The worst war crime ever committed in history

The Armenian / Greek / Assyrian Genocide

This photo is from the 1919 film Ravished Armenia, but it shows the destiny of Armenian girls crucified after being raped. Armenia was the first land to officially declare Christianity as official religion back in the 4th century A.D.

The Young Turks government set up some “Special Organizations” made of criminals of all kinds, and ordered them to go Armenia and raze everything to the ground. They killed the men, raped the women and girls, raided the houses, and many of the women were taken for prostitution. Their killing methods were quite gruesome. These methods included "drowning people in rivers, throwing them off cliffs, crucified them and burned them alive". They then burned each village to the ground, leaving a smoldering pile of ash, and no clue that there might have once been a village at that place.

Of course, more traditional methods were also employed, like beating, torturing, arresting and murdering Armenians with high rankings in the Turkish government. And death marches into the Syrian Desert, depriving the ordinary people of food and water, subjecting them to all kinds of harassment.

Because they were Christians, Armenians had to pay special taxes (some kind of Jizya) to live in Turkish lands. Still, the Armenian society thrived under Ottoman rule.

The massacres started at the end of the Ottomon Empire, with the Hamidian Massacres in 1895, as a desparate way to keep the empire from collapsing. But the new Turkish government wanted to “purify” Turkey and further escalated the violence. No Armenian old man or woman, or child, or baby was safe from the brutality of these crimes.

Ottoman Gendarmes posing in front of executed Armenians, in Alep, Syria, in 1915

A picture released by the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute purportedly shows Armenians hung by Ottoman forces in Istanbul in June 1915.

From the approximately 3 million Armenians living in the old Ottoman Empire, it is estimated that half (1.5 million) were killed during the genocide.

The Assyrians of the upper Mesopotamia were also slaughtered. Between 150,000 and 300,000 were murdered by the new Young Turks goverment.

A report published in the Washington Times on March 26, 1915.

And the Greek were victims as well. At the outbreak of WW1, the Ottomans thought that Greek speaking populations would support their enemies. In the coastal regions of Anatolia including the Black Sea Coast, it is estimated that 550,000 Greek civilians were killed 

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Phocaea in flames, during the massacre perpetrated by Turkish irregulars in June 1914.

"Turks Slaughter Christian Greeks", Lincoln Daily Star, 19 October 1917 : File:Nygreeks.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

And it is still painful, because unlike the Holocaust, there was no prosecution or punishment to the perpetrators.

And not every country recognizes the Armenian Genocide. Only the ones below in green (from Wikipedia):

Armenian Genocide recognition - Wikipedia

I wish I had a time machine, so I could jump back to 1890 and I could warn all Armenians and other targets about the atrocities that were about to take place at the end of the Ottoman Empire.

Edit: Changed to include the Hamidian Massacres and moved the start of the genocide to 1895 by the Ottoman Empire. Included the Assyrian and Greek genocides. Changed photo description and added other pictures.