Welcome to today's Deep Dive. We are really thrilled
to have you here with us. Yeah, thanks for joining
us. Today we're exploring a piece of history
that is incredibly intense, it's layered, and
it is still at the absolute center of fierce
international debate. Right. This isn't just
a standard history lesson about dates and treaties.
This is really an exploration of how modern nations
are forged from the ashes of empires, how millions
of people are uprooted overnight, and how the
labels we put on historical events, the actual
specific words we choose to use, they matter
deeply, even full century later. That is exactly
the right lens to view this through. To give
you some context on the foundation of our conversation
today, we're analyzing an extensive encyclopedia
entry on the events surrounding the Ottoman Greek
population between the years 1913 and 1923. Yeah,
it's a massive amount of information. It is.
It's a dense compilation of primary eyewitness
accounts, diplomatic cables, and modern academic
analysis. And it paints a picture of a world
in total transition. And really, the mission
of this deep dive is to guide you through that
timeline. We are going to explore the incredibly
complex geopolitical fallout of the Ottoman Empire's
collapse. And we want to unpack that highly charged
ongoing debate over how to define what happened
to the people living there, which is still heavily
debated. Exactly. But to grasp the magnitude
of the collapse, I mean, we really have to understand
what this region actually looked like. before
everything fell apart, because it wasn't what
it looks like today. Not at all. It's essential
to understand that before World War I, Asia Minor,
which is roughly modern day Turkey, it was a
deeply, deeply diverse region. Right. It was
not ethnically or religiously homogenous. You
had Turks, Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, Jews,
and many others living side by side in this vast
imperial territory. And the Greek presence there
was ancient. Very ancient. We are talking about
Rus dating back to the Late Bronze Age around
1450. So long before the events of the 20th century.
Millennia before. This was the land of Homer.
the land of early philosophers like Heraclitus.
Through the Roman and Byzantine empires, the
indigenous inhabitants primarily practiced orthodox
Christianity and they spoke Greek. Even after
the Ottoman Turks conquered the region in the
15th century, that Greek culture remained deeply
embedded. They became a minority under Turkic
rule, but their towns, their commerce, their
culture, it was completely woven into the fabric
of the region. Let's unpack this. We have this
ancient diverse multi -ethnic society. But as
we move into the early 20th century, specifically
the years just before World War I, so around
1913 to 1914, a massive ideological shift happens.
It's a huge shift. The Ottoman Empire is fading.
They have just suffered devastating territorial
losses in the Balkan Wars. And driven by a rising
tide of nationalism, the government begins viewing
this indigenous Christian Greek population not
as neighbors, but as a literal existential threat.
Yes, the political atmosphere becomes a pressure
cooker. The government at the time was led by
a group called the Committee of Union and Progress.
You might know them historically as the Young
Turks. Right, the Young Turks. Their mindset
shifted to the idea that to form a modern secure
country in an era of aggressive nationalism,
the empire needed to purge minorities who might
sympathize with the empire's European enemies.
To achieve this, the government adopted a strategy
that historians describe as a dual track mechanism.
A dual track mechanism. It sounds incredibly
bureaucratic, but when you look at how it played
out on the ground, it's actually the birth of
modern, plausible deniability in state -sponsored
violence. That is a perfect way to describe it.
The dual -track mechanism meant combining official
public state policies with unofficial extra -legal
terror. Wow. On one track, the government would
issue official acts of relocation. They'd tell
the international community, hey, we are just
moving these populations for military necessity,
or it's a standard security policy. Keeping it
strictly professional on paper. Exactly. But
on the parallel, hitting track, they utilized
covert terror campaigns carried out by irregular
groups. Specifically, a shadowy paramilitary
wing known as the Special Organization. Basically,
state -sponsored death squads. That's what they
were. This gave the central government complete
plausible deniability. They could empty out Christian
villages through sheer terror. And when foreign
ambassadors complained about the violence, the
state could simply throw up its hands and deny
any pri - knowledge. Blaming local bandits. Yes
blame the rogue actors all while pulling the
strings behind the scenes. And the historical
records give us a chilling detailed example of
exactly how this dual track system operated.
In June 1914 there was an attack on Fokia. which
was a prosperous town in western Anatolia. A
very prosperous town. Turkish irregular troops
completely destroyed the city, dozens of civilians
were killed, and the entire surviving population
was forced to flee for their lives to Greece.
And we know definitively that this wasn't just
random mob violence because of French eyewitness
Charles Manciet. Manciate's accounts are so crucial
here. He was a French diplomat who was there
on the ground, and he explicitly stated that
the atrocities were highly organized. Methodical.
Very methodical. He described how these irregular
forces purposefully aimed to circle and drive
out the Christian peasant populations. And alongside
these direct attacks, the state also implemented
what were called labor battalions. They would
conscript Greek men of military age, but instead
of giving them weapons, they sent them hundreds
of miles into the harsh Anatolian interior. Just
brutal conditions. They forced them to work on
roads and tunnels until they literally dropped.
