An isillusion weighed heavily on the Armenians after the calamities of 1894-1896, yet some comfort was found in the fact that various non-Armenian elements were also trying to organise against the Sultan's tyranny. Several of these groups merged into the Committee of Union of Progress, popularly referred to as the Young Turks. In 1908 a military coup led by the Young Turks forced Sultan Abdul-Hamid to become a constitutional monarch. The Armenians hailed the victory of the Young Turks amid manifestations of Christian and Muslim brotherhood.

From 1908-1914 the seemingly egalitarian Young Turk became xenophobic nationalist bent on creating a new order and eliminating the Armenian Question by eliminating the Armenian people. European exploitation of the Turkish weaknesses after the 1908 revolution and the Turkish loss of more territory in the Balkans contributed to this process. In 1909 more than 20,000 Armenians were massacred in the region of Cilicia. The Young Turks blamed Abdul-Hamid and deposed him, but there were strong indications that adherents of the Young Turks themselves participated in the carnage. The crisis prompted the Young Turks to declare a state of siege and suspend constitutional rights for several years.

It was during this period that the concept of "Turkism" and exclusive nationalism attracted several prominent Young Turks, who began to envisage a new, homogenous Turkish state in place of the enervated and exploited multinational Ottoman Empire. With the ideology of Turkism expounded by such writers as Zia Gokalp, the Young Turk extremists began to contemplate ways to abandon multinational "Ottomanism" for exclusive "Turkism" and so transform the Ottoman Empire into a homogenous Turkish domain.

In a study on the development of Turkish nationalism, Uriel Heyd notes that in "relacing the belief in God by the belief in nation," for Gokalp, "nationalism had become a religion."

Regarding the nation, Gokalp wrote:

I am a soldier; it is my commander
I obey without question all its orders
With closed eyes I carry out my duty.

Professor Robert Melson has summarised this attitude: "Simply put, the good of the nation and for its sake all is permissible". Despite the ominous circumstances, Armenian leaders continued to hope that satisfactory reforms and equality could be achieved within the structure of the Ottoman Empire.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 deeply alarmed the Armenians. If the Ottoman Empire entered the conflict on the side of Germany, the Armenian plateau would be would become the inevitable theatre of another Russo-Turkish war. In view of the fact that the Armenian homelands lay on both sides of the frontier, the Armenians would suffer severely no matter who might eventually win the war. For these reasons, Armenian spokesperson implored the Young Turk leaders to maintain neutrality and spare the Empire from disaster. Despite these appeals, the Germanophile Young Turks faction, led by the Minister of War Enver Pasha, and Minister of Internal Affairs Talaat Pasha sealed a secret alliance with Berlin and in return for joining the war against Great Britain, France and Russia, looked to the creation of new Turkish realm extending into Central Asia. The Armenians were now seen as an obstacle to the realisation to that goal. Turkism was to supplant Ottomanism and give purpose and justification to unlimited violence for the greater good of producing a homogenous state and society. In Accounting for Genocide, Helen Fein concluded:

The victims of twentieth century premeditated genocide - the Jews, the Gypsies, the Armenians - were murdered in order to fulfil the state's design for a new order . . . War was used in both cases . . . to transform the nation to correspond to the ruling elite's formula by eliminating the groups conceived as alien, enemies by the definition.

Sometimes Armenian Catholics and Protestants were exempted from the deportation decrees, only to follow once the majority belonging to the Armenian Apostolic Church had been dispatched. Secrecy, surprise, and deception were all part of the process.

The whole of Asia Minor was put in motion. Armenian serving in the Ottoman armies had already been segregated into unarmed labour battalions and were now taken out in batches and murdered. Of the remaining population, the adult and teenage males, as a pattern, swiftly, separated from the deportation caravans and killed outright under the directions of the Young Turk agents, the gendarmerie, and bandits prepared for the operation. Women and children were driven for months over mountains and deserts. Intentionally deprived of food and water, they fell by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands along the routes to the desert. In this manner, the Armenian people were effectively eliminated from their homeland of several millennia. Of the refugee survivors scattered throughout the Arab provinces and the Caucuses, thousands more were to die of starvation, epidemic and exposure. Even the memory of the nation was intended for obliteration, as churches and cultural monuments were desecrated and small children, snatched from their parents, were renamed and given out to be raised as non-Armenians and non-Christians.

The following excerpt from a report by the Italian consul-general at Trebizond typifies the hundreds of eyewitness accounts by foreign officials:

The passing of gangs of Armenian exiles beneath the windows and before the door of the Consulate; their prayers for help, when neither I nor any other could do anything to answer them; the city in a state of siege, guarded at every point by 15,000 troops in complete war equipment, by thousands of police agents, by bands of volunteers, and by the members of the Committee of Union and Progress; the lamentations, the tears, the abandonments, the imprecations, the many suicides, the instantaneous deaths from sheer terror; the sudden unhinging of mens' reason; the conflagration; the shooting of victims in the city; the ruthless searches through the houses and in the countryside; the hundreds of corpses found every day along the exile road; the young women converted by force to Moslem families; or else placed by the hundreds on board ships in nothing but shirts, and then capsizes and drowned in the Black Sea and the River Deyirmen Dere - these are my last ineffaceable memories of Trebizond, memories which still, at a month's distance torment my soul and almost drive me frantic.

Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, tried to reason with the Young Turk leaders and to alert the United States and world to the tragic events, but, except for some donations for relief efforts, his actions were in vain. His description of the genocide begins:

The Central Government now announced its intention of gathering the two million or more Armenians living in the several sections of the Empire and transporting them to this desolate and inhospitable region. Had they undertaken such a deportation in good faith, it would have represented the height of cruelty and inj ustice. As a matter of fact, the Turks never had the slightest idea of re-establishing the Annenians in this new country . . . The real purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction; it really represented a new method of massacre. When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to the whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact

Ambassador Morgenthau concluded:

I am confident that whole history of the human race contains no terrible episode as this.

Estimates of the Armenian dead vary from 600,000 to two million. A United Nations Humans Rights Sub-Commission report in 1985 gives the figure of "at least one million," but the important point in understanding a tragedy such as this is not the exact and precise count of the number who died - that will never be known - but the fact that more than half the Armenian race perished and the rest were forcibly driven from their ancestral homeland. Another important point is that what befell the Armenians was by the will of the government. While a large segment of the general population participated in the looting and massacres, many Muslim leaders were shocked by what was happening, and thousands of Armenian women and children were rescued and sheltered by compassionate individual Turks, Kurds and Arabs.

Although the genocide committed by the Ottoman Young Turks and the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Gennany each had particular and unique features, there were some striking parallels. The similarities include the perpetration of genocide under the cover of major international conflict, thus minimising the possibility of external intervention; conception of the plan by a monolithic and xenophobic clique; espousal of an ideology giving purpose and justification to racism, exclusivism, and intolerance towards elements resisting or deemed unworthy of assimilation; imposition of strict party discipline and secrecy during the period of preparation; formulation of extra-legal special armed forces to ensure the rigorous execution of the operation; provocation of public hostility towards the victim group and ascribing to it the very excesses to which it would be subjected.

Certainty of the vulnerability of the targeted groups (demonstrated in the Armenian case by the previous massacres of 1894-1986, and 1909); exploitation of advances in mechanisation and communication, and thoroughness; and the use of sanctions such as promotions and incentives to, loot or conversely, the dismissal and punishment of reluctant officials and the intimidation of persons who might consider harbouring members of the victim group.