In 1915, the decaying Ottoman Empire launched a pogrom against eastern Turkey’s Armenian population, falsely accusing them of supporting a Russian invasion. Tens of thousands of men were shot and hundreds of thousands of women and children driven out of their homes and on forced marches towards Syria and Iraq. The death toll is estimated to have been a million people.
It was also one of the century’s first atrocities to be photographically covered; there are anonymous photographs and there are signed and documented photographs that corroborated witness accounts. A German military officer Armin T. Wegner, stationed with the 6th Ottoman Army, took a series of photographs of dying and dead Armenians. These pictures anticipates photographs that were to follow during the Second World War, and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
In fact, the international nonchalance over the Armenian genocide emboldened Hitler. In his August 1939, he spoke “Who after all is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?” in an haunting harbinger of his own Holocaust. “The world believes only in success,” he added, justifying his potential invasion of Poland and all the deeds that would follow that calamitous event.
Resource: http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/armenian-genocide/
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