The opening assault against Armenians soon broadened into a systematic campaign. Armenian soldiers—all able-bodied men had been drafted into the Ottoman wartime army—were transferred to new labor battalions, where they faced execution or death from exhaustion. Women, children and the elderly were subjected to deportation from the ancient Armenian homeland of East Anatolia. Many perished from the grim circumstances of their deportation. Others died in the anti-Armenian massacres that erupted in towns scheduled for Armenian removal. Thousands of women and children died in the forced marches through the Syrian desert.
The methods used to annihilate the Armenians stunned even some of the Ottoman Empire’s Axis allies. Entire villages were destroyed as thousands of Armenian civilians were burned to death. Personnel of foreign consulates witnessed the calculated drowning of women and children who had been sent into the Black Sea in overcrowded boats. Already employed on the war front, poison gas was used to kill prisoners in caves and schools.
The anti-Armenian campaign had a bitter anti-Christian orientation. In her memoir Ravished Armenia, the survivor Aurora Mardiganian describes the crucifixion of 16 Armenian adolescent women she witnessed in the town of Malatia. “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her hands and feet. Only their wind-blown hair covered their bodies.”