Member of the German Parliament Katrin Werner sent a letter to Minister of State at the German Federal Foreign Office Cornelia Pieper expressing disagreement with German government’s position on Armenian Genocide. Toros Saryan informed NEWS.am that the letter reads:

“With this position, the German government quite openly endorses the official position of the Turkish government, which would like to entrust a commission of historians to clarify this question. If, however, the German government is of the opinion that what has long since been the consensus of the overwhelming majority of historians has yet to be clarified, then the question posed to me is: what was the meaning and aim of the of the German parliament's motion from 2005, in which at least regret is expressed for &‘the organized expulsion and annihilation of the Armenians’.The crux of the matter is that the German government thus undermines its motion, which at the time had been voted up unanimously, if it suddenly thinks that historians, in face of the vast, empirically documented facts, have to decide afresh whether or not these historical facts apply at all.

Alongside the numerous original source documents which are to be found in the archive of the German Foreign Ministry, the genocidal quality [of the events] can be recognized even solely from the methods that the Young Turk government of the time adopted to carry out the deportation of the Armenian population. The so-called &‘resettlement’ of 1915/1916 was directed against the Armenians as a group, whereby the men of arms-bearing age were mainly massacred and the women, children, and aged, were subjected to such physical living conditions that made it impossible for them to survive in the north Mesopotamian desert. These were bona fide death marches, mass deaths through hunger and epidemics, deportations of children and young women as well as mega-killings by regular police guards, irregular killer squads, and marauding gangs. If this does not correspond to the criteria of the U.N. Genocide Commission of 1948, then I do not know what genocide otherwise should look like.

Similarly, I can not agree with you that it is primarily Turkey and Armenia which should undertake the necessary task of working through and appraising the past. This must, in my view, apply to Germany even in a special way. At that time, the German Empire, as most important military ally of the Ottoman Empire, was both in the know and in part complicit. German military personnel were involved in the execution of the genocide. In the Ottoman Empire, active German firms like Philipp Holzmann and the Deutsche Bank made a profit from the deployment of Armenian slave laborers in the construction of the Baghdad railway, slave laborers who were then dispatched to a certain death. In addition, after the First World War, Germany protected leading persons responsible for the genocide from legal prosecution. For these reasons, today's German government has a very special obligation, even here at home — as, by the way, that parliamentary motion defined as a task — to educate children in school classes, for example, about the genocide of the Armenians. This would be important for all schoolchildren, whether of immigrant background or not.

We know from German history how important an honest clarification process is for the democratic development of a society. It is only through acknowledgement of the darker sides of one's own history that one can sharpen one's consciousness that something similar will hopefully never be repeated. Now, a full 95 years after the fact, Armenian descendants of the genocide survivors, here in Germany too, are still suffering the psychological effects of having to prove that their ancestors were even victims of a crime. This is an unacceptable way of dealing with the victims. Moreover, embracing such a position, the German government is discouraging those forces in Turkish civil society who are taking personal risks to fight for a critical review and working through of the historical record. As you yourself remarked in your answer, over the past few years in Turkey an increasingly open discussion process has happily begun to unfold. And in this process, Turkey would require concrete support and encouragement from the German government. This, however, assumes that the German government itself first unconditionally acknowledge the historical truth about the Armenian genocide including German complicity.”