Monument to Armenian (Nazi) Hitler

Monument to Armenian Hitler

 Jun 11 - 3:30 pm "Russian planet"

At the end of May, Yerevan hosted the installation of a monument to Garegin Nzhdeh, who was a collaborator and actively cooperated with the military leaders of Nazi Germany during the Great Patriotic War. At the time, the Moscow authorities, the expert community and the media did not react to such a shocking event. Vestnik Kavkaza became the first Russian news agency that drew attention to the open glorification of a Nazi criminal, while certain media buried their heads in the sand, preferring to ignore such an outrageous fact.

Vestnik Kavkaza made an appeal to the whole of Russian society to sound the alarm and not turn away from such a serious problem as the glorification of any manifestations of fascism and extremism, even and especially when it happens in a country that is a strategic partner of Russia. And we are happy that our voice was finally heard. Vestnik Kavkaza presents the article of the 'Russian Planet' project, which relates that the Russian State Duma also paid attention to this problem.

State Duma MP Maxim Shingarkin (LDPR) has prepared an inquiry addressed to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, with a request to use diplomatic measures against the leadership of the Republic of Armenia and remind them about the inadmissibility of glorification of Nazi collaborators. The reason for this was the installation of a monument to the collaborationist, Hitler's accomplice Garegin Nzhdeh, in Yerevan. Previously, a square and a subway station have also been named after him.

"Processes such as the installation of a monument to collaborators, Hitler's accomplices, resemble the Ukrainian events. There, as you may recall, everything began with the glorification of the executioners of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. It is especially strange to observe these processes in friendly, brotherly Armenia, where internationalism is strong; in the country that gave us the brilliant Marshal Baghramyan, whose military talent made a great contribution to the victory. Unfortunately, Nazism is raising its head in many former Soviet republics, and the consequences of flirting with radical nationalism could be severe," Maxim Shingarkin explained.

 

The MP also noted that Armenia is seeking international recognition of the Armenian genocide, the victims of which were up to 1.5 million people, and the Nazis and their accomplices were also condemned at the Nuremberg trial for genocide. According to Shingarkin, it is necessary to be careful in choosing national heroes, especially those who have tarnished themselves by collaborating with the military and political leadership of the Third Reich.

On May 28th, the Day of the First Republic, the center of Yerevan hosted an official ceremony of the installation of the monument to Garegin Nzhdeh, one of the founders of the Tseghakron-nationalist ideology. The aim of Tseghakron is to unite the Armenian people across the entire territory of their historical homeland into a united Armenian state. In Armenia, Nzhdeh is called a hero of the national liberation movement of the early 20th century. Everything would be fine, but Nzhdeh actively cooperated with the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War.

It is well known that during World War II Nzhdeh was in the Caucasian bloc of emigré organizations of the Caucasian peoples on the platform of support for Germany and its armed forces as liberators of the Caucasus from "Soviet occupation". In 1942 he formed units from captured Armenian Red Army soldiers in the Wehrmacht. On December 15th, 1942, Garegin Nzhdeh became one of the seven members of the Armenian National Council, established by the Germans. According to historians, Armenian militarized formations led by Nzhdeh, created in Germany, took an active part in operations to capture Crimea and attacks on the Caucasus.

Drastamat Kanayan, known under the name of General Dro, assisted him in the creation of the infamous 'Armenian Legion'. As Austrian historian Erich Feigl pointed out in his works, Dro paid a visit to Himmler in December 1942. "Dro had practice and experience of killing without feeling any remorse, Himmler was very impressed," Feigl writes. "Neither Dro nor Himmler cared about the fact that they sent people to death. About 30 thousand Armenians responded to the call of Dro and joined the Nazis." Nevertheless, today in Armenia, which is considered to be a close ally of Russia, a massive cult of General Dro and Nzhdeh has been created.

At the end of the war, Garegin Nzhdeh was arrested and sent to Moscow, to the inner prison of the Ministry of State Security at the Lubyanka. He was transferred from the Lubyanka to Yerevan prison in 1946. Nzhdeh was accused of counter-revolutionary activity, primarily of participation in the "anti-Soviet" uprising in Zangezur, as well as the mass killings of communists during this uprising. On April 24th 1948 the Special Council of the Ministry of State Security sentenced him to 25 years in prison.

"It's hard to imagine, but Russia did not react to the installation of a monument to Nazi henchmen. And considering Armenia's total dependence on Russia, one phone call of Lavrov to the president of Armenia would be enough. I remember how my Armenian friends told me about the constant work carried out by the US Embassy in Yerevan, literally attracting young people using cola and cookies. Russia couldn't even allocate three hundred (!) dollars a month in order to support the only Russian bookshop in Yerevan. The store was forced to shut down ... What can I say about our "wise men from the Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry?" the president of the 'Patriot' Fund Vladimir Fedorov noted.

According to the head of the scientific sector of the Russian Military-Historical Society, Yuri Nikiforov, to install a monument to Garegin Nzhdeh today means to rehabilitate him in the eyes of public opinion. At first glance it seems that the collaborators were guided by certain ideas about the welfare of their homeland, Armenia, but actually it is something that is called by believers a deal with the devil. And it is useless to play with him – he will still trick you.

