April 24 marked one hundred years since the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. A century after the methodically planned, organized, and executed destruction of the Anatolian Armenians, it is instructive to revisit the causes of this genocide and recognize its importance for understanding the present.

Two decades after the genocide, on August 22, 1939, Adolph Hitler told his military chiefs of his plans to massacre the civilian population of Poland, remarking, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” And indeed, after the prosecution of the men most responsible for Turkey’s extermination policies — trials were held from 1919 to 1922 under pressure from the victorious powers — the Armenian Genocide was quickly forgotten.

Ankara’s official line has not changed since the foundation of Kemalist Turkey in 1923: it claims that the Armenians fell victim to the hardships of life in wartime, deadly epidemics, and isolated cases of violence, and the Ottoman state thus bore no blame for the mass fatalities.