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In memory of my grandparents, Rose, Lucy, Karekin,
and Megerdich
 INTRODUCTION

When I was a little kid, there was nothing I loved better than hanging out at
my grandparents’ house. In her sunny kitchen, my Grandma Lucy would
fashion honey-drenched Armenian pastries, while out in the backyard
Grampa Megerdich roasted lamb shish kebab under the apple trees. After
dessert, Grampa might knock back a tiny glass of arak and tell me stories. I
was held rapt by the horrific narratives he dredged up from his faraway past.
In his sweetly accented English, Megerdich would describe burning churches
and sadistic horsemen. The stories would always end the same way. My
grandfather would instruct me, “If you ever meet a Turk, kill him.”
I was no more than four years old when I first heard those words.
My grandfather had spent his boyhood in the troubled eastern frontier of
the Ottoman Empire more than a century ago. He had plenty of reason to hate
the Turks, who had killed his father and almost killed him. In 1915, when he
was barely twenty-one years old, Megerdich escaped the genocide that
would exterminate hundreds of thousands of his fellow Armenians. More
than once he told me the story of how his village burned while he and his
mother crouched down in the middle of a wheat field, hiding from the
zapiteh. Under darkness of night they fled, managed to find passage to
France, and in 1916 Megerdich and my great-grandmother immigrated to the
United States from Le Havre. My grandfather claimed that he had survived
because he was smarter than the rest. That’s why I was such a smart little
boy. But perhaps it was just luck.
Megerdich’s own father was not so lucky. Ovygin Jamgochian, after
successfully immigrating to the United States in the 1890s, had gained
American citizenship. But he made the mistake of returning to “the old
country” to find his wife and teenage son. The Young Turk government didn’t
recognize his American citizenship, and he was swept up with hundreds of
thousands of other able-bodied men and drafted into the army. His
conscription would become a death sentence. Within months of being drafted,
Ovygin, like most of the Armenians in the Ottoman army, was disarmed, then
forced into a labor battalion where Christian soldiers were worked to death.
All we know is that his family never saw him again. My Grandma Lucy also
lost her father, Koumjian the jeweler, who once worked in the Constantinople
bazaar. As far as we know, Lucy’s father, like Ovygin, also died violently.
I understood from a young age that I was an “Armenian,” and this meant
that my family, like countless other Armenian families, had lost loved ones at
the hands of the Turks. But knowing this and embracing it were two different
things. Most of my freckle-faced friends in Woburn, Massachusetts, were of
Irish American ancestry, blissfully unaware of their own harsh history.
Though I was olive-skinned and kinky-haired and attended the Armenian (not
Roman Catholic) church, I saw myself, like them, as nothing more than a
carefree American kid. The horrors that had touched the lives of my
grandfather’s generation had not touched me. I was not an immigrant, I spoke
perfect English, and I had zero interest in emphasizing anything that would
exaggerate the differences between me and my classmates.
Horrible things had happened back in “the old country,” but there was a
disconnect between that carnage and my sweet existence as a suburban
teenager. My life growing up in a Massachusetts subdivision was filled with
pot-smoking teenagers in torn jeans who barely paid attention to school and
in their spare time protested the Vietnam War. In another universe, a long
time ago, Kurdish tribesmen armed with pistols and knives had terrorized
villagers and abducted young Christian women. My grandfather’s world was
genuinely dangerous. The stories I had heard at his knee were so intense they
seemed mythic, unreal, more like adventure stories than real life. These
events had taken place in a land a million miles away, a place my grandfather
called “Armenia.” I loved Armenian food, I loved Armenian weddings and
the strange choral music sung in our churches, but I was an American kid, not
an Armenian.
As I began my career as an author and actor, I refrained from emphasizing
my roots. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as an exotic “ethnic” actor, and if I
was going to write about the human condition, I would represent the world I
knew, the leafy suburbs of New England and, later, the streets of New York
City, not the harsh plains of Anatolia, of which I had no direct experience.
The Armenian history that I had come to know through my grandfather’s
stories was not my history. I had not suffered in the desert, I had not lost
loved ones there, I had not witnessed atrocities firsthand. Why should I be
the one to write about those sad events from so long ago?

When I first heard about the assassination of Talat Pasha about twenty years
ago, the story seemed more like wishful thinking than the truth. Mehmet Talat
Pasha, a leader of the Ottoman Empire (which became the modern Republic
of Turkey) during World War I, had been assassinated in 1921 in Berlin by a
young Armenian. The twist was that this young engineering student,
Soghomon Tehlirian, was acquitted and set free. A supreme act of vengeance
had seemingly been pardoned. To most Armenians this made perfect sense.
Talat was a monster, he was responsible for a massive tragedy, and Tehlirian
slew him, like David slew Goliath. Like my grandfather’s stories, Talat’s
death brought to mind an episode from a nineteenth-century novel.
When I came upon a reference to Tehlirian again in Peter Balakian’s
Black Dog of Fate and a few years later in Samantha Power’s Pulitzer
Prize–winning book on genocide, A Problem from Hell, I realized that this
was not some kind of Armenian urban legend. Peter Balakian (whose great-
uncle had been a witness at Tehlirian’s trial) and Samantha Power told the
same tale: Tehlirian had been a survivor of the genocide who had seen his
entire family brutally massacred by Turks. He had then chanced upon Talat,
who was in hiding in Berlin after the war. After his arrest, Tehlirian
explained to the police that he’d been driven to shoot Talat by the effect of
all that he had witnessed. Incredibly, the judge and jury sided with the young
assassin, sympathizing with his suffering and loss. The June 4, 1921, New
York Times headline summed it up: “THEY SIMPLY HAD TO LET HIM
GO!”
I found the transcript of Tehlirian’s trial online. It was packed with
gruesome details of Soghomon’s ordeal as well as a blow-by-blow
description of the assassination. Why wasn’t there a book or a film based on
Tehlirian, I wondered. Clearly, the killing of Talat and Tehlirian’s
exoneration were tailor-made source material for a motion picture. I could
easily imagine the structure of a big film: Act 1: the deportations and
massacres in the desert; Act 2: Berlin, the assassination; Act 3: the trial and
the triumphant acquittal. A true story filled with pathos and complexity. And
history. I had finally found an Armenian subject that would challenge me as a
writer and memorialize my beloved grandfather. I decided to set aside a few
months to write the screenplay.
As soon as I began to sketch out a draft, obvious questions came to mind.
How does an engineering student manage to kill a man who has spent his life
surrounded by bodyguards? And with one shot? In the middle of a busy
street, in the middle of the day? How did Tehlirian, a man who could barely
speak German, get his hands on a gun in postwar Berlin? Was Tehlirian
really a student? There was no evidence of his attending classes or having
any friends who were students. If he wasn’t a student, what was he doing in
Berlin in the first place? How did he support himself? He didn’t seem to
have had a job. I read the court transcript over and over again. Something
was wrong with this picture.
Then I discovered Resistance and Revenge, a dense monograph
published in France in the 1980s by the journalist Jacques Derogy, which
explained that in fact, the young Armenian was not an engineering student at
all. Nor, as it turns out, had he been a witness to the massacre of his family in
the desert. At the time of their deportation he hadn’t even been living in
Turkey.
Derogy laid out an even more remarkable, almost unbelievable story: A
small group of Armenian conspirators with headquarters in the United States,
calling themselves “Operation Nemesis,” had successfully organized the
assassination not only of Talat but also of most of the Turkish leaders
responsible for the genocide. Neither Peter Balakian nor Samantha Power
had made much of the Nemesis conspiracy; neither had mentioned its long list
of victims. They focused on Tehlirian and repeated the story he told in court.
I needed to know more. Over the next seven years I immersed myself in an
exploration of history and of horror, of what the judge at Tehlirian’s trial
called “a tradition of bloody vengeance.” I found links to British intelligence,
and I reviewed recent research on interference in the trial by German
officials. I asked scholar Aram Arkun to translate Tehlirian’s 1953 memoirs,
originally published in Armenian, and his work allowed me to deepen my
understanding of this complex conspiracy.
These men were contemporaries of my grandfather; some had grown up
only a hundred or so miles from where my grandfather was born. But they
were nothing like my grandfather. My grandfather could hate Turks, but could
he ever have killed one? It is one thing to hate, to wish harm on one’s enemy,
but it is a very different thing to step up to someone on the street and put a
bullet in his brain. And watch him die.
My grandfather wanted me to know what had happened to him long before
I was born. He wanted me to be ready for the worst. He wanted to save me.
And so he told me terrible stories and he warned me about the Turks. I’m
sure he could never have imagined his young grandson actually killing a
Turk, but he had said what he’d said and it never left me. He shared his
memory with me, the most valuable thing he owned.
Tehlirian and his cohorts were not simply avengers. They were a small
group of men, including a Boston newspaper editor, a Syracuse CPA, and a
Washington diplomat, who, through their actions, tried to offset in some way
the anonymous deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who
died in the deserts and in their homes and in mountain wastelands. No
headstones mark where those victims of Talat and his gang fell. Nothing is
left of them but our memory of them. To the million and a half Armenians
who perished at the hands of Ottoman Turks during the First World War, and
to their countless descendants, the actions of Operation Nemesis shouted,
“You existed. You are memorable. We remember you.”
For almost one hundred years, the story of this controversial band of men
has been clouded by myth. I wrote this book because I had no choice. The
Nemesis story required more attention than a simple screenplay. I’ve done
my best to tell it as honestly and completely as possible. In this way, I honor
memory.
 PROLOGUE

Around ten o’clock on the morning of March 15, 1921, a heavyset man
wearing an overcoat emerged from his apartment house in the fashionable
Charlottenburg district of Berlin. He carried a cane and was bareheaded
despite the cool early spring weather. The man wasn’t comfortable wearing a
European-style hat. It didn’t look right to him. But he wouldn’t dare wear a
fez in this anarchic city of spies. The last thing he wanted to do was call
attention to his Turkishness. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, the fresh air
lifted his spirits. The winter had been long and hard, but a thaw was coming.
Soon this exiled Turk could return to his home in Constantinople. His fellow
Young Turk, General Mustapha Kemal, was finding success in the east; in
months the war would finally be over.
The man in the overcoat, Talat Pasha, had been hiding in Germany under
an assumed name, pretending to be a businessman. In the years prior to
moving to the apartment on Hardenbergstrasse, Talat had achieved fame as
the leader of the Ottoman Empire during the Great War. The name Talat was
known to people all over the world, but for the present it was a liability. The
British forces occupying Constantinople had arrested numerous Ottoman
leaders, the sultan’s government had held war crimes trials, and though he
had evaded arrest, Talat had been found guilty and sentenced to death in
absentia. For the time being, it would be wiser to go by the more humble
“Salih Bey.”
Exile had diminished but not extinguished Talat’s power. He was still a
very important man, looked up to by many for leadership. But he had no
choice; he had to remain hidden. Only days before, in a secret meeting with
the British agent Aubrey Herbert, Talat had been asked if he feared
assassination. He had coolly responded, “I never think of it.”1 But he did
think of it. He thought of it all the time. There were rumors that the
Armenians were hunting for him, that there was a bounty on his head. Talat
was accustomed to the fact that his very presence intimidated people, but he
also knew that he had to be extremely careful.
What Talat did not know as he strolled down Berlin’s fashionable
Hardenbergstrasse on this cool spring morning was that his alias had already
been discovered. Danger was much closer than he imagined. Even as he
stepped lightly among the local Berliners on his way to the Tiergarten park,
he was being followed. Across the street and parallel to his course, a young
Armenian émigré from Turkish Anatolia tracked his route. Unlike Talat,
Soghomon Tehlirian was almost invisible, figuratively and literally. No one
knew his name, no one in Berlin would ever recognize him, and in the midst
of this posh neighborhood of White Russian émigrés, he did not stand out at
all. Tehlirian was the personification of anonymity. In a few moments, that
anonymity would end.
Anticipating Talat’s path, the assassin jogged across Hardenbergstrasse,
then abruptly turned and strode back toward his quarry. The young Armenian
found himself coming face-to-face with the heavyset Turk. His temples
throbbing with excitement, Tehlirian focused on his breathing, slowing it,
controlling it. This was no time to fall to pieces. Tehlirian searched Talat’s
eyes as the two men passed each other. Was there a reaction, a recognition? If
there was, it lasted only a fraction of a second. “Fear came into his eyes,”
Tehlirian would later write, as an “amazing calmness engulfed my being.”2
As Tehlirian stepped past Talat, the larger man adjusted his stride,
slowing just slightly. The young soldier drew his pistol from his waistband,
raised it to the nape of Talat’s broad neck, and squeezed the trigger. The
victim probably never heard the gun fire. The bullet cleaved Talat’s spinal
cord, entered the base of his skull, traversed his brain, and exited his temple
just above his left eye. The shock set off a massive coronary, and the large
man shuddered. Then, according to Tehlirian, “he fell on his face with a
sound like a branch sawed off a tree.” A woman a few feet ahead of them on
the sidewalk screamed and fainted as a single thought popped into
Tehlirian’s mind: “So effortless!”
Tehlirian, whose sole raison d’être was to end the life of the man now
lying on the ground before him, immediately understood that another bullet
wouldn’t be needed. Transfixed, the twenty-five-year-old Armenian refugee
stood over the corpse, the pistol still clutched in his hand, as “the black thick
blood flowed like kerosene out of a broken container.” The killer then
dipped the toe of his shoe into the pool of blood as shouting rose up all
around him: “Someone has been murdered! Grab him!” Tehlirian broke out of
his trance, reflex took over, and he ran, completely forgetting his handler’s
explicit instructions to stay put after the killing. “I passed by them, no one
tried to stop me.” Tehlirian sprinted twenty or thirty steps, then veered into
the Fasanenstrasse.
The crowd, at first reluctant to chase a violent, perhaps deranged killer,
caught up with the young man and surrounded him. Someone grabbed his
shoulder. Another smacked him on the back of the head. More punches and
slaps. People in the crowd were attacking Tehlirian because they mistakenly
believed he had gunned down a famous German general. As he was being
beaten, Tehlirian felt something hard and sharp tearing at his face. Later he
would realize that someone had been hitting him with a key ring full of
jagged keys. The blood dripped down onto his shirt. A man interceded and
hauled him off to the local police outpost by the Tiergarten gate. Tehlirian
shouted to the crowd, “What you want? I am Armenian, he, Turkish. What is
it to you?”3
The police hauled the bleeding young man back to the scene of the crime.
“Blood was flowing from my head. Other policemen arrived. They turned me
toward Hardenberg. The monster had fallen in the same position on the
sidewalk. The police, the crowd, at a certain distance, surrounded all sides.
We passed on.”4 The crowd surged, still struggling to lay hands on the killer.
A paddy wagon rolled up and Tehlirian was shoved into the back. Fifteen
minutes later he was in his cell at the Charlottenburg police station.
A trial followed a little over two months later. Stunningly, Tehlirian was
acquitted. In occupied Constantinople a few weeks after that, the Muslim
Azeri leader Khan Javanshir was gunned down outside the Pera Palace Hotel
by another Armenian. That assassin, Misak Torlakian, would also be set free
after a two-month trial. In December, Said Halim Pasha, former Young Turk
Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, was shot dead as he was returning to
his home only blocks away from the Borghese Gardens in Rome. This
assassin would also evade arrest despite a massive manhunt.
 The following spring in Berlin, Said Halim’s killer, Arshavir Shiragian,
teamed up with Aram Yerganian to assassinate both Dr. Behaeddin Shakir,
former head of the organization that oversaw the genocide of Armenians in
Turkey, and Djemal Azmi, the notorious former governor-general of
Trebizond. Neither Shiragian nor Yerganian was caught. Finally, in July
1922, Djemal Pasha, one of the key members of the Young Turk government,
was slain by Stepan Dzaghigian in Tiflis, Georgia. Dzaghigian was arrested
by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, and sent to Siberia, where he would
remain until his death.

These assassinations and at least four others were a response to the genocide
of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. As the war
wound down, it appeared that those Turks responsible for the massive
destruction of the Christian civilian population would face judgment.5 Trials
were held in Constantinople, but by that time the central leaders had already
slipped out of Turkey and had found safe harbor in Berlin, Rome, Tiflis, and
Moscow. President Woodrow Wilson proposed a protective “mandate” for
the Armenian provinces of Turkey, providing a homeland to which survivors
might return. The mandate never materialized. Instead, Turkish nationalists
under General Mustapha Kemal successfully pushed back forces seeking to
occupy Turkish territory. By 1922, any thoughts of reparations for the
Armenians, an Armenian homeland, or even a right of return had been
extinguished as the Soviets moved in to claim possession of the short-lived
Republic of Armenia, the tiny sliver of territory in the Caucasus to which
hundreds of thousands of refugees had fled.
Operation Nemesis was an unprecedented conspiracy designed to avenge
an unprecedented modern genocide. With little training, resources, or
experience in intelligence operations, this humble collection of businessmen,
intellectuals, diplomats, and former soldiers virtually eradicated an entire
former government. As a group, they complemented one another: the quiet,
steadfast members collaborated with the romantic visionaries; the impetuous
spurred on the cautious. Together they formed an international team,
understaffed and underfinanced, at a time when communication was by cable
and all travel by rail or steamship. This thin network spread out across
Europe and the Near East before systematically and effectively dispatching
its targets. In the end, “Operation Nemesis” would satisfy its ambitions while
having repercussions far beyond its need for revenge. Then, as suddenly as
they appeared, this small cadre of businessmen, editors, and veterans faded
into the background of history, almost forgotten. This is their story.
PART I
 CHAPTER ONE

The Rise of Empire

Ne mutlu Türküm diyene! [Happy is the man who can say, “I am a

Turk!”]
—Kemal Ataturk

I am Armenian, he, Turkish. What is it to you?

—Soghomon Tehlirian

The Christian Armenians and the Muslim Ottomans claim rich and complex
histories. The Armenians flourished in Asia Minor as early as the dawn of
recorded history. In fact, an Armenian king established the first Christian
state in AD 301, while the ancestors of the Ottoman Turks invaded the same
region about seven hundred years later. By the seventeenth century, the
Muslim Ottoman Empire had conquered and absorbed territory extending
from Europe to Persia, including the ancient Armenian homeland. At their
peak, the Ottomans displayed a cultural and scientific sophistication equal to
the greatest premodern civilizations.
It is not an exaggeration to say that both peoples, the Muslim and
Christian subjects of the sultans, shared a civilization for centuries. There is
no greater demonstration of this fact than the awe-inspiring mosques of
Istanbul, requisitioned by royalty and designed by an Armenian, Mimar
Sinan. In these mosques are made manifest the grandeur of the Ottomans and
the aesthetic perfection that Sinan envisioned. Neither could exist without the
other.

