Genocide of Armenians: Through Swedish EyesThe Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915–1916
Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Review of: ••Goran Gunner, Genocide of the Armenians – Through Swedish Eyes ••Wolfgang Gust, ed., The Armenian Genocide. Evidence from the German Foreign Archives 1915-1916 in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Winter 2015) 29 (3): 483-488. Robert M. Ehrenreich United States Holocaust Memorial Museum* doi:10.1093/hgs/dcv050 *The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not to be viewed as ofﬁcial statements of the USHMM. Genocide of Armenians: Through Swedish Eyes, edited by Goran Gunner (Yerevan: Armenian Genocide Institute-Museum, 2013), 370 pp., paperback The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Ofﬁce Archives, 1915–1916, edited by Wolfgang Gust (New York: Berghahn, 2014), xxviii + 786 pp., hardcover $85.45. On March 11, 2010, in spite of years of resistance from its foreign minister (“it is not the duty of the Government to establish a historical course of events” [ p. 349]), and a no-vote from its own Committee on Foreign Affairs (which found it inappropriate for a representative body to decide matters of international law), Sweden’s parliament voted across party lines—131 to 130—to ask its government to recognize the Genocide of Armenians, Assyrians, Syrians, Chaldeans, and Pontic Greeks. Goran Gunner’s Genocide of Armenians: Through Swedish Eyes offers an unpretentious (many photo- graphs, no index), but fascinating survey of how Sweden got to that decision. A scholar with the Church of Sweden’s research unit, Gunner asks two ques- tions: what did faraway Swedes know of the fate of the Armenians, and what can Swedish sources tell us about it? Beginning with the massacres of the 1890s, Gunner draws his answers from three categories of material: newspapers, which published ﬁfty articles on the Armenians from 1914 to 1920; reports from military intelligence Book Reviews Downloaded from http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on December 31, 2015 ability to resist is not borne out by the archaeological evidence. As Sturdy Colls notes, various personal items of sentimental and actual (economic) value were found in the small pit excavated in the location of the former gas chamber at Majdanek. She posits that the items were buried by the victims to keep them out of the hands of the perpe- trators; the items thus served as “material witnesses” to the victims’ resistance to the Holocaust up until the end ( p. 256). The only deﬁciency in this important and timely volume is its poor production quality. The text contains many grammatical errors and typos, the photographs are small and fuzzy, and the captions could have been more explicit. Readers should not allow these problems to detract from the overall content and message of the volume, however. Sturdy Colls’ crucial and ambitious volume has provided the foundation for a desperately needed practical and ethical protocol for archaeological investigation of Holocaust sites—one that will aid students and archaeologists considering entering the ﬁeld, allow educators to keep their courses timely and relevant, inform interested laypeople, and spur debate about the future of Holocaust archaeology.