Nâzım Bey

Mehmed Nâzım Bey , also known as Doctor Nazim (* 1870 in Thessaloniki , † August 26, 1926 in Ankara ), was an Ottoman doctor and politician . He was one of the leaders of the Committee on Unity and Progress . For a short time Nâzım was Minister of Education of the Young Turks and between 1916 and 1918 the eighth chairman of the Fenerbahçe Sports Club. He played a major role in the genocide of the Armenians and the persecution of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire from 1914 to 1923 .

Early years and Balkan Wars

Nâzım came from a wealthy family of Jewish Dönme origin. He finished secondary school in Thessaloniki in 1887. He then attended the military medical high school and then studied medicine in Istanbul. While still a student, Nâzım joined the predecessor organization of the Committee for Unity and Progress, the İttihâd-ı Osmanî Cemiyeti . On behalf of Cemiyet he was sent to Paris in 1893 and completed his medical studies there in 1895 and worked there in the hospital after completing his studies. Nâzım met Ahmed Rızâ while he was still a student and published the newspaper Meşveret with him . Because of his political activities, Mehmed Nâzım was declared a traitor and sentenced to death. In 1907 Nâzım secretly traveled to Thessaloniki in the Ottoman Empire and then to Izmir to organize the uprising against Sultan Abdülhamid II .

From 1908 he was a member of the Central Committee of the Unionists. Mehmed Nâzım belonged to the pan-Islamic and Turkish wing of the organization. He met Beria Hanım in Izmir and married her in 1909. During the Balkan Wars , Nâzım became director of the Hilaliahmer Hospital in Thessaloniki. When the Greeks captured Thessaloniki in October 1912, he was captured as a Turkish nationalist and imprisoned in Athens for eleven months without trial . The guards tortured him and told him that his family had been wiped out and " Constantinople " had been captured. It is only a matter of time before the whole of Anatolia falls. At the instigation of the "Committee for Unity and Progress" he was released and shipped to Izmir. Separated from his hometown, family and young daughter, he went from being a patriotic doctor to a vengeful and fanatical nationalist. From now on he wrote in newspapers about Bulgarian atrocities against Muslims and called for revenge against the remaining Ottoman Christians.

Role in the genocide of the Armenians

After the severe attacks on the Armenians in Adana in 1909 , Nâzım is said to have stated that the Ottoman Empire had to be exclusively Turkish. The foreign minorities are a reason for European interventions. Therefore one has to enforce the Turkization by force of arms.

He was a member of the "special organization" Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa . According to a presentation by the Kurdish politician Mevlânzade Rıfat from 1929, Nâzım is said to have spoken out in favor of the complete extermination of the Armenian people at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Young Turks in February 1915 . This statement is variously valued as evidence of the genocidal intentions of the Young Turks. Since Rıfat, contrary to what he claims, was not a member of the Central Committee of the Young Turks, but on the contrary banned from Constantinople because of an attempted coup in 1909, his report is now considered unreliable.

After the war

After the war he fled to Sevastopol on a German warship . From there he went to Berlin. Because of his role in genocide, Nâzım was sentenced to death in absentia by the Turkish military courts in 1919. Nâzım traveled to Moscow and Bukhara and again to Berlin. After Bahattin Şakir was murdered, he feared for his life and demanded personal protection from the German authorities. After conquering Izmir, he returned to Turkey in 1922.

Because of his alleged involvement in an assassination attempt against the Turkish state founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Izmir , he was sentenced to death by the independence court in Ankara and executed in 1926 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Former Presidents
2. ^ Fuat Dündar: Crime of Numbers . Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ 2010, ISBN 978-1-4128-4341-6 , pp. 62 (English): “Dr. Nazım Selanikli (1870–1926), one of the oldest members of the Committee (İstanbul 1899), was one of the responsible for the expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks from Western Anatolia. ”
3. ^ Samuel Totten with Bartrop, Paul R .: Dictionary of genocide . 1. publ. Edition. Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. [u. a.] 2008, ISBN 978-0-313-34644-6 , pp. 303–304 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
4. ↑ Donald E. Miller, Lorna Touryan Miller: Survivors an oral history of the Armenian genocide . University of California Press, Berkeley 1993, ISBN 0-520-92327-8 , pp. 44 (English, limited preview in the Google book search): “In addition to Drs. Nazim and Shakir, other physicians were involved in the genocide.”
5. ^ Marc David Baer: The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks . 1st edition. Stanford University Press, Stanford 2010, ISBN 978-0-8047-6867-2 , pp. 91 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
6. ↑ Taner Akçam : A Shameful Act. The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York 2007, p. 42.
7. ^ Uğur Ümit Üngör : The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 . 1st pbk.ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-965522-9 , pp. 45–49 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed February 16, 2013]).
8. ↑ Taner Akçam: A Shameful Act. The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York 2007, p. 64.
9. ^ Robert Melson: Revolution and genocide: on the origins of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust . With a foreword by Leo Kuper. 1st published edition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1996, ISBN 0-226-51990-2 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed February 16, 2013]).
10. ↑ Guenter Lewy: The Armenian Case. The politicization of history. What happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Edition divan. Klagenfurt / Celovec 2009, p. 70 f.
11. ↑ Translated into English by Haigazn Kazarian: Verdict ("Kararname") of the Turkish Military Tribunal. Published in the Official Gazette of Turkey (Takvimi Vekayi), no. 3604 (supplement), July 22, 1919, accessed on January 12, 2013 (Ottoman): "In accordance therefore with the above mentioned paragraphs in the law code, Talaat, Enver, Djemal and Dr. Nazim are sentenced to death " 
12. ↑ Dr. Nazım's political life ( Memento of the original from March 23, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. turkish .