Labor Battalion (Ottoman Empire)

Greek workers are being deported inland from the western and northern coasts of Anatolia . Approx. 250,000 Greeks lost their lives due to the hardship of living and working there.

The labor battalions ( Amele Taburları in Turkish ) were a form of forced labor in the late years of the Ottoman Empire . This often went hand in hand with the disarmament and murder of the Ottoman-Armenian soldiers during the genocide of the Armenians in the First World War .

Armenians in labor battalions

The Armenians did not serve in the military of the Ottoman Empire until 1908. Shortly after the Young Turkish Revolution , which promised that the unjust treatment of Christians in the empire would end, the Armenians - now officially treated as citizens with equal rights - were drafted into military service, like all other members of society. The Ottoman war minister Enver Pasha claimed that Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army Armenian fedayeen joined, or the on the Armenian volunteer units Imperial Russian Army joined.

The government's first countermeasure was that on February 25, 1915, Enver Pasha issued an order to all military units to disarm the Armenians active in the Ottoman units. Some of these were subsequently killed, and some were grouped together in so-called "labor battalions". Enver also ordered that now all Armenians in the Ottoman units, some of them 60 years old, should be demobilized and attached to these labor battalions . Several of these battalions were executed a little later. In these and the following actions consisting of Kurds, released prisoners and refugees from the Balkan and Caucasus members of the of were mainly Behaeddin Shakir led Special Forces Special Organization involved, probably another volunteer units ( Çete all types) must be attributed to .

Descriptions

The Greek author Elias Venezis later described the situation in his novel number 31328 ( Το Νούμερο 31328 ).

Leyla Neyzi published a study of the diary of Yaşar Paker , a member of the Jewish community in Ankara , who was drafted twice into the labor battalions: once during the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and once during World War II . Neyzi's writings, based on Paker's diary, were published by Jewish Social Studies and provide an overall picture of the conditions in these labor camps, which were made up entirely of non-Muslims.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Foreign Office Memorandum by Mr. GW Rendel on Turkish Massacres and Persecutions of Minorities since the Armistice, March 20, 1922, Paragraph 35
2. ^ USA Congress, Concurrent Resolution, September 9, 1997
3. ↑ Yves Ternon : Report on the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire . In: Tessa Hofmann (ed.): The crime of silence . Göttingen and Vienna 2000, p. 57
4. ↑ Taner Akçam: Armenia and the Genocide. The Istanbul Trials and the Turkish National Movement. 2nd edition, Hamburg 2004, pp. 54ff.
5. ↑ Strong as Steel, Fragile as a Rose: A Turkish Jewish Witness to the Twentieth Century, Leyla Neyzi paper on the basis of Yaşar Paker's diary published in the Jewish Social Studies in Fall 2005