Hundreds of thousands died in these battalions
due to starvation. exposure and outright massacre
by their guards. It was essentially a death sentence
disguised as civic duty. And it's worth noting
that around the same time there were actually
early attempts at voluntary population exchanges
between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Oh really?
Voluntary? Yes. They signed an agreement in 1914
to swap some Muslim populations living in Greece
for Greek populations in Anatolia. But the outbreak
of World War I stopped that bureaucratic process
in its tracks, replacing it with the brutal mechanics
of imperial collapse. So the war just accelerates
everything. It does. A fading empire, terrified
of being carved up by foreign powers, often resorts
to extreme violent homogenization. They believe
that removing the Greek and Armenian populations
was the absolute prerequisite for the empire's
survival. So you have this powder keg of nationalism
and secret paramilitary squads. And then in 1914,
the rest of the world catches fire. World War
I breaks out, and suddenly this internal Ottoman
policy becomes a massive global geopolitical
issue. It certainly does. Because Eleutherios
Venizelos, the leader of Greece, starts playing
a very high stakes game of chess. He absolutely
does. Venizelos threatened to drop Greece's neutrality
and join the Entente allies, or to retaliate
against Muslims living in Greece if the persecution
of Greeks in Anatolia didn't stop. That is a
massive threat. And this diplomatic threat actually
worked briefly. It caused Germany, who was the
primary ally of the Ottomans, to demand that
the Ottoman government halt the persecutions.
Germany really didn't want Greece entering the
war against them. But did the violence actually
stop? Or did the Ottoman government just tell
Germany what they wanted to hear? What's fascinating
here is how the central official policy supposedly
changed to appease an ally, but the grim mechanics
of history just kept grinding forward on the
ground. So they ignored the orders? Pretty much.
Despite central orders from Constantinople to
halt, the local massacres and deportations continued
largely unpunished. The state policy just shifted
its justification. They began forcefully moving
Greeks from coastal areas, particularly the Black
Sea region, deep into the And what was their
excuse this time? Claiming these populations
were a military vulnerability who might aid a
Russian naval attack. And what about the Germans?
They were military allies stationed right there
in the Ottoman Empire. Did they just turn a blind
eye to this? It goes well beyond turning a blind
eye. The historical archives reveal that German
military officials themselves became directly
complicit. You have German General Lehmann von
Sanders, who was advising the Ottoman military,
directly ordering the deportation of 30 ,000
Greeks from the town of Ivalik in March 1917.
And this wasn't a peaceful relocation. This operation
involved death marches, the mass looting of property,
and the massacre of the civilian population.
there at the time are just staggering to read.
Sweden's ambassador to Constantinople in 1917,
Kaspar Ankersverd, wrote a report noting that
the cruelty of extending these deportations to
women and children was done specifically to make
it easier to confiscate their property. It wasn't
about security, it was about eradicating a presence
and taking what they left behind. And you can
hear the stark reality of the situation in the
private observations of the officials involved.
The German Chancellor at the time... Theobald
von Bethmann -Halweg stated plainly in 1917,
he said, the indications are that the Turks plan
to eliminate the Greek element as enemies of
the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians.
That's a direct quote. Yes. He detailed how they
displaced people into the interior, exposing
them to death and hunger, and then looted their
homes. Even the Ottoman officials themselves
were brutally clear behind closed doors. An Austrian
consul in 1916 reported a conversation with an
Ottoman official named Refet Bey. Bey reportedly
said, we must finish off the Greeks as we did
with the Armenians. Today I sent squads to the
interior to kill every Greek on site. Just horrific.
The international diplomat stationed there actually
coined a term for this specific type of atrocity,
these deportations involving death marches and
starvation camps. They call them white massacres.
A chilling term. Death by attrition, exposure,
and exhaustion rather than a firing squad. But
it is also important to note that this wasn't
entirely a one -sided slaughter without pushback.
Right. There was resistance. Yes. The Pontic
Greeks, those living along the Black Sea coast,
responded by forming insurgent groups. By 1920,
they had an 18 ,000 -man resistance force in
the Caucasus fighting alongside Russian units
against the Ottoman army to safeguard the withdrawal
of Greek refugees. Here's where it gets really
interesting, though. because World War I ends
in 1918. The Ottoman Empire capitulates to the
Allies. But the end of the global war does not
mean the end of the violence in this region.
Not at all. A new force rises from the ashes
of the Empire, the Turkish national movement
led by Mustafa Kemal, who would later be known
as Ataturk. And this leads us directly into the
Greco -Turkish War. Yes. The period immediately
following World War One from 1919 to 1922 was
marked by intense, devastating mutual violence.
