The Central Council of Jews in Germany has called on the German government to recognize the World War I mass murder of over one million Armenians in what was then the Ottoman Empire as a genocide, the World Jewish Congress reports.
“One hundred years ago, the government of the Ottoman Empire ordered the deportation of one million Armenians. They were murdered directly, or died of starvation and dehydration in the desert,“ Central Council President Josef Schuster told the newspaper ‘Der Tagesspiegel.’ He added: “These terrible events should be called what they were: a genocide.”
Schuster said the Armenian genocide later served Adolf Hitler and his Nazis as a blueprint for the Holocaust.
The main German parties, CDU and SPD, have so far been reluctant to use the term genocide because they fear a conflict with Turkey.
