleppo, Jackson was afforded a unique overview of the extermination plan, because week in and week out, he saw the remnants of the endless string of deportation marches that had originated all over the empire.
Jesse Jackson was a small-town boy from Paulding, Ohio, and a veteran of the Spanish-American War before he arrived in Alexandretta, Syria, as U.S. consul in 1905. At the time of the Young Turk revolution in 1908, he was transferred to Aleppo. By 1915 he was a seasoned diplomat who had seen the fall of Abdul Hamid II and the rise of the new Young Turk regime, and he knew the workings of the Ottoman bureaucracy.
In Aleppo, Virginia Meghrouni, who had survived with her mother on a deportation march from Kayseri, described the city in the fall of 1915 as a place teeming with Armenian survivors, most of whom were sick or dying of dysentery and crammed into makeshift hospitals.1 Hundreds of thousands of Armenians passed through Aleppo on their way to the Deir el-Zor desert about a hundred miles southeast, where they died of starvation, torture, and massacre. Today on that ground stands the Martyrs’ Church, a Genocide memorial site, and the nearby area of Margadeh, still strewn with bones, is a frequented spot of pilgrimage.
With the new Ottoman government’s wartime restrictions on diplomatic correspondence, all official dispatches to Constantinople had to be mailed unsealed, and inspected by a censor. Even though Jackson had close personal relations with Enver Pasha and Jemal Pasha, he found it impossible to “induce them to lift the restrictions” on his correspondence with the embassy in Constantinople.2 Determined to circumvent the censorship and get his messages to Ambassador Morgenthau, he used a private courier and also communicated with a foreshortened code.
“It was in February, 1915,” Jackson wrote, “that the Turkish Government decided to disarm the Armenians in Zeitun, a town situated about five days travel North of Aleppo, an action that was rightly judged to be the forerunner of further and more disastrous events in which the Armenian race was to be the main sufferer.”3 In the following weeks and months, the Armenians in the region just north and west of Aleppo—in Aintab, Alexandretta, Marash, Urfa, Biridjik, and many smaller towns and villages—were disarmed. In Marash, for example, Abraham Hartunian noted that as they were being deported they saw the corpses of the massacred Armenians from Zeitun “piled all over the outskirts of their city.” It was clear from the start that the gendarmes were ordered to go into the most remote mountain towns—like Zeitun, Fundejak, and Dereköy. In Fundejak, for example, the Armenian men tried to hold off some three thousand Turkish military and killing squads, and the remaining Armenians—mostly women and children—were “annihilated.”4
In Aleppo Province in the summer, Talaat Pasha installed the leadership he needed to carry out the genocide program. First he removed Jelal Bey and then Bekir Sami Bey as governors of Aleppo because they were too lenient with the Armenians. Finally Talaat brought in one of his protégés, Mustafa Abdullah Bey, who made sure the CUP plan would be put in place in Aleppo Province. By the summer, news of deportations from all over the empire reached Jackson: from Sivas, Erzinjan, Harput, Trebizond, Samsoun, Erzurum, Moush, Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Mardin, Malatia, Kayseri, Talas, Konia, Ankara, Broussa, Adana, Mersin, Hadjin, and hundreds of other towns and villages of Turkey.5
In late July 1915, Jackson reported that as the temperature ran somewhere between 105 and 115 degrees, “a group of more than 1,000 women and children from Harput was being conducted southward near Veren Chiher [Veran Shehir], East of Diyarbekir.” The women and children were then turned over to a band of Kurdish chetes who abducted “the best looking women, girls and children, killing those who put up the most resistance,” and beat and stripped the rest of the women, Jackson went on, “thereby forcing them to continue the rest of the journey in a nude condition.” About three hundred of these women arrived in Aleppo days later “entirely naked, their hair flowing in the air like wild beasts,” having traveled “afoot in the burning sun.” Some of these women came to the consulate, and Jackson recorded that their bodies were “burned to the color of a green olive, the skin peeling off in great blotches, and many of them carrying gashes on the head and wounds on the body as a result of the terrible beatings.”6
