(Reuters) - The German parliament overwhelmingly approved on Friday a resolution branding the mass killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces a century ago as genocide, risking a diplomatic rupture with Ankara.
The vote marks a significant change of stance for Germany, Turkey's biggest trade partner in the European Union and home to a large ethnic Turkish diaspora. Unlike France and some two dozen other countries, Berlin has long resisted using the word. The term 'genocide' also has special resonance in Germany, which has worked hard to come to terms with its responsibility for the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust.
In a parliamentary session to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of the killings, all parliamentary groups in the Bundestag lower house backed the resolution in a vote likely to infuriate Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.
"What happened in the middle of the First World War in the Ottoman Empire under the eyes of the world was a genocide," Bundestag President Norbert Lammert said at the start of German lawmakers' debate on the resolution.
Muslim Turkey denies that the massacres, at a time when Ottoman troops were battling Russian forces in the east of the empire, constituted genocide. It says there was no organized campaign to wipe out the Armenians, who are Christians, and no evidence of any such orders from the Ottoman authorities.
German President Joachim Gauck also used the word 'genocide' in a speech on Thursday. Gauck, a former East German pastor with a penchant for defying convention, also suggested Germany itself might bear some of the blame because of its actions during World War One.
The Ottoman Empire, whose large ethnic Armenian population had flourished for centuries, was an ally of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany during World War One when the massacres occurred.
Most Western scholars refer to the mass killings of the Ottoman Armenians as genocide. Pope Francis also used the term this month, prompting Turkey to accuse him of inciting hatred.