The Armenian Genocide begins with the arrest of Constantinople's Armenian leaders
Ottoman authorities round up hundreds of Armenian intellectuals in a single night, then deport and kill as much as three quarters of the empire's Armenian population.
Quick facts
- Government
- Committee of Union and Progress (Young Turks)
- Began
- 24 April 1915, Constantinople arrests
- Deaths
- At least 664,000, possibly up to 1.2 million
- Turkish government position
- Disputes the term genocide; scholarly and most-government consensus affirms it
What happened
On the night of 24 April 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested roughly 250 to 270 Armenian political leaders, writers, and clergy in Constantinople and deported them, a roundup now commemorated annually as the start of the Armenian Genocide. Over the following months the Committee of Union and Progress government, then fighting Russia in the Caucasus and citing fears of Armenian collaboration with Russian forces, ordered the mass deportation and killing of the empire's Armenian population, then estimated at about 1.5 million people concentrated in eastern Anatolia. American diplomats stationed in the empire, including Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr., cabled the State Department in real time that the persecution amounted to a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations through arbitrary arrests, torture, and mass deportation accompanied by killing. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum documents that at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were killed between spring 1915 and autumn 1916, through massacre, forced marches, exposure, and starvation.
Why it matters
The genocide destroyed the Armenian presence in what had been its historic homeland in eastern Anatolia for millennia and is widely described by historians as the first genocide of the twentieth century. The Republic of Turkey has never accepted the term genocide for these events and continues to dispute the scale and intent of the killings, but the scholarly consensus among genocide historians, and the position of most Western governments and international bodies that have formally addressed the question, holds that the Ottoman government's actions meet the definition of genocide.
How we know
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia entry on the Armenian Genocide sets out the death toll range and describes the killings as reaching from spring 1915 through autumn 1916; a July 1915 cable in the US State Department's own historical archive, held by the Office of the Historian, documents the persecution in real time as reported by American diplomats stationed in the Ottoman Empire.
Sources
- US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia. The Armenian Genocide (1915-16): Overview · Reputable sourceencyclopedia.ushmm.org · The domain "encyclopedia.ushmm.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- US Department of State, Office of the Historian. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915 Supplement: Persecution of Armenians and Jews in Turkey · Primary source (author-declared)history.state.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Related timelines
- World War I → · See the World War I timeline for how the genocide unfolded alongside the Ottoman war effort on multiple fronts.