The terms “Turk” and “Armenian,” used continuously since the end of the
nineteenth century, seem easy to understand: Turks are the people from
Turkey and Armenians are the people from Armenia, right? In fact, Turks
didn’t always call themselves “Turks,” and “Armenians” hail not only from
the eastern marches of Asia Minor but also from the Russian Caucasus and
would also settle the fertile region of Cilicia, just north of Syria. Aside from
their respective religious faiths, the two peoples are in many ways congruent
in their culture and style. Both peoples call roughly the same vast territory
home.1 In fact, over the last one thousand years, they have intermixed
populations continuously via religious conversion, intermarriage, and the
complex Ottoman practice of devshirme, the systematic forced conversion to
Islam of a prescribed number of Christian young men. In the end, religion
became identity.2
An interesting example of intermixture is the Hemshin, a Muslim people
who make their home in the mountains near the Black Sea. It is believed that
the Hemshin are the descendants of Armenians who fled Muslim raids
centuries ago, settled in the region, and over time forgot their roots. As a
result, they believe that they are Turks, though they speak an Armenian
dialect and continue to practice certain rituals associated with Christianity
(for example, rudimentary baptism). In the twentieth century, as railroads and
automobiles made Asia Minor a much smaller place, these remote Hemshin
villages began to integrate with the rest of Turkey. The Hemshin people
started to migrate into larger population centers and as “Turks” were amazed
to discover people who spoke their Hemshin mountain dialect.
Over the millennia, the armies of numerous empires invaded and re-
invaded the peninsula that extends from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus,
from the Syrian deserts to the Black Sea. The Hittites, the Greeks, the
Persians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Seljuks, the Mongols,
the Russians, and finally the Ottomans all at one time or another invaded and
settled here. Each empire brought its civilization as well as its subject
people. Over thousands of years, not only did dozens of ethnic and religious
groups such as Kurds, Turks, Arabs, Persians, and Greeks settle in the region
but also Jews, Roma, Albanians, Uzbeks, Christian Arabs, Hemshin, Laz,
Turkmen and Yoruks, Georgians, Chaldean people, Tajiks, Zaza, later
“Tartars” and Circassians, Pomeks, Cossacks, and Uygurs. Unbelievably,
even the Normans of France invaded eastern Anatolia at one point. Invaders
melded with those who came before them as well as migrants who entered
the region as they were chased from their far-off homelands. Before the
modern era, a greater variety of peoples crossed and recrossed this region
than anywhere else on earth. And as far as we know, going back to the
earliest written history, through all these invasions and migrations, the
Armenians lived here, as kings and as peasants.
Asia Minor is where the East meets the West, where Asia meets Europe,
making the great city of Constantinople a point where most traffic moving
eastward or westward, northward or southward, had to pass. The first
humans must have traveled through this land northward from Africa.
According to the Bible, Noah’s ark finally came to rest on the holy mountain
of Ararat, which rises up from the easternmost reaches of the Armenian
plateau. The Silk Road traverses this territory. The Ottoman Empire knit
together Europe and the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans. Before it
began to break apart, roughly one third of those ruled by the sultan were
European, one third Anatolian, and one third Arabian/African. Just prior to
World War I, Constantinople was both a European and a Near Eastern
capital. For centuries it had been populated by Muslims and Christians as
well as Jews, and at the end of the nineteenth century, the mix, reflecting the
makeup of the empire itself, was almost fifty-fifty Muslim-Christian. Asia
Minor has always been a place of convergence.
After the earliest years of Ottoman conquest, when the Armenians became
a subject people, it was the Muslim Turks who held power as military men,
administrators, or clerics, as inheritors of a vast militaristic empire. Often
the Christians and Jews performed those tasks the Muslims avoided. They
became the artisans, the merchants, the traders, the bankers. In the earliest
days of the Ottoman Empire, society was divided not so much by religion as
by “those who fought in its wars and those who paid for them.”3 The people
who belonged to the sultan’s military-administrative machine were known as
askeri. The taxpaying class, by contrast, was known as raya (from the
Arabic meaning “flock”). In time, raya would refer to the Christian
peasantry.
In the first century after the death of Jesus, long before the Ottomans arrived
in Asia Minor, apostles of the new Jewish sect based on his teachings
traveled to outlying lands spreading the “good news.” It was natural that
some would end up in the kingdom of Armenia, which around the time of
Christ existed as an autonomous if subordinate region of the Roman Empire.
According to legend, Saint Jude (also known as Thaddeus), one of the
original twelve apostles, was the first to make his way to Armenia,
whereupon he converted the king’s daughters. A few years later, Saint
Bartholomew also visited Armenia and made yet more conversions,
including the king’s sister. (In the early Christian era, women seemed to be
attracted to conversion more often than men.) These missions did not end
well for the apostles, both of whom ended up as martyrs, Jude in Beirut and
Bartholomew at Albanopolis in Armenia. Bartholomew is traditionally
depicted in religious imagery as crucified upside down or skinned alive, as
in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, where he is seen clutching his own flayed
skin. Because the first Christians in Armenia were converted by original
apostles, Armenians named their form of Christianity “Apostolic.”
By AD 200, according to Tertullian (widely considered to be the first
Christian author of note), numerous Christian enclaves had been established
in Armenia. The Armenian rulers at the time hewed to the policy of the
Roman Empire and tried to root out these secret societies. They persecuted
the followers of Jesus with increasing violence, just as the Romans attempted
to extinguish the cult wherever it arose in the empire.
Around AD 300, two and a half centuries after the apostles arrived to
make converts, the reigning Roman emperor, Diocletian, became one of the
most energetic antagonists of the new faith. This was the era when Christians
would be smeared with pine tar and set afire or forced to fight hungry lions
in the Roman Colosseum for the entertainment of the masses. The reigning
Armenian king, Trdat, being an ally of Diocletian, followed suit, and became
notorious in his own right for torturing and killing Christians.
An itinerant Christian monk named Gregory arrived at Trdat’s court. Here
the story gets complicated, because not only was Gregory Christian but also,
according to legend, he was the son of Anak, the assassin of King Trdat’s
father. (Some sources claim that Gregory specifically sought out Trdat as a
way of atoning for his father’s sin.) When Trdat learned that the young monk
was Anak’s son, he had him tortured and tossed into an underground stone
cell littered with dead bodies and crawling with serpents. The cell is located
at the Khor Virap monastery in Armenia, and to this day, pilgrims to the
Armenian homeland delicately descend, one by one, into the gloomy chamber
by means of a steep iron ladder.
The legend has Gregory remaining in solitary confinement for a full
thirteen years while King Trdat continued to wreak havoc among the
believers. According to the fifth-century historian Agathangelos, thirty-seven
Christian virgins, fleeing Roman persecution, arrived in Trdat’s kingdom
during Gregory’s imprisonment. The king lusted after one of the virgin nuns,
Hripsime, a renowned beauty. Hripsime had, of course, taken a vow of
chastity, so she resisted Trdat’s advances. In a rage, the king tortured and
killed Hripsime, then martyred the entire flock of young virgin nuns. (One did
manage to escape: Saint Nino, patron saint of the Georgian Orthodox Church,
who went on to found Christianity there.)
According to church history, as a result of his evil deeds, God struck
Trdat with a sickness that left him crawling around on all fours, on the brink
of madness. In some stories the king lost his mind; in others God literally
turned Trdat into a wild boar. Willing to try anything to cure her brother,
Trdat’s Christian sister, Khosrovidukht, proposed freeing the Christian monk
Gregory, who at this point had been imprisoned for over a decade. Gregory
was dragged out of his filthy dungeon, cleaned up, and brought before Trdat.
Gregory, full of Christian forgiveness, blessed Trdat, and the old king
snapped back to perfect health. Overcome with joy, Trdat immediately
declared Armenia a Christian nation and invited Gregory to be the first head
of this new state church. Saint Gregory “the Illuminator” would assume the
role of chief bishop4 and leader of the new Armenian Christian faith. Trdat
and Gregory demanded compliance with the new way of doing things; any
resistance was met with violence. Throughout the kingdom, heathen
sanctuaries and temples were leveled. (The only surviving pagan temple in
Armenia is in Garni, a popular tourist spot.) Hundreds of churches and
monasteries were established, and hundreds of priests and bishops were
ordained.
 While converting members of the existing priestly class to Christianity,
Gregory negotiated terms in order to secure the allegiance of the formerly
pagan priests. For example, Armenian priests are allowed to marry and the
pagan ritual of animal sacrifice was also preserved, since this sacrament
provided an important part of a priest’s income. After the animals were
dispatched, the pagan (and, later, Christian) priest would take a commission,
bringing a chunk of the slaughtered animal home to his own family. In the
early church writings, Gregory laid down the law to his priests: “Your
portions of the offerings shall be the hide and right-hand parts of the spine,
the limb and fat, and the tail and heart and lobe of the lungs, and the tripe
with the lard; of the ribs and shank-bones a part, the tongue and the right ear,
and the right eye and all the secret parts.”5 This ritual has survived to the
present as the madagh. Anyone who has attended an Armenian funeral has
partaken of this animal sacrifice in the form of a small sliver of cooked lamb
on bread. In Armenia today, ritual slaughter of sheep is still common.
Madagh has also become part of the annual ceremony memorializing the
genocide on April 24.
While meditating in Trdat’s capital city of Vagharshapat, Gregory had a
vision of Jesus descending to earth and striking the ground with a hammer. In
his vision, a great Christian church topped with a massive cross rose from
that spot. Following what he understood to be a divine commandment,
Gregory built a church, renaming the city Etchmiadzin (translated as “the
place of the descent of the only begotten”). This complex of holy shrines and
churches still stands, some seventeen hundred years later.
Around the same time that the Armenian Church was founded, circa AD
300, long before the Muslim Arabs, Turks, or Mongols invaded, the anti-
Christian Diocletian stepped down, and Emperor Constantine took over the
Eastern Roman Empire. Constantine’s mother, Helena, had been a practicing
Christian, encouraging his more tolerant attitude toward the new religion. In
313 he issued an edict “tolerating” the fledgling faith throughout the Roman
Empire. Constantine also moved the center of the Eastern Roman Empire to
the city of Byzantion and renamed it after himself. Thus Constantinopolis, or
Constantinople, would carry Constantine’s name until 1923, when Ataturk
officially renamed the great city Istanbul.
There are at least three reasons why Constantinople grew to be the capital of
an empire. First of all, it straddles the Bosphorus, the major strait connecting
the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. It is the gatekeeper to all of Russia’s
warm-water ports as well as the Crimea. For this reason it has always been a
key chokepoint for Russian trade. (At the onset of World War I, half of
Russia’s world trade moved via the Bosphorus.)6 Second, this place where
two seas join culminates in one of the world’s greatest harbors. In places it is
a hundred feet deep and is protected from weather by the vast, calm Sea of
Marmara, lying just to the south. Farther south are the headlands of the
Dardanelles, and beyond them the eastern Aegean littoral, an awesome
collection of islands and inlets. “Not only did the site control trade between
the Black and Mediterranean Seas, and between Asia Minor and the Balkans,
but it also could potentially rely upon a vast and sea borne provisioning zone
stretching from the Crimean peninsula to Egypt and beyond.”7
Third, this magnificent harbor is naturally defensible thanks to the
imposing rocky heights projecting over it. This massif was, until the time of
aircraft, almost impregnable. Constantinople/Istanbul is perched atop seven
hills of stone, ringed by walls and fortifications built by the Romans and the
Byzantines and, later, the sultans. Any approaching warships must either pass
the Dardanelles or come down the Bosphorus. Gallipoli peninsula, where
tens of thousands of soldiers died during World War I, is the landmass
flanking the Dardanelles straits.

In its early years, Armenians made up a significant segment of the burgeoning

Christian society. But Armenian churches celebrated the liturgy in Greek or
Syriac, not Armenian. The priesthood and various educational institutions
widely used Greek and Syrian. A century after the Armenian Church was
established, the Armenian king Vramshapouh and his reigning Catholicos,
Sahak Partev, concluded that an Armenian alphabet was crucial to
strengthening the national Christian Armenian identity.
The task of creating a new alphabet was assigned to a scholar-monk
named Mesrob Mashtots, who invented the Armenian alphabet of thirty-six
letters (two more were added later) in 405. After naming the characters and
ordering them, Mesrob had the renowned calligrapher Rufinus add artistic
refinements. The first sentence written down in Armenian by Mesrob is said
to have been the opening line of Solomon’s Book of Proverbs: “For learning
about wisdom and instruction, for understanding words of insight.” In 430 the
Bible was translated into the Armenian language from copies imported from
Constantinople and Edessa. Previously the Bible was available only in the
Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Abyssinian languages. The introduction of a
written language unique to the Armenians triggered a cultural renaissance.
More than that, it unified a people and permanently forged a bond between
literacy and religion that has survived to this day.
In 451, a century and a half after the Armenians embraced Christianity,
their faith was tested. During this era the Byzantines (who were the heirs to
the Eastern Roman Empire) began to lose their grip on the farthest reaches of
their empire and the Persians became the dominant power in the region. The
Persians practiced Zoroastrianism, a religion and philosophy based on the
teachings of the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra), and they were not pleased
that the Armenians followed another faith. These religious differences
resulted in a number of insurrections by the Armenians against the Persians.
On May 26, 451, a major battle took place on the Avarayr Plain in
Vaspurakan. Thousands of Armenians fought the vastly superior Sassanid
Persian troops. Though most of the Armenian princes, including their leader,
Vartan Mamigonian, fell in battle, the encounter had enduring value. The
Armenians lost the battle but won the war, so to speak, because after the
“Battle of Vartanantz,” the Persians, finding the Armenians too difficult to
control, left them alone to practice their faith as they wished. Saint Vartan is
revered to this day by Armenians all over the world.8
Armenians were participants in many of the early church councils in
which Christian leaders from different regions and sects came together to
hash out matters of doctrine. Of particular importance to the history of the
Armenian Church was the Council of Chalcedon, convened in 451, at which
a key point of theology was debated. The gist of the argument came down to
whether God/Jesus possessed two “natures” (godly and human) or only one.
This was an important theological question, because if Jesus was not a man,
then obviously his suffering on the cross was mitigated by his supernatural
powers. You can’t torture a god the way you can torture a human. The
Armenians, distracted by their war with the Persians, were not represented at
Chalcedon. Perhaps because they did not participate in deciding the issue,
the Armenians did not agree with the outcome.
The Byzantine Christian establishment (and Rome) embraced the notion of
Christ’s dual nature—humanness and godliness—through which his suffering
absolved humanity of its original sin. The Armenians (and other “schismatic”
churches), by contrast, opted for one nature. God was holy and that was that.
That is why the Armenians are labeled “monophysite.”9 Theological
resistance morphed into political resistance to the Byzantine hegemony. This
position would now set the Armenians in contrast to their fellow Christians
as well as the Islamic empire in which they lived.

For the next thousand years, the rising power of Islam would threaten the
Christian world. When the Arabs invaded parts of Asia Minor in the second
half of the first millennium, they decimated the Greek and Armenian
communities settled there. If you visit Cappadocia today, you can tour a vast
collection of manmade caves, in some places descending twenty stories
underground, where temporary tunnel cities once housed thousands of
Christians hiding from the Arab raiders. The Arab followers of Muhammad
(570–632) had always thought of their military ventures as holy wars. During
the first centuries of Islam, religion and warfare defined the new Islamic
empire. The world was divided into two camps: the House of Islam (dar al-
Islam) and the House of War (dar al-Harb). The House of Islam was
congruent with the territorial empire of the Arabs (and the later caliphates,
including the Ottomans). Everything beyond that border was considered a
war zone.10
The Arab raiders would be followed by the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh
century. Turkic tribes from the Central Asian region now called Kazakhstan
(and farther east) swept into Persia and then Anatolia. Like the Mongols, the
original Turks were highly mobile cavalrymen, agile masters of the
composite bow and arrow (wood, horn, sinew, and glue). Turkic forces
employed an early version of “shock and awe,” combining surprise with
overwhelming force, often completely annihilating opposing armies. Like the
Mongols, Turkic forces insisted on complete surrender. Often resistance was
met with total destruction. And like the Arabs and the Mongols, the Turkic
tribes were Muslim. The Seljuk Turks, a tribal dynasty, established a
foothold in Anatolia by defeating the Christian Byzantines at Manzikert in
1071. They then proceeded to disrupt the Byzantine Empire by raiding and
controlling the territory lying between the major population centers. As each
city was cut off, it became helpless and could then be taken by siege.11
The Islamic Turkish invasion of Byzantium and the Holy Lands prompted
the Byzantines to ask for assistance from the Christians of Europe proper.
Crusader knights from France and other parts of Europe, blessed by the pope,
invaded the eastern Mediterranean littoral in an attempt to wrest the
birthplace of Jesus from “the Saracens.” The pope promised his holy legions
that if they “took up the cross,” he would vacate sins and guarantee an
afterlife. For the commoners of Europe, the Crusades were one way to
escape the grinding misery of medieval existence. In this way the concept of
the “holy warrior” or Crusader also became a fixture in Christian thinking.
At first the knights were successful and managed to occupy Jerusalem.
Fiefdoms were established up and down the coast, and the Knights
Hospitaller, the Knights Templar, the Teutonic Knights, and others became a
presence in the Middle East. Themselves at odds with the Byzantines,
Armenians sided with the Crusaders (commonly known as “Franks”),12 who
arrived on the scene at the dawn of the second millennium.
The fury with which the Crusader knights attacked the East was not
always aimed at Muslims. By the Fourth Crusade in 1202, the knights,
motivated by treasure and glory, had become a powerful political body in
their own right. In this Crusade, they never got as far as the Holy Land but
instead attacked Constantinople, where the Christian Byzantines, no longer
on friendly terms with the Catholics, ruled. The Catholic French and Venetian
knights ransacked the holy Byzantine city. “The Latin soldiery subjected the
greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they
murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale which even the ancient
Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable.… The Greeks were
convinced that even the Turks, had they taken the city, would not have been as
cruel as the Latin Christians.”13
Ravaging Constantinople, the Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire,
the Franks and their confederates murdered the priests and raped the nuns.
The Library of Constantinople was destroyed. Antiquities were looted. Much
of the city was torched. Inside the magnificent Hagia Sophia, at the time the
greatest church in Orthodox Christendom, the invaders smashed icons, tore
holy books to shreds, and desecrated the altar while guzzling sacred wine
from holy chalices. The rampage was followed by a massacre of the
population. Islamic historians would later cite the actions of the Crusaders
(as well as the Catholic conquistadors in the Americas) as evidence that
Christians were as bloody as any Muslim army.

