A German Officer During the Armenian Genocide

Max von Scheubner-Richter was the German vice-consul in Erzerum in Ottoman Turkey during the genocide of Armenians in 1915. As the representative of a major power allied to the Ottoman Turks, he was an acute observer of developments around him and had direct relations with Ottoman civil and military officials. As historical records show - most notably his own consular dispatches - Scheubner-Richter was not indifferent to the destruction of Ottoman Armenians. He took active steps to save people however he could and aired his views to the German Foreign Office. Scheubner-Richter's intimate knolwedge of the Armenian Genocide and his later role as a co-founder of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany has inevitably added fuel to assertions that the Nazis were well informed by the lessons of the Armenian Genocide, that is, organized mass murder as state policy. The present work was originally written under a German title in 1938 by Paul Leverkuehn, a personal friend and colleague of Scheubner-Richter. Both men served in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and Leverkuehn's work was based on personal recollections, as well as German consular documents filed by Scheubner-Richter on Armenians, as well as their special mission into Persia as part of the Turko-German was effort. This translation includes an extensive introduction by Dr. Hilmar Kaiser.