Woodrow Wilson                                                    

United States President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924):

“I am in hearty sympathy with every just effort being made by the people of the United States to alleviate the terrible sufferings of the Greeks of Asia Minor. None have suffered more or more unjustly than they."¹

Henry Morgenthau     

In a telegram to the Secretary of State regarding Ottoman Greek deportations conducted in 1915, Henry Morgenthau (1856-1946), United States ambassador to Turkey, states:

"Evidently Turkish nationalistic policy is aimed at all Christians and not confined to Armenians."²

In an article first published in The Red Cross Magazine (March, 1918), Henry Morgenthau (1856-1946), United States ambassador to Turkey, asked:

"Will the outrageous terrorising, the cruel torturing, the driving of women into the harems, the debauchery of innocent girls, the sale of many of them at eighty cents each, the murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to, and starvation in, the deserts of other hundreds of thousands, the destruction of hundreds of villages and cities, will the wilful execution of this whole devilish scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian Christians of Turkey -- will all this go unpunished?"³

In his memoirs Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1918) Henry Morgenthau wrote:

"Acting under Germany's prompting, Turkey now began to apply this principle of deportation to her Greek subjects in Asia Minor... This procedure against the Greeks not improperly aroused my indignation. I did not have the slightest suspicion at that time that the Germans had instigated these deportations, but I looked upon them merely as an outburst of Turkish ferocity and chauvinism. By this time I knew Talaat well; I saw him nearly every day, and he used to discuss practically every phase of international relations with me. I objected vigorously to his treatment of the Greeks; I told him that it would make the worst possible impression abroad and that it affected American interests... "Turkey for the Turks" was now Talaat's controlling idea."⁴

"Their [the Young Turks] passion for Turkifying the nation seemed to demand logically the extermination of all Christians---Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians."⁵

"The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians. Indeed the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea."⁶

“The Turks adopted almost identically the same procedure against the Greeks as that which they had adopted against the Armenians.”⁷

George Horton 

In a report addressed to the US Secretary of State, George Horton (1859-1942), former United States Consul General at Smyrna, wrote:

“I wish to repeat that the consistent policy of the Turk, since the fall of Abdul Hamid, has been the expulsion, killing and elimination of the Christian races."⁸

Lewis Einstein

Lewis Einstein was the late Special Agent of the American Embassy at Constantinople. In his memoirs he wrote:

"The persecutions of the Greeks are assuming unexpected proportions. Only a fortnight ago they reassured and told that the measures taken against the Greek villages in Marmora were temporary and not comparable with those against the Armenians. Now it looks as if there is equality in suffering and that the intention existed to uproot and destroy both peaceful communities. The poor Greeks are obliged to leave their homes, often without any notice compelled to march night and day without food or water, and when they cry for this, their Turkish guards point to the mosque and tell them the highroad to the comforts of life lies in Islam."⁹

David Lloyd George                                                                  

Speaking on Greek deportations in the House of Commons, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1863-1945) declared:

“... tens of thousands of men, women and children have been deported, and tens of thousands have died. It was pure deliberate extermination.”¹

David Lloyd George later wrote in his memoirs:

"The Greeks of Asia Minor had also suffered heavily from the brutalities of the Turks during the Great War. Hundreds of thousands were massacred in cold blood during the War and many more driven from their homes to find refuge in Greece and the Greek islands."²

Horace Rumbold        

Sir Horace Rumbold (1869-1941), British High Commissioner in Constantinople to Lord George Curzon, British Minister of Foreign Affairs:

"The Turks appear to be working on a deliberate plan to get rid of Minorities. Their method has been to collect at Amassia Ottoman Greeks from the region between Samsoun and Trebizond. These Greeks are marched from Amassia via Toket and Sivas as far as Ceasarea and then back again until they are eventually sent through Kharput to the East. In this manner a large number of deportees die on the road from hardship and exposure. The Turks can say that they did not actually kill these refugees, but a comparison may be instituted with the way in which the Turks formerly got rid of the dogs at Constantinople, by landing them on an island where they died of hunger and thirst.^"3

George Rendel           

In a memorandum on massacres and persecutions of Greeks, George W. Rendel (1889-1979) of the Foreign Office wrote:

“... it is generally agreed that ... over 500,000 Greeks were deported, of whom comparatively few survived."⁴

Winston Churchill          

In his memoirs Winston Churchill (1874-1965) wrote:

“... Mustapha Kemal's Army ... celebrated their triumph by the burning of Smyrna to ashes and by a vast massacre of its Christian population...”⁵

Şevket Paşa                                                                           

General Mahmut Şevket Paşa (1856-1913), the Ottoman Commander-in-Chief, tells Orthodox Patriarch Ioakeim III (1834-1912), Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, in June 1909:

"We will cut off your heads, we will make you all disappear. Either we will survive or you."¹

Talaat Bey      

According to an Austro-Hungarian agent, on 31 January 1917 Talaat Bey (1874-1921), the Minister of the Interior, declared:

"... I see that time has come for Turkey to have it out with the Greeks the way it had it out with the Armenians in 1915."²

In a telegram dated 14 May 1914, addressed to the Vali of Smyrna, Rahmi Bey, and authored by Ali Riza, Chief of Correspondence and co-signed by Talaat Bey and İbrahim Hilmi, the Director of the Ministry of the Interior, the following order is given:

"It is urgent for political reasons that the Greeks living on the coast of Asia Minor are obliged to evacuate their villages and to settle in the vilayets of Erzeroum and Chaldea. If they should refuse to be transported to the places indicated, you will like to give verbal instructions to our Moslem brothers, in order to oblige the Greeks, by excesses of any kind, to emigrate themselves of their own accord.  Do not forget to obtain, in this case, certificates stating these immigrants leave their homes of their own initiative, so that later political questions do not result from it."³

Rafet Bey

On 26 November 1916 Rafet Bey (or Paşa) informs Dr. Ernst von Kwiatkowski, the Austro-Hungarian consul in Samsoun:

"We must at last do with the Greeks as we did with the Armenians..."⁴

Two days later, 28 November 1916, Rafet Bey informed Consul Kwiatkowski:

"We must now finish with the Greeks. I sent today battalions to the outskirts to kill every Greek they pass on the road."⁵

Damad Ferid

Damad Ferid Paşa (1853-1923), the Ottoman Turkish Grand Vizier, described Turkey's policy of extermination against the Christians in June 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference as crimes:

"... such as to make the conscience of mankind shudder with horror for ever."⁶

Mustafa Kemal

As validated by a report of French military colonel Mougin, on 13 August 1923 in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (Turkiye Buyuk Millet Meclisi) in Ankara, Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) declared:

"At last we've uprooted the Greeks ..."⁷

In an interview with Swiss journalist Emile Hilderbrand, published on Sunday 1 August 1926 in the Los Angeles Examiner under the title "Kemal Promises More Hangings of Political Antagonists in Turkey", Mustafa Kemal states:

“These left-overs from the former Young Turkey Party, who should have been made to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse, from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule.”⁸

Kückhoff                   

Kückhoff, the German Vice-Consul at Samsoun, reported to the German Ministry of the Interior in Berlin on 16 July 1916:

“I was informed by reliable sources that the entire Greek population of Sinope and the coastal region of the district of Kastamoni has been exiled. Exile and annihilation have the same meaning in Turkish, for whoever is not killed, dies on the most part from illnesses and hunger.”¹

Richard Kühlmann   

Dr. Richard von Kühlmann (1873-1948), German Ambassador in Turkey from 16 November 1916 to 24 July 1917, informed German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in Berlin in December 1916:

"The consuls in Samsoun and Kerasoun report of the forceful movement of the Greek coastal population... Until now 250 guerrillas have been killed. Prisoners are not kept. Five villages have been reduced to ash."