These scenes kept passing before Jackson’s eyes, and only weeks later he described what he called “one of the most terrible sights ever seen in Aleppo,” the arrival of “some 5,000 terribly emaciated, dirty, ragged and sick women and children, 3,000 on one day and 2,000 the following day.” They were the only survivors, Jackson reported, of what he termed “the thrifty and well to do Armenian population of the province of Sivas,” where the Armenian population had been “over 300,000 souls.” They told Jackson that they had traveled about a thousand miles on foot since before Easter, and hundreds of the women had been carried off into harems, or raped, robbed, and left naked.7
What Jackson saw was the remnant of women who survived the kind of sexual violence that Aurora Mardiganian described in her survivor narrative, Ravished Armenia. Mardiganian, from a wealthy banking family in Chemeshgezek, a town north of Harput, was one of thousands of young Armenian girls raped and thrown into harems. Her descriptions of sexual violence confirm and go even beyond what Jackson saw and heard. Having been in a house full of Armenian girls who were raped and then killed by Turkish soldiers, she escaped and before long found herself with about four hundred young men and women who agreed to convert to Islam to save their lives. After they had converted, the gendarmes robbed them all, stripped the women and raped them in front of their husbands, who were tied up and forced to watch before they were killed. Then, the surviving women were marched to Malatia, south of Mezre near the Euphrates. Approaching the city of Malatia, they found the wells stuffed with the corpses of dead women, and as they entered the city, they saw sixteen girls crucified on wooden crosses, vultures eating their corpses. “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands,” Mardiganian wrote, “only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.”8
In Aleppo too, the city was becoming overwhelmed by corpses and famine-ravaged refugees. By the fall a typhus epidemic had broken out in the city and the surrounding towns and villages, and the entire place resembled something from the Black Plague. “The number that succumbed in the city was so great,” Jackson wrote, “that the sanitary authorities could not cope with the situation, and the military authorities provided huge oxcarts into which the dead bodies were thrown, 10 or 12 in each cart, and the procession of 7 or 8 carts would proceed to the nearby cemetery with their gruesome loads of ghastly uncovered corpses, usually nude, with the heads, legs and arms dangling from the sides and ends of the open carts.” At the cemetery, the gendarmes dumped the bodies into trenches that had been dug for the purpose. For months the procession of death carts passed in front of the consulate. Several of Jackson’s closest friends and members of his consular staff died in the epidemic, and, as he wrote, his own survival seemed “almost a miracle.”9
Because of his strategic location on the line of the deportation marches, Jackson quickly became a receiving station for reports on the atrocities in the region, and he informed Morgenthau that reigns of terror had begun in Diyarbekir and Urfa, and that the gendarmerie was now “searching the houses of the Armenians for weapons, and not finding any.” In Urfa (the site of massacre and the burning of the cathedral in 1895–96), the gendarmes told the bishop of the city that unless weapons were produced, “the entire Armenian population” of Urfa would suffer the fate of Zeitun, where everybody had been massacred or deported in early April. What Jackson emphasized to Morgenthau was that “the people here [Urfa] have always been loyal to the Government and have never resisted; not even when they were butchered like sheep. Why the local Government persists in persecuting a population that has always had a good record for loyalty is very strange.”10
In the terrible heat of August, writing again to Morgenthau (who was at his summer quarters on the Bosporus), Jackson enclosed a letter he had just received from the Reverend F. H. Leslie.11 In the chaos of the deportations and massacres in the Urfa region, Reverend Leslie had just been made the American consular agent for the entire district of Urfa.
