The number of deaths of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire occurred between 1914 and 1923, the period of the Armenian genocide. Most estimates of Armenian deaths between 1915 and 1918 range from 1.3 million to 1.5 million, which corresponds to roughly one-third to over half of the Armenian population at the time. Alt URL
Prewar estimates
There is no agreement among historians how many Armenians lived in the empire prior to the genocide. The official census reported 1.1 million Armenians living in the empire in 1912. This is considered an underestimate, and the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople reported 2.1 million Armenians.
The majority of historians estimate that between 1.5 and 2.1 million Armenians lived inside the Ottoman Empire in 1914. Of these, the Ottoman Empire expelled approximately 1.5 million Armenians from its territories.
Armenian casualties from 1915 to 1917–18
Ottoman and Turkish estimates
The statistics provided by Djemal
The official Ottoman statistics compiled for the period between 1915 and 1917–18 were of 800,000 killed. This figure originates from Djemal's bureau. The results were published in the official Ottoman gazette.Ottoman Gazette Takvimi Vekâyi No. 3909, July 21, 1920, pp. 3, 4. Cited published in Alemdar, March 15, 1919
It was allegedly the result of a commission formed by the interior minister Mustafa Arif. It is said that they relied on reports and statistics they had compiled in a period of two months; on March 14, 1919, the results were made public by Djemal. This same figure was mentioned in Rauf Orbay's own memoirs.Rauf Orbay, Rauf Orbay'ın Hatıraları, (Vol. 3), Yakın Tarihimiz, İstanbul, 1962 p. 179, he refers to what Mustafa Kemal told him about the Armenians. The initial results apparently represented those who were "massacred" during the deportation, without any indication as to the total number of people who perished. Mustafa Kemal, during a conversation with Major General Harbord, the chief of the American Military Mission to Armenia, in September 1919, repeated the same number.Yakm Tarihimiz, 3, (1962), p. 179, cited in Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, Providence, RI: Berghan Books, 1995, p. 234 The figure of 800,000 excludes Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army liquidated in the early stages of the genocide, as well as the number of women and male and female children assimilated into Turkish families.
However, following the dissolution of the military tribunal, those figures were reinterpreted. The Turkish author Taner Akçam refers to a Turkish military estimate published by Lt. Col. Nihat in 1928, in which the figure of 800,000 no longer represented those "massacred" or "killed", but simply those who perished. Then the historian Bayur in a famous work wrote: "800,000 Armenians and 200,000 Greeks died as a result of deportations or died in labor brigades." Bayur concluded: "According to our official sources, these numbers are correct."Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, Türk İnkılabı Tarihi, Vol. III, Sec. IV, p. 787
The Remaining Documents of Talaat Pasha
According to documents that once belonged to Talaat Pasha, more than 970,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916. In 1983, Talaat's widow, Hayriye Talaat Bafralı, gave the documents and records to Turkish journalist Murat Bardakçı, who published them in a book titled The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha (also known as "Talat Pasha's Black Book"). According to the documents, the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before 1915 stood at 1,256,000. It was presumed, however, in a footnote by Talaat Pasha himself, that the Armenian population was undercounted by thirty percent. Furthermore, the population of Protestant Armenians was not taken into account. Therefore, according to the historian Ara Sarafian, the population of Armenians should have been approximately 1,700,000 prior to the start of the war. However, that number had plunged to 284,157 two years later in 1917.Tavernise, Sabrina "Nearly a Million Genocide Victims, Covered in a Cloak of Amnesia". The New York Times, 8 March 2009.
Other Ottoman sources
While the official figures were of 800,000 killed, there were many unofficial numbers presented during the war by some Ottoman authorities—Talat, for instance, presented the figure of 300,000—but there is no indication as to how those figures were obtained. This figure is currently the one used often by the Turkish government officials.
Ottoman allies estimates
Germany
German sources gave the highest estimates of Armenian losses during the war even though they were the Ottoman Empire's ally. Some speculate that it was due to their access to murder sites. German major Endres, who served in the Turkish army, estimated the number of Armenian deaths as 1.2 million.Carl Franz Endres, Die Türkei. Munich, CH Beck, 1918, p. 161 The same figure was mentioned during the Yozgat trial,Cited in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 1997, Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series, Genocide Study Project, H. F. Guggenheim Foundation. and before the Permanent Peoples' TribunalGérard Chaliand, Le Crime de silence : le génocide des Arméniens: Tribunal permanent des peuples, [Session de Paris, 13-16 avril 1984]; pref. de Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Flammarion, 1984. and is often cited elsewhere.