The Allies had promised Greece territorial gains
in Anatolia as a reward. for joining the war.
So they move in. Right. So in May 1919, Hellenic
or Greek troops landed at the city of Smyrna,
a major port city with a massive Greek population.
And when looking at this period, we want to emphasize
to you listening that we are just reporting the
source material impartially here. Historians
emphasize that the chaos resulted in horrific
atrocities committed by both sides. When the
Greek military occupied Western Anatolia, the
record showed devastating massacres of the local
Turkish populations. Precisely. The British historian
Arnold J. Toynbee wrote extensively on this mutual
tragedy. He noted that the Greek military landings
in Smyrna were actually the catalysts that ignited
Mustafa Kemal's Turkish national movement. It
gave them an enemy to rally against. Exactly,
a unifying foreign invader to fight. Toynbee
pointed out that both the Greeks of Pontus and
the Turks of the Greek occupied territories were
victims of original political miscalculations
made by leaders sitting in boardrooms far away
in Paris. This is a profound tragedy where civilian
populations on both sides paid the ultimate price
for the political ambitions of their leaders.
And this mutual violence reached a terrifying
climax with the Great Fire of Smyrna in September
1922, after the Turkish forces recaptured the
city. A truly dark moment in history. The chaos
at the docks as hundreds of thousands of people
tried to flee the flames in the advancing army
is one of the most harrowing scenes of the 20th
century. Estimates of the death toll for Greeks
and Armenians who perished in the fire and the
accompanying massacres range from 10 ,000 to
100 ,000 dead, with up to 200 ,000 expelled.
And tens of thousands of able -bodied men who
couldn't escape were deported to the interior,
most of whom died or were executed. This brutal,
decade -long chapter finally reached a formal
resolution with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
which fundamentally redrew the demographic map
of the world. It did. The treaty formalized a
massive compulsory population exchange between
Greece and Turkey. And let's be clear about what
a compulsory population exchange actually means.
That is a highly sanitized, bureaucratic term
for forced mass deportation. Absolutely. Over
1 .1 million Ottoman Greeks were packed up and
permanently expelled to Greece, leaving behind
homes their families had lived in for generations.
And on the other side. Simultaneously, hundreds
of thousands of Muslims living in Greece were
forcibly sent to Turkey. This exchange abruptly
and permanently ended millennia of continuous
Greek ethnic presence in Asia Minor. And the
human cost of this decade of violence is just
staggering. The academic estimates for the Ottoman
Greek death toll between 1914 and 1922 vary heavily
depending on the parameters of the research.
Right, the numbers differ. Scholar Rudolf Rommel
estimates around 347 ,000. Political scientist
Adam Jones suggests 750 ,000. And researchers
like Thea Halo, when accounting for a broader
timeline and region, estimate up to 1 .2 million
deaths. It's an immense loss of life. So what
does this all mean? How do we categorize violence
on this scale? This brings us to a fierce modern
debate over a single word, genocide. The word
itself didn't even exist when these events happened.
It was coined in the 1940s by a Polish lawyer
named Rafael Lemkin. Yes, Lemkin was trying to
create a legal framework for the destruction
of a nation or an ethnic group. And in his early
writings defining what genocide was, Lemkin specifically
detailed the fate of the Greeks in Turkey alongside
the Armenians as a prime historical example of
the crime he was trying to name. But the debate
over whether to officially apply this label today
is where the academic and political spheres deeply
fracture. Again, staying entirely impartial with
the sources here, can you break down the dividing
lines in this academic debate? Certainly. On
one side, you have institutions like the International
Association of Genocide Scholars, or IAGS. In
2007, they passed a resolution overwhelmingly
affirming that the campaign against the Ottoman
Greeks was a genocide, qualitatively similar
to the Armenian Genocide. And some governments
agree with that. Yes. Several nations, including
the US, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Austria,
have passed resolutions officially recognizing
it as such. But there is a very prominent counter
argument within the academic community, right?
Scholars who argue that while the events were
horrific, they don't meet the strict legal definition
of genocide. Correct. You have prominent scholars
like Manus Modlarski, Michael Schwartz, and Angrachos
Varnova who argue that this was ethnic cleansing
or deportation, but not genocide. Because of
the legal definition. Right. Their argument hinges
on intent and outcome. They point out a disjunction
between the violent rhetoric of some Ottoman
officials and the actual overarching goals of
the state. They argue that because of the strong
cultural and political ties the Ottoman Greeks
had with European powers, total biological annihilation
simply wasn't a viable option for the Ottomans.
So it was more about moving them out of strategic
areas. Exactly. These scholars point to the fact
that the massacres were often contained to sensitive
border regions and ultimately over a million
Greeks survived the war to be exchanged in 1923.
