Green Party members of the Bundestag, with party leader Cem Özdemir in the center, vote on June 2 the resolution on the Armeniain massacre | Michael Kappeler/EPA Eleven German MPs under police protection over Armenian vote Foreign ministry also warns they would not be safe in Turkey.

Eleven German MPs of Turkish origin have been put under police protection after receiving death threats for supporting a parliamentary resolution that calls the 1915 massacre of Armenians in Turkey a genocide, the BBC reports.

The German foreign ministry also advised the MPs against traveling to Turkey, saying that Berlin can not guarantee their safety there.

Cem Özdemir, one of the champions of the resolution said death threats and insults are nothing new, but they have intensified after the vote.

The 11 MPs have suffered criticism both from Germany's Turkish community and from authorities in Turkey.

“Their blood is impure and we know whose mouthpiece they are,” Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in Istanbul. They are “the long arm of the separatist terrorists placed in Germany,” he said of the 11 MPs.

Ankara withdrew its ambassador to Berlin following the Bundestag vote.

Ankara’s Mayor İbrahim Melih Gökçek tweeted a montage of photos of the 11 German-Turkish MPs who backed the genocide resolution, accusing them of “stabbing us in the back.”

Turkey opposes the term “genocide” being attached to the deportation and murder of members of the Christian Armenian authority by Ottoman Empire authorities during World War I, when Turkey was a German ally. While acknowledging there were deaths and deportations, Turkey rejects as exaggerated estimates that 800,000-1.5 million people died between 1915-16.

Angela Merkel’s response, during a news conference Tuesday, was to call the Turkish response “incomprehensible” and defend the MPs in question as “freely elected parliamentarians.”

Janosch Delcker contributed to this article.