Russian historian unveils new facts of Armenian nationalist’s criminal activity

Glorification of personality and overtly racist theory of the Armenian nationalist organization Tsegakron led by Garegin Nzhdeh (Ter-Harutyunyan) and its transformation into the official state ideology of Armenia contradict all the provisions of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

This was stated by Oleg Kuznetsov, a well-known Russian historian and political scientist, at a press conference “Armenia: a country of permitted Nazism” on October 4.

This is the second press conference with the participation of Kuznetsov, where he talks about archival secret documents confirming the ideology of Armenian nationalism, and in particular the Nazi essence of famous dashnak Garegin Nzhdeh.

Kuznetsov said that the declassified materials of the archive of the State Security Service of Azerbaijan revealed a set of documents of the Soviet state security bodies, confirming the Nazi essence of the Tsegakron ideology in Armenia.

“Armenian nationalism and the Dashnaktsutyun party, which represented this nationalism, until the mid-1930s weren’t perceived by the USSR state security bodies as ideological opponents, which should be closely monitored,” he noted.

“Even then, the Dashnaks were kept under control, and the most active were sent into exile or imprisoned in concentration camps, seeing them as rebels and terrorists in the first place, and not as political rivals. Dashnaks turned into ideological enemies for the Bolshevik party in 1933, when Garegin Ter-Harutyunyan, better known by the party name Nzhde, created the organization Tseghakron in Boston (Massachusetts, US) at the founding conference. Subsequently, it was renamed the Federation of Armenian Youth or Racists,” Kuznetsov said.

During this period two more important events took place, at first glance, in no way connected with each other, according to the Russian historian.

First, on January 30, the leader of the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (NSDAP), Adolf Hitler, was appointed Reich Chancellor of Germany, and, second, the French anthropologist George Montandon declared that there was a separate Armenoid race that was as ancient as and the Aryans in the racial theory of the Nazis.

“The coincidence of these two facts in the same period is not accidental, since Garegin Nzhdeh created the organization explicitly in order to attract the attention of the new Fuhrer of the German nation, to join the ranks of the Nazis and use their military-technical power in the interests of the Armenian nationalism,” Kuznetsov said, adding that Nzhdeh was not just a follower of Nazism, but one of the interpreters of this ideology among the peoples of the Soviet Union.

The historian said that the documents with the interrogations of prisoners of war of the German army, who personally took part in the recruitment of the leaders of the Armenian nationalists in European countries to serve the Third Reich, are kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in the fund of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

“One of them was Peter Kamsarakan - a former agent of the Reich Main Security Office of Nazi Germany, an Armenian from Shamakhi, who lived in Austria before the World War II,” he said. “Austrian Armenian Kamsarakan was of great importance for the Soviet special services as a source of information, so his case was personally supervised by Interior Minister of the USSR Colonel-General Sergey Kruglov.”

In November 1948, a top secret reference signed by Kruglov was drawn up in six copies, addressed to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and other representatives of the Soviet power, Kuznetsov added.

He went on to say that this fact testifies to an extremely high level of secrecy of this document, which contained information about cooperation of the special services of the Third Reich and Armenian nationalists.

Kuznetsov further cited an excerpt from this document, which stated that Dashnaks collected in all countries information that was of interest to the Germans and was related to the Soviet Union, countries of Central America and England.

“It was proposed to establish within the territories of Germany an Armenian state where the Dashnaks would be the government party, in the event of a war with the USSR. Thus, besides the annexation of the Armenian regions of Turkey in the east, the territory of Armenia had to be expanded at the expense of Nagorno-Karabakh and in the north – through annexation of the Borchali region of Georgia. The document also states that the testimony of Kamsarakan and his role in attracting Dashnaks to cooperation with the Germans is confirmed by the convicted leader of Armenian emigrants Ter-Arutyunyan, known by the nickname of "Nzhdeh", kept under arrest in Vladimir prison of Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR,” the historian said.

Kuznetsov also noted that Nzhdeh actually admitted that he, like his other nationalist associates, had consciously and purposefully cooperated with the Nazis since 1940, and the complicity with the Nazis manifested itself not only in the form of military and economic intelligence, but also in the sale or legalization of property of Holocaust victims.

He said that basically, Nzhdeh confirmed that he is a supporter of German Nazism, its ideology of tseghakronism and racism.