Dr. Lepsius took considerable care with the figures he used, although perhaps he should have been more circumspect in accepting the figure of 1,845,450 given by the Armenian patriarchate in Constantinople as the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, it is unlikely to be far wrong, if we accept the figures that Enver Pasha gave to Dr. Ernst Jackh as early as the end of August 1915 for the number of Armenians dead (300,000) and those quoted by the German Embassy on October 4, 1916. Of the approximately 2 million Armenians living in the empire, 1,500,000 had been deported and between 800,000 and 1,000,000 of those had been killed. Lepsius initially estimated the number of Armenians who had died in the empire at 1,000,000; in the 1919 edition of the Bericht he revised that figure to 1,100,000. Lepsius put the number of eastern Armenians killed during the Ottoman invasion of Transcaucasia in 1918 at between 50,000 and 100,000. Another German closely involved at the time, Ernst Sommer of the Deutscher Hilfsbund, estimated in 1919 that 1,400,000 Armenians had been deported, of whom at the time scarcely more than 250,000 were alive (Sommer, 1919). <…> Lepsius also estimated that the number of Armenians forcibly converted to Islam was between 250,000 and 300,000. There was no religious element in the forced conversions to Islam at this time. The Ittihadist rulers of the empire were unbelievers. By contrast, some Turkish Muslim leaders, imams and hodjas, expressed disapproval at what the Armenians were compelled to endure. The harsh measures against the Armenians of Kutahia were declared theologically invalid by the local mufti Forced conversion had instead a political motive: to destroy the Armenians' identity, to turn Armenians into «Turks» so that they would appear in the other column of statistics and thus weaken or nullify any Armenian demands for autonomy or independence. Some Armenians appear to have returned to their faith after the armistice, but no figures exist for them.