page_title: Armenian Genocide denial
section_title: Casualties
hierarchical_section_title: Armenian Genocide denial / Efforts at rebuttal / Casualties
caption_attribution_description: English: Survivors
context_page_description: Armenian Genocide denial is the denial of the planned systematic genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War I, conducted by the Ottoman government. Turkish nationalists similarly deny the Assyrian and Greek genocides of the same period.
  The Armenian Genocide is almost unanimously acknowledged as a historical fact by historians and genocide scholars alike. It is also widely considered to have been the first modern genocide, with the word genocide itself having been invented in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin to describe partly the Holocaust and partly the previous similar instances, one of them being the sheer scale and success of the plan organized to systematically eliminate the Armenians. Deniers argue that claims of genocide are anti-Turkish propaganda or a conspiracy spread by Armenians; they may claim that the events of the genocide either did not occur or that they were justified at the time.
  Denial of the Armenian Genocide is officially outlawed in Switzerland, Greece, Cyprus, and Slovakia.
  Currently, only the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan deny that there was an Armenian genocide, while Pakistan refuses to recognize the state of Armenia.
context_section_description: Turkish scholars and other denialists reject the Western European consensus of up to 1.5 million Armenian deaths attributed to the genocide. McCarthy calculated an estimate of the pre-war Armenian population, then subtracted his estimate of survivors, arriving at a figure of less than 600,000 for Armenian casualties for the period 1914 to 1922. However, in a more recent essay, he projected that if the Armenian records of 1913 were accurate, 250,000 more deaths should be added, for a total of 850,000.
  McCarthy's numbers were highly criticized by academia for underrepresenting the actual numbers. Some of them, like Frédéric Paulin, have severely criticized McCarthy's methodology and suggested that it is flawed. Hilmar Kaiser another specialist has made similar claims, as have professor Vahakn N. Dadrian and professor Levon Marashlian. The critics not only question McCarthy's methodology and resulting calculations, but also his primary sources, the Ottoman censuses. They point out that there was no official statistic census in 1912; rather those numbers were based on the records of 1905 which were conducted during the reign of Sultan Hamid. While Ottoman censuses claimed an Armenian population of 1.2 million, Fa'iz El-Ghusein (the Kaimakam of Kharpout) wrote that there were about 1.9 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and some modern scholars estimate over 2 million. German official Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter wrote that fewer than 100,000 Armenians survived the genocide, the rest having been exterminated (German: ausgerottet).
caption: Survivors
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Make": "NIKON", "Image Model": "COOLPIX L310", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "COOLPIX L310V1.0", "Image DateTime": "2013:03:12 17:36:10", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "2340", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "300", "Thumbnail YResolution": "300", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "15558", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7724", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/15", "EXIF FNumber": "7/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Standard Output Sensitivity", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:03:12 15:58:37", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:03:12 15:58:37", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "2", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "16/5", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "73/10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4320", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3240", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "15388", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "41", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Portrait", "EXIF GainControl": "High gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "930C7CE049EE4C7F91B3AB63C87958DE", "EXIF Padding": "[]", "EXIF OffsetSchema": "3908"}