The World War I-era massacre of Armenians by the Turks should be recognized as genocide despite the political ramifications such a move would have with Turkey, the chief Nazi hunter of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said Thursday.

Historians estimate that as many as 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed by Muslim Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1923, in what is widely viewed by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, Yad Vashem, which has recently referred to the mass killings in Darfur as genocide, said Thursday that the massacre of the Armenians was part of the Holocaust center's educational activities on "other instances of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass murder." The issue is especially sensitive for Israel on a political level due to the country's close relations with Turkey.