Therefore, they classify it as a ruthless campaign
of ethnic cleansing designed to homogenize the
state rather than an attempted biological eradication
of the entire Greek race. And the political pushback
on this terminology is immense. When the Greek
Parliament passed laws in the 1990s affirming
the events as genocide, the Turkish government's
official response was swift and angry. They released
a statement claiming the genocide label is without
any historical basis. Very strong words. They
accused Greece of distorting history and covering
up the massacres Greece perpetrated in Anatolia,
claiming the resolution displayed an expansionist
Greek mentality. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, you can see how international law and
geopolitical alliances deeply complicate historical
memory. Think about how often you see this today.
Nations turning a blind eye to human rights abuses
because they need a military base, a trade deal,
or a strategic partner. That exact dynamic is
what buried this history for decades. Right,
because why hasn't the United Nations or the
European Parliament universally recognized it?
Well, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne essentially
sealed the end of the conflict with an amnesty
declaration, avoiding any massive war crimes
trials. Then you have the Cold War. Following
World War II, Greece and Turkey were both critical
NATO allies facing a common communist enemy in
the Soviet Union. They needed each other. Geopolitics
demanded they be partners, not adversaries fighting
over historical grievances. Acknowledging a genocide
threatened that delicate diplomatic balance,
so the international community largely stayed
silent. It's wild how the present needs of governments
dictate how the past is officially remembered.
But there is one more piece of this deep docks
that is truly bizarre, and it connects this regional
conflict to the darkest chapter of the 20th century.
Research by historian Stefan Ehrig shows that
the Nazi party in Germany in the 1920s viewed
Mustafa Kemal and the new Turkey as a literal
role model. It is a profoundly dark inspiration.
The Nazi press continually praised the cleansing
of the Greeks and Armenians as a prerequisite
for creating a strong unified national state.
It's hard to even process that. In 1921, the
official Nazi newspaper stated that the German
nation would one day have to resort to Turkish
methods. Adolf Hitler himself later referred
to Kemal as his star in the darkness and considered
himself a student of the Turkish leader's nation
-building tactics. But the historical record
reveals an incredible paradox here. Hitler idolized
Kemal for his ruthless homogenization of a country.
But how did Kemal actually view Hitler and the
Nazis? Because the feeling was definitely not
mutual. This raises an important question about
how extreme regimes weaponize and distort history.
The irony is profound. Despite Hitler's intense
admiration in 1933, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk actually
granted asylum to thousands of Jewish scientists
and academics who were fleeing Nazi repression,
employing them at Turkish universities to modernize
the country. He actively worked against Hitler's
goals. Yes. Kemal publicly called Mussolini a
clown, and he referred to Hitler as a maniac
corporal and a dangerous racist. He thought Nazism
was a direct threat to Europe. It just shows
how totalitarian regimes will completely cherry
-pick historical models. Hitler ignored Ataturk's
actual geopolitical stances, his modernizing
values, and his disdain for fascist racism. Instead,
the Nazis simply extracted the brutal mechanics
of ethnic cleansing to justify their own future
atrocities. Exactly. They stripped the history
of its context, ignored the complexities of the
era, and turned the raw data of human suffering
into a blueprint for their own crimes. This has
been an intense deep dive. If you're listening
to this, we want to validate your desire to dig
into topics this complex. Because history is
rarely just a clean timeline of what happened.
As we've seen today, history is about who gets
to write the final piece Treaty. It's about the
specific words we choose to define the dead,
whether a textbook says ethnic cleansing or genocide.
And it is about how past atrocities are weaponized
by future regimes to justify new horrors. And
before we go, I want to leave you with a final
lingering thought from the literature section
of our research. There was a Greek novelist named
Elias Venessis. He actually survived one of those
Ottoman death marches, the labor battalions we
discussed earlier. Oh, wow. Out of the 3 ,000
people conscripted into his specific labor brigade,
he was one of only 23 who survived the ordeal.
23 out of 3 ,000. He later wrote a harrowing
autobiographical book about his experience titled
Number 31, 32, and 8, which was simply the conscript
number the Turkish army assigned to him. Surviving
as one out of 3 ,000, that is just unimaginable.
It is. And decades later, in 1978, a Greek filmmaker
turned his survival story into a movie. But here's
the catch. Greece itself banned the film from
being shown in its own country until 1982. Greece
banned it. Yes. Why? Because of intense diplomatic
pressure from the Turkish foreign ministry who
complained the film would ruin Greek -Turkish
relations. So I want you to ponder this as we
wrap up. What does it say about the fragility
of our geopolitical peace when a democratic nation
feels forced to censor the harrowing survival
stories of its own citizens just to maintain
diplomatic relations with a neighbor? That is
a phenomenal question to end on. Thank you for
joining us on this deep dive. Keep reading, keep
seeking out multiple perspectives, and keep questioning
the history you think you know.