Armenians often quote Hitler as having told his aides in 1939, "after all, who remembers the Armenians" on the eve of Poland's invasion and one of the worst points of the Holocaust. But Turkkaya Ataov, a professor emeritus at Ankara University, told a lecture here late Monday that this remark did not exist in original Nazi documents.
The Nuremberg court, which punished Nazi leaders in the wake of World War II, did not accept this remark as true during the trials in 1946, Ataov told the lecture organized by U.S. Turkish groups at George Washington University.
He said the quote in this form first appeared in two separate reports in The New York Times and the London Times on the same day, on Nov. 24, 1945.
He said the articles had not carried a reporter's name and only had the byline, "by our special correspondent."
"There is no indication that Hitler, who was ignorant and an idiot who led his nation to a disaster, had any comprehensive knowledge about Turkish-Armenian relations," said Ataov.
Armenians and their supporters claim that nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1923 by the Ottoman empire, modern Turkey's predecessor, qualifying the deaths as "genocide."
Hurriyet daily news
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