On Martin Tamkey’s Dissertation: “Armin T. Wegner and the Armenians: one Witness’s Claim and the Reality”
Summary
Albert V. Musheghyan
In 1980-90s the evangelic theologian Martin Tamkey came up with a number of articles, a PhD dissertation and a monograph in Goethingen, Marburg and Hamburg. The mentioned works were addressed against the pure memory of the witness of the Armenian Genocide, Armin Theofil Wegner. In his dissertation “Armin Theofil Wegner: One Witness’s Claim and the Reality”, separately published as a book in Hamburg in 1993 and 1996, written on the basis of the materials collected by him in the literary archive and extraneous documents, professor M. Tamkey has taken the task to prove that ostensibly Armin Wegner who served as a sanitarian in the German military headquarters did not witness the Armenian Genocide in Mesopotamia in 1915-1916. He also defends the mendacious thesis of the Turkish historiography according to which during World War I thousands of Armenians who were displaced from Asia Minor merely because of military necessity died in the Syrian Desert only because of unfavourable conditions. In the article based on the testimonies of contemporaries, Martin Tamkey’s own new publication and Wegner’s diaries the undivine and insolvent viewpoints of the Doctor of Theological Studies are being one after the other denied.