Armin T. Wegner

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Armin T. Wegner (October 16, 1886 – May 17, 1978) was a soldier in World War I, a writer and a co-creator of German Expressionism, a political activist for Armenian and Jewish human rights, and a victim of Nazi persecution.

He was born in the town of Elberfeld, Rhineland (Wuppertal) in Germany. He enrolled as a volunteer nurse in Poland at the outbreak of World War I during the winter of 1914-1915, and was awarded the Iron Cross for assisting wounded under fire. He served in the German Sanitary Corps of the Turkish Army during WWI, following the military alliance of Germany and Turkey. Being his personal caretaker, he traveled with Field Marshall von der Goltz along the Baghdad railroad in Mesopotamia, where he witnessed the Armenian Genocide.

Disobeying orders intended to smother news of the massacres, he gathered information on the Genocide – collected documents, annotations, notes, and letters and took hundreds of photographs in the Armenian deportation camps – that later served as visible proof of the Armenians' systematic annihilation. At the Turkish Command's request, Wegner was eventually arrested by the Germans and recalled to Germany. His photographs were confiscated and destroyed; however, he succeeded in taking out secretly some emulsions in his belt with images depicting the Armenian Genocide.^[1]

Wegner protested against the atrocities perpetrated by the Turkish army against the Armenian people in an open letter, which was submitted to Woodrow Wilson, the American President, at the peace conference of 1919. He appealed for the creation of an independent Armenian state. For the rest of his life, the tragedy of Armenian people, to which he had been a witness in Ottoman Turkey, would haunt him.

In the 1920s Wegner reached the peak of his popularity as a writer and a co-creator of German Expressionism. His book "Five Fingers Over You" made him a celebrity. It foresaw the advent of Stalinism.

Right from the beginning he was one of those to protest the Nazis' treatment of the Jews in Germany. He protested publicly against the persecution of the Jews, thus being the only writer in Nazi Germany ever to do so. In 1933 the Gestapo arrested him, a few days after he sent an open letter to Hitler protesting the state-organized boycott against Germany's Jews. He suffered incarceration in seven concentration camps and prisons before he could escape to Italy.

Wegner was awarded the Highest Order of Merit by the Federal German Government in 1956. His native city of Wuppertal awarded him the prestigious Eduard-Von-der-Heydt prize in 1962.

A great part of his life was dedicated to the fight for Armenian and Jewish human rights. He was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Israel in 1967, the next year he received an invitation to Armenia from the Catholicos of All Armenians. He was awarded the Order of Saint Gregory the Illuminator.

At the age of 92 he died in Rome. Part of his ashes were taken to Armenia in 1996. A posthumous state funeral took place near the Armenian Genocide Monument's perpetual flame.

The Armin T. Wegner Award was created in 2003 by the Arpa Foundation for Film, Music and Art as a humanitarian honor. It is awarded to motion pictures that contribute to the fight for human rights and social conscience, the struggle Armin T. Wegner devoted his life.