The Ottoman Eichmann: Mustafa Reşat (Mimaroğlu) and The Technocracy of Genocide

Notorious SS officer Adolf Eichmann took the order he was given to send millions of Jews to death camps and applied it to the letter. Eichmann made sure that every single Jew reached the respective concentration and death camps. In his stunning biography of Eichmann, historian David Cesarani describes him as a critical cog in the Nazi mass murder machine, along with Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich. The personal, social, political, and ideological dynamics that shaped the character and mindset of genocide technocrats such as Eichmann, their formation, and acquisitions, play a key role here. Concurrently, these dynamics provide us with important clues and data on how they made decisions and choices at certain stages and episodes of their careers, and how these choices determined the direction of their lives. The historical actor who must be addressed in the context of the Armenian genocide is Mustafa Reşat (Mimaroğlu). As a young bureaucrat, he was the head of the Second Department of General Security (also known as the Department of Political Affairs or Kısmı Siyasi), a section of the Ministry of the Interior. Along with other officers in the same unit, Mustafa Reşat played an active role in the planning, organization, and implementation of the 24 April 1915 mass arrests in Istanbul that sparked the Armenian Genocide. As such, he facilitated the work of political decision-makers. Building on his memoirs published in two volumes titled Gördüklerim ve Geçirdiklerimden, in this talk, I focus on the course of Mustafa Reşat’s life, his actions and ‘jobs’ and explain how he turned into a genocide technocrat. My main goal is to trace the career of the major protagonist and his decisions at critical junctions and to explore him as an outstanding representative of a category of perpetrators who prepare the propitious infrastructure, ground, and climate for such large-scale violence.

About the Speaker- Ümit Kurt is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He is currently Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industry, and Social Sciences (History) and an affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of award-winning book, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Harvard University Press, 2021) and the co-author of The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (Berghahn, 2017). He is now working on his third book manuscript project on the global patterns of mass violence in the Ottoman borderlands in 1860s-1920s.

This event is hosted by Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies with support from the Comparative Muslim Societies Program.