By 1200, the Seljuk Turks had solidly installed themselves in Asia Minor. In
the thirteenth century, the even fiercer Mongols burst onto the scene and
destroyed what the Seljuks had established. Some hundred years later, the
Mongols relinquished their hold on Anatolia and various resilient Turkish
ghazi emirates reestablished themselves, again moving westward and
crowding the weakened Byzantines. One tribe in particular flourished. It was
founded by a man named Osman (1258–1326). In time his descendants, the
Osmanlis, controlled all of Anatolia to the east and as far as the Balkans to
the west. Europeans called the Osmanlis “Ottomans.”
Then, around 1400, in a final Turco-Mongol thrust into the region,
Tamurlane (or Timur) invaded Armenia and Georgia. Over the next two
years he retook all of Anatolia and defeated the Ottoman sultan Bayezid in
the Battle of Ankara. Tamurlane continued onward to Smyrna and ousted the
Knights Hospitallers, remnants of the surviving Crusader forces. Tamurlane’s
stay in the Ottoman lands was brief, but the damage done to the region,
especially to the Armenians, was deep and permanent.
The Ottomans reconstituted themselves and expanded their Islamic empire
in all directions. As the Ottoman Empire grew and flourished, it spread into
territories all around Constantinople but could not take the imperial city
itself. In 1453, after two years of preparation, Sultan Mehmed “the
Conqueror” attacked the Christian city. The massive walls were hammered
with artillery for weeks on end, only to be repaired as fast as they crumbled.
In one of the most famous battles in history, Mehmed ordered Turkish
warships physically lifted out of the water, carried overland, and dropped
into the harbor on the other side of the Golden Horn. He then attacked from
two sides at once and succeeded in taking the city, ending a thousand years of
Christian rule. Sultan Mehmed repopulated the city by inviting, and
sometimes forcing, people to move there. This included Christians and Jews.
The apogee of imperial Ottoman glory was achieved by Suleiman “the
Magnificent” almost one hundred years after Mehmed the Conqueror took
Constantinople. Suleiman was a sultan of immense authority who
successfully led armies against Europe until his advance was checked at the
Siege of Vienna in 1529. In this way, the Ottomans took control of most of
eastern Europe as well as all of Arabia and North Africa up to, but not
including, Morocco. This Muslim imperium was populated by Turks as well
as Slavic speakers of the Balkans.14 The peoples of the empire also included
Christian Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians as well as Jewish refugees from
the Inquisition in Spain. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Ottoman
system was how successfully it incorporated the conquered peoples into its
highest levels, enriching its cultural infrastructure. A slave girl from the most
remote corner of the empire could become mother to a sultan. A Christian
Bosnian could rise up through the ranks to the position of Grand Vizier.15

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent reached its
 apogee. At its peak, the empire controlled most of the Middle East, Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor,
and North Africa.

In the first centuries of the Ottoman Empire, Europeans had little contact with
its people except during warfare or on the high seas. Europeans referred to
them as “Musselmen” and erroneously regarded them as descendants of the
ultra-violent Mongol Tamurlane. The Ottomans appeared, in the European
imagination, as caricatures—hookah-smoking outlaws who abducted women
into their harems, castrated young boys, or enslaved the crews of captured
ships. Westerners pictured the Ottomans perched on pillows, ogling their
odalisques while devouring roasted meat off skewers. (In fact, European
traders introduced tobacco to the Ottomans. Muslim mullahs forbade its use,
to no avail. The clerics labeled tobacco, wine, coffee, and opium as “the four
legs of the couch of satan.”)16 The West indulged itself with fantasies of
decadent sultans who wasted their days in lavish, cloistered extravagance.
(Some did.) But this was a cartoonish view of an impressive civilization.
Suleiman, the longest-reigning sultan, was intelligent and brave, instituting
vast reforms in law, taxation, and education. A great patron of the arts,
Suleiman oversaw the golden age of Ottoman architecture. His court was as
complex and as sophisticated as any in Europe.
By the time Mozart was composing his opera The Abduction from the
Seraglio (1782), set in an Ottoman harem, the “otherness” of the Ottomans
had totally captivated the European imagination. The artists and storytellers
of Europe expanded vague hearsay about the sultan’s court into lush fantasies
filled with naked slave girls and fierce eunuchs. Could there be a greater
nightmare than getting caught by a Turk and being enslaved in his seraglio?
The “Lustful Turk” represented the ultimate unfettered degenerate, a sadistic
satyr with an enormous sexual appetite (and genitals), who would as soon
drink blood as eat.

Ironically, in the middle of the sixteenth century, as the Ottomans were

reaching their imperial apex under Suleiman, European kingdoms continued
to fight tooth and nail amongst themselves. The advantage shifted from the
Spanish to the English to the French to Hapsburg monarchs, with Russia
waiting in the wings. The wars between the kingdoms were long and bloody.
(Among the dozens of wars fought before, during, and after the European
Renaissance were the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and Britain’s
war with its North American colonies.) For over a hundred years, as
Europeans wasted energy on hostilities, the Ottoman Empire loomed like a
massive wall at one end of the continent, an enigmatic foe constantly
threatening invasion. The Ottomans had been stopped at Vienna, but for how
long?
With the discovery of “the New World,” Europe fortified itself with
plundered gold and silver, and the Ottoman Empire, laboring under its
immense size, peaked. The Ottomans had no access to the treasure from
across the Atlantic that was transforming Europe from a cluster of warring
principalities into an interlocking quilt of very wealthy kingdoms. Moreover,
Europeans were inventing new ways of utilizing their newfound wealth, as
modern banking and transnational corporations superseded the outmoded
feudal economic system. The Industrial Revolution dawned and
manufacturing exploded, making Europe dominant in the art of war. The
Ottomans, by contrast, remained mired in the old ways, leaving themselves at
a distinct disadvantage. The Europeans used their money to construct fast
ships and powerful new means of warfare, making the seemingly insuperable
Ottoman armies vulnerable, and ultimately obsolete. As the empire loosened
its grip on its vast territories, the balance of power shifted. Europe could
now shove back at the formidable Turks.

What distinguished the Ottomans culturally from their contemporaries in

Europe was not just their religious identity but their complex traditions and
institutions, evolved over hundreds of years. Though the empire was ruled by
a sultan who in almost every way seemingly paralleled the position of
emperor, the similarities were in appearance only. Dynasties were forged in
the harem in a manner completely unlike the system of primogeniture common
in the West. The Ottoman military, heir to the Seljuk system, was from its
earliest years organized in a unique fashion that made it fearsome. Finally
and significantly as far as the history of the Armenians is concerned,
religious minorities were tolerated under what was called the millet system,
in contrast to the violent suppression of “heretics” common in Europe.
The sultan was not only the supreme political ruler; he was also caliph,
leader of the Islamic world, the “shadow of God on earth” (in Arabic, zill
Allah fi’l-alem),17 and thus the entire empire belonged to him. Every ounce
of gold, every acre, every slave was his property. Some of the highest
dignitaries were legally his slaves. The first sultans were ghazis, warrior
sultans who led their armies into battle. The sultan as caliph symbolically
reigned beyond the borders of his empire: he was the leader of all Muslims,
whether living as Ottomans or not.
In the Ottoman Empire, power flowed to the unknowable center. This was
where the sultan held court and lived. There are almost no first-person
accounts of the earliest sultans because few individuals were actually
allowed to be in the royal presence—certainly not Westerners or anyone who
might write a memoir. Sultans avoided appearing in public; in governmental
meetings they would often be hidden behind a screen. With the sultan
secreted away, others could establish bases of power within the complex
bureaucracy of the palace and the Sublime Porte, the functional Ottoman
government, run by the Grand Vizier, who was often the true head of the
empire.
At the height of Ottoman power, the palace of the sultan was Topkapi
Sarayi (visited today every year by thousands of tourists). The palace housed
the royal entourage, including the royal harem, for hundreds of years. Later
the royal residence would move to the more European-styled Dolmabahce.
Finally, Sultan Abdul Hamid II would move the palace once again, to Yildiz,
in an effort to make his residence more secure.

The Islamic view that divided the world into the House of War and the House
of Islam made war making a primary function of government. With a
permanent state of war as its foundation, the Ottoman culture was defined by
a militaristic spirit. In the early years of the empire, the most exalted legions
of the Ottoman military were the Janissaries (from yeni ceri, meaning in
Turkish “new force”). These were crack military units composed mostly of
Christian youths harvested from villages of the realm, usually in eastern
Europe. In a cycle of three, five, or seven years, emissaries from
Constantinople would visit these outlying villages, particularly in Christian
Bosnia. The most attractive teenagers were collected under the process of
devshirme, often with the consent of their families, because to be invited into
the sultanic milieu was a great honor and opportunity. These young men were
converted to Islam and divided into units for intensive training. Some were
sent to work in the countryside to develop their physical strength. Others
were transported directly to Constantinople to work in the palace. The most
impressive candidates were selected to enter the elite military devoted to the
sultan, the Janissaries.
The Renaissance historian Paolo Giovio explained why the Janissaries
were a superior fighting force: “Their discipline under arms is due to their
justice and severity, which surpasses that of the ancient Romans. They
surpass our soldiers for three reasons: they obey their commanders without
question; they seem to care nothing at all for lives in battle; they go for a long
time without bread or wine, being content with barley and water.”18
The Janissaries were the first standing army originated in Europe, slave
soldiers whose lives were dedicated to war, and who were prepared to fight
at any time. In the early years of the empire marriage was forbidden. In fact,
they were not supposed to consider any life outside their duties as soldiers.
The Janissaries were a primary reason for the Ottomans’ success in battle,
and they became the germ seed of an elite soldier class that flourished within
the empire, until they wielded outsized power in the civilian, commercial,
and political spheres. In 1826 the reigning sultan, Mahmud II, after patiently
planning the destruction of the Janissaries for some eighteen years, secretly
created a new army and, with no warning, trapped the Janissaries and
destroyed them. More than ten thousand men perished in one night, gunned
down or burned to death in their barracks. The last holdouts died in hand-to-
hand combat in a vast murky underground lake, originally built by the
Romans, the Cistern of the Thousand and One Columns. The bodies floated
down the Bosphorus for days. In Ottoman history, this mass killing of the
Janissaries is called “the Auspicious Event.”
The history of the Ottoman Empire parallels the history of the royal line.
For all intents and purposes, the story begins with Osman and ends with
Abdul Hamid II. (The last two sultans following Abdul Hamid were no more
than figureheads representing the Young Turks and the British, respectively.)
For centuries, the royal line was generated in the royal harem. It was here
that the “politics of reproduction” were played out.19
“Harem” derives from the Arabic haram (h-r-m), with a “root meaning
something like ‘forbidden’ or ‘taboo’ and evok[ing] constraint and often
heightened sanctity as well.”20 In the Muslim household, it refers to the area
of the home where the women live and work. The public is not to intrude on
these inner rooms. Traditionally, men spend more time in the outer rooms,
where the more public aspects of social life take place. In the sultan’s
household, the imperial harem was located in the inner area of the palace
grounds, in the “House of Felicity,” where only the closest members of the
sultan’s personal retinue could enter. Of course, for sexually obsessed
Westerners, the area of most interest has always been that part of the harem
where the sultan’s hundreds of potential sexual partners resided, a warren of
small rooms called the seraglio, situated alongside the sultan’s quarters,
where his complex hierarchy of support staff resided. The seraglio was
guarded by black and white eunuchs, who in turn were under the command of
the kizlar agasi, the chief black eunuch. The kizlar agasi was one of the most
powerful people in the realm. As overseer of the women of the harem, he
was responsible for their care and, if necessary, their disposal.
The denizens of the harem numbered in the hundreds, with about half
acting as servants to the other half. The women selected to pleasure the sultan
and to bear his children were slaves, acquired for the most part in the outer
realms of the empire, particularly Greece, eastern Anatolia, the Balkans, and
the Crimean Peninsula. Under Islamic law, Muslims cannot be slaves to other
Muslims, so these women were almost entirely Christian. (This rule was
fudged with regard to Bosnia.) The earliest sultans did marry highborn
Islamic women, who could also bear their children, but this practice was
eventually abandoned for the more pragmatic selection of young women with
no connections to extended families. (The most exceptional case was the
concubine Roxana, who married Suleiman and in turn became the most
famous of all the slave girls to rise up from the seraglio.) The preferred
system of extending the royal lineage was through children born of the
concubines. Prisoners of the harem, when concubines were no longer useful
they could be put to death, their bodies placed in sacks and thrown into the
Bosphorus.
In fact, most of the hundreds of odalisques would never spend even a
minute with the sultan. They were under the constant guard and care of the
black eunuchs. (Black eunuchs were captured in Africa by traders and, after
being subjected to the most extreme form of castration—removal of all their
genitalia—sold to the wealthy. The royal eunuchs were named after flowers:
Hyacinth, Rose, Carnation.)
The imperial harem was no pool of wanton lust. If anything it was a
prison filled with bored inmates, a highly formalized institution: “a machine
to perpetuate the dynasty, even against the Sultan’s will.”21 Over the
centuries, the sultan became something like a queen bee, sequestered at the
center of a massive hive, protected and pampered and not really in charge of
anything. The individual personality of any particular sultan was superseded
by the idea and the institution. The sultan could always be replaced. “With
the exception of such forceful men as Mehmed the Conqueror, Selim I or
Murad IV, the Ottoman sultans were little more than cogs in a machine.”22 In
the nineteenth century, sultans continued to lead a cocooned life, with activist
Grand Viziers and other ministers actually running the empire. Indeed, there
were a number of dissolute, even alcoholic sultans. But for the West to brand
the Turkish court as decadent was somewhat disingenuous, given the court of
Charles II in England or Louis the XV in France, where hedonism was an
established institution in its own right.
When the sultan wished to select a girl, he first had to obtain permission
from his mother (his mother!), the Valida Sultana, in a long and complicated
ritual. The girls were paraded before him, the royal selection was made, and
the girl would be separated from the group and, over the next day, prepared
for her meeting with destiny. She would be bathed, covered in a mudpack of
oil and rice flour, and then scrubbed for hours. Her body would be shaved,
her nails would be dyed, her eyelashes brushed with lemon kohl; she would
be perfumed and hennaed. Two large candles would be lit, and intimacy
would proceed as other women guarded the doors to the sultan’s
bedchamber.
In the morning, the sultan rose first, accompanied by his usual entourage.
A royal secretary would enter the date of the encounter into a register. The
girl would return to her cell and, if nine months later she did not produce
royal progeny, she would probably never see the sultan again. Concubines
who became pregnant with the sultan’s child immediately rose in status. Male
heirs were prized, of course. Mothers of the princes and princesses had the
highest status in the harem. Since the various children usually had different
mothers (each concubine was permitted to have only one son by the sultan),
this put the mothers in competition with one another. And once the new sultan
was firmly enthroned, his mother became Valida Sultana, the most powerful
woman in the realm, simply by dint of her ability to control him.
As a result of this competition, there was a very dark side to bearing sons
for the sultan. Should a boy find his way onto the throne, all of his brothers
were in immediate danger. Beginning with Mehmed the Conqueror, all adult
male relatives of the sultan were at risk. This culling would ensure that royal
competition could not endanger the dynasty itself. Brothers and cousins were
strangled with a silken cord, as it was considered sinful to spill royal blood.
It made no difference how old or young the victim was. Babies were
smothered; grown men were garroted. It was understood that to leave any
other heirs alive would jeopardize the stability of the state. Nothing personal.
Murder was an essential part of the smooth running of the empire.
In later centuries the wholesale killing of princes was replaced with a
system of sequestering them for their lifetime in “the cage,” a suite in the
palace which they were never permitted to leave. This confinement
transformed some princes into anxious neurotics, cut off from the outside
world and in constant fear for their lives. There were instances of caged
princes who became sultan but, having been driven mad by their confinement,
were unfit to rule and were subsequently removed.
Very few men could enter the most private of the sultan’s quarters. Those
who did were generally eunuchs or prepubescent pages. In 1566 Selim, the
son of Suleiman, ascended the throne. He invited a Hungarian convert to
Islam, Gazanfer, to take the job of chief white eunuch and head of the privy
chamber. He had to accept castration as the price to be paid for this most
lofty position. Gazanfer went on to become one of the most influential
persons in the Ottoman Empire, serving for over thirty years.

Militarism and dynastic succession were not the only distinguishing aspects
of the Ottoman world. Though it was an Islamic empire, the Ottoman Empire
was for much of its history roughly fifty percent non-Muslim, either Christian
or Jewish. The millet system, originally developed under Arab-Islamic
Sharia law, contrasted sharply with the religious intolerance practiced in
Europe, where “heretics” were routinely tortured and executed.
Understanding that the non-Muslim minorities had a value in the empire,
sultans had for hundreds of years followed the example of the Islamic Arabs
before them and invited Christian and Jewish “People of the Book” to live in
relative peace in the “House of Islam” as second-class subjects. Under the
millet system, Muslims constituted the ruling class, while Christians and
Jews were raya, the flock, who were tolerated as long as they kept to their
place.
Though they were not forced by law to convert, Christian and Jewish
subjects were subject to specific restrictions. They paid a tax that Muslims
were exempt from. Their men could not marry a Muslim woman. Their
church steeples could not be higher than the minarets of the mosques. Loud
church bells were not permitted. They were forced to defer to Muslims at all
times and had subordinate legal rights in a court of law. A Muslim master
could kill or take property from Christians under his command with impunity.
Jews and Christians were “formally forbidden” to dress like Muslims or
live near mosques, to build tall houses or buy slaves. “They… were not
supposed to wear certain colours;… their houses or places of worship
should not be ostentatious; they were excluded from positions of power,”
with some exceptions.23 Most important, non-Muslims were forbidden to
bear arms.
A millet system of self-governance on the part of each religious group
was encouraged and took root, and each group (Greek, Armenian, Jewish)
had its religious community leaders or patriarchs. In this way, the millets
became political entities within the Ottoman Empire “representing” each
community. Different millets were identified by their clothing. “Only
Muslims could wear white or green turbans and yellow slippers. Greeks,
Armenians and Jews were distinguished respectively by sky blue, dark blue
(later red) and yellow hats, and by black, violet and blue slippers.”24 Legal
issues that concerned only the millet could be resolved by the millet
overseers. The leaders of the millets had power and acted as a conduit
between the Sublime Porte and the communities. In time this relationship
would evolve, allowing some Armenians to become very powerful within
the construct of the Ottoman universe.
In the modern era, the fragmented and dispersed Armenian population
existed in areas under Ottoman, Persian, and Russian control. These three
antagonistic empires treated their Armenian populations in different ways.
Very significantly, Armenians in the Ottoman universe lived as Christians in a
Muslim world. In the Russian territories, mainly in the Caucasus (though the
border was constantly shifting), Armenians were Christian in a world where
the tsar saw himself as a champion of Orthodoxy. Further divisions within the
Armenian populations broke along class lines: peasants, artisans, and
tradespeople, merchants and wealthy elites moved within their own
societies. Over time, the “Turkish” (western) Armenians and the “Russian”
(eastern) Armenians would speak very different dialects and become
culturally distinct.25
The Armenian Genocide was nothing less than the final clash of two
civilizations: the ancient Armenian nation and the Ottoman Empire. The
centuries-old intersection of two peoples had come to an end. Though the
Armenians would continue to be a major presence in the Middle East and the
Caucasus, they were no longer living in their homeland. Mere thousands
remained of the millions who had dwelled there for millennia. By 1923, with
the birth of the Republic of Turkey, the Armenian presence in Asia Minor
would effectively be over.
 CHAPTER TWO

Rushing Headlong into the Modern Era, 1800–

1914

Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund

and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are
new worlds born.
—Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

