Aryan Roots Save Armenians from Nazi Extermination

[Yegoyan]

By Grigor Hakobyan

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, various cultural minorities were targeted for persecution and harassment. One of these minorities was the Armenian minority of Europe.

The Turkish government of that time took an opportunity to launch a major propaganda campaign against the Armenians living in Germany and the rest of Europe, where they claimed that Armenians were Semite and no different from gypsies. They encouraged the persecution of Armenians by planting falsified information on Armenian history, culture and its origins.

The times were severe for the Armenians of Europe, and particularly of Germany, where a second Genocide seemed to be on the horizon. To counter the anti-Armenian propaganda in Germany, the Armenian community in Potsdam, Germany published an academic book on Armenian studies called Armeniertum-Arivertum, meaning Armenism-Aryanism. Three thousand copies were printed under the leadership of Artashes Abeghyan in cooperation with German Armenologists Yohannes Lepsus and Paul Rohrbakh.

Many German Orientologists like Hans Haynrikh Sheder, Yohannes Fon Lears, Karl Rot, Rev. Gerhard Klinge, and Evar Shteer, took part in this project by submitting their academic findings about the Indo-European origins of Armenians and their Aryan linguistic identity in this book.

The book was republished in 1942-1943 in Shtugart, when the Turkish propaganda reemerged in the German press. Around the same time, Armenologist Hyek Asatrian, in cooperation with Armenian military General Garegin Njdeh, published another book called Armenia-the Cradle of Aryans in Asia.

After those publications, the German Interior Ministry issued a document recognizing Armenians as an Aryan nation. Thanks to the German academics and active participation of Armenian community of Germany, the threat of yet another Armenian genocide, this time in Europe, was eliminated.

Source: Armenism-Aryanism, Armenian reprint by Uri Xachatryan, Aram Aleksanyan and Alina Sonoyan, Yerevan, 2001.