So wrote Bernau, an American representative of the Vacuum Oil Company of New York, whose business trip across Anatolia in 1915 proved unexpectedly horrendous (U.S. Documents, 1993: III, 131).

This genocide was committed well before the rise of Hitler. It was not the product of “terrible Turks” or “alien Asiatics,” as Europeans have often liked to believe. Instead, it was perpetrated by the “Young Turks,” secular, European-style modernizing nationalists. The Ottoman Turkish state was also a player in European power politics, being in World War I allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary. This genocide emanated from Europe, even if almost all the killing occurred just over the Bosphorus in Asia. Nor was genocide the culmination of ancient ethnic hatreds, though these tensions were indeed old.