My dear Consul Jackson:
…For six weeks we have witnessed the most terrible cruelties inflicted upon the thousands of Christian exiles who have been daily passing through our city from the northern cities. All tell the same story and bear the same scars: their men were all killed on the first days march from their cities, after which the women and girls were constantly robbed of their money, bedding, clothing, and beaten, criminally abused and abducted…. Their guards forced them to pay even for drinking from the springs along the way and were their worst abusers but also allowed the baser element in every village through which they passed to abduct the girls and women and abuse them. We not only were told these things but the same things occurred right here in our own city before our very eyes and openly on the streets. The poor weak women and children died by thousands along the roads and in the khan where they were confined here. There must be not less than five hundred abducted now in the homes of the Moslems of this city and as many more have been sexually abused and turned out on the streets again.12
Desperate and fearing total annihilation for the Armenians, Reverend Leslie begged Jackson to send him his own vice-consul, Samuel Edelman, to help. “I cannot handle this work nor remain here much longer,”13 Leslie pleaded. Not long after, the American pastor was imprisoned for aiding the Armenians. Already mentally broken from what he had witnessed, he was now tortured in prison, and he committed suicide there. Later Jackson was able to get Leslie’s wife and child out of the country.14
With reports like these coming to him, Jackson informed Morgenthau on August 19 about the fate of the Armenians in Aintab, about fifty miles north. A historic Armenian city on the eastern edge of Cilician Armenia, “the city of Aintab,” Jackson wrote, “is being rapidly depopulated of Armenians, several thousands have already passed through Aleppo on their way to the South.” Jackson also noted that as one of the wealthiest Armenian communities in the empire, the Aintab Armenians offered “a splendid opportunity for pillage.” All their household belongings were plundered, and the stores of the Armenian merchants, who upheld the economy of the city, were stolen. Even that early, it became clear to Jackson that the plan to exterminate the Armenians was, as he put it: “a gigantic plundering scheme as well as a final blow to extinguish the race.”15
Jackson described in detail the arrival of trains deporting Armenians from the north. “Since August 1, the German Baghdad railway has brought nine trains each of fifteen carloads,” he wrote; each car was stuffed with thirty-five to forty people, so that already five thousand had arrived by train, making a total of twenty thousand who had already arrived. “They all relate harrowing tales of hardships, abuse, robbery and atrocities committed en route.” In the twenty-five-mile span between Urfa and Arab Pournar, “the beaten paths are lined with corpses of the victims.”16 In a dispatch of September 29, Jackson would send Morgenthau charts and tables enumerating the railway deportations by city, town, and Armenian religious sect (Armenian Apostolic, Armenian Protestant, Armenian Catholic), and giving the numbers of children and adults. “The deportation of Armenians from their homes by the Turkish government,” he concluded, “has continued with a persistence and perfection of plan.”17
Thirteen-year-old Virginia Meghrouni and her mother found themselves on one of those cattle cars sent east to Ras ul-Ain. Full of survivors suffering from dysentery—“glued together in a car without windows,” as she put it—the car stank of excrement, and when they reached Ras-ul-Ain, the guards shoved them out into the desert, calling them “infidel dogs,” and telling them, “You’re on your way to slaughter valley.”18
From his vantage place in Aleppo, Jackson continued to watch the sweeping uprooting of the Christians from all over the empire. “From Mardin the Government deported great numbers of Syrians, Catholics, Caldeans, and Protestants,” he wrote to the ambassador in Constantinople, “and it is feared all Christians may later be included in the order and possibly even the Jews.” By August 19 Jackson reported that practically all the Armenians from the provinces of “Van, Erzerum, Bitlis, Diarbekir, Mamouret ul-Aziz, Angora and Sivas…have already been practically exterminated.”19 Conservative estimates, Jackson noted, had already placed the death toll by August 15 at well over five hundred thousand,20 but a month later, Jackson informed Morgenthau that the survival rate of the deportation marches was about 15 percent, which put the toll of vanished Armenians at about a million.21