In a separate report sent some days later on 16 December 1916 Richard von Kühlmann relays the following:

"... Greek refugee families, the majority women and children, are being deported from the coast towards Sevasteia in very large numbers. The need is great."²

Ernst Kwiatkowski                        

Dr. Ernst von Kwiatkowski, the Austro-Hungarian consul in Samsoun, reported to Austria's Foreign Minister István Burián on the 30 November 1916 by telegram of the what the local moutesarif had informed him:

“On 26 November he said: ‘We must at last do with the Greeks as we did with the Armenians and if this does not happen now, certainly at the latest it should happen during the peace negotiations, when Greece would have entered the war, whereupon we will be free to act.'
On 28 November he said: 'We must now finish with the Greeks. I sent today battalions to the outskirts to kill every Greek they meet on the road.'
For this reason I fear for the expulsion or the deportation of the entire Greek population and a repeat of what occurred last year.”³

On 9 January 1917 Ernst von Kwiatkowski telegraphed:

"Up to today in the region of Samsoun Turkish troops plundered and burned 16 Greek villages with 890 houses, 17 churches and 16 schools. Previously the same troops burned and plundered 22 villages with 341 houses and 2 churches. 75 individuals were murdered including 3 priests and 69 women were raped."⁴

Pallavicini   

The Austrian Ambassador of Constantinople, Johann Markgraf von Pallavicini (1848 -1941), described the events in and around Samsun in December 1916:

“11 December 1916. Five Greek villages were pillaged and then burnt. Their inhabitants were deported. 12 December 1916. In the outskirts of the city more villages are burnt. 14 December 1916. Entire villages including schools and the churches are set on fire. 17 December 1916. In the district of Samsoun they burnt eleven villages. The pillaging continues. The village inhabitants are ill-treated. 31 December 1916. Approximately 18 villages were completely burnt down, 15 partially. Around 60 women were raped. Even churches are plundered.”⁵

On 20 January 1917 Ambassador Pallavicini informed his superiors in Vienna:

"The situation of the deported is for despair. Death awaits them all. I tried to draw the attention of the Grand Vizier to the events and stress how sad it would be if the persecutions of the Greek element takes the form and dimensions of the Armenian persecutions."⁶

Wangenheim      

Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (1859-1915), German Minister in Athens, 24 June 1909:

"The Turks have decided on a war of extermination against the Christians of the Empire."⁷

In June of 1915, the German Ambassador in Constantinople, Wangenheim reported to German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg that Talaat Bey, the Minister of the Interior, recently told Dr. Mortdmann of the [German] Embassy that…

“..the Porte is intent on taking advantage of the World War in order to make a clean sweep of internal enemies – the indigenous Christians – without being hindered in doing so by diplomatic intervention from other countries. Such an undertaking will serve the interest of the Germans, the Allies of Turkey, which thus in turn could be strengthened.”⁸

Alfred Brady         

Alfred E. Brady of Texas and member of the American Smyrna Disaster Committee, stated in 1922.

“Although the majority of Greek and Armenian civilian men in Asia Minor have been deported into Angora, into what is tantamount to slavery, and the majority of women and children exiled, the Turks' campaign of massacre and terror continues, as the last surviving Christian communities are wiped out one by one.”¹

Stanley Hopkins   

Stanley E. Hopkins (b. 1895), an American citizen and employee of the Near East Relief, 16 November 1921:

“… the Greeks of Anatolia are suffering the same or worse fate than did the Armenians in the massacres of the Great War. The deportation of the Greeks is not limited to the Black Sea Coast but is being carried out throughout the whole of the country governed by the Nationalists. Greek villages are deported entire, the few Turkish or Armenian inhabitants are forced to leave, and the villages are burned. The purpose is unquestionably to destroy all Greeks in that territory and to leave Turkey for the Turks. These deportations are, of course, accompanied by cruelties of every form just as was true in the case of the Armenian deportations five and six years ago.”²

Frank Jackson    

Frank W. Jackson (1874-1955), chairman of the Relief Committee for Greeks of Asia Minor, on 17 October 1917 stated:

"The story of the Greek deportation is not yet generally known. ... There were some two or three million Greeks in Asia Minor at the outbreak of the war in 1914, subject to Turkish rule. According to the latest reliable and authoritative accounts some seven to eight hundred thousand have been deported, mainly from the coast regions into the interior of Asia Minor.. . . Along with the Armenians most of the Greeks of the Marmora regions and Thrace have been deported on the pretext that they gave information to the enemy. Along the Aegean coast Aivalik stands out as the worst sufferer. According to one report some 70,000 Greeks have been deported towards Konia and beyond."³

Ernst Jacob     

Ernst Otto Jacob, General Secretary to the Smyrna Y.M.C.A, after arriving in Athens in late 1922 declared:

