Գերմանական պատկերացումները հայոց մասին եւ հայ-նացիական յարաբերութիւնները
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2020
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The issue of Armenian relations with Nazi Germany has been the subject of few studies and much speculation in Armenian scholarly and non-scholarly circles. From the eighteenth century on, coinciding with European colonial expansion and the struggle for the control of the decaying Ottoman Empire, Armenians were racialized and otherized in Western European sources, including those of German scholars, travelers, and publicists, and frequently associated with another much maligned group, the Jews.
This trend continued unabated during the period of the internationalization of the Armenian Question, and it offered a rationalization for the Hamidian massacres of 1895-1896 and the subsequent genocide of 1915. It is not surprising to find its echo in the sparse references to Armenians by Adolf Hitler from 1922 to 1943. After his coming to power in 1933, an anti-Armenian campaign started in the German press and various Nazi circles with frequent accusations leveled at the supposed non-Aryan character of Armenians and their ethnic and racial association with the Jewish people.
This campaign was also fueled by Turkish intervention, which would also be behind the prohibition raised against the newly published novel by Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, in early 1934.
The Deutsche-Armenische Gesselschaft (German-Armenian Society) reacted first by obtaining official declarations from the Nazi government that Armenians were Aryan (July, August, and September 1933). Then, its vice president, Artashes Abeghian (1878.
1955), an Armenian Studies scholar and professor of Armenian language at Berlin University, spearheaded and edited a volume of articles by German-speaking scholars and journalists, all non-Armenian, with the eloquent title Armeniertum-Ariertum (Armenianness-Aryanness), published in 1934. The volume made a strong case about the "Aryan" identity of the Armenian people, playing within the discourse established by the dominant ideology to distance the minuscule Armenian community of Germany from the heightened discrimination and racism that was already befalling the "non-Aryan" realm in Nazi Germany.
Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime in Italy made a turnaround against the Jewish community in 1938 under German influence and pressure, and some government documents initially listed Armenians as "Asiatic," outside the "Aryan" category. There was another turnaround in 1939, and Armenians were then considered Aryans. In order to make Armenians better known and establish a safety net around the small Italian-Armenian community, the Armenian Union of Italy made an agreement with journalist Lauro Mainardi, a member of the Fascist party, to publish a collection of books about Armenia and the Armenians, which included the Italian translation of Armeniertum-Ariertum, entitled Armeni-Aryani, in 1939.
The German edition of the book had not managed to stop completely the anti-Armenian tropes being repeated in scholarly and journalistic publications, and World War Il saw a renewed return of the anti-Armenian offensive in Nazi Germany. The ideological attacks no longer threatened Armenians only in Germany, but also in all territories occupied and influenced by the Nazi regime in Europe. The Nazi-Soviet conflict and the thorny fate of the thousands of Soviet Armenian war prisoners in Germany became two of the pressing issues around the much-debated cooperation of a small group of Armenian Revolutionary Federation members with the Nazi regime in 1941-1943. According to certain testimonies, Artashes Abeghian, who was involved in this cooperation, appears to have reprinted (although no extant copy has surfaced so far) Armeniertum-Ariertum in 1942 or 1943 to counteract the anti-Armenian smears.
This campaign was also extended to France, where anti-Armenian feelings had surfaced in some right-wing publications since the 1930s and found fertile ground during the German occupation.
In his conclusion, the author discusses briefly the translation into Armenian of Armeniertum-Ariertum, serially published in 1998 and as a book in 2001, in the context of the collapse of racialist ideas and the "Aryan myth" after World War II.
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Մատթէոսեան, Վ., «Գերմանական պատկերացումները հայոց մասին եւ հայ-նացիական յարաբերութիւնները», «Հայկազեան հայագիտական հանդէս», 2020, Պէյրութ, էջ 7-50