Collections
Siege of Aintab, by Dr. Lorrin Shepard
Location
Aintab (Gaziantep), Turkey
Year
1921
Item Detail
The Siege of Aintab: A Phase of the Turkish Nationalist Movement, by Dr. Lorrin A. Shepard
Context
Nellie Marie Miller Mann (1897–1997) was a Mennonite volunteer from Elkhart, Indiana, who served as secretary to the treasurer of Near East Relief headquarters in Beirut from 1921 to 1923.
A graduate of Goshen College and member of Prairie Street Mennonite Church, she was one of only two Mennonite women to serve in the Near East through the Mennonite Relief Commission during this period. From her desk in the Beirut office, Mann processed correspondence and financial records while the organization managed the evacuation of tens of thousands of Armenian orphans from Cilicia into Syria. She witnessed the Smyrna disaster refugee crisis of 1922 and the murder of NER worker Lester James Wright by bandits near Aleppo.
The collection includes personal and official correspondence, NER administrative reports, field accounts of relief operations in Syria and Cilicia, and documents related to the deaths of NER workers Lester James Wright and Menno Shellenberger. Mann’s letters to her family and fiancé Cleo Mann provide a rare firsthand account of daily life at NER headquarters during one of the organization’s most intense operational periods.
David W. Mann published his mother’s writings in Letters from Syria, 1921–1923 (2013) and donated the original materials to the Near East Foundation.
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Holding Institution
Rockefeller Archive Center
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External Link
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Attribution
Nellie Miller Mann Series (Series 14), Near East Foundation Records (FA406), Rockefeller Archive Center. Courtesy of David Mann.
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Rights
Some materials may be protected by U.S. copyright law. Materials are presented for non-commercial research and educational use under fair use. Uses beyond fair use may require permission from the copyright owner. Responsibility for rights determination and compliance rests with the user.
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Notes
Reproduced in Letters from Syria appendix, pp. 253–259.
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Document Contents
Five-page narrative by Dr. Lorrin P. Shepard titled “The Siege of Aintab, A Phase of the Turkish Nationalist Movement,” recounting the 1920–1921 Turkish-French confrontation at Aintab against the wider Nationalist resistance to the Treaty of Sèvres. Shepard opens with the February 1, 1920 murder of two YMCA secretaries, Perry and Johnson, by Nationalists between Killis and Aintab, and the parallel Marash massacre of January–February 1920 in which two-fifths of that city was destroyed and ten thousand Armenians killed. After a French column withdrew from Aintab on April 1, 1920, the Armenians fought a seventy-day siege from their quarter — including the manufacture of a homemade cannon nicknamed “The Avenger,” the inclusion of about fifteen hundred orphans and rescue-home women whose food stocks fed the population, and an organized defense council with military, food, police, health, housing, and judicial commissions — ended by an end-of-May armistice that withdrew the French to the College buildings half a mile west; one orphan was killed and two NER matrons wounded by Turkish fire on the American-flagged buildings. After the Turks resumed hostilities on July 28 against the French only, an August 11 French column relieved the city, and after a final phase beginning November 20 the Turkish garrison surrendered February 8, 1921 from lack of food. Shepard credits NER with over $30,000 in funds for the destitute, hospital treatment of Armenian soldiers and civilians, French officers and men, colonial troops, and even Turkish prisoners, and industrial work-employment for needy men and women.