"The Turkish policy of the elimination of the Christian minorities in Asia Minor has been determinedly carried into effect. The Christian quarters of Smyrna have been practically wiped out; the populations are dead from massacre, fled, or banished into exile. When I left, only fifty thousand homeless and foodless refugees remained in the city."⁴

In his diary entry for 24 September 1922, Ernst Jacob noted:

"In Smyrna, hunger and exposure are the least of the evils: persecution, deportation, robber, rape, murder—those are going on now, and the victims are justified in dreading that they will go on until the last of their races are extinguished."⁵

Johannes Lepsius                                                                

Johannes Lepsius (1858-1926), a Germany Protestant missionary and president and founder of Deutsch Orient Mission, stated on 31 July 1915:

“The anti-Greek and the anti-Armenian persecution are two phases of one and the same program, the extermination of the Christian element in Turkey.”⁶

Ethel Thompson     

Miss Ethel Thompson of Boston worked with the Near East Relief in Turkey and when she returned to America she described:

"the ghastly lines of gaunt, starving Greek women and children who staggered across Anatolia through the city of Harput, their glassy eyes fairly protruding from their heads, their bones merely covered with skin, skeleton babies tied to their backs, driven on without food supplies or clothing until they dropped dead—Turkish gendarmes hurrying them with their guns."⁷

Mark Ward

Dr. Mark Hopkins Ward (1884-1952), medical missionary for the Near East Relief at Kharput, 7 June 1922:

“From May, 1921, to March last, when I left, thirty thousand deportees, of whom six thousand were Armenians and the rest Greeks, were collected at Sivas and deported through Kharput to Bitlis and Van. Of these thirty thousand, ten thousand perished last winter and ten thousand escaped or have been protected by the Americans. The fate of the other ten thousand is not known. The deportations are continuing; every week's delay means deaths to hundreds of these poor people. The Turkish policy is extermination of these Christian minorities.”⁸

Edith Wood

Miss Edith Wood of Philadelphia who worked in Kharput and later in Malatia as a nurse with the Near East Relief wrote in her diary in May 1922 that during her two weeks journey to the coast she saw every day:

"groups of deportees, mostly women and children, all starving, and a great number of bodies along the road ... and the entire remaining population was being deported without food and clothing ... Conditions at Malatia, where the deportees died at the rate of forty or fifty a day, were far worse than in Harpoot."⁹

Forrest Yowell

Major Forrest D. Yowell (b. 1882), director of the Kharput Near East Relief unit, May 1922:

“Two thirds of the Greek deportees are women and children. All along the route where these deportees have travelled Turks are permitted to visit refugee groups and select women and girls whom they desire for any purpose. These deportations are still in progress, and if American aid is now withdrawn all will perish. Their whole route is today strewn with bodies of their dead, which are consumed by dogs, wolves, vultures. The Turks make no effort to bury these dead and the deportees are themselves not permitted to do so."¹⁰

"The condition of the Greek minorities is even worse than that of the Armenians."¹¹

"The Turkish authorities frankly state their deliberate intention to exterminate the Greeks, and all their actions support these statements. At the present time fresh deportations and outrages are starting in all parts of Asia Minor, from the northern seaports to the southern districts."¹²

Israel Charny    

Prof. Israel W. Charny of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; Executive Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem; and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Genocide:

"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide."¹

Speaking on the Armenian Genocide in a 2008 interview, Charny affirmed that:

"... the victims of the Turks' genocide were not only Armenians but also Assyrians and Greeks."²

Gregory Stanton                                                                                                          

Prof. Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), stated in response to the IAGS resolution affirming the Greek and Assyrian Genocides:

"This resolution is one more repudiation by the world's leading genocide scholars of the Turkish government's ninety year denial of the Ottoman Empire's genocides against its Christian populations, including Assyrians, Greeks, and Armenians. The history of these genocides is clear, and there is no more excuse for the current Turkish government, which did not itself commit the crimes, to deny the facts. The current German government has forthrightly acknowledged the facts of the Holocaust. The Turkish government should learn from the German government's exemplary acknowledgment of Germany's past, so that Turkey can move forward to reconciliation with its neighbors."³

