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Armin T. Wegner
Biography
Armin Theophil Wegner — Intellectual, doctor in law,
photographer, writer, poet, civil rights defender and eyewitness
to the Armenian Genocide.
Armin T. Wegner was born on October 16, 1886 in the town of Elberfeld
/ Rhineland (Wuppertal) in Germany. At the outbreak of World War
I, he enrolled as a volunteer nurse in Poland during the winter
of 1914-1915, and was decorated with the Iron Cross for assisting
the wounded under fire. In April 1915, following the military alliance
of Germany and Turkey, he was sent to the Middle East as a member
of the German Sanitary Corps. He used his leave to investigate the
rumors about the Armenian massacres that had reached him from several
sources. Disobeying orders intended to stifle news of the massacres,
he gathered information on the Genocide—collected notes, annotations,
documents, letters and took hundreds of photographs in the Armenian
deportation camps—visible proof of the first systematic genocide
of the twentieth century. At the request of the Turkish Command,
Wegner was eventually arrested by the Germans and in December of
the same year he was recalled to Germany. Hidden in his belt were
his photographic emulsions with images of the Armenian Genocide.
In an open letter, which was submitted to American President Woodrow
Wilson at the peace conference of 1919, Wegner protested against
atrocities perpetrated by the Turkish army against the Armenian
people, and appealed for the creation of an independent Armenian
state. The tragedy of the Armenian people to which he had been eyewitness
in Ottoman Turkey haunted him for the rest of his life. In the 1920s
Wegner reached the height of his success as a writer. He became
a celebrity with his Russian book, Five Fingers Over You, which
foresaw the advent of Stalinism.
Wegner was also one of the earliest voices to protest Hitler's
treatment of the Jews in Germany. He was the only writer in Nazi
Germany ever to publicly protest against the persecution of the
Jews. In 1933 he was arrested by Gestapo, a few weeks after he sent
an open letter to Hitler protesting the state-organized boycott
against the Jews of Germany. He would suffer incarceration in seven
Nazi concentration camps and prisons before he could make his escape
to Italy.
In 1956 Wegner was awarded the Highest Order of Merit by the Federal
German government. The city of Wuppertal, where he was born, decorated
him with the prestigious Eduard-Von-der-Heydt prize in 1962.
Armin T. Wegner dedicated a great part of his life to the fight
for Armenian and Jewish human rights. In 1967 he was awarded the
title “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem in
Israel, and in 1968 he received an invitation to Armenia from the
Catholicos of All Armenians and was awarded with the Order of Saint
Gregory the Illuminator. Furthermore, a main street in Yerevan was
named after him in his honor.
He died in Rome at the age of 92 on May 17, 1978. In 1996 part
of his Ashes were taken to Armenia, where a posthumous state funeral
took place near the perpetual flame of the Armenian Genocide Monument.
In 2003 the Armin T. Wegner Award was created by the Arpa Foundation
for Film, Music and Art in Hollywood, as a humanitarian honor, awarded
to a motion picture that contributes to the fight for social conscience
and human rights, a struggle to which Armin T. Wegner devoted his
life. |
