Within the Department of State records, there are multiple records groups containing State Department records on Turkish atrocities against the Armenians during World War I. One significant source is RG 59: General Records of the Department of State. The 1910-29 section of the Central Decimal File (NAID 302021) within this group holds crucial documentation linking the Turkish persecution of the Armenians. The file “867.4016” (Internal Affairs of Turkey. Social Matters. Race problems.) within this section contains approximately 6,000 pages of crucial documentation. Other files in this group, such as “867.00” (Internal Affairs of Turkey. Political Affairs.), containing roughly 16,000 pages of documented material, can provide additional context on these atrocities.
After World War I, the so-called “Turkish Gold” file, Reparations from Turkey are in file “467.00R29”. It can only be found in a printed format, not microfilm.
Additional materials may be found in RG 59: Unindexed Retired Office Files, 1910-1944 (NAID 1079774). Some of this material duplicates that in the Central Decimal File. The 1919 file contains a copy of the RG 59: Unindexed Retired Office Files, 1910-1944 (NAID 1079774) can provide ample references. However, one will find some duplicated material in the Central Decimal File. The 1919 file contains a copy of the “Report of the American Military Mission to Armenia” by MGEN James G. Harbord and “The Armenian Question: Before the Peace Conference.” The 1920 file shows the U.S. attitude toward independent Armenia and includes a May memorandum entitled “America and the Armenians.” The Report clearly provides muliple accounts how the Armenians girls were mutilated, raped and killed:
Numbers were murdered by savage Kurds, against whom the Turkish soldiery afforded no protection. Little girls of 9 or 10 were sold to Kurdish brigands for a few piastres, and women were promiscuously violated. At Sivas an instance was related of a teacher in the Sivas Teachers’ College, a gentle, refined Armenian girl, speaking English, knowing music, attractive by the standards of any land, who was given in enforced marriage to the beg of a neighboring Kurdish village, a filthy, ragged ruffian three times her age, with whom she still has to live, and by whom she has borne a child. In the orphanage there maintained under American relief auspices, there were 150 “brides,” being girls, many of them of tender age, who had been living as wives in Moslem homes and had been rescued. Of the female refugees among some 75,000 repatriated from Syria and Mesopotamia, we were informed at Aleppo that 40 per cent are infected with venereal disease from the lives to which they have been forced. The women of this race were free from such diseases before the deportation. Mutilation, violation, torture, and death have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages. Yet immunity from it all might have been purchased for any Armenian girl or comely woman by abjuring her religion and turning Moslem. Surely no faith has ever been put to harder test or has been cherished at greater cost.
The report also provided the demographic of the region before the mass deportations:
Even before the war the Armenians were far from being in the majority in the region claimed as Turkish Armenia, excepting in a few places. To-day we doubt if they would be in the majority in a single community even when the last survivors of the massacres and deportations have returned to the soil, though the great losses of Turkish population to some extent offset the difference brought about by slaughter. We estimate that there are probably 270,000 Armenians to-day in Turkish Armenia. Some 75,000 have been repatriated from the Syrian and Mesopotamian side, others are slowly returning from other regions, and some from one cause or another remained in the country. There are in the Transcaucasus probably 300,000 refugees from Turkish Armenia, and some thousands more in other lands, for they have drifted to all parts of the Near East.
RG 59: Unindexed Retired Office Files, 1910-1944
The 1922 files contain:
- “Report of the Activities of the American Committee for the Independence of Armenia, 1918-1922”
- “A Memorandum by American Committee for the Independence of Armenia Against the Proposal of an ‘Armenian Home’ in Turkey.”
- The 1928 files contain an August 1928 memo on “President Wilson’s Armenian Boundary Award.” None of these records is on microfilm.
Additional documentation can be found among American diplomatic and consular posts files in RG 84: Records of Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State. The records from 1912 till the 1940s are organised according to a decimal filing scheme:
- File “800” covers Internal Affairs/Political affairs,
- File “840.1” covers Social Matters and the Armenian massacres.
- The records of the American embassy in Turkey, including the files of the post-World War I High Commissioner, for the period 1914-1925
- The records of the various consular posts in Turkey also contain additional documentation. None of these records is on microfilm.
An important note: Some of the files on the Armenian issue were destroyed when the U.S. entered World War I. In January 1919, the American Commissioner in Turkey reported that the embassy’s vast files covering the Armenian deportations were destroyed after the break in relations with Turkey to avoid compromising the identities of persons who provided information (see Despatch #19, January 9, 1919, file “800”, Embassy Turkey (Istanbul), RG 84).
RG 256: Records of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace contain files depicting events in the United States during the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference. The records of The Inquiry, a group of experts tasked with organizing and reporting on various issues related to peacemaking, are also included. Approximately 35 documents about Armenia can be found among the records of The Inquiry, which are listed on pages 88-90 of the inventory of RG 256 inventory. They can be obtained through National Archives Microfilm Publication M1107. Additionally, the General Records of the ACNP contain documentation related to Armenia, with documentation related to the American Military Mission to Armenia (the “Harbord Mission”) being located in File 184.021. These records have been microfilmed as National Archives Microfilm Publication M820.