The Central Council of Jews in Germany has called on the German government to recognize the Armenian Genocide, the Council’s website reported.

“One hundred years ago, in 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.