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Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. This book goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that the book now uses to overturn the official narrative. The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic. By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.

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The author analyzes the Ottoman Archives as a source of information on the Armenian Genocide of 1915. He discusses the contradictory positions of two broad groups of scholars on the reliability of these archives, concluding that the Ottoman Archives agree with the information found in the archives of the United States, Britain, Germany, and Austria. He discusses the various categories of Ottoman documents, which mostly came out during the trials related to the Armenian Genocide, which took place from 1919 to 1921, and makes clear that there was a wide-ranging cleansing operation of the archives after the armistice in 1918. The author explores the reliability of this evidence and, based on the existing documents that remain, tries to reconstruct the structure and implementation of the genocide. He concludes that the Ottoman documents clearly show the genocidal intent of the Ottoman authorities and puts the Armenian genocide within the broader context of an overarching plan to homogenize the ethnic population of Anatolia. This article seeks to shed light on the issue of the ''cleansing of the Ottoman archives'' and to summarize some of the remaining documents, which could be classified as direct evidence illustrating the genocidal intent of the policies enacted by the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) against the Armenians in 1915. 1