Rudolph Rummel           

Prof. Rudolph Joseph Rummel (b. 1932), professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, in his publication titled "Statistics of Democide" wrote:

"Democide had preceded the Young Turk's rule and with their collapse at the end of World War I, the successor Nationalist government carried out its own democide against the Greeks and remaining or returning Armenians. From 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes killed from 3,500,000 to over 4,300,000 Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians."⁴

Mark Levene

Historian Dr. Mark Levene, in his journal titled “Creating a modern ‘zone of genocide’: The impact of nation- and state-formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878-1923”, writes:

"By ridding themselves of the Armenians, Greeks, or any other group that stood in their way, Turkish nationalists were attempting to prove how they could clarify, purify, and ultimately unify a polity and society so that it could succeed on its own, albeit Western-orientated terms. This, of course, was the ultimate paradox: the CUP committed genocide in order to transform the residual empire into a streamlined, homogeneous nation-state on the European model. Once the CUP had started the process, the Kemalists, freed from any direct European pressure by the 1918 defeat and capitulation of Germany, went on to complete it, achieving what nobody believed possible: the reassertion of independence and sovereignty via an exterminatory war of national liberation."⁵

Hannibal Travis    

Prof. Hannibal Travis of Florida International University College of Law, in his paper "Native Christians Massacred", writes:

"The Turks extended their policy of exterminating the Christians of the empire to the Armenians, Greeks, Syrians, and Lebanese."⁶

"German military officers, diplomats, and civilians also witnessed the planning and execution of the genocide of Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians as it unfolded. The accounts of German ambassadors and other officials dealing with the Ottoman Empire are replete with such terms as ‘‘extermination,’’ ‘‘massacre,’’ ‘‘destruction,’’ ‘‘slaughter,’’ ‘‘systematic butchery,’’ and ‘‘murder of thousands of human beings.’’ As the Ottomans’ main ally in World War I, the Germans had military officers ‘‘stationed throughout the Empire’’; they trained and led Turkish troops, and their ‘‘military commanders and soldiers undoubtedly knew, saw, and it is alleged [indirectly] participated’’ in the genocide of Ottoman Christians."⁷

"Absent a governmental intention to exterminate the Christians of the empire, it would be nearly impossible to explain how the massacres, rapes, deportations, and dispossessions of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians living in the Ottoman Empire at the time of World War I could have taken place on such a vast scale."⁸

Taner Akçam    

Turkish professor Taner Akçam (b. 1953) in a televised interview aired in 2005 stated:

"The salvation of the Turkish nation was only to get rid of the Christians from Anatolia and they developed plans at the beginning of 1913 and they implemented these plans first in Western Anatolia against the Greeks."⁹

Richard Dawkins    

Prof. Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871-1955), an Oxford University professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek studies, stated in September 1915:

"It seemed that the aim of the Turks was now the total destruction of the Greek population."¹⁰

Silas Bent

Regarding the Treaty of Lausanne, Professor Silas Bent (1882-1945), American journalist, author and lecturer, wrote:

"Before the World War there were three millions of Greeks in Turkish territory; a million of them were killed or dispersed in 1915; a million and a half of them, since 1915, have been killed or dispersed (dispersal being the more merciless method of driving them to arid plateaus where they died lingeringly from starvation), and the events at Smyrna were still fresh before the minds of the delegates. What assurances could there be against further massacres and forcible deportations if these helpless and peaceable folk were left at the mercy of the Turk?"¹¹

Stephen Pound

On 7 June 2006, Stephen Pelham Pound (b. 1948), member of the British Parliament, raised the issue of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocides in the House of Commons:

"I hope that it is not contentious to say that 3.5 million of the historic Christian population of Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks then living in the Ottoman empire had been murdered—starved to death or slaughtered—or exiled by 1923."¹²

"Genocide did happen—3.5 million people were killed or died in the desert. Why did it happen? Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians had lived in the Ottoman empire for many hundreds of years, and some for even longer; and there was not a systematic programme or pogrom until late in the 19th century. Without doubt there were isolated incidents, but something changed, particularly during the caliphate of Sultan Abdul Hamid, and especially with the election of the Committee for Union and Progress."¹³