One might rightly ask, then (see yesterday's post) how it was that Marash Girl's family was still in Marash in 1919 and 1920, after all the Armenians had been driven out of the city to their death? Another story of the kindness of their Muslim neighbors.
As Grandpa Peter told it, the muhajjirs that lived next door would warn his mother Yepros when the Turkish gendarmes were planning to scour the neighborhood clean -- clean of Armenians, that is -- warn Yepros to leave her home and move to an Armenian neighborhood that had already been "cleaned out". The family would stay there until the neighbors -- the muhajjirs -- alerted them that the coast was clear, that they could return to their home, that the gendarmes had left Kumbet (their neighborhood in Marash).
There is a simple explanation for that. The Ottomans had never declared Jihad against the Armenians. The genocide had all the earmarkings of a planned, well organized assault, of 'German Order', if you will. This was in contrast to the 1895 massacre whose rampage began from village to village by the trumpeting of the local imams. This lent religious validity to the slaughter, unlike the one begun in 1915. 'The night of the long knives' led by Hitler in 1936 (?), had its origins in the German planning of 'the year of the scimitar' with the ottomans. This ethnic cleansing abetted long terman German foreign policy whose dream of a Berlin to Baghdad railway line would course through the territory of those pesky Armenians. German connivance in the genocide could only strenghtenin their position with The Young Turks to realize Bismarck's long held foreign policy objective.
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