1. The use of the remains of their victims by the Kemalists through the eyes of New York Times and French Midi correspondents. In December 1924, information was leaked that the nationalist government of Mustafa Kemal sold four hundred tons of human bones “for industrial use” to French entrepreneurs, which corresponds to the remains of approximately fifty thousand people. The bones, which may have been used to make animal feed and fertilizer, were brought to the port of Marseille on a British ship via Thessaloniki.
2. Hervé Georgelin, “Lies in the French Archives Concerning the Destruction of Smyrna.”
Below is a translation of the telegram from the New York Times.
“The Rumor of a Load of Human Bones”, 1924. Special telegram for the New York Times. December 22, Paris. Marseille is rattled by a strange story that a British-flagged ship called “Jean” has arrived in port with a mysterious cargo of 400 tons of human bones on board, destined for local industrialists. It is said that the bones were loaded on a ship in Mudaniya, in the Sea of Marmara, and that they are the remains of the victims of those atrocities that took place in Asia Minor. In view of the fact that such rumors are circulating, it is expected that an appropriate investigation will be initiated.
How can one not recall in the light of this fact the worthy followers of Ataturk, the German Nazis, who, in their desire to make money on the dead, produced lampshades made of human skin, mattresses stuffed with the hair of dead women, and the zealous Germans ground the bones into flour or burned them in the furnaces of crematoria and used them for field fertilizers.
***
The term “Asia Minor catastrophe” refers to the last stage of the Asia Minor campaign, that is, the end of the “Greek-Turkish war of 1918-1922”, the flight from Turkey of the Greek administration, established by the Treaty of Sevres, on the western coast of Asia Minor, in Smyrna ( immediately after the Armistice of Mudros). As well as the almost disorderly retreat of the Greek army after the breakthrough of the front and the already general expulsion of the autochthonous Greek population from Asia Minor, which began much earlier and stopped after the signing of the Mudros Truce.
You can read more about this war and the events of the “Asia Minor Catastrophe” in the materials of our author, historian Panayot Kesmedzhi:
- Second Greco-Turkish or Asia Minor War
- The second Greco-Turkish or Asia Minor war. Part two
- The second Greco-Turkish or Asia Minor war. Part Three
- The second Greco-Turkish or Asia Minor war. Part four
- Greek Expeditionary Force in Ukraine and Crimea
- August 30, 1922: Greeks on the eve of the greatest tragedy
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