The secret reference book by Liparit Nazaryants and Khachatur Malumyan to the German Embassy in Constantinople
Summary
Ashot N. Hayruni
Doctor of Sciences in History
Lusine S. Sahakyan
Ph.D. in History
After the outbreak of the First World War, when the Ottoman State, allied with Germany, entered the war, the German-Armenian Society was very concerned about it, because the Turks, under cover of the war, could carry out new massacres of Armenians. Both for this reason and in order to ensure a friendly attitude towards the Armenians in the German Foreign Ministry, it was necessary for the organization to constantly possess the latest information about the events taking place in the Ottoman State. Johannes Lepsius, the president of the Society, under the pretext that the organization wishes to send its representative to Turkey in order to convince the Western Armenians that they must take the side of Turkey during the war, managed to get the support of the German government in this matter. Towards the end of 1914, Liparit Nazaryants, a board member of the Society, departed for Constantinople using a passport issued by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with all associated expenses covered by the Ministry.
But Nazaryants’s real mission was something else. He established contact with the Central Committee of the ARF of Sofia, together with the Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople and other figures in the city, he sent information to Lepsius about the new systematic persecutions against Armenians, on the one hand, and, also informed Constantinople’s German Embassy, trying to induce them to intervene and stop the persecutions on the other hand. Nazaryants was also instructed by the German-Armenian Society to go to the Caucasus to inform the Eastern Armenians about the plight of the Western Armenians. The Russian consul in Sofia, considering him a German spy, did not permit him to go to the Caucasus.
On the other hand, the German Embassy in Constantinople, after some time considered Nazaryants a Russian spy, so they took his documents from him, after which, being deprived of freedom of movement, Nazaryants had to stay in Sofia for a long time. Before that, however, he had already communicated a large amount of information to Lepsius and the German-Armenian Society, which was of great importance for the development and success of Society’s further pro-Armenian activities. One of Nazaryants’s valuable reports addressed to the German Embassy in Constantinople is published with this article for the first time. The report is in German and an Armenian translation is provided.
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