Whether or not they called themselves “modern,” from the middle of the
nineteenth century onward the citizens of the West understood that the world
was changing. Fueled by the Industrial Revolution, the idea that civilization
is forever moving forward to new and greater heights caught every thinker’s
imagination. This, in essence, was modernism. Progress animated all areas
of human existence: finance, medicine, education, painting, literature, music,
and, ironically, the art of making war. Combat achieved new levels of
awesome and unprecedented destructiveness. Technologies combined to
foster violence not only between nations but within empires. The Ottoman
Empire, like the rest of the world, joined the rush to modernize.
Progress created political turbulence. From the mid-nineteenth century
until the conclusion of World War I, assassination, revolution, and war
plagued the world. In 1848 revolution broke out in Italy, Germany, Denmark,
Hungary, Ireland, Romania, and Moldavia. Civil war and revolution would
follow in the United States, Mexico, India, and China. The short-lived
socialist regime known as the Paris Commune was born during this period, in
1871, and rebellions arose across the Balkans against Ottoman rule.
Successive wars, including the massively destructive Crimean War, broke
out between Russia and the Ottomans, leaving hundreds of thousands dead on
both sides and further weakening the Turkic empire. No sooner had the Civil
War ended before the United States government began an all-out war of
extermination against the Plains Indians. The Boer Wars in South Africa, the
Boxer Rebellion in China, as well as uprisings in India and the Philippines
were all manifestations of a world order in flux. The interplay of modern
political institutions and the mechanization of warfare laid waste to human
life on a scale never before experienced.
From the killing fields of Gettysburg to the trenches of Alsace, humans
now could slaughter one another by the tens of thousands in a matter of days.
During World War I, the Battle of Verdun alone left three hundred thousand
fatalities, an average of one thousand deaths a day for ten months. New
weapons technologies would accelerate and intensify conflict, making
possible sudden flashes of mass violence. It was during this period that the
machine gun and long-range artillery were developed. Deadly chlorine gas
was concocted in German laboratories and deployed by both sides in the
Great War. Barbed wire and the simple but deadly fixed bayonet amplified
the hell of trench warfare, while land and naval mines intensified the
anarchy. The armored tank, the hand grenade, and the long-range carbine
were all perfected during this initial era of modern warfare.
The Industrial Revolution accelerated the tempo and scope of war through
improvements in transportation and communication. The railroad, the
steamship, motorized vehicles, and the telegraph (and later the airplane)
allowed military leaders to deploy troops over extensive territory with
unprecedented speed. Not only could soldiers and supplies be moved
quickly, but so too could local populations. Modern warfare set in motion
vast flows of refugees and displaced people, many of whom died for the
simple lack of a safe haven.
Information itself became an adjunct to war, as newspapers—the “mass
media” of the nineteenth century—proliferated. The journalists of the era
endowed nations with personalities and intentions, portraying them as willful
actors who were healthy or unhealthy, peaceful or belligerent, who
flourished or sickened, had appetites and diseases, made enemies or friends.
As World War I began, headlines typically characterized each nation as a
sentient being imbued with intention: “Austria Has Chosen War”; “China
Fearful of Japan War Moves.”1 Tsar Nicholas I had famously labeled the
Ottoman Empire “the sick man of Europe.”
At the same time, world conflicts were reported as if they were
competitions, not unlike modern sporting events, with the intention of rallying
the local fans. Sides were “winning” or “losing.” This helped foster
nationalism, a new way of thinking that defined a nation by language and
culture. When the war in western Europe finally reached its combustion
point, many young men (particularly in the West) saw it as an adventure, their
appetite for conflict stoked by reports of wars on every continent.
A new breed of assassin appeared on the scene as the deadly accuracy of
handguns and explosives improved dramatically. After Samuel Colt’s patent
of his revolver in 1835, the semiautomatic handgun became easily available
thanks to extensive distribution during wartime. Mausers, Brownings, and
Colts were the prized possessions of revolutionaries everywhere. When
Alfred Nobel invented gelignite in 1875, bomb making became an art, and
bombs became a significant part of the revolutionary arsenal. In 1919
anarchists mailed dozens of dynamite bombs to politicians, editors, and
businessmen in the United States. One year later Wall Street was bombed;
thirty-eight people died. Political agendas could be advanced in seconds as
anarchists and other radicals required only a proximity of a few yards to
their victims before pulling a trigger or lobbing a bomb.
The half century prior to World War I was open season on world leaders.
Three American presidents, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, were shot to
death by assassins. A bullet would end the lives of Prime Minister Juan Prim
of Spain, King Umberto of Italy, King Carlos of Portugal, King George of
Greece, and Naser al-Din Shah Qajar of Persia. Empress Elizabeth of
Austria, President Sadi Carnot of France, and Richard Southwell Bourke,
sixth Earl of Mayo, were stabbed to death. Gabriel García Moreno, president
of Ecuador, was hacked to death by machete. The killing spree against world
leaders reached its climax in 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of
Austro-Hungary was gunned down in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian
nationalist, triggering World War I.
A small cadre of organized revolutionaries could effect broad regime
change. And so assassination became an adjunct to revolution. In 1881 the
Russian left-wing organization Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will)
succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II. Thirty-five years later, the
Bolsheviks would tighten their hold on Russia by murdering Nicholas II and
his extended family. Between 1919 and 1922, the period of the Nemesis
murders, there were over three hundred political killings in the German
Reich alone.2

In the century before the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian millet consisted
of three overlapping groups. In Constantinople and other large cities like
Smyrna and Alexandria, the economic and cultural elite flourished. Among
these well-to-do were genuinely wealthy families, even men who were
addressed as “pasha.” The second group consisted of Armenians living
throughout Asia Minor who were artisans and merchants, constituting a
middle class of sorts, usually clustered in large towns and cities. This was
the milieu from which the assassin Soghomon Tehlirian came. And
everywhere in the empire, especially in eastern Asia Minor and the Russian
Caucasus, lived the rural peasants, who, subject to the predations of armed
Kurdish tribes and endless Ottoman taxation, made up the vast majority of
Armenians. Their marginal existence only grew more perilous during the
Ottoman period of modernization. By the end of the nineteenth century,
massacres were common.
The deep poverty of the eastern vilayets, or provinces, where most
Armenians lived, undermined the stability of the region. The inhabitants of
these outlying frontier lands endured a medieval quality of life. Rural
peasants shared their mud-walled houses with domestic animals. Farmers
tilled their fields with makeshift plows and prayed for rain; blacksmiths
hammered red-hot iron into horseshoes just as their fathers had and their
fathers before them; mothers and sisters worked hand looms, weaving cloth
for the home and the market. Shepherds tracked their sheep and goats in the
same manner as their ancestors two thousand years earlier. There was no
refrigeration, little electricity, and very few motorized vehicles. The brightly
colored clothing designating the different millets was washed and beaten on
the rocks along streams and rivers, just as it had been washed and beaten for
the last twenty generations.
The Industrial Revolution which had radically changed life in Europe
barely touched the vilayets beyond the outskirts of Constantinople.3 The
occasional presence of a sewing machine or kerosene lamp gave the only hint
of the modern world enjoyed by the West. (Both kerosene and Singer sewing
machines were imported from America and usually sold by Armenian
merchants.) By World War I, only a few telephones (available since the
1890s in the United States) were in use outside the big cities, not even in the
larger towns. Telegraphy provided the only long-distance instant
communication. No paved roads connected the cities. In fact, cars and trucks
were a rarity and railroads almost nonexistent. When railroad track was laid,
most of it consisted of unfinished trunk lines leading nowhere. Municipal
services were unknown. The government’s main job was to collect taxes and
maintain control. No factories existed as the West knew them.
The great cities of the empire—Constantinople, Salonika, Smyrna,
Alexandria, and Beirut—all resembled a patchwork quilt of neighborhoods
and markets where Muslims, Christians, and Jews commingled and did
business. Complex mazes of streets and alleys were crammed with every
kind of trade and food production imaginable. Nearby harbors bustled with
foreign trade, providing goods for those who could afford them and
employment for the poor, who flooded into the great cities. In Constantinople,
mansions of the elite rose up along the mighty Bosphorus, itself churning with
shipping traffic. Sultans and their families built majestic mosques and
rambling parklands, bathhouses and bazaars, often adjacent to the holy
institutions. In an era before accurate maps or even comprehensible
addresses, these cities were sprawling and mysterious organisms.
Though the territories beyond the great coastal cities could hardly be
described as lush, the villages had the potential for natural abundance,
especially along the Black Sea and the region known as Cilicia, or “Little
Armenia.” Fruit orchards and mulberry, fig, walnut, almond, and olive trees
supplied seasonal produce as well as leaves for silkworms. Grapevines
provided grapes for wine and bastek (fruit leather), and of course the
blanched leaves for dolma. Honey and wax were harvested from the
honeycombs of beehives. When irrigated properly, cotton and tobacco grew
easily in the sunbaked volcanic soil. Green tomatoes and raw cauliflower
were pickled into tourshee. Rose petals were steeped to make rose water.
Goats and sheep were milked for yogurt and cheese, then slaughtered for
their meat. In every market, piles of apricots, sheaves of mint, cherries,
pomegranates, eggplants, and potatoes were piled high alongside
overflowing baskets of spices, coffee, and lokum candy.
Villages might be exclusively Kurdish, Armenian, or Greek, although
sometimes two groups would share a town—Turkish and Armenian, Turkish
and Greek. All were “Ottomans,” but each group traced a lineage back to a
distant and sometimes mythic past. Larger towns were multiethnic, with
quarters dedicated to particular groups. In the largest cities, neighborhoods
could support a mix of peoples: Turkish and Armenian peasants, Armenian
merchants and artisans, as well as Arabs, Jews, Kurds, Tartars, even Roma.
In many rural areas, whoever owned the land owned those who worked it,
and when the land was sold, the peasants living on the land came with the
property. This system of serfdom was supported by the millet law. Most
Christian Armenian peasants had no economic power and no rights. In the
east, these vulnerable peasants were surrounded by Muslim tribes,
particularly Kurds, whose religion conferred superior social status. Many
Kurds were pastoral nomads, not settled in farms and towns as were most
Armenians. Over the summer months, Kurds would pasture their animals in
the highlands, while the sedentary Armenians tended their crops. But come
winter, when the freezing cold and deep snow forced both Kurds and
Armenians indoors, it became convention that an Armenian must house any
Kurd who demanded it. Not only were the tribesmen allowed to take up
residence in Christian homes (along with their animals), but also as Muslims,
they were allowed to enjoy all the perks that the head of the household
enjoyed, which included, in some cases, the peasant’s wife.

When Abdul Hamid II became sultan in 1876, he found himself caught

between two conflicting trends. The empire was buckling under the burden of
high-interest loans and many felt that the economy had to be modernized. The
financial crisis was tearing the empire apart. Outlying territories, inspired by
Greek independence in 1829, had been attempting to break away from the
empire for decades. At the same time, entrenched power blocs preferred the
status quo.
In the years before Abdul Hamid came to power, Ottoman lawmakers,
desiring to see the Ottoman Empire become a constitutional monarchy, had
pushed through a progressive series of edicts known as the Tanzimat. These
efforts led to the establishment of a constitution in 1876 (only months before
Abdul Hamid took power) in the hope of bringing the Ottoman Empire in line
with the norms of the “Concert of Europe.” When Abdul Hamid first became
sultan, the empire was struggling to adjust to this new systems of governance.
In the same year, 1876, with yet another war with Russia looming and the
domestic economy falling apart, Abdul Hamid suspended the new
constitution and disbanded parliament, bringing the era of reform to an abrupt
end. In contrast to the idealistic “Young Ottomans,” moderate precursors to
the Young Turks who lobbied for equality amongst all the sultan’s subjects,
and their European friends, Abdul Hamid saw the constitution, and the
system of governance it represented, as untenable. The sultan, a fastidious
and bureaucratically oriented man, was afraid of losing his grip on all the
outlying regions of the empire. His response was to tug harder on the reins.
In the eastern frontier lands, the uncontrollable power of the Kurdish
chieftains diminished the power of the government in the east. The sultan
tried to solve the Kurdish problem in two ways: first, by breaking up the
most belligerent tribes (either by moving them or arresting or killing their
leaders), and second, by co-opting the tribes, incorporating them into a
paramilitary called the Hamidiye (named in honor of Abdul Hamid). These
Kurdish units were dedicated to the sultan and replicated what the Cossacks
had done for the tsar: provide a ferocious advance guard terrorizing problem
areas.4 Because the Turkish army en masse was more powerful than these
Kurdish units, the Hamidiye could be disciplined if necessary. If they went
rogue, the leader could be captured and either imprisoned or executed.
This, in turn, heightened the danger for Armenians living in the eastern
regions of the Ottoman Empire, the areas closest to Russia and Persia. For
hundreds of years, the balance of power between the Kurds and the
Armenians had been stable, if tense and often violent. But by the middle of
the nineteenth century, the fragmented Kurdish tribes became even more
lawless. It was impossible for the sultan’s troops to be everywhere at once.
Besides, restricting what the Kurds did to the Armenians was not a priority
for the Sublime Porte.
This bad situation came to a head in 1894, 1895, and 1896, when Sultan
Abdul Hamid let the Hamidiye loose on the Armenian villages in a series of
bloodbaths, crushing any sign of insurrection, real or fabricated. The
violence was terroristic, leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian
fatalities. News reports, as well as dozens of books published at the time,
describe immolations, flaying, rape, dismemberment, and massacre.
Overwhelmingly, the vilayets in the east bore the brunt of the killings. The
goal was to undermine Armenian support of the Russians in their perennial
war with the Ottomans. This began what Vahakn Dadrian has called “a
culture of massacre” in Asia Minor that persisted from that period through
World War I.5

Though Armenians lived throughout the Ottoman Empire, these six vilayets featured major Armenian
populations and endured major massacres under Sultan Abdul Hamid’s rule.

With no recourse against government-sponsored violence, in the late

nineteenth century, Armenians formed revolutionary societies, notably the
Armenakan Party, the Hnchag (Bell) Party (or Hnchags), and the Hai
Heghapokhakanneri Tashnagtsutiun (the Armenian Revolutionary Federation,
or ARF, also known as the Tashnags). Emboldened by revolutionary activity
in Russia, these organizations had committed themselves to education of the
peasantry, agricultural reform, and the establishment of a constitutional
and/or socialist government. They were also, by their own admission,
terrorist.6
In the end, despite the idealistic goals they outlined in their manifestos,
violence as a means to an end would come to define both the Hnchags and the
Tashnags. Both revolutionary organizations began their “work” by
assassinating small-time Armenian and Turkish officials they viewed as
traitors. Bloodied corpses would be dumped in the streets, a note pinned to
the jacket lapel describing the offense. Suspected spies were assassinated. In
an operation called “The Storm” (P’ot’orik in Armenian) in 1900, family
members of wealthy Armenians were kidnapped in order to extort funds to
support revolutionary activity,7 a tactic still practiced in the Middle East in
the early twenty-first century.
Because non-Muslims were forbidden to carry arms in the Ottoman
Empire, Hnchags and Tashnags secretly distributed firearms to villagers for
self-defense against the violent Kurdish tribes. In addition, the Armenian
revolutionaries sometimes attacked local Turkish officials with the
deliberate intention of inciting retribution by the Turkish army. The hope was
that the resulting massacres of the innocent local populations would gain the
attention of Europe. They did exactly that as Western newspapers trumpeted
the news of atrocities. The Armenian revolutionary organizations,
particularly the Tashnagtsutiun, or ARF (parent organization to Nemesis),
were a real force in the Ottoman Empire.
These Armenian revolutionary groups not only were inspired by the
Bolsheviks in Russia (Stalin, one of the early leaders of the Bolshevik
Revolution, had been a divinity student in Tiflis) but also looked to the
French Revolution and other similar movements that celebrated progress,
enlightenment, socialism, nationalism, and social Darwinism. With their
headquarters located safely beyond the reach of the sultan and his spies, the
Armenian revolutionary groups sent operatives across the borders and back
into the empire. Armed teams of fedayeen operated throughout eastern Turkey
and the Caucasus. The volunteer fighters adopted an Persian-Arabic name
(fida’i, or “devotee”), which they took to mean “he who is committed” or
“he who is sacrificed.” “Field workers for the parties were known as
‘apostles’; guerrilla fighters, who had given up comfort to sacrifice their
lives for the people, became ‘martyrs for the cause’; priests blessed the
soldiers on the eve of major battles.”8 Attacks against the Ottoman
government were called surp kordz, or “holy task.”
The Armenian revolutionaries particularly sought the attention of Western
leaders. If Europeans could only see how barbaric the Turks were, they might
pressure the sultan to ease off on violence aimed at the Armenian peasantry.
More than that, external pressure might secure constitutional rights for
Ottoman minorities, giving them some relief. The millet system was no
longer functional in this modern world. Some Armenians benefited from the
new economies and trade with the West, but most were finding life in the
eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire barely sustainable.

In the West in the 1890s, every well-read person was familiar with the
atrocities committed by the “Bloody Turk” and the “Red Sultan.” Every
newspaper and monthly magazine featured lurid stories of Muslim violence.
The New York Times published dozens of accounts. One reported: “A witness
hiding in the oak scrub saw soldiers gouge out the eyes of two priests, who in
horrible agony implored their tormentors to kill them. But the soldiers
compelled them to dance while screaming with pain, presently bayoneted
them.”9 Committees were formed by indignant Americans and British
insisting that the horrific violence cease immediately. European powers
demanded that Abdul Hamid “protect” the indigenous Christian populations
living as subjects within the borders of his empire. And if the sultan refused
to behave as the West wished, the West would force him to behave. The
sultan, and Ottoman Turks in general, were developing a very bad rep. As
early as 1876, British prime minister William Gladstone summed up the
West’s opinion of “the Turk”:

Let me endeavor very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline, what the
Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mahometanism
simply, but of Mahometanism compounded with the peculiar character
of a race. They are not the mild Mahometans of India, nor the
chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They
were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered
 Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they
went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them; and, as far
as their dominion reached, civilisation disappeared from view.10

Despite their disdain for the barbarism of the East, Europe and the United
States had already written their own bloody histories as overlords of their
respective colonies. Utilizing the latest Maxim machine guns and unstoppable
“gunboat diplomacy,” by the 1800s the major European powers and the
upstart United States had used violence to found settlements all over the
world. In East Africa (Kenya), the British had forced local Africans onto
reservations and turned the natives into a peasant labor force serving the
white settlers. When the locals resisted, they were murdered. The peoples of
Central and South America had long ago been decimated by Spanish and
Portuguese conquistadors. Belgium’s King Leopold presided over stunning
atrocities as he ran his own personal fiefdom in the Congo. Germany had
intentionally destroyed the Herero people of South-West Africa (Namibia).
General Lothar von Trotha, who oversaw these massacres, was unequivocal:
“It was and remains my policy to apply force by unmitigated terrorism and
even cruelty. I shall destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of
blood.”11 British coercion in India (labeled “administrative massacre” by
one observer in 1924)12 and China, the American war against the native
people of its frontier lands and its scorched-earth campaign in the
Philippines, and the French subjugation of North Africa were all oppressive
policies that reached their height during this period.
When the West overpowered native populations, these actions, no matter
how violent, were rationalized as manifestations of the natural order of
things. “Manifest destiny” and “social Darwinism” laid the foundation for
violent improvement of the world. Europeans saw themselves as superior
and naturally born to rule. They believed that their domination of faraway
lands brought “civilization” to the natives. In return, the rulers of the empires
benefited. “The purpose of colonies was to supply the mother country with
raw materials and to provide a market for her manufactured goods, all on an
exclusive basis.”13 As late as 1943, British home secretary Herbert
Morrison, when commenting on the subject of granting African colonies their
independence, would be quoted as saying, “It would be like giving a child of
ten a latch-key, a bank account, and a shot-gun.”14

Empires were gradually giving way to a new paradigm, the “nation,” an idea
that a “people” have a shared history, language, and culture that form the
bedrock of a “nationality.” As the nineteenth century ended, Europe, and
eventually the whole world, became enamored with nationalism. A nation
was not a tangible thing; it was an abstract idea, and as such it could be
defined to serve different needs. Great Powers like Britain and France
included their far-flung colonies in their definition of nation. In theory, the
idea of a nation seemed to be an immutable truth, but it was actually a
complex ideological fantasy. National “purity,” a romantic notion attractive
to many, rarely existed in the real world. It would nevertheless be only a
matter of time before the idea of “nation” served as a catalyst to war.
Nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are related: they all share mythic
notions of a pure and common origin, and they all serve material ambitions.
For the subject peoples of aging empires, “nationhood” became a call to
arms, especially with regard to the Ottoman Empire. Egged on by Great
Powers like Russia and Great Britain, smaller populations like the Serbs, the
Greeks, the Arabs, and the Armenians also began to think of themselves as
“nations.” Inspired by that idea, they attempted to break away. Some
succeeded; others did not. In the case of the clash between Armenians and the
Ottoman Empire, nationalism would have tragic consequences.