"It is obvious that you can go too far, while rehabilitating collaborators in the eyes of certain nations. To look at it this way, why there is only a monument to Garegin Nzhdeh, let's install monuments to all of them, the entire lineup, from ordinary participants of the collaborationist movement and to its leaders. It can go on forever ... Then we will begin to install monuments to fascist dictators. And who are they, they are simply the same collaborationists, who couldn't find anything better than to work under Hitler and start to fight together with him. I'm sure that, for the most part, the Armenian nation will never betray the memory of the common victory over fascism, of our friendship, of our common contribution to the creation of a huge and great state," Nikiforov concluded.

Were the Armenians "uber-Jews" by Pat Walsh

Pat Walsh

Were the Armenians ‘über-Jews’?

Posted on 2016-02-26 by drpatwalsh

In his Irish Times (20/2/16) book review of ‘Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler’ by Stefan Ihrig,  Lawrence Douglas states:
“Ihrig brilliantly lays bare the ‘confluence’ between German anti-Semitic and anti-Armenian stereotypes. Jews and Armenians were treated as ‘Semitic cousins’, with the latter playing the role of ‘quasi-‘ or even ‘über-Jews’.”
The Nazi extermination of the Jews is the ultimate analogy drawn to demonise Ottoman Turkey in relation to the Armenians. The comparison is historically absurd and no historian worthy of the name would make such an analogy. But academia these days is heavily populated by those who substitute feeling and effect for truth and fact. So we are forced to ask the question: were the Armenians really what Stefan Ihrig calls ‘über-Jews’ in Nazi Germany?

Luckily we have a book by an Armenian about a very famous Armenian freedom fighter which helps us answer the question. The book in question is “‘Dro’ Drastamat Kanayan: Armenia’s First Defence Minister of the Modern Era” by Antranig Chalabian. Not only does it reveal that Ihrig’s “brilliant” work is utter nonsense but it also highlights the one actual and irrefutable link between the Armenians and Nazi Germany – and it is not Turkish. The book is published by the Indo-European Publishing House of Los Angeles (the significance of whose name will become apparent).

I first came across ‘Dro’ when writing a book ‘The Armenian Insurrection and the Great War’ which includes reprints of the celebrated Insurrectionary, Garegin Pasdermadjian’s writings in which ‘Dro’ features both in text as well as pictured, at the start of the Insurrection of 1914. Along with the famous General Andranik, ‘Armen Garo’ (Dr. Pasdermadjian) and ‘Dro’ were the most famous Armenian guerrilla leaders. I introduced ‘Dro’ with the initial  information I had learnt about him:

“Another character prominently featured in Pasdermadjian’s 1918 book, was General ‘Dro’ or Drastamat Kanajian. ‘Dro’ (who is pictured with Pasdermadjian on the book cover) went on to head the Armenian Nazi Legion of 22,000 in World War 2, with a large complement of SS in tow. ‘Dro’ apparently put his special skills of massacre learnt in the Armenian Insurrection at the Fuhrer’s disposal, whom he met on a number of occasions. It is said Hitler consulted him on a number of occasions and his nickname was ‘the Jew hunter’. When World War II ended the surviving Nazi Armenian soldiers along with their commander were admitted to the U.S, despite being wanted by the Russians for mass murder. ‘Dro’ lived out the rest of his life there, before dying in Massachusetts in 1956. His body was returned to the Soviet Republic of Armenia and he was given a State funeral.”
The bulk of this character sketch is confirmed in the Armenian biography of ‘Dro’. And there is much more.
Antranig Chalabian writes of ‘Dro’ in his biography of the Armenian Insurectionary:

“World War II changed the course of Dro’s life regardless of his will or intention, linking him to the Russian-German struggle as ‘a collaborator with Nazism’… It is not possible to accuse Dro of sympathising with the Nazi ideology… He was guided solely by the supreme interests of the Armenia and the Armenian nation.” (‘Dro’ Drastamat Kanayan: Armenia’s First Defence Minister of the Modern Era.p. 219)
‘Dro’ went round the German Prisoner of War camps and recruited the captured Armenians who had been drafted into the Red Army  into the Nazi Armenian Legion.  The Armenian 812th Battalion was created in December 1941 growing from 8,000 to 20,000 men. Christopher Walker argues that Dro’s intention was that the Nazi forces should fight for Hitler, culminating in an entrance into Yerevan to finally deal with the Turks.
Chalabian notes that the Armenian National Council published Nazi propaganda from a weekly newspaper, ‘Armenien’ and a radio station in Berlin from 1942. ‘Dro’s’ biographer asks:
“… Why did he collaborate with the Nazis? Simply because he and his comrades perceived the Armenian prisoners of war, the Armenians in the occupied territories, as well as the survival of the Armenians in their homeland to be in grave jeopardy.” (p.221). “Dro and his comrades saved the lives of around 40,000 Armenian prisoners of war by enlisting them in the German army.”(p.227)
Dro’s collaboration is a difficult issue for Armenians and it is a tricky job to write a sympathetic biography of the national hero without attempting to excuse his actions. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks) considered establishing a distance from Dro from his Nazi collaboration but decided against it. Chalabian indeed notes that the Nazi collaborators from Armenia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia would have been many more “… if Hitler had behaved a little differently… they could have shaken the anti-populist regime of the Kremlin’s dictator and his sycophants from its foundations… They hoped to advance side by side with the Wehrmacht… Toward Moscow, and to topple Stalin’s hated regime.” (p.222)
The Armenian recruits did not just come from captured Red Army soldiers of the Yerevan Republic but also from the large Armenian communities in the Balkans and Ukraine.
Dro and his Dashnak comrades went to Berlin for discussions with the Nazi high command as the invasion of Russia got underway. Chalabian notes:
“They were impressed with everything in the city; law and order was notable everywhere. Berlin was peaceful and life was as if normal.” (P. 243)
From there Dro was taken to Warsaw and then the Crimea. Dro visited the POW camps recruiting Armenians for the German army there. Whilst in the Crimea he witnessed the disposal of the bodies of hundreds of Jews in trenches the SS had had dug by locals. Although “people were not allowed to go anywhere near these trenches” Dro’s group was treaty specially by the Nazis and permitted access, according to Chalabian. (p.245)
However, Hitler never reached Yerevan to deal with the Turks and Dro fled west as the Red Army closed in on Berlin. He was captured in Heidelberg by the Americans. At first the Americans decided to send him back to the Soviets as a collaborator but then “they sent him to Mannheim, to a retention centre for high-ranking German commanders who were not considered Nazis. The retention centre was a former palace/estate, and the accomodation was very comfortable.” (P. 254) US Intelligence had use for him it seems.
It is most probably true that Dro was never an ideological Nazi. However, Armenians did work with the Nazis and attempt to secure a place for the Armenians in the new Hitlerite racial order. According to Simon Vratsian (Along Life’s Pathways), an influential wing of the Nazi Party wanted to classify Armenians as not “Indo-European”, but “listed among the Asiatic peoples, which meant a race unworthy of living. Dro and his comrades were able to recognise the danger… They put forth proofs that Armenians are of Indo-European origin and belong to the Arian race.” (p.224)
Apparently Armenian/Nazi connections had begun a generation before the Final Solution. The German-Armenian Union, formed in 1914, and predating the Nazis, included Artashes Abeghian, Professor of Eastern Studies at the University of Berlin who “conducted propaganda about the Aryan origin of the Armenians.” It was these people, including German academics, who later contacted Dro and decided to collaborate with the Reich from 1940, according to Chalabian (p.232). The German-Armenian Union “was formed by Johannes Lepsius” who is often cited as a “good German” speaking out against Ottoman treatment of the Armenians.
Chalabian also reveals that Dr Paul Rohrbach and Artashes Abeghian published a book in 1934 called ‘Armenian-Aryan’ in collaboration with Nazi intellectuals which “strove to prove that Armenians belong to the Aryan race and the Armenian language to the Indo-European family of languages.” (p.234) The year before, in 1933, “Goebbels had formally declared that the Armenians were Aryan.” (p.248)
These pieces of information revealed by Chalabian were probably only the tip of the iceberg. The author would have no interest in publicising any more details that he had found out about Armenian/Nazi links in his Armenian sources and it is surprising he revealed even these.
To return to the point of this article: How can it be asserted by Stefan Inrig and Lawrence Douglas that the Armenians represented “the role of ‘quasi-‘ or even ‘über-Jews’” in Nazi Germany when Dro and his Legion were welcomed into the ranks of the Third Reich and aspired to be and were accepted as a good racial type by prominent Nazi intellectuals. Could we imagine a Nazi Jewish Legion being accepted by Hitler or the Jews pressing for high racial status and being spoken for by Goebbels?
So what is all this nonsense about the Armenians being ‘über-Jews’? What idiots could write such rubbish if they had bothered to read anything beyond their ideological horizons.
Let us be fairer to the Armenians than Inrig and Douglas are to the Turks. Let us accept that the Armenians who collaborated with Hitler did so from the motivation of self-preservation rather than any ideological affinity with the Nazi philosophy. Let us leave aside the fact that this would have strengthened the Nazi war machine and have fatal consequences for the many minorities that the Nazis chose to exterminate and make them accessories to Genocide through such collaboration. Let us accept Chalabian’s argument that Dro and the Armenian Legion did such things because of their love for one section of humanity over all others and their desire to preserve their people/race, even if it meant legitimising the Nazi racial policy by acquiescence to it and engagement with it.
Let us, however, also take on board the understandings of another Armenian writer, Dr. Manuel Sarkisyanz, given as lectures in Heidelburg University to its South Asia Institute. In these lectures Dr. Sarkisyanz explains that Nazism did not come out of a vacuum. It indeed had substantial ideological forebears in its ant-semitism, expansionism and its Genocide and the practices to demonstrate such statecraft. And no where in the Armenian’s lectures do we read mention of the Ottomans as his inspiration for the Nazi regime. Manuel Sarkisyanz’s lectures have been published in book form by Athol Books. It is called ‘Hitler’s English Inspirers’.