As the summer unfolded, Jackson, much like Leslie Davis in Harput, became more and more involved in rescuing Armenians. The Armenians in Aleppo, and nearby Meskene, Rakka, and Deir el-Zor were dying by the thousands daily, Jackson wrote Morgenthau. In Aleppo the consul was “furnishing funds” through the churches to about nine thousand Armenians. But, he told the ambassador, “I am trying to keep those in the outside towns alive, also, but it is a terrible task, as many persons have been beaten to death, and some hung or shot for having distributed relief funds.” He underscored to the State Department that it was “a veritable reign of terror.” “You cannot make it too black,” he went on. “The sides of the roads are strewn with the bones or decaying bodies.”22
As deportee encampments cropped up along the railroad tracks on the southwest side of the city, Jackson visited each of them once or twice a week to distribute bread or funds. While some were able to get shelter under ragtag tents, most of the Armenians were left out in blistering heat and sun. The deportation trail and the encampments continued south of Aleppo along the muddy, corpse-filled Euphrates as it moved past the towns of Meskene, Hamam, Rakka, Sebha, Abu-Harari, and finally to Deir el-Zor. At Ras ul-Ain, a station on the German Baghdad railway about 200 miles east of Aleppo, and about 180 miles east of the Euphrates River, Jackson reported that “careful estimates” placed the number dead at three hundred thousand.23
When Virginia Meghrouni and her mother were thrown out into the desert at Ras ul-Ain, they were stunned to find miles of large black tents in which thousands of people were dead or barely breathing. They went into a tent and saw people “stretched out on the bare ground, side by side,” she writes, “some were dead and the ones still alive looked like cadavers, barely breathing.” Flies, insects, and birds were eating corpses, and the stench was unbearable. Virginia remembers being frightened at the sight of the women who had escaped harems or slavery and bore the insignias of their captivity—severe tattoo marks on their bodies.
They wore long, blue, sleeveless caftans with several, very long strips of cloth, swinging from the shoulders, to shield their faces against the desert winds. Some covered their heads with turbans; some toted cushions on their heads carrying heavy loads; some had babies suspended in cloth bags on their backs; some displayed rings in their nostrils. And all flaunted garish, dark blue tatoo marks—on their faces, bosoms, hands, arms, ankles, even knee caps.24
Armin T. Wegner, the German nurse and second lieutenant in Field Marshal von der Goltz’s retinue, spent time, against orders, in the Armenian refugee camps at Ras ul-Ain (as well as Rakka, Meskene, Aleppo, and Deir el-Zor). From Ras ul-Ain in November 1915 he wrote:
I have just returned, this very moment, from a round of inspection of the camp: hunger, death, disease, desperation on all sides. You would smell the odour of feces and decay. From a tent came the laments of a dying woman. A mother identifying the dark violet badges on my uniform as those of the Sanitary Corps, came towards me with outstretched hands.
Taking me for a doctor, she clung on to me with all her might, I who had neither medicines, nor bandages, for it was forbidden to help her. But all this is nothing compared to the frightful sight of the swarms of orphans which increase daily. At the sides of the camp, a row of holes in the ground covered with rags, had been prepared for them. Girls and boys of all ages were sitting in these holes, heads together, abandoned and reduced to animals, starved, without food or bread, deprived of the most basic human aid, packed tightly one against the other and trembling from the night cold, holding pieces of still smoldering wood to try to get warm.25
Defying Turkish and German orders, Wegner took hundreds of photographs (which today comprise the core of the witness images of the Genocide), made notes, wrote letters, and even carried letters from deported Armenians to Constantinople, where he gave them to Ambassador Morgenthau to send back to the United States. When a letter to his mother describing the Armenian atrocities was intercepted, he was kicked out of the Armenian camp zone and forced to work in the cholera wards, where he fell seriously ill and was sent back to Constantinople, and then to Germany. Risking his life, he hid in his belt the negatives of the photographs he and other German officers had taken.26
