According to Schellendorff , after all the former Ottoman chief of General Staff of the army, this general Armenian rebellion was so immense that it endangered all the Ottoman military operations in the East against Russia. He spoke of an exodus of the Muslim population in these regions out of fear of Armenian massacres, and the need for the Turks to act fast. He then stated that the cabinet declared the Armenians, all of them, enemies of the state and gave the order for deportation. He went as far as to assert, fantastically, that the Armenians were to be deported to these Northern Mesopotamian sparsely populated areas for their own safety, that is, far away from the war and the Kurds, and also for their own benefit, in that they would be able to colonize this “promising land.” Schellendorff went on to claim that the deaths of the deportees were just unlucky side effects of the war, that is, the difficult logistics and the lack of food, medicine, and so on... It becomes clear that for Schellendorff —as for many of the justificationalists—genocide was a “reasonable,” “justifiable,” if not unavoidable cost of doing political and military business in the twentieth century.