In a speech to parliament in April 2015, Röttgen urged his fellow parliamentarians to call the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians under Turkish rule in 1915 genocidal and to acknowledge that German actions at the time were partly to blame, adding that this recognition was overdue. After the 2017 constitutional referendum that handed new powers to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Herrmann demanded that EU accession talks for Turkey should be ended, not paused.