As things grew increasingly desperate in Aleppo and hundreds were dying daily of typhus and other diseases, of bayonet wounds, or starvation, and as dogs fought over the dead bodies of children, Jackson appealed to Morgenthau for funds from the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. Knowing that the ambassador was a bridge to the committee, he begged for $150,000 a month, “which would hardly furnish bread,” he wrote, “to say nothing of clothing, shelter, medical treatment.”27 By October 1915 the relief process was under way back in the United States, and by late fall the money began to come from the committee in New York City, and Jackson started to feed and clothe as many survivors as possible.28
Like Davis in Harput, Jackson found himself in the midst of chaos, and soon the U.S. consulate in Aleppo became, as he called it, “the Mecca for the deported Armenians that were lucky enough” to survive. As the hungry, sick, and dying arrived in Aleppo daily begging for aid, Jackson urgently appealed to Morgenthau to raise more money back home in the United States for Armenian relief.29 Although the Ottoman authorities had “issued strict orders” against giving aid to the Armenians, Jackson asserted, “I never paid the slightest attention to them.” And, as thousands of refugees began arriving at the consulate by the day, Jackson found that distribution of relief became “most burdensome, and it was necessary to set apart the afternoons for this work.”30
Not only did Jackson work in the camps along the Euphrates, but he supported the heroic work of Beatrice Rhöner, a Swiss missionary who had been working in Marash, and of Norah Altounyan, the daughter of a prominent Armenian doctor of Aleppo and an Irish missionary. Each of these women opened up several orphanages. Beatrice Rhöner was later killed for her relief work, but the orphanages continued to operate even after Jackson left Aleppo in 1917, when another brave Swiss resident of Aleppo, Emil Zollinger, took over the operation.31
The consulate was busy night and day helping Armenians escape further redeportation. Daily the Turkish officials came “fanatically,” as Jackson put it, looking for Armenians who were sheltered at the consulate. At night the consular staff sneaked the refugees out to “secret friends among the townspeople” and “even to the friendly Bedouin Arabs adjacent to the city.”32
Between Aleppo and the surrounding towns and villages, there were about two hundred thousand Armenian refugees needing relief as Jackson began to correspond and work closely with the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief at “No. 1, Madison Avenue, New York City,” as he recorded. As in Harput, many Armenians in Aleppo left their money and valuables at the consulate, all of which Jackson was able to protect and return until he was forced to leave in 1917, when he turned the remaining valuables over to the Dutch consul for protection.
Jackson began to receive hundreds of letters and telegrams from Armenian Americans in the United States inquiring about their families who had been deported to Aleppo and vicinity. Vice-Consul George W. Young spent most of his time tracking down refugees and replying to the anxious relatives overseas. These messages and much other valuable information, “including copies of military and political reports, and details of massacres and racial disturbances,” Jackson burned at the instructions of the State Department before leaving Aleppo. He was forced to destroy twelve years’ worth of what he considered valuable historical information. But he felt there was no alternative, especially in light of what had happened to the French consul general at Beirut, who in failing to destroy his records found them seized by the Turks. As a result “more than sixty estimable men of Syria were exposed and hanged, and some 5,000 more were deported and all had their property confiscated by the Turkish Government.”33
As Jackson struggled to rescue Armenians and as he watched their property and wealth being confiscated, Morgenthau was dealing with Talaat Pasha back in Constantinople. He continued to try to reason with the minister of the interior, telling him that after the war he would have to meet with “public opinion everywhere, especially in the United States. Our people,” he said, “will never forget these massacres…. You are defying all ideas of justice.” Not only was Talaat unreachable, but at one point, he changed the subject and made an astonishing request. Knowing that many Armenians with American ties had life insurance policies with the New York Life Insurance Company and the Equitable Life of New York, Talaat said to the ambassador: “I wish that you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders. They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course all escheats to the State. The Government is the beneficiary now. Will you do so?”