Austria-Hungary
The Austrian consul at Trabzon and Samsun, Dr. Kwatkiowski on March 13, 1918, reported to Vienna, restricting himself to the six eastern provinces, Trabzon and Samsun district, that of the million deported, most died, while Austria-Hungary's Adrianople (Edirne) consul Dr. Nadamlenzki reported that for the entire Ottoman Empire 1.5 million had already been deported.Austrian Foreign Ministry Archives 12 Türkei/380, ZI.17/pol and 12 Türkei/463, Z.94/P. The Austrian Vice Marshal Joseph Pomiankowski estimated the Armenian losses at about a million.Joseph Pomiankowski, Der Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches, Graz, Austria, 1969, p. 160(originally printed in 1928)
The allies and neutral parties
Arnold J. Toynbee Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the British Foreign Office during World War I, estimated a death toll of 600,000 from a population of 1,800,000 Armenians who lived in AnatoliaThe Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs By Viscount Bryce, London 1916 but excluded most of 1916 and the following years, as Robert Melson writes:
Toynbee's description and analysis stop with the winter of 1915 and the spring of 1916, by which time the bulk of the Armenian population has been killed or deported. As valuable as it is, this work cannot take into account what subsequently happened to the deportees in 1916, nor can it take into account the Armenians who were deported from some of the major urban areas after 1916.Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, University Of Chicago Press, October 15, 1992, p. 147
The King Crane Commission The King Crane Commission estimated a million for wartime losses, but also stated that the Hamidian massacres had been included. Whether or not the Armenian casualties were being deliberately understated to increase the Armenian population to support Armenian independence is still a matter of debate. The Armenian wartime losses of a million, the Adana massacres, and Hamidian massacres had been combined for the sake of what the commission at one point called "justice," in what appears to have been an attempt to maximize the population count.Harry N. Howard, The King-Crane Commission: An American Inquiry in the Middle East, Khayats, 1963 p. 212 includes them all, but The King-Crane Commission Report, August 28, 1919 is more contradictory: in one instance, it considered the million lost as the outcome of the war (as if excluding the other massacres) and there is no way to know whether or not it was a mistake. The Armenian estimates showed the same tendency. At times, they were even reduced to 500,000A. P. Hacobian, Armenia and the War: An Armenian's Point of View with an Appeal to Britain and the Coming Peace Conference, George H. Doran Company, New York. 1918. He presents as range from 500,000 to 800,000, and presents the cases of the possibility of the construction of an Armenia. How far those politically motivated figures influenced commission reports of mortality, such as those of the King Crane is not well known, apparently it was considered due to Mr. Aharonian and Boghos Nubar presentation of the cases, in this regard, it is relevant to read the British views on the problem of Kurdistan, and on Boghos Nubar Pasha, in December 1919, see United Kingdom, Foreign Office, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939. Edited by E. L. Woodward and Rohan Butler. First Series ( London, H. M. S. O., 1952), IV, 920-24. Later cited as British Documents, 1919-1939. when the high Armenian death count endangered the possibility of an Armenian state including Ottoman territory, and in other instances raised to over a million.Boghos Nubar, the head of the Armenian delegation at the Paris Peace conference, wrote in The Times on 30 January 1919, that "over a million out of a total Armenian population... have lost their lives in and through the war." Apparently, when it was noted that a possibility of an Armenia as wanted by the Armenian delegation was impossible, the Armenian delegation changed its tactic, as to not minimise the number of victims, but rather use them and indirectly accuse the allies, and expect that they might consider Armenia as reparation for the losses. The United States figures for the period between 1915 and 1917 vary widely, but most figures approach a million or more.
League of Nations The League of Nations estimated one million dead.The extent of the Armenian tragedy is described in Fridtjof Nansen's book: "Armenia and the Near East" translated from (l'Arménie et le Proche Orient, Paris, 1923). Nansen concludes his work: "Woe to the Armenians, that they were ever drawn into European politics! It would have been better for them if the name of Armenia had never been uttered by any European diplomatist."
Armenian casualties, 1917–18 to 1923
While the Ottoman official statistics covered 1917–18, and some of German figures, most other figures excluded them. Another problem remains, as to the availability of the sources for what followed 1917. More recent scholars have called this period the second phase of the Armenian genocide. Melson, for instance, provide' a rough estimate of 500,000.In his book: Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, University Of Chicago Press, October 15, 1992 On the other hand, those estimates have no archival grounds, for this reason some researchers considers any such figures could be near to the actual casualty figures or far from it.
Armenian casualties outside of the Ottoman borders during Ottoman invasion