The Imperial Bank Ottoman in Constantinople served as a “de facto central

bank,”15 so in the eyes of the ARF, it symbolized European economic
interests in the Ottoman Empire. Twenty years earlier, the empire had
officially gone bankrupt because of lavish spending by Abdul Hamid’s
predecessors, who were intent on building sumptuous palaces for themselves
and their kin while pursuing a debauched lifestyle. That extravagance came
to an end when the Ottoman Public Debt Administration was established in
1881. European bankers stepped in and assumed Turkey’s debt in exchange
for control over how public monies were collected and spent by the Sublime
Porte. Britain joined France in picking up a good chunk of the debt. By
controlling the economy, the European bankers took over firm control of the
state.
The Ottoman Empire had become an economic colony of the West. By
World War I, Britain, France, and Germany would own or manage not only
the empire’s finances but most of its infrastructure and resources as well.
Either directly or indirectly, the Great Powers had rights over railroads,
shipping, mining, tobacco, cotton, municipal water and lighting, banking, and
mineral licenses, including the newly important petroleum reserves. In
addition, the Europeans were essentially unregulated when doing business
within the jurisdiction of the sultan, because over the centuries they had
established a parallel legal system within the empire, especially with regard
to business. These “capitulations” were a series of treaties allowing subjects
of certain foreign governments to evade harsh Sharia-based law. In the
Ottoman Empire, Europeans and Americans had their own courts and their
own post offices. In addition, France, Britain, and Germany shipped in
numerous military advisors, an easy way to keep a close eye on the Ottoman
military.
In 1896, twenty-five years before Talat’s assassination, and the year of
Soghomon Tehlirian’s birth, the ARF established its international reputation
by making a spectacular raid on the Imperial Bank Ottoman. The Tashnag
attackers hoped that their frenzied attack on the bank would draw attention to
the horrific massacres of Armenians at the hands of the sultan’s forces and
his Kurdish Hamidiye in the eastern provinces.
Two dozen heavily armed fedayeen stormed the bank. They hurled bombs,
shot and killed a guard, rounded up hostages, and occupied the building. The
Armenian revolutionaries set dynamite charges on every floor and issued a
list of demands, threatening to blow up the building if they were not met. In
response, Sultan Abdul Hamid surrounded the bank with his troops, rolled in
artillery batteries, and prepared to reduce the building to rubble. He seems to
have had no qualms about killing the attackers, the employees, or the
customers locked inside the bank.
As the sultan’s artillerymen primed their guns, foreign warships drifted
into the great harbor of Constantinople. British diplomats then contacted
Abdul Hamid’s Grand Vizier in his offices at the Sublime Porte and
explained that if the sultan destroyed the European-owned bank, the sultan’s
home, Yildiz Palace, would be shelled in turn. Communiqués were quickly
exchanged between the sultan’s secretaries and the Grand Vizier. Abdul
Hamid blinked and stood down his guns. It was a three-way standoff.

One of the leaders of the Bank Ottoman takeover was the twenty-four-year-
old firebrand Karekin Pastermadjian, best known by the revolutionary alias
“Armen Garo.” Before joining the Tashnags, Garo, an Armenian born into a
wealthy Erzurum family, had been studying abroad in Nancy, France.
Shocked by the newspaper reports of massacres of Armenians in eastern
vilayets, the idealistic young man had traveled to the Geneva ARF
headquarters with a group of fellow students in tow to volunteer his services
to the cause. Garo and three other students were instructed to move to
Constantinople, where they would receive further orders. In Constantinople,
Garo joined seventeen-year-old Babken Suni (Bedros Parian), who would
lead the attack.
In the spectacular initial raid on the bank, 150 staff members and
customers were held hostage. Two employees and four of the young
Tashnags, including Suni, were killed. After the day-long stalemate, the
British governor of the bank, Sir Edgar Vincent, brokered a truce between
Garo and the authorities. The young revolutionaries were safely led out of the
bank, past the Turkish troops surrounding the building, and escorted to
Vincent’s yacht. After escaping Constantinople, they were transferred to a
Greek freighter and finally ended up in Marseilles.
Sadly, the sultan’s spies had been aware of the Tashnags’ plans all along
and used the attack as an excuse to punish the Armenian community. As soon
as the bank was occupied, hundreds of armed white-turbaned Islamic
students (softas) appeared as if on cue in the streets of the city. They had
been provided with clubs studded with nails and attacked every Armenian
they encountered. Thousands died before British troops entered the city to
quell the rioting. Bodies were piled up “like offal in the scavenger carts.”16
The rioting against Armenians spread throughout the provinces, where
thousands more died.
Armen Garo and most of his compatriots lived to fight another day
(though a number of the Armenian “farm boys” who joined in the attack were
deported from France to Argentina, never to be heard of again).17 Not one of
Garo’s negotiated demands was met. The resulting deaths of thousands of
Armenians were rationalized by the Armenian revolutionaries as collateral
damage in the fight for a just cause. The ARF considered the bank raid a
success because it put the Armenian conflict with the Ottomans, and the ARF
itself, under an international spotlight. They believed that the world could no
longer ignore their plight. Thus was born the revolutionary career of the man
who, twenty-five years later, would found the Nemesis conspiracy. Armen
Garo would become one of the most prominent and controversial forces
within the ARF.
Despite the perceived success of the bank raid, the cause of Armenian
rights made little progress in the years immediately following the assault. In
1905, almost ten years later, frustrated at the lack of progress, the Tashnags
raised the ante and made plans to assassinate the sultan. Assassination had
been a favorite tool of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation since its
inception. In the late nineteenth century, spies, snitches, and government
officials were routinely shot in the streets. These political assassinations
were called deror, a word derived from the word “terror.” The killings were
held sacred, a tool that would “elevate the spirit of the people.” In an 1892
publication, the “Program of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation,” in
which the goals and means of the organization are laid out, it is clearly stated
that the organization would strive “to stimulate fighting to terrorize
government officials, informers, traitors, usurers, and every kind of
exploiter… to expose government establishments to looting and
destruction.”18
Gerard J. Libaridian, the former Tashnag archivist and official of the
post-Soviet Armenian Republic, expands on this theme: “Revolutionaries
struck down government officials as a show of power. More often than not
these officials were the more cruel and unscrupulous; their elimination would
provide relief to the populace on the local level. Such actions were also
expected to spread fear among remaining functionaries who were thereby
warned that their behavior would not go unpunished.”19 The ARF deployed
their assassins as virtual weapons, unstoppable once they were set in motion.
The Armenians enlisted the aid of a Belgian anarchist, Edward Joris, to
plan the assassination.20 After considering various options, including sniper
fire and launching grenades at the royal entourage, they settled on deploying a
time bomb. A custom-built coach was stuffed with the plastic explosive
gelignite. The agents carefully monitored the sultan’s comings and goings and
timed his movements with stopwatches, learning precisely when he would be
at any particular point in his routine, and decided to attack during his
observance of the Muslim Friday prayer ceremony, something he did every
week.21
Because of his obsessive focus on security, Sultan Abdul Hamid was not
an easy target. A thin, nervous man who chain-smoked, Abdul Hamid rarely
drank alcohol and was extremely careful about what he ate, mainly because
of his sensitive stomach, but also because he was morbidly afraid of being
poisoned. He routinely fed morsels of his dinner to his dogs and cats to test
for toxins and reportedly employed a eunuch to take the first puff of every
cigarette. Hamid’s royal compound, Yildiz Palace, featuring thick twenty-
foot-high walls, had been specifically designed and reinforced to withstand
attack. Every night he slept in a different room, hoping to confuse potential
assassins. He even avoided the use of telephones for fear that his enemies
were eavesdropping. Bodyguards were ever present, and the sultan rarely
appeared in public. According to James Burrill Angell, the president of the
University of Michigan who was appointed minister to the Ottoman Empire
by President McKinley in 1897, “The Sultan had suppressed the former mail
service because he received so many threatening postal cards and because
conspirators could by mail mature dangerous schemes.”22 The sultan’s spy
network was vast; it was rumored that one person from every major
household in the realm was spying for the palace.
Because of his role as caliph, or ceremonial leader of Islam, it was
compulsory that the sultan attend the weekly public service at the Hamidiye
mosque. He left the palace proper every Friday morning, accompanied by a
large entourage of carriages and attendants. To keep his public exposure as
brief as possible, Abdul Hamid had built the mosque within the palace
grounds. After the assassinations of the king of Italy and an attack on the shah
of Persia in Paris, European visitors were forbidden to attend the ceremony
without official permission. Unaccompanied Armenians were not allowed
onto the grounds at all. To get around these prohibitions, the conspirators
pretended to be young couples seeking a blessing for their marriage vows.
Every Friday, surrounded by infantry and cavalry, the sultan would enter
the mosque at around eleven thirty with an entourage that included his sons.
As his spies circulated among the participants, the sultan would observe the
service from a special unseen chamber reserved for him. As soon as the
service ended, he would exit the mosque quickly, step up into a two-seat
phaeton drawn by two white horses, and drive himself back to the palace.
On Friday, July 21, 1905, Operation Dragon (Vishab) went into action.
The Tashnag assassins slipped the gelignite-laden carriage into the
procession. Because the ceremony followed a specific timetable, the bomb
was set to go off within seconds after the sultan emerged from the mosque.
On this occasion, however, Abdul Hamid was delayed when the Sheikh ul-
Islam, the minister of public worship (evkif), approached him for a short
conversation. The two spoke for barely a minute, but the delay was fateful.
Lacking a remote control, the timer on the bomb could not be reset. The
Tashnag bomb maker and twenty-six members of the sultan’s retinue died in
the explosion. Another fifty-eight were wounded. The sultan escaped
uninjured.
Abdul Hamid had hundreds arrested and tortured in an attempt to root out
the conspirators, but to no avail. (Mysteriously, after only two years of
confinement, the Belgian coordinator, Edward Joris, was released and
allowed to return to his native country.) And again, though the attempt on the
sultan’s life had been unsuccessful, the Tashnags’ reputation as fearless
revolutionaries spread all over the empire. With the assault on the Bank
Ottoman and now the attempt on Abdul Hamid’s life, the Tashnags were
establishing themselves as a truly dangerous terrorist organization. In the
rural provinces their agrarian principles were blended with armed revolt
against the Kurds, but in Constantinople, their goals were specifically anti-
sultanic. Either way, they were seen as fearsome, brave, and cunning. For a
young Armenian desperately in need of heroes, the Tashnags filled the bill.
These were the men young Tehlirian looked up to.

Around this same time, a clique of young Ottoman military officers chafing at
the bit of the sultan’s ineffectual rule sought the reestablishment of the
constitution and parliament. These men would be labeled “les Jeunes Turcs”
(the Young Turks). Formally, they were the Committee of Union and Progress
(originally the Committee of Progress and Union). The Young Turks, with
help from their putative enemies, the ARF, would eventually succeed in
overthrowing the sultan.
The Young Turks needed heroes as much as the revolutionaries did. For
this reason, events halfway around the world made 1905 memorable. In May,
Admiral Togo Heihachiro, commanding a small Japanese fleet, destroyed
much of the Russian navy in the Battle of Tsushima. Japan went on to win the
war against Russia. For the first time in history, a non-European state had
defeated one of the great European powers. In this display of strength the
Young Turks saw a glimmer of hope for the future of the Ottoman Empire.
Japan had embraced constitutionalism in the middle of the nineteenth century,
as the Ottomans had also tried to do, and it was in this “modernism” that the
Young Turks saw the possibility of escaping the clutches of Europe and its
relentless absorption of their nation.
The sultan’s days as all-powerful leader of the Ottoman Empire were
numbered. In 1908 the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP; in Turkish,
Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti), with help from the Armenian Tashnags and
other non-CUP Muslims, succeeded in bringing down the government. (The
Hnchags, fearing a double-cross by these Turkish nationalists, had kept their
distance.) Together the CUP and the ARF pulled off a bloodless coup. Abdul
Hamid was forced to restore the constitution he had shelved back in 1877.
“For the first time in Ottoman history an organized political party dominated
politics.”23
The revolution of 1908 was embraced by all as momentous. Certain that a
new age of equality was dawning, the Armenians and Greeks of the Ottoman
Empire were ecstatic. They believed that something approaching
representational government would give them rights like those enjoyed by the
citizens of the European constitutional monarchies. Though inexperienced at
governing, the leaders of the CUP (who included the future Talat Pasha,
Enver Pasha, and Djemal Pasha) were sure that they had saved the country.
With the new constitution, the Ottoman Empire could modernize and fend off
Europe’s plans to parcel out and devour its territories. Muslims and
Christians celebrated in the streets and joined together to pray at the graves
of those massacred during Abdul Hamid’s reign.
 A parliament was elected. Among the new deputies who represented the
vilayets were a handful of Armenians, including thirty-six-year-old Armen
Garo, veteran of the Bank Ottoman takeover fourteen years earlier. The
Tashnags had become a legitimate party and as such could participate in
running the country. Garo could now have direct dialogue with the CUP
leadership, particularly Talat.
But the revolution had not solved the deep-rooted problems facing
Turkey. No sooner had the new regime of constitutional government begun
than violence broke out in the distant vilayets. “The leaders of the CUP…
were unprepared for their sudden accession to power.”24 Maintaining control
of an empire was not so easy when entrenched power blocs wanted to
preserve the status quo. Warlords in the east, rich aghas, even Armenian
Church leaders were not ready for a dawning of egalitarianism. The empire
was not prepared for democracy. A reactionary counter-coup broke out,
designed to put an end to constitutional government and restore Abdul
Hamid’s powers as absolute monarch. With the quick suppression of the
counter-coup, Abdul Hamid was thrown out altogether and replaced with a
sultan who would toe the CUP line. A new pragmatic and violent style of
governing infected the CUP leadership. Presiding over this new approach to
government, one in which assassination and murder would become business
as usual, was Mehmet Talat, later Talat Pasha. Over the next four years,
Talat, Enver, Djemal, and the Young Turks would tighten their iron grip on
the government. Clearly, the CUP “were not constitutionalists.”25
The new leadership needed to divert attention from its own lack of a clear
agenda. Armenian revolutionaries provided an obvious scapegoat. A series
of attacks against Armenians erupted in the vilayet of Adana in 1909, leaving
some twenty to thirty thousand dead. Many historians now believe that the
CUP government was complicit. With these attacks, the specter of massacre
across the empire rose up again. Many of the Armenian leaders who had
embraced their legal status in the new government became alarmed. Could it
be that their “friends” the Young Turks were not to be trusted? Armenian
revolutionary activity throughout the empire increased, and on the threshold
of World War I, so did violent repression. Most Tashnags and Hnchags could
see that the honeymoon with the CUP was over. In response to the violence,
pressure from the European powers again increased. An intervention by the
Great Powers became imminent, but because the Russians and British would
not trust each other, they were unable to put together a plan with any teeth in
it. Eventually, European provincial overseers were sent to eastern Turkey to
guarantee the civil rights of the Armenians, but it was too little, too late. A
few weeks later, World War I broke out and the oversight system was
scrapped.
Beginning in 1912, two successive Balkan wars had resulted in defeat for
the Ottomans (i.e., the CUP). Major Ottoman territories in eastern Europe
were lost. Hundreds of thousands of Balkan Muslim refugees (muhacirs)
flooded into Constantinople. The Young Turks, squabbling amongst
themselves, found their authority slipping away. Finally, in 1913, the more
radical members of the CUP completed their takeover of the government.
This time the coup was not bloodless. On January 23, 1913, Enver Pasha,
accompanied by an entourage of Ittihadists, burst into parliament and gunned
down the minister of war, Nazim Pasha. The Grand Vizier, Kamil Pasha, was
forced to resign and, fearing for his life, abandoned Constantinople. Other
moderates, particularly Prince Sabahaddin, who had lobbied on behalf of the
Armenian cause, also chose exile abroad after the takeover. Then CUP
opponents assassinated Kamil’s successor, Mahmut Sevket Pasha, in June
1913. The Ittihadists (or Unionists) were now in complete control. Talat,
Enver, Djemal, Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, and other members of the CUP Central
Committee would from this point on direct the Ottoman Empire. The
experiment with democracy was over. The Central Committee was in charge.
These men were the true bosses of the Ottoman Empire during World War
I. “The Central Committee would remain until the end of World War I ten
years later the centre of power in the Ottoman Empire.”26 The membership of
the Central Committee had been secret, evolving over the years. Moderates
had been forced out and replaced by ardent racist nationalists. Most histories
of the Ottoman Empire during World War I describe the leadership as a
“triumvirate” of Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemal Pasha, but in fact the
Ittihad had many guiding hands.
Mehmet Cavid organized the finances, including large infusions of gold
from the Germans. The sociologist and poet Ziya Gokalp provided the Young
Turks with a complex nationalist ideology replete with ideas such as “in
reality there cannot be a common home and fatherland for different peoples.
… The new civilization will be created by the Turkish race.”27 Generals
Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) and Kara Kemal provided military muscle. “The
CUP functioned as a strict hierarchy, with the central committee at the top
and the periphery totally subordinated to the center whenever it was within
its control.”28
Though Enver and Djemal oversaw the military and were fully versed in
the machinations of the central government, it was Talat Pasha, as minister of
the interior, who ran the show. Talat was always at the center of things.
Clever, strong-willed, and comfortable in his dealings with foreign
diplomats, Talat was also a physically imposing man. United States
ambassador Henry Morgenthau seemed almost in awe when he described
him:

Physically he was a striking figure. His powerful frame, his huge,

sweeping back and his rocky biceps emphasized that natural mental
strength and forcefulness which made possible his career. In
discussing matters, Talat liked to sit at his desk, with his shoulders
drawn up, his head thrown back, and his wrists, twice the size of an
ordinary man’s, planted firmly on the table.… Whenever I think of
Talat now, I do not primarily recall his rollicking laugh, his
uproarious enjoyment of a good story, the mighty stride with which he
crossed the room, his fierceness, his determination, his
remorselessness—[no], the whole life and nature of the man take form
in those gigantic wrists.29

Like many Young Turk leaders, Talat was not ethnically Turkish; rather he
was of Pomak descent, that is, native Bulgarian Muslim. He was born in
1874, the son of a civil servant. At the time of the Young Turk revolution, he
had worked for the post office for ten years. As interior minister, he shared
many traits with other leaders of the twentieth century who rose from humble
backgrounds. Talat’s natural charisma, intelligence, and single-mindedness
combined to give birth to a ruthless political pragmatist. Always careful to
make strategic moves that enhanced his power, he cooperated with his fellow
Central Committee members while never relinquishing control. Unlike his
fellow committee members, Talat had neither military training nor an
advanced education. Though many of his cohorts were urbane, Talat was
flexible and canny, which made him well suited to international politics. He
was highly respected by the Kaiser, who in 1917 conferred on him the
Prussian Order of the Black Eagle, “one of the highest German decorations…
seldom conferred on non-Germans.”30
Though Enver Pasha lacked Talat’s Machiavellian talent for political
engagement, his charisma arose in part from his sheer impetuosity. He was
well known as a hero to the people and was considered Talat’s equal in the
Ottoman Empire. Enver was the most prominent military leader in Turkey
and, after visiting Germany a few years before the onset of World War I,
began to pattern his style of leadership after that of the Prussian military. He
had confirmed his reputation as a courageous and resourceful general in the
Second Balkan War. (Ironically, he wasn’t actually present during the battle
for which he is best known.) Brash and cocky, he was famous for his
mustache with its upturned twisted ends.
Enver was not only a celebrated general and a snappy dresser; he was
also married to the Princess Emine Naciye, making him a member of the
royal family. This direct connection to the caliphate lent him an aura of
Islamic significance. At the end of the war and later, this special status would
give Enver license to lead an “Army of Islam” in Azerbaijan and Central
Asia. In contrast to Talat’s meat-and-potatoes strongman image, Enver
appealed to the public with his dashing exploits and confrontational style.
Talat, ever the sly politician, had no problem with Enver’s overconfidence,
realizing that it actually made his greatest rival for the top leadership
position more vulnerable. Nonetheless, Enver, like Talat, would
enthusiastically embrace the decision to exterminate the Armenians.
Djemal Pasha, the third member of the triumvirate, was also a military
leader. Unlike Enver, he was a Francophile who had trained with the French,
and so he lacked Enver’s more severe Prussian style. Djemal led the navy
and was in charge of the southern flank of the empire, including Syria, the
Sinai, and Mesopotamia. Also, as commander of the Syrian region, he
oversaw the vast numbers of deportees flooding into the desert around the
oasis town of Der Zor and other concentration camps.
The man who later would lead the “Special Organization,” the secret
paramilitary tasked with some of the most gruesome killings of the genocide,
was Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, a former personal physician to the Ottoman crown
prince. Shakir kept close tabs on the deportation efforts as he motored from
city to city in a large black car, giving personal instructions to commanders
and CUP secretaries. In this respect Shakir provided the link between Talat
in Constantinople and the local valis, or governors, who controlled each
vilayet. Shakir, like many of the other leading lights in the CUP, was the son
of refugees (muhacirs) from Bulgaria. As such he had been witness to the
vicious Christian attacks on the Bulgarian Muslim populations. By the time
World War I began, Shakir had no compunctions about using similar tactics to
clear the Armenians out of Turkish Anatolia.
An early indication of the CUP’s callous disregard for life presaged its
later approach to what it saw as “the Armenian problem.” Tens of thousands
of stray dogs ran loose on the streets of Constantinople, defecating in the
public parks and snapping at people, as packs of wild dogs virtually took
over neighborhoods. In 1910, two years after first coming to power, the CUP
decided to solve the problem of Constantinople’s dogs with an eye toward
improving the party’s popularity and public image. The dogs, unlike more
intractable difficulties, were a problem with an easy solution.
Dogcatchers were dispatched, and the dogs of Constantinople were
captured one by one and locked in cages. The cages packed with barking
canines were then shipped off to a deserted island, Hayirsiz Ada, one of the
Princes’ Islands lying just off the coast, a short boat ride from the city and a
favorite tourist destination today. The cages were brought ashore and opened,
and some eighty thousand dogs were set loose on the rocky island, where,
lacking food, the strong cannibalized the weak until those that remained
simply starved to death. Supposedly, ships crossing the Sea of Marmara
could hear their plaintive howls across the dark waters. Their treatment
received so much attention that the Turkish Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals was founded by one Alice Washburn Manning, an
American who came to Turkey specifically in response to the plight of the
dogs, as well as the horses that had been wounded during the war.31
The CUP’s approach to the stray dogs was simple and straightforward. A
problem had presented itself, and an efficient solution had been found. It’s
hard not to see a parallel with the fate of the Armenians a mere five years
later. Talat and his colleagues were pragmatic and decisive. Without Talat’s
cold focus on “the problem” and its cold-blooded “answer,” the deportation
program would never have happened.
 CHAPTER THREE

Blood Flows

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community-building.

—Philip Gourevitch

Many of the best-known histories of World War I have focused on the

trench warfare between the Triple Entente (the United Kingdom, France, and
Russia) and Germany. World War I was all about aerial dogfights and poison
gas, “Tommys” and “doughboys.” This was a European war, wasn’t it? The
events depicted in films like Gallipoli and Lawrence of Arabia have crept
into our consciousness, but most people would probably be hard-pressed to
explain how they fit into the big picture of the “Great War.”
The southern flank of World War I would hold long-term consequences
for the Western world because the prize was nothing less than control of the
earth’s greatest oil deposits, regions that to this day represent over half the
world’s known oil reserves. It was on this front that the Ottoman Empire
finally fell to pieces, losing its Arabian territories in the process. And it was
under the cloak of this war between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies that
the Armenian Genocide proceeded with little detection.
The Ottoman Empire, particularly its war minister, Enver Pasha, admired
Germany’s might, ambition, and efficiency, but the two nations were not
natural allies. In fact, though Kaiser Wilhelm II had professed deep affection
for Turkey and Islam, Germany’s interest in the Ottoman Empire was above
all strategic. Likewise, the Young Turk government could just as easily have
found an ally in Great Britain and historically had a genuine affinity for
France. The real enemy for both Germany and the Ottoman Empire was
Russia, which shared a long, challenging border with both states. For at least
a century, Russia had its sights set on controlling the Bosphorus, and that
meant Constantinople, which the Russians fondly called “Tsargrad.”
Many historians refer to the complicated jockeying for control of this
critical intersection of Europe and Asia as “the Great Game.” If Russia (or
Germany) could gain control of Asia Minor, it would be well positioned to
seize the Arab lands, specifically the Levant, the Hejaz (western Saudi
Arabia), and Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq). As far as Great Britain was
concerned, control of Arab lands meant control of the Suez Canal and, by
extension, access to Persia and India. For this reason, the central territory of
the Ottoman Empire, what we now call Turkey, stood as a massive buffer
between the Great Powers. But Germany was unhappy with the status quo for
various reasons, lack of oil resources being only one of them. Germany
viewed the Ottoman lands, particularly Asia Minor, as fertile ground for
development, what would later be called Lebensraum, or “living space,” a
concept that loomed in the German consciousness long before the Nazi era.
At the onset of World War I, the Baghdad Railroad, financed by Deutsche
Bank, was slowly but surely penetrating the Turkish hinterlands.
By the summer of 1914, the Young Turk government was exhausted by two
wars in the Balkans. Large chunks of Ottoman territory in Europe had broken
free. War loomed, and it was easy to see that Russian troops would soon
flood into the eastern (Armenian) vilayets, while British forces would be
testing the Aegean littoral. The Young Turks tried to stave off a clear
decision about joining the war for as long as possible, but by the end of July,
Winston Churchill had seized Turkish vessels being built in English
shipyards, clearly setting the stage for conflict between the two powers.
Secret negotiations led to an alliance between Germany and the Ottoman
Empire, and when Ottoman (formerly German) warships fired on Russian
ports on the Black Sea, the Turks had finally entered the war.1
Six months into the fighting, the Ottomans suffered major setbacks as
Russian and Turkish troops fought it out in eastern Turkey. Enver Pasha, in an
ill-conceived move, had pushed into Russian Caucasian territory in
December, losing more than seventy thousand men in the freezing
mountainous heights near Sarikamish. At the other end of Asia Minor, British
warships massed in the Mediterranean in preparation for a thrust past
Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, through the Sea of Marmara, and into the
imperial city. Making provision for the inevitable, the CUP leaders made
ready to abandon their home base, planning to pull back from all fronts and
consolidate their forces in central Anatolia.
But the collapse of the western (Constantinople) front never materialized.
Skittish and under stress, Admiral Sackville Carden could not find a way to
move the British fleet past the heavily mined Dardanelles. Over the ensuing
months, the Ottoman army held the line at Gallipoli as British, Australian,
and New Zealander troops suffered thousands of deaths and tens of thousands
of casualties. Both the threat of invasion and the reversal that followed
spelled doom for the Armenians, who were viewed by the Young Turk
leaders Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha as a potential “fifth column.”
To be sure, committed Armenian fedayeen fighters in the east had either
stepped up their sabotage against the regime by cutting telegraph wires,
working as spies for the Russians, or moving illicit arms. Some drifted
across the border and joined the Russian troops as a vanguard of the invading
army, working as guides for the Russians through the foreign terrain. The
veteran Armenian leaders of these hardened Tashnag and Hnchag troops
gathered up and took command of the volunteers migrating toward the war
front. The Ottoman parliamentarian and former revolutionary Armen Garo, to
the consternation of many Armenians, joined the Russian forces, going so far
as to have his picture taken in full Russian battle regalia.2 But these
Armenian fighters, who numbered a few thousand, did not accurately reflect
the attitude of the Armenian population of Turkey, at that time estimated at
about two million souls.

During the tense weeks prior to the onset of “the war to end all wars,” the
Ottoman army was desperately in need of men. After two Balkan wars that
had dragged on for years, young Ottomans harbored few illusions about what
a soldier’s life held in store. Before the Balkan wars, a series of conflicts
with Russia had decimated generation after generation of peasants. The
people had nothing to show for their sacrifice but casualties, famine, and
rampant disease. The Ottoman army, unlike the orderly and smartly
uniformed European military, was badly outfitted and poorly trained.
Conscription was seen as nothing more than a delayed death sentence. Army
life meant backbreaking work, near-starvation, and slow death by flea-borne
typhus or a fast death by bullet or bayonet. The role of the Turkish soldier
was best summed up in General Mustapha Kemal’s famous command at
Gallipoli: “I’m not ordering you to fight, I’m ordering you to die.”
And now, because of the political reforms, even Christians were included
in the draft rolls. Young Armenian men, as members of the Christian millet,
had traditionally paid the bedel tax and were excluded from service. Now,
since the restoration of the constitution, they were no longer exempt and were
obliged to fight. The first Armenian conscripts were full-fledged soldiers,
and as such, armed with rifles. There were even Armenian officers serving in
the ranks.3 But soon after the war officially began, in February 1915, Enver
ordered that the Armenians’ weapons be taken from them. Instead of serving
on the front, Christian soldiers were collected into “labor battalions”
(inshaat taburu). These battalions were little more than slave units in which
the soldiers were worked to death like pack animals. The men were
exploited until they died, and if they did not die, they were marched to
remote areas and murdered outright.
Though many young men, Turkish and Armenian, did serve in the Turkish
army, many others avoided military service at any cost. In the countryside,
men hid in the mountains where the gendarmes could not find them. In
Constantinople, a vast underground network was created to help them elude
the authorities. Young men were hidden in cellars, behind walls, in secret
rooms. Throughout the city, this “Army of the Attics” (tavan taburu)
numbered in the thousands. Concealing these young men and maintaining the
underground support system became an important function of the urban
Armenian revolutionaries.

The Central Committee of the CUP quickly came to believe that the Armenian
population represented a mortal threat to the dying Ottoman Empire.
Enmeshed in war with Britain and Russia and harassed by small bands of
Armenian fedayeen on its eastern front, the Ottoman government decided to
solve the “Armenian question” once and for all by eliminating all Armenians
residing in Anatolia. This eradication of over a million people would
proceed in stages, often disguised as deportations. All would be
camouflaged by the fog of war.
Examples of ethnic cleansing can be found at least as far back as biblical
times, but the slaughter that was to befall the Armenian people in the Ottoman
Empire in 1915 was unprecedented in scope and definition. The intensity of
the violence, and the staggering numbers of people murdered in such a short
period of time—almost one million people—introduced to the world a new
phenomenon: genocide, the attempt to eradicate a people, physically and
culturally. Equally important, this mass killing was committed by a
government against its own subjects. This was not a case of an invading army
or a violent colonization of a faraway land. The Armenians were not a
rebellious or combative indigenous people settled in conquered territory.
Despite the small bands of Armenian guerrillas harassing Ottoman troops
during the war, the overwhelming majority of Armenians had steered well
clear of politics or rebellion. Rather, they were for the most part peaceful
subjects of the sultan who had always lived productively within the borders
of the state. The Armenians of the Ottoman Empire paid taxes, obeyed the
law, and contributed to the culture and institutions of the empire. Their
destruction was a sinister innovation of a society that thought of itself as
“modern” and “civilized,” and would foreshadow the systematic mass
murder of innocents by Nazi and communist governments only a few decades
later.
This was not the first time that the Christians in the eastern provinces of
the Ottoman Empire had been attacked directly. Twenty years earlier,
intensely violent episodes had wiped out over a hundred thousand Armenians
under the watch of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Tens of thousands more had died
in the bloodbaths of 1909 after the Young Turks took power. Bloodletting
aimed at the Armenians had become commonplace in the eastern Ottoman
vilayets, fostering a “culture of massacre.” With the advent of World War I in
1914, a vastly more efficient and highly organized wave of terror swelled
and broke upon an unsuspecting Christian population, removing the
Armenians from their ancestral lands altogether.
The operation to remove and ultimately erase the Armenian population in
Anatolia went into effect just as World War I was beginning. It was neither
random nor unplanned, but rather systematic and centrally orchestrated by a
guiding hand in Constantinople. By the end of the summer of 1915, owing to
this program of relocation and massacre, most of the hundreds of thousands
of Armenians who had been living in Anatolia no longer resided in their
villages. By the end of the war, most of those Armenians of the Ottoman
Empire who had not managed to cross the border were either dead or dying
in the Syrian desert.
The process began in the regions farthest from Constantinople and closest
to Russia, and then, with gruesome efficiency, worked its way westward
across Asia Minor. Some Armenians in the western vilayets were forced to
pay their own way as they were deported by railway, even if this meant
traveling in cattle cars. The sick and dying were mixed in with the healthy.
The dead were removed at each station and in some instances thrown down
the embankments. Along the Black Sea littoral, victims were taken out in
boats and drowned. If local Muslim leaders balked at the deportations
because they understood that it was nothing more than thinly disguised mass
murder, those leaders were replaced. Sometimes they, too, were executed.
Victims were often forced to undress before being killed, since it was
against Sharia law to strip clothing off a corpse and then sell it in the market.
Many deportees would arrive at their destination completely naked. In
addition to being subjected to organized theft, those in the deportation
caravans were attacked continually, and whatever meager possessions they
had managed to carry were taken. At one point, in a conversation with
Ambassador Morgenthau, Talat Pasha demanded the life insurance proceeds
for Armenians the regime had murdered! This real property and treasure
would contribute to a program of Turkification, thus subsidizing the cost of
the deportations themselves.4

The Ottoman campaign against the Armenians of Asia Minor proceeded in

the following way:

1) Since the Balkan wars, able-bodied Armenian men faced conscription

by the army. Now they were disarmed, segregated from the regular army, and
re-formed into “labor battalions” (inshaat taburu). These underfed and ill-
clothed young men were worked to death or executed in remote areas.

2) Small villages were surrounded by soldiers or irregulars (chetes) and

destroyed. All residents were killed on the spot. The village often would be
burned to the ground.
In larger villages or towns where the populace was both Christian and
Muslim:

3) Male leaders of the Armenian community were arrested, imprisoned,

and tortured. Within a few days, they would be “moved” from the prison to
another location, farther from the town. These men would not be seen again,
having been executed. This group would include those not eligible for the
army but who had some capacity as potential leaders: businessmen,
merchants, pharmacists, teachers, clergy.

4) Once the leading men of the community had been removed, a

proclamation would announce that the remaining Armenians were being
moved to another location. A typical posting, quoted in one survivor account,
reads:

Leave all your belongings—your furniture, your beddings, your

artifacts. Close your shops and businesses with everything inside.
Your doors will be sealed with special stamps. On your return, you
will get everything you left behind. Do not sell property or any
expensive item. Buyers and sellers alike will be liable for legal
action. Put your money in a bank in the name of a relative who is out
of the country. Make a list of everything you own, including livestock,
and give it to the specified official so that all your things can be
returned to you later. You have ten days to comply with this
ultimatum.5

Armenians would be given a few days to get their possessions together.

Often a “fire sale” would follow, and families would be forced to sell what
they couldn’t carry at an extreme discount.6 Large storable possessions—for
example, goods in a warehouse or household furniture and carpets—would
be confiscated “for safekeeping” by the government. Deportees were forced
to sign over real estate deeds. Bank accounts of those who had been deported
were taken. Merchants and farmers and tradesmen lost their stock, including
foodstuffs, animals, manufactured goods for sale, and raw materials. Small
factories, farms, and mines were seized. Churches and church property were
confiscated and converted into mosques.7

5) The Muslim population was warned that Armenians who ran away or
tried to hide would be executed. Any Muslim who attempted to conceal or in
any way aid an Armenian would be punished by death, and his or her family
would likewise be executed and their house razed. All Armenians were
included in the caravans. No exceptions were allowed for age or disability.
The only Armenians permitted to stay behind were those who either had a
secure job within a consulate or a hospital or whose skills might benefit the
war effort (e.g., working in a flour mill).8 Eventually every Armenian,
whatever his or her value to Turkey, was to be deported. Farmers were
killed or exiled before they could harvest their crops, resulting in grain
shortages and famine.

6) Guarded by soldiers, police, or chetes, the caravans were led into the
frontier. Harassment and killings began soon after they left the populated
areas. The persecution ranged from small boys throwing stones to theft,
beatings, the abduction and rape of young women, and murder. Kurds were
allowed to attack the caravan in order to kidnap young women and children
or rob those who might have valuables with them; minor infractions were met
with whippings, bayoneting, or shooting. Suicides were common. Often the
pious would rather die than renounce their Christian faith, as their captors
demanded. Others suffered permanent psychological harm.

