A Near East Relief worker named Gertrude Anthony submitted a report to Admiral Mark Bristol, the American High Commissio...

A Near East Relief worker named Gertrude Anthony submitted a report to Admiral Mark Bristol, the American High Commissioner in Constantinople, on 1 November 1921, documenting killings, arson, looting, and deportations of Greeks and Armenians in northern Asia Minor. Bristol did not forward it to the State Department. The document recording that failure is now held at the US National Archives. The report reached Washington anyway. On 12 December 1921, an internal State Department note recorded that Anthony had delivered a copy directly to the department that same morning, and acknowledged that Bristol had never passed it on. That note is what confirms the report did eventually reach the responsible service. Anthony's account detailed violence from July 1921, including attacks carried out by the armed men of Topal Osman, the notorious Osman Aga, against Greek and Armenian communities in the Merzifon area. The State Department note, drawing on her account and those of her colleagues, described the persecutions as a continuation of the Young Turks' extermination policy, now carried out by nationalist forces, and relayed the assessment that US intervention could save thousands of lives. Anthony was a niece of Susan B. Anthony and had taught natural sciences in Berkeley, California before travelling to the region in 1919 with her sister Amy, a nurse. She was meticulous in her reporting, separating firsthand knowledge from secondhand accounts she judged credible, and even correcting an earlier draft because imprecise wording had made one week of massacres appear to be two. She asked Bristol not to publicise her statements, worried that exposure would result in new restrictions or a halt to humanitarian operations further inland. In 1922 she returned to the region and that autumn organised the movement of roughly 500 refugees and orphans from Merzifon to Samsun using 56 wagons, a journey that took three days. Her papers are held at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. #PontianGenocide #GreekHistory #NearEast