Outraged by this, Morgenthau lost his temper, told Talaat he would never get such a list from him, and stormed away.34
As the summer of 1916 arrived, Jackson was still working hard, trying to outsmart the Turks and bring relief to the Armenians of the outlying regions. In August he sent one of his part-time employees, German businessman Auguste Bernau, to the towns of Meskene, Rakka, and Sebka, southeast of Aleppo and close to the death zone of the Deir el-Zor. When Bernau’s report of his mission was forwarded by Jackson to the Chargé d’Affaires Hoffman Philip at the American Embassy in Constantinople, it was sent on to Secretary of State Robert Lansing in Washington, marked “Very confidential.” The Bernau report arrived safely at the State Department in late September 1916, and the markings on it indicate that Secretary of State Lansing and President Wilson both read it.35
Bernau left Aleppo on August 24, 1916, and arrived in Meskene six days later. As an agent for the Vacuum Oil Company, Bernau was hoping that his business trip to the region might disguise his covert mission to help the Armenians. But when Jemal Pasha learned of Bernau’s relief mission he was furious and threatened to have Bernau arrested. Jackson ignored the governor’s threat, and as he wrote to Hoffman Philip back at the embassy, “I can see no other way than to continue, even in the face of disastrous results to myself.”36 So with three million Turkish lira, under Jackson’s auspices, Bernau went to those areas along the Euphrates that were clotted with concentration and refugee camps.37
“It is impossible to give an account of the impression of horror which my journey across the Armenian encampments scattered all along the Euphrates has given me,” Bernau wrote Jackson. “Brutally dragged out of their native land,” naked, starving, robbed of everything, he found them “penned up in the open like cattle.” A few of the survivors had made makeshift tents out of cloth and had bought watermelons or a sick goat for food, but everywhere, he reported, “you see emaciated and wan faces, wandering skeletons, lurking for all kinds of diseases and victims moreover to hunger.”38 And, “The young girls, often even very young ones, have become the booty of the Musulmans.” If they weren’t killed, he noted, they were raped and sold into slavery or harems.39
But even Bernau had not seen what Aurora Mardiganian experienced north of Aleppo in Diyarbekir, where the killing squads played “the game of swords” with Armenian girls. Having planted their swords in the ground, blade up, in a row, at several-yard intervals, the men on horseback each grabbed a girl. At the signal, given by a shout, they rode their horses at a controlled gallop, throwing the girl with the intent of killing her by impaling her on a sword. “If the killer missed,” Mardiganian writes, “and the girl was only injured, she would be scooped up again until she was impaled on the protruding blade. It was a game, a contest,” the traumatized survivor wrote in her memoir, and after the girls were dead, the Turks forced the Jews of the city to gather up the bodies in oxcarts and throw them in the Tigris River.40
“As on the gates of ‘Hell’ of Dante,” Bernau wrote, “the following should be written at the entrance of these accursed encampments: ‘You who enter, leave all hopes.’” Feeling that what he had “seen and heard surpasses all imagination,” he underscored: “I thought I was passing through a part of hell…. everywhere it is the same Governmental barbarism which aims at the systematic annihilation through starvation of the survivors of the Armenian nation in Turkey, everywhere the same bestial inhumanity on the part of these executioners and the same tortures undergone by these victims all along the Euphrates from Meskene to Deri-Zor.”41
In Meskene alone, Bernau reported, there were sixty thousand Armenians buried, and “as far as the eye can reach mounds are seen containing 200 to 300 corpses.” Bernau saw men, women, and especially children eating “herbs, earth and even their excrement,” and every day dozens were dying of typhus and dysentery. As he watched a group of women who were searching for barley seeds in some horse dung, he gave them bread and they “threw themselves on it like dogs dying of hunger, took it voraciously into their mouths with hiccups and epileptical tremblings.” Within minutes another 250 women, children, and old people who hadn’t eaten for a week “precipitated themselves towards me from the hill,” Bernau wrote, “extending their emaciated arms, imploring with tears and cries a piece of bread.”42
Bernau also noted what had become a pattern around the empire. When a government official was discovered to be lenient toward the Armenians, Talaat saw to it that he was immediately replaced. The governor at Deir el-Zor, Ali Souad Bey, had placed under his protection a thousand orphans and “was looking after their subsistence.” He was quickly removed from his post and replaced with the fanatically anti-Armenian Zekki Bey, who ran a new reign of terror with tortures, public hangings, and mass killings.43
Bernau begged Jackson to keep some flow of money coming, even though the Ottoman authorities were trying to halt any and all aid. If funds were not sent, Bernau wrote with urgency, “these unfortunate people are doomed; if, on the contrary the funds are fairly substantial, it is believed that many among them can survive” until the war is ended and their fated decided. “I think, Mr. Consul, I have said enough regarding this forsaken wreck of humanity,” Bernau signed off, “so that immediate measures be taken for the purpose of giving them assistance, and under the impression that my weak voice will be heard and bring results I close my report and beg you to accept the assurance of my most distinguished sentiments.”44