7) As the caravans continued along the meandering semi-desert tracks,

hunger, thirst, and relentless heat would take their toll. Deportees were often
forbidden to drink from springs. The weak, primarily the elderly and very
young, were left by the roadside to die. (After numerous reports of corpses
cluttering the roads, Talat Pasha sent out strict directives to bury all the
dead.) The caravans were quickly transformed into a ragtag collection of
starving people dragging their emaciated bodies through the desert. There
was little chance that the old, infirm, or very young would survive more than
a week of this torture. Young women were kidnapped into households, boys
taken as slaves (often as shepherds). The only men who survived were those
who escaped and ran.
 8) The ultimate destination was a string of outposts in the Syrian desert,
particularly the oasis town of Der Zor. Here, with little shelter and no
facilities for basic hygiene, the remaining deportees died from hunger and
disease. The camps were regularly culled through outright executions in
order to make room for new arrivals. Thousands of children were left
orphaned.

There were innumerable witnesses. Commissioner Giacomo Gorrini, who

was stationed as the Italian consul general in Trebizond in northeastern
Anatolia on the Black Sea, wrote:

There were about 14,000 Armenians at Trebizond—Gregorians,

Catholics, and Protestants. They had never caused disorders or given
occasion for collective measures of police. When I left Trebizond, not
a hundred of them remained. From the 24th June, the date of the
publication of the infamous decree, until the 23rd July, the date of my
own departure from Trebizond, I no longer slept or ate; I was given
over to nerves and nausea, so terrible was the torment of having to
look on at the wholesale execution of these defenceless, innocent
creatures.
The passing of the gangs of Armenian exiles beneath the windows
and before the door of the Consulate; their prayers for help, when
neither I nor any other could do anything to answer them; the city in a
state of siege, guarded at every point by 15,000 troops in complete
war equipment, by thousands of police agents, by bands of volunteers
and by the members of the “Committee of Union and Progress”; the
lamentations, the tears, the abandonments, the imprecations, the many
suicides, the instantaneous deaths from sheer terror, the sudden
unhingeing of men’s reason, the conflagrations, the shooting of victims
in the city, the ruthless searches through the houses and in the
countryside; the hundreds of corpses found every day along the exile
road; the young women converted by force to Islam or exiled like the
rest; the children torn away from their families or from the Christian
schools, and handed over by force to Moslem families, or else placed
by hundreds on board ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized
 and drowned in the Black Sea and the River Deyirmen Deré—these
are my last ineffaceable memories of Trebizond, memories which still,
at a month’s distance, torment my soul and almost drive me frantic.9

One group remained dedicated to aiding the Armenians: the Christian

missionaries. They pleaded with American diplomats to intercede.10
Ambassador Morgenthau, in turn, made it his duty to lobby on behalf of the
Armenians and wrote long essays on the plight of the Armenians, which
eventually became books. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story has long been a
cornerstone of the case against the Young Turks. Morgenthau knew Talat
personally and had many tributaries of reportage finding their way to him. “I
now see what was not apparent in those early months,” he wrote, “that the
Turkish Government was determined to keep the news, as long as possible,
from the outside world. It was clearly the intention that Europe and America
should hear of the annihilation of the Armenian race only after that
annihilation had been accomplished.” Though Morgenthau was stationed in
Constantinople and did not personally witness the evacuation and slaughter
of the Armenian villagers, he was entirely convinced by those on the front
lines who reported what they had seen. “For hours, [the missionaries] would
sit in my office and, with tears streaming down their faces, they would tell
me of the horrors through which they had passed. Many of these, both men
and women, were almost broken in health from the scenes they had
witnessed.”11
Missionaries had begun to flood into the region in the last half of the
nineteenth century as the dire straits of the Christian population became
better publicized. Though the missionaries hailed from several European
countries, many were Americans affiliated with the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The ABCFM was founded in 1810,
part of the wave known as the “Second Great Awakening,” which fostered
missions, antislavery movements, temperance campaigns, and pacifism
around the world. This organization, affiliated with several Protestant
churches, had been conceived of by a group of students from Williams
College who brought the idea of foreign proselytizing to the Andover
Theological Seminary. During the nineteenth century, the ABCFM flourished
and had a profound effect on the course of world events. Missions were
founded not only in the Ottoman Empire but also in Africa, Siam (Thailand),
Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii),12 where the
missionaries set in motion forces that would lead the United States to annex
the islands in 1898. The ABCFM spread not only the words of Christ but
also, infused with a belief in manifest destiny and social Darwinism, a deep
commitment to the idea that the American way was superlative. The “object
of the missions was moral renovation of the world,” wrote Joseph L. Grabill,
bringing with them a new way of living embodied in “glass windows,
wooden floors, wagons, clocks, sewing machines, organs, cotton gins [and]
telegraph instruments.”13
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the first waves of American
Protestant missionaries met resistance as they arrived to make converts in the
Levant. The Jews, having had their fill of Christians in Europe, wanted to be
left alone. The Greek patriarch had no use for competition and openly warred
with the missions. Some Muslims were curious, but Sharia law dictated that
the punishment for apostasy was death. And any Catholics in the region
naturally wanted nothing to do with Protestant missionaries.
The “backward” Armenians became a focus of Protestant efforts at
conversion. Though the Armenians had been practicing Christianity for over
a millennium before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door
of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, the American missionaries saw them as
souls in need of saving. Nine hundred years earlier they had aligned
themselves with the Crusaders, or “Franks,” and this created another link to
the West.
Neither as elaborate as Roman Catholicism nor as austere as
Protestantism, the ancient Armenian Christianity was nothing like the faith of
the earnest preachers arriving in steamships from America. The missionaries
wanted to overwhelm this “crusty ritualism” with the undeniable light of their
truth. They “hoped that their idea of individual repentance and obedience to
God would be more attractive than Gregorian ceremonies.”14 One prominent
Protestant writing in 1854 called the Armenian Apostolic Church “a
miserable counterfeit of Christianity” and “that degenerate Church,” adding
the punch line, “There is no essential difference between an Armenian and a
Roman mass.”15
Christians had come to “save” other Christians (including Greeks and
Assyrians). “Though they were barely aware of it, American Board
personnel were a liberal force in the Ottoman domains, with as much
potential for disruption as for renewal.”16 In hindsight, it’s easy to blame the
fervor of the missionaries for nurturing revolutionary spirit in Christian
Anatolia. “They came with arguments, tracts and funds. Their purpose, they
said, was to infuse vitality and spirit into the unprogressive and dormant
eastern Christian communities.”17 They preached from their pulpits, and,
more important, the missionaries built schools and hospitals. Colleges that
exist to this day were founded all over the Middle East. The Muslims
avoided the Christian schools while the Armenians embraced them. Along
the way, they not only became educated in the teachings of Christ but also
became exposed to the world beyond their hardscrabble existence. Wealthier
students like Armen Garo headed to Europe for higher education and returned
full of liberal ideas of progress and even revolution. The missionaries were
a full-service institution, bringing not just the Bible to the desperately poor
Armenians but literacy, doctors, teachers, and agitation. By teaching the
Armenians to read and by disseminating a modern form of Christianity that
preached individual salvation rather than deliverance through clerics, the
missionaries were not only disruptive but also became a thorn in the side of
the established Armenian Church hierarchy.

Because the United States had not yet entered the war (and in fact never
declared war on the Ottoman Empire), its diplomats, missionaries, and
doctors were allowed to remain in the country, and were able to bear witness
to what was going on. Their accounts have appeared in various forms: in
Viscount Bryce’s volume The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire, 1915–16 (known as the Bryce “Blue Book”), the Reverend James L.
Barton’s compilation of missionary reports, and individual memoirs by
others stationed all over Turkey.
Myrtle O. Shane, a missionary, attested:

During the first two days after leaving Diyarbakir we quite frequently
saw bodies on or near the road. Some of these had apparently been
killed while trying to escape. Others had been stripped of their
clothing. In many cases the bodies were terribly mutilated. In one
 place we passed three lying near together. The faces had been so
mutilated that no features were discernible and the bodies were one
mass of gashes. Once our driver had to turn the horses aside in order
to avoid running over a body which lay across the road. We saw a dog
standing over one corpse and as we drew nearer could see that it had
already gnawed a part of the flesh from the bones.

Another witness told the Reverend George P. Knapp that “she saw fifty men
near the road forced to lie down on their backs in a row, their hands and feet
bound. Then a butcher proceeded to cut their throats one after another, each
man knowing when his turn would come.”18
Missionaries from different countries would often work together toward a
common Christian goal of helping the unfortunate. A Danish missionary,
Maria Jacobsen, a member of the Women Missionary Workers (Kvindelige
Missions Arbejdere), kept a diary while in Kharpert. On May 30, 1915, she
reports: “From other places we hear of terrible ill-treatment. It is said that in
one place 13 Armenians have been crucified, nails being driven through
hands, feet and chest. In Severek the old minister has been crucified.” On
July 29: “Last night about 100 Armenians were sent away from Harpoot, but
they reached no further than the spring, two hours walk from the town. Here
the soldiers started shooting.” On August 7: “They do not make such great
efforts now. They just take them outside the town and kill them. It would be
more merciful if they took them as far as the river to drown, instead of
torturing and flogging them to death.” On August 14, 1915, Jacobsen visited
the local Armenian cemetery, where the dead and dying were dumped. As
she entered the grounds, Turkish soldiers standing guard outside told her,
“You cannot stand this.” She entered with the American missionary Henry H.
Riggs and the American consul.

The large area was filled with the sick, but these poor ones no longer
looked human. Not even animals could be found in such a condition.
People would have had mercy on them and killed them, but these were
the hated Christians—now in the hands of their enemies—who
intended to make it as difficult as possible for them. As soon as we
entered the gate a crowd gathered around us. All who could move
 jostled each other to come close enough to beg for money—ten paras
for bread.… They were dirty, with unkempt hair, and as thin as the
people who died of starvation in India. Beside this, they were ill and
black with flies. Many were too ill to rise and follow us, but they tried
to sit up and they cried for help. Others were even too weak to cry
after us, only raising their heads to see what all the stir was about
them. Half naked women lay around and one could not tell if they were
alive or dead. Two little girls nine or ten years old, were dragging
away the corpse of a six year old boy.

On the same day she wrote: “In Hooiloo all women were gathered together
and killed. The men had been killed earlier. The women were ordered to
remove their best clothes, and they were laid on top of each other, two by
two, and beheaded.” On October 2 she wrote: “The Consul went to Kezin
Khan and said that the corpses of Armenians are lying so thick on the main
road that there are too many for the animals to eat. How frightful it must be
for those now being sent away, to see their brothers and sisters lying dead on
the road.”19
Leslie Davis was the American consul stationed in Kharpert. In the 1980s
Susan K. Blair, a diligent American researcher working in the United States
National Archives, managed to retrieve his misplaced report after much
digging. The report, which has since been published under the title The
Slaughterhouse Province,20 is a horrific indictment of the Ottoman
government. In a letter to Ambassador Morgenthau, Davis states: “The term
of ‘Slaughterhouse Vilayet’ which I applied to this Vilayet [Kharpert] in my
last report… has been fully justified by what I have learned and actually seen
since that time.” Davis, an athletic and deeply ethical man, rode on
horseback for five hours to Lake Guljuk to see for himself what others had
described. His descriptions and photographs of corpses and killing fields are
like scenes from the most gruesome horror film. According to Davis,
caravans of deportees were led into the remote valleys and dispatched in the
thousands.

In almost every valley there were some bodies and in several of them
a great many,—in one, at least a thousand; in another I estimated that
 there were more than fifteen hundred, but the stench from them was so
great that, although I tried to go up in the end of the valley, I was
unable to do so at the time. I explored it more carefully a month later.
This valley, like many of the others, was triangular in shape and shut
in on two sides by high precipitous banks which the people when
attacked were not able to climb. Two or three gendarmes stationed on
each side could prevent a multitude from escaping in that way. Many
bodies lay wedged among the rocks at the extreme end of the valley,
showing that some had tried in vain to scale them in their attempt to
escape and had been killed there.… Thus the victims were literally
penned in and butchered in cold blood. The bodies were piled on top
of one another and had apparently been there between two and three
weeks.

A collection of American consular reports runs to over six hundred pages.21

These reports are congruent with the reports by German, British, and French
observers. Turkish deniers of the genocide argue that the reports were made
by American missionaries and diplomats and so are unreliable. The
implication is that Americans were on the “other side” by the end of the war
(although the United States never declared war on Turkey), so the reports
must be biased. Reports by the Turks’ German allies, however, confirm
rather than refute the missionary and consular reports.

The Ottoman Empire threw its lot in with Germany during the war. Hundreds
of German officers were stationed in Anatolia. The asymmetric relationship
between Germany and the Ottoman Empire as allies was complex and was
not always fully embraced by either high-level Germans or Turks.
Nevertheless, owing to the machinations of hawks on both sides, the alliance
thrived. This meant that Germany and German officers must have been aware
of, or in some way a party to, Muslim actions against Christians in the
Ottoman Empire. How Germany aided and abetted the genocide has been
debated for years. But without doubt, German diplomats knew that bad things
were happening to the Armenians.
Wolfgang Gust has collected a massive archive of German documents in
his Volkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16 (The Armenian Genocide:
Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915–1916). The
archive consists of six hundred pages of German testimony regarding the
genocide. General Otto Liman von Sanders, who testified at Tehlirian’s trial,
addresses the deportation of the Armenians in Smyrna: “It was confirmed to
me that several hundred Armenians had been arrested by the police—partly
in the roughest manner, by fetching old women and sick children out of their
beds in the night—and had been taken straight to the train station. Two trains
full of Armenians had been transported away.”22
Heinrich Vierbucher, who was Liman von Sanders’s interpreter during the
war, visited much of the territory and was able to make objective
observations. In the book Armenia 1915, this German national reports on
what he learned through official sources:

The teachers of the American school in Kharpert were gruesomely

tortured before they were killed. Professors Tenekejian and
Bujiganian had their hair and beards ripped out while in prison in
order to extort confessions, and were hung by their hands for days at a
time. Another professor went insane when he was forced to watch
Armenians being beaten to death. The vali himself took part in the
torture of Professor Lulejian. The senior executive president beat him
until he was exhausted and said, “Whoever loves his religion and his
people, may he continue beating.”
In Diyabekir the same procedure was followed as in Trabizond.
Twenty-six prominent Armenians, among them the priest of Alpiar,
were first murdered in prison; the priest’s young wife was raped by
ten policemen and almost humiliated to death. Then 674 men were
loaded onto rafts, and thrown overboard in the Euphrates and shot by
the policemen. Five priests were stripped and tarred, and led through
the streets of Diyarbakir. A noncommissioned officer boasted that
along with five policemen he had shot to death seven hundred
defenseless Armenians on the road from Diyarbakir to Urfa. The
district administrator of Lijeh, who did not comply with a verbal
order from the vali to mow down the Armenians, was removed from
office and murdered on the way to Diyarbakir.
In the vicinity of Sasun three thousand men were deported to
 Kharpert and with the exception of three persons, were slaughtered.23

Lieutenant Colonel Stange, a German officer stationed in Erzerum, states:

“The Armenians from Erzindjan were all driven together into the Kamakh
gorge (Euphrates) and massacred there. There are fairly credible reports that
the bodies were loaded onto carts which had already been placed there in
preparation, and driven to the Euphrates and then thrown into the river.”24
Vice Consul Walter Holstein reports from Der Zor, “The misery of these
people is indescribable; women and children are dying of hunger every day;
their clothes decay on their bodies.”25
The German consul, Wilhelm Litten, traveled from Baghdad to Aleppo, in
the direction opposite to the deportation trains. He describes the scene along
the route:

Beyond Der Zor began the Trail of Horror.… I no longer needed to

guess the individual fates but had to behold the misery with my own
eyes: a large transport of Armenians passed me by just beyond Sabha,
driven by the gendarmerie guards to walk faster and faster, and then
the whole misery of the stragglers became apparent in live form. I saw
by the wayside hungry, thirsting, sick, dying, freshly deceased,
mourning beside fresh bodies, and those who could not part quickly
enough from their relatives endangered their own lives, because the
next station or oasis was three days march away for those on foot.
Weakened by hunger, disease, pain they staggered on, fell, and lay still
on the ground.… Not until I was between Meskene and Aleppo did I
see no more Armenians and no more bodies since the transports did
not touch Aleppo at all, but were re-routed via Bab.26

The issue of German complicity is one that is argued to this day. Liman von
Sanders was explicit in his court testimony that Germany did not take orders
from Turkey and committed no atrocities or massacres. More recently, in a
2005 interview, Hilmar Kaiser, a German historian who specializes in the
Armenian Genocide, stated, “The complicity of the Germans in the Armenian
Genocide is a political invention and does not withstand scrutiny.”27
Yet historian Vahakn Dadrian insists: “By explicit and strict orders from
the German High Command in Berlin, the multitudes of German officers
affiliated with the Germany Military Mission to Turkey were forbidden to
intervene in the process of the extermination of the Armenian population of
the empire.”28 (A footnote to the topic of German complicity: hundreds of
Germans fought in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, including a man
who would become one of Adolf Hitler’s best friends, Max Erwin von
Scheubner-Richter. Many of these German soldiers would later serve as SS
officers during World War II.)
Dadrian quotes one soldier: “Turkish officers and gendarmes each
evening were picking out dozens of Armenian men from the ranks of the
deportees and were using them as targets for practice games.” As a Turk who
served in the army explained after the war, “They were going to die
anyway.”29 Among the many German witnesses was Armin Wegner, who
backed up his reporting with photography. He would become an ardent friend
of the Armenians after the war, as would a number of fellow Germans who
witnessed the atrocities.

There are several collections of survivor interviews as well. The following

is from Verjiné Svazlian’s vast volume of testimony. Svazlian spent fifty-five
years compiling testimony by Armenian survivors, most of whom were small
children at the time of the genocide. They are damning in their details.
Smbyul Berberian was seven years old when he was deported from
Afion-Garahissar:

We heard afterwards that, together with seventeen other Armenian

young men, they had massacred them by night and had thrown them
under the bridge. Thus, when we were deported, there were no males
left in our family. They took away my five aunts in Der Zor, later they
cut off their heads, impaled their heads with their bayonets to show
them to us and then they threw their corpses in the Euphrates. We
found only half of the body of my mother’s aunt. My mother buried her
in the earth. They massacred everyone. My mother wept so much that
she lost her eyesight.

Eva Choulian, the sole survivor of her village near Zeitoun, was thirteen:
 The Turks came and drove us all out of the village. They were forcing
us to march with whip strokes. They tied our hands behind.… They
disrobed us totally and we stood naked as the day we were born. Then
they broke one’s hand, another’s arm, still another’s leg with axes and
daggers. Behind us a little boy, whose arm was broken, was crying
and calling for his mother, but the mother had already died by an axe.
… [T]hey came in the morning, assembled us and started once more to
kill and drop the bodies in water. Below the cave, the River Khabur
was flowing. They cut someone’s head, another’s leg, still another’s
hand and all these human parts were piled one upon another on the
ground. Some were not yet dead, but had their bones shattered or their
hand severed. Some were crying, others squeaking. There was the
odor of blood on the one hand and hunger on the other. People who
were alive started to eat the flesh of the dead.

