Lord Bryce On The Armenian Atrocities -out19161018
THE OUTLOOK
(An illustrated weekly journal of current events)
LORD BRYCE ON THE ARMENIAN ATROCITIES
OCTOBER 18, 1916
The testimony of German as well as of American missionaries confirm the reports of the all but incredible cruelty of the Turkish Government to the Armenians. One letter from Aleppo signed by four German missionaries was published last year in the Swiss papers, and in part at least in German papers, but finally was suppressed by the German censors. It is a detailed story of unspeakable horror addressed to the German Foreign Office, and urging that "our school work will be deprived for the future of its moral basis, and will lose all authority in the eyes of the natives, if it is really beyond the power of the German Government to mitigate the brutality of the treatment which the exiled women and children of the massacred Armenians are receiving."
This letter and other evidence from German sources, together with letters from Danish Red Cross nurses, from other foreigners in the East, and from Armenians, are included in the complete report and summary of evidence prepared for publication by Viscount Bryce, formerly Ambassador to the United States, whose report on the Belgian atrocities convinced many before skeptical on the subject. The New York "Times," which prints this report in advance of its book publication, declares that it forms "a record of horror, callous cruelty, and fiendish massacre far more revolting that Lord Bryce's report on German atrocities in Belgium, which shocked the world a short time ago." In a cable dispatch to Dr. James L. Barton Lord Bryce himself says: "Several hundred thousand exiles who survived the horrors of deportation are now perishing of exposure and starvation in the Arabian desert. Latest reports of neutral eye-witnesses describe terrible conditions. Sick people are throwing themselves into graves, begging grave-diggers to bury them; women are going mad and eating grass and carrion; parents are putting children out of their misery, . . . and awaiting death."
The evidence amply bears out these statements. Extermination by wholesale, starvation, deportation, torture, ravishment, murder direct and murder indirect, make the other Armenian atrocities of history, foul and terrible as they were, sink into insignificance. And the Government of Germany dare not even protest when its own missionaries appeal to it out of the East lest it hurt the sensibilities of its ally and close friends! Heartless and callous are mild words to apply to the German official attitude. That the atrocities are continuing is due to just this German indifference, which thus becomes blood-guiltiness.
Contributions to the relief of the survivors of this attempt to destroy a race, root and branch, should be sent to the office of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, at 70 Fifth Avenue, New York. President Wilson has appointed October 21 and 22 as special days of giving. Let Americans rescue those whom Turks have persecuted and Germans have passed by with indifference.
A hard copy of this article or hundreds of others from the time of the Armenian Genocide can be found in The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts From The American Press: 1915-1922