Trvanda Mouradian, born in Kharpert in 1905, was ten years old:

They confined all the young people in a cave-like place, poured

kerosene from an opening in the roof and set fire to them. Then they
gathered all the women and smashed their heads with stones. They
killed my mother and grandmother with stones too. They separated the
children like lambs from their mother-sheep. I had a three-year-old
sister; they took her also, together with other children near the
Euphrates River bridge, cut their throats and threw them in the river.

Megerdich Karapetian, born in Diyabekir in 1910, was six years old:

They separated us, the children, and took the adults towards the valley
and made them stand in a line. There were about three to four hundred
adults and we, the children, were nearly as many. They made us sit on
the green grass, and we didn’t know what was going to happen.
Breaking from the line, my mother came several times to us, she kissed
and kissed us and went back. We, my elder brother, I and my one-year-
old brother, saw from afar a line of women moving forward; our
mother was among them. On coming out of our house, mother was
 dressed in her national costume—a velvet dress, embroidered in gold
thread; her head was adorned with gold coins; on her neck was a gold
chain; twenty-five gold coins were secretly sewn inside her dress on
both sides. When mother came for the last time and kissed us madly, I
remember she was clad only in her underwear; there were no
ornaments, no gold and no velvet clothes. We, the children, were
unaware of the events happening there.30

Ottoman authorities forbade Germans and missionaries to photograph the

victims. To reinforce this edict, when passenger trains traveled through the
worst regions, the windows were blacked out. Any shop or studio that
developed photographs was ordered to confiscate and report photos of the
deportees or the corpses.

Although my grandfather blamed the killings on “the Turks,” this is an

oversimplification. While governmental entities organized most of the
killing, many of the attacks on Armenians were also fueled by a combination
of tribal hegemony, religious antipathy, and desperate poverty. Kurds,
gendarmes, soldiers, and local Muslims were all encouraged to take part in
the slaughter.
There was, however, one group that had no such larger motivation, and
whose participation in the genocide was utterly malicious and mercenary. In
fact, its ranks were fortified with convicted felons released from prison
specifically for the purpose of intensifying the sadistic terror of the killings.
This group, which took orders directly from the Committee of Union and
Progress, was the “Special Organization” (Teshkilati Mahsusa), a
paramilitary network under the direct command of Dr. Behaeddin Shakir. The
local populations knew them as chetes.
The Special Organization was formed during the Balkan Wars of 1912
and 1913 to carry out secret operations, like committing sabotage and
fostering terror. These chetes were guerrilla fighters, dedicated to doing
whatever was necessary to force populations to abandon territory. As the
genocide commenced, the Special Organization was expanded to include in
its duties the rounding up and destruction of the Armenian population.
Toward these ends, some thirty thousand prisoners were released from
custody specifically to boost the violent capacity of these outfits. Many of
these men relished fearsome, brutal sadism. Working in tandem with the
Kurdish militia, the Special Organization was responsible for much of the
dirty work of the genocide.
Slitting throats, gouging out eyes, beheading, and torture—these were
hallmarks of the chetes. They tore out teeth, hair, beards, and fingernails, and
sliced off noses and ears. Victims were whipped raw with animal-hide
whips. Locked into barns or churches, many victims were burned alive. Rape
was followed by rudimentary crucifixion and impalement. Young women
were stripped, doused with kerosene, and forced to dance as they burned.
In addition to the horrors perpetrated by the Special Organization, much
of the worst violence against the Armenians was dealt out by Kurds, a
Muslim people who shared parts of the Armenian homeland in eastern
Anatolia. When the Armenians were uprooted and forced on long marches
through Kurdish territory, it served the purposes of the Turkish government in
Constantinople to encourage the nomadic Kurds to harass, rob, and injure,
and often kill, the hapless Armenians passing through.31 The population of
eastern Anatolia, whether Muslim or Christian, was extremely impoverished
at this time. The Muslims were told again and again that the Armenians were
terrorists, that they were infidels. That they were the root cause of their
poverty. Muslims were encouraged to steal from or murder those Armenians,
especially those who came from distant towns. They would be doing God’s
work. Among these intensely poor populations, some were bound to avail
themselves of virtually free household goods, clothing, and even small
children taken as “servants.”
Muslim refugees from the former Ottoman territories which had recently
been “freed” from the empire—the muhacirs—also participated in
tormenting the deported Armenians. Originally from Serbia, Bulgaria, and the
Crimea, they had been terrorized and forced to flee from their provinces to
avoid the massacres of the 1850s and the Balkan wars. Having lost
everything, in some instances having seen their families murdered, the
muhacirs migrated to Muslim Turkey. They felt they had a right to whatever
they could get their hands on, whether it be possessions or homes, because
they were refugees themselves. From the government’s point of view, these
returning “Turks” could be put to good use. They could help unify the country,
“Turkify” the country, make the nation “one,” and end the everlasting problem
of the restless minority population. They could assume ownership of
property, housing, and land that had formerly belonged to the missing
Armenians. This substitution of Muslims for Christians in Anatolia was
integral to the CUP solution to the Armenian problem.
Despite the relative indifference to religion on the part of the Young Turks
(an attitude that evolved into genuine animosity toward the religious
establishment when Kemal Ataturk “founded” the Turkish Republic), the
CUP was happy to enlist the cooperation of the Islamic leadership in its
attack on the Christian millets. As Peter Balakian writes: “On November 14
[1914], less than two weeks after the Ottoman Empire entered the war, the
Sheikh ul-Islam (the chief Sunni Muslim religious authority in the Ottoman
world), Mustafa Hayri Bey—who was a CUP appointment and not, as it was
traditionally, the sultan’s choice—made a formal declaration of jihad in
Constantinople, followed by well-organized demonstrations on the streets.”32
Proclamations and pamphlets were distributed. Ambassador Morgenthau
quotes extensively from one such pamphlet: “He who kills even one
unbeliever of those who rule over us, whether he does it secretly or openly,
shall be rewarded by God.”33 There had been many clashes between
religious Muslims and Christians in the streets over the years, but this fatwa
gave license to wholesale slaughter. In a bizarre twist, Morgenthau was
assured by Enver Pasha that no harm would come to American Christians in
the empire. And the Germans—allies of the Ottomans but Christians as well
—were also exempt from harm. This left only the Armenians, Greeks, and
Nestorians as the targets of the jihad. It’s true that many devout Muslims,
particularly in the east, understood that attacking helpless people,
nonbelievers or not, was contrary to the tenets of Islam. Still, a vast number
of Muslims saw the pronouncement of jihad as an endorsement for killing and
looting.
The planning of the genocide included a program of cover-up to follow
the process of carving out and killing off population groups. Though the
Allies, particularly Ambassador Morgenthau, were aware of the massacres
of Armenians, the organization behind the effort was very difficult to
uncover. After the war, it became almost impossible.34
The cover-up was designed to confuse and obfuscate. To this day, the
Turkish government refuses to admit that the actions against the Armenians
were centrally planned. The cover-up included:

1) Saying one thing while doing another. When diplomats complained of

the killings, the Sublime Porte replied that it would look into the allegations,
or that the diplomats were misinformed.

2) Blaming the violence on the Armenian insurgents.

3) Making hollow public pronouncements that the Armenians in the

caravans must be protected, or that seized property must be carefully
inventoried, orders that were later presented as evidence that the Ottoman
government had only the deportees’ best interests at heart.

4) Sending double telegrams. One telegram gave the actual order; the
second was contrary to it. The actual order was destroyed, the second saved
to support the cover story during the inevitable trials to come.35

5) As the war came to a close, ordering the destruction of relevant CUP

files and other pertinent documents.

6) Continuous destruction of relevant files by the Turkish government to

the present day.

7) Restricting or banning access to archives.

Finally, denial itself was institutionalized as a government function. Since

1923, the Turkish government has spent tens of millions of dollars in a
concerted disinformation campaign to delude the world at large and, perhaps
more important, its own people.
PART II
 CHAPTER FOUR

Tehlirian Goes to War

A nation is a group of people, united by a mistaken view of their past

and hostility toward their neighbors.
—Karl Deutsch

Soghomon Tehlirian, the young man who would gun down Talat Pasha on a
placid Berlin street, was born in a small village in the Anatolian province of
Erzurum in 1896. The village was usually peaceful, but violence could break
out at any time. By the end of the nineteenth century, massacre and famine had
transformed eastern Turkey into something not unlike America’s “wild West,”
rife with famine, disease, and lawlessness. In a region where the meager
economy depended on subsistence farming and sheepherding,
revolutionaries, hard to distinguish from the bandits who roamed the
countryside with impunity, made it their life’s work to pester the local
authorities. This was the world that young Tehlirian grew up in, a desperate
world interrupted every few years by massacre.
Around the time of the raid on the Bank Ottoman in Constantinople, the
weak economy obliged Tehlirian’s father to leave his family and head for
Serbia. Khatchadur Tehlirian was typical of thousands of Armenian men who
(like my great-grandfathers on both sides) emigrated during this same period.
Mired in poverty, unable to feed their families, these men covered great
distances to find profitable work, hoping to send some money home.
Emigration to outlying parts of the Ottoman Empire was typical. In Valjevo,
Serbia, Khatchadur joined other men from the Kemah region of Erzurum,
establishing himself as a “coffee merchant.” Though he made promises to
return to visit his family, he never made it back before what the Armenians
would later call the Medz Yeghern, or “Great Crime.” During the war,
crossing borders was almost impossible. Once the war was over, there was
no home to return to.
With the head of the household gone, Soghomon’s mother moved the
family to the larger town of Erzincan. With 26,000 Armenian residents,
Erzincan (or Erzinga) was a provincial center where rural folk could come to
buy dry goods, have their horses shod, see a doctor. It was a more
sophisticated place than the Tehlirians’ home village of Pekarich. The boy
was exposed for the first time to the corrupt practices of Ottoman government
“tax farmers,” the proselytizing of Protestant missionaries, and the exciting
and brave revolutionary actions of the Tashnag fedayeen.
In 1913, with the Balkan wars winding down, and with the hope of
eventually making his way to Germany to study engineering, Tehlirian
emigrated to Serbia to join his father. In the late summer of 1914, on the eve
of World War I, eighteen-year-old Soghomon heard that Armenians were
volunteering to join the Russian forces massing along the border on the brink
of war with the Ottoman Empire. Thrilled by the news, the young man was
determined to enlist, although his father, with whom he was now living, had
forbidden it. In this way he was no different from the millions of idealistic
young men in Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Russia, and Germany lining up to
volunteer for their respective armies, inflamed by romantic notions of war.
Defying his father, Tehlirian slipped out of Serbia in the fall of 1914 and
traveled for twenty-four hours by train to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he found a
gathering of Armenian volunteers. Telegrams flew back and forth between
the teenager and his father. Khatchadur finally relented and gave Soghomon
the permission he needed as a minor, whereupon he formally signed up.
Tehlirian and his comrades covered hundreds of miles by rail, crossing
eastward through the Crimea and Rostov-on-Don deep within Russian
territory. After days of travel, the group of volunteers finally arrived at the
northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Here in the capital city of
Georgia, Tiflis (Tblisi), Tehlirian officially became a soldier. Barely
eighteen, too young to carry a rifle, he insisted on joining the troops headed
for the front. In October he was inducted into the medical corps as a
gamavor (volunteer).
 The volunteer Armenian battalion was led by General Antranig Ozanian,
a veteran fedayee, known by all simply as Antranig. Antranig had the look of
a storybook Caucasian paramilitary soldier, with a dramatic black mustache,
his chest crisscrossed with bandoliers of bullets, his head topped with an
astrakhan hat adding an extra few inches of height. By World War I, Antranig
was legendary, having thrown himself into violent confrontations with
Muslims since the 1890s, both as an insurgent against Ottoman forces in Asia
Minor and Bulgaria and, some say, as an ARF assassin. He had squabbled
with the ARF leadership, never trusting their affiliation with the Committee
of Union and Progress, and for this reason had always been considered a
maverick. (In his later years he would distance himself from the ARF
altogether.) Antranig’s total commitment made him invaluable to the cause.
He fiercely refused to retreat from any battle zone, and he was nothing short
of brutal when it came to dealing with Muslims. (When World War I fighting
was over, he would be accused of war crimes by the Ottomans.) He was
typical of the non-intellectual component of the ARF forces. According to the
biographer of another renowned fedayee fighter, Murad, both men were
“almost illiterate.”1 A large monument of Antranig astride a rearing horse
stands at his gravesite at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
In Tiflis, the tsar’s commanders had set up dormitories for the volunteers,
and it was here that Tehlirian bunked while waiting for deployment. Every
morning after a quick breakfast of bread and tea, commanders would gather
up the young recruits, march them to the parade grounds, and instruct them in
the fundamentals of warfare. Under his Russian trainers, Tehlirian learned
how to handle a weapon and how to survive by his wits. Thus began his
transformation from country boy to disciplined soldier.
Tehlirian loved spending his off-hours in the sophisticated and populous
Georgian capital city, very different from his small hometown. In 1914, a
greater concentration of Armenians lived in Tiflis than anywhere else in the
world. Georgia, primarily a Christian country, had embraced these Christian
Ottomans who had roamed beyond the borders of the empire. The flourishing
Armenian culture and society in the city supported a growing Armenian
merchant class. In the Anatoli Restaurant, famous for its shish kebab and
Georgian wines, Tehlirian found plenty of friends from his home vilayet.
Tehlirian would trudge the snowy streets toward Yerevan Square, the
center of Armenian life in Tiflis. Here he would hang out in the Russian
coffeehouses where the artistic types and his fellow volunteers gathered to
argue politics. Influenced by the intellectual traditions of Russia, the
Armenian intelligentsia residing in Georgia were deeply literate. These
young men who gathered to drink and eat and trade stories were for the most
part poor country boys with more passion than insight. They were like the
emaciated young antiheroes of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, too full of
idealism for their own good. Though the elders of the Armenian diaspora
were effective and industrious capitalists, many of their progeny were more
interested in confrontation.
The Hamidian massacres of 1895–96 had taken the lives of thousands of
Ottoman Armenians when most of Tehlirian’s new young friends were only
infants. These young Armenians had grown up hearing the stories of Kurdish
atrocities, but they had not experienced the terror firsthand. Intoxicated with
the patriotic promise of a national homeland, they did not fear the prospect of
violence. In fact they welcomed it. They were eager to test their mettle
against the hated enemy, “the Turk.” They were ready to throw off the “yoke
of servitude” (as Tashnag rhetoric had it) forced upon the Armenians by their
Muslim masters.
One day, in the Aramiants café, a popular spot for Armenians in Tiflis,
Tehlirian ran into Nishan Tatigian, a grizzled former ARF fighter who hailed
from Tehlirian’s hometown of Erzincan. The meeting sparked feelings of
nostalgia and even homesickness. Tatigian insisted that the young soldier join
him for dinner at his home. Upon his arrival, Nishan’s wife pumped the
young man for gossip about her former neighbors. It had been eighteen
months since Tehlirian had left the town, even longer for the Tatigians. Their
bond of homeland and politics was deep and genuine.
Living with the Tatigians was their teenaged daughter Anahid. This was
an era when Armenian women rarely left the confines of home. Over dinner,
shy Anahid found the teenaged would-be rebel spellbinding as he described
his life as a volunteer fighter. As she laughed at his stories, Tehlirian was
stirred by her interest in him. Years later he would write in his autobiography
that he felt like he “was drunk.” Tehlirian’s romantic feelings for Anahid
tested his commitment to the Tashnag cause. In his autobiography he added
that he hadn’t intended to be “in love.” But, he said, “I felt like I’d always
known her.” The fedayee was a holy warrior, saintly in his devotion, pure.
Fighters were expected to keep their desires in check until completion of the
mission. To volunteer as a revolutionary was to make a commitment as
serious as one’s commitment to God. Nothing should stand in the way of
one’s dedication. Soldiers had no time for a love life.2
When the call came for the troops to move out, Tehlirian opted against
seeing Anahid one last time. He was going away, perhaps forever, to lay his
life on the altar of the cause. This was no time to be distracted. Filled with
emotion, torn between love and honor, he wandered the narrow winding
streets of old Tiflis in a dreamlike state. He passed a boy standing alone on a
bridge. Impulsively, like some kind of Armenian Raskolnikov, Tehlirian
emptied his pockets of rubles and dumped the money into the boy’s hands.
Then in a trance he resumed his wandering. He found himself standing before
the Tatigians’ shop, not quite sure how he got there. He interpreted this
serendipitous moment as proof that Anahid was his destiny. Tehlirian went
inside and spent a few precious moments with his beloved until, moved to
tears, he finally tore himself away and joined his comrades. At least this is
how he tells the story in his intensely lyrical autobiography.
A National Bureau run by the ARF coordinated incorporation of the
hastily trained and outfitted Armenian volunteers into the greater Russian
forces. In the early spring of 1915 the decision was made to move out, and on
March 28 Antranig’s sub-commander, General Sebouh, and his legion of two
hundred Armenian fighters were sent by train toward the front, where
sporadic clashes had broken out between Ottomans and Russians. The first
stop for the recruits was Alexandropol (Gyumri), situated in the midst of
historic Armenia. According to Tehlirian, thousands surrounded the
carriages, cheering and waving handkerchiefs. The young men stood at the
railings of the open cars and gazed down at the enthusiastic well-wishers,
already feeling like heroes.
Moving through Alexandropol, Tehlirian and his two hundred comrades
rode the last link of the railroad to the ancient city of Julfa, just north of
Persia. (Founded by an Armenian king in the Middle Ages, Julfa was later
destroyed by the Persian Shah Abbas I, who then moved over 150,000
Armenians across the border and resettled them in what would become
“New Julfa.”) This was the wildest and most difficult terrain of the empire,
mountainous and inhabited by tough Kurdish tribesmen. The region had at
various times been Armenian, Persian, Russian, and Turkish. Crossing the
border between Persia and Turkey, Tehlirian met veteran Russian fighters
face-to-face for the first time.
Over the next few years Tehlirian would learn the heartbreaking lessons
of war, but in the late fall of 1914, as he first stepped onto Persian soil, he
was still a freshly trained recruit, in love and ready to fight, surrounded by
fellow Armenians hungry to confront Ottoman troops. The eager Tehlirian
could not know how gruesome the next four years would be, but what was
truly beyond his imagination was the tragedy about to befall his family back
home in Erzurum and how that event would shape his destiny.
Tehlirian’s first assignment was as an unarmed medical orderly, attached
to troops equipped with German Mauser or British Lee-Enfield rifles,
always fitted with bayonets. In addition, the seasoned fedayeen draped
bandoliers over their shoulders and kept pistols and fighting knives thrust
into their belts. The Russian troops were further supported by horse-drawn
artillery guns—provided there were any horses available and the roads
passable. Cumbersome machine guns weighing sixty pounds or more were
rare but, when brought to bear on the enemy, terribly effective. These self-
loading weapons evolved from the original Gatlings and Maxims, the fierce
rapid-fire killing machines that had opened the colonies in Africa and China.
One gunner with a Gatling gun could make mincemeat of any conventional
formation of troops.
Horses were in short supply, giving the Turks, Germans, Kurds, and
Cossacks an edge over the irregulars. Motorized vehicles, unusual in the
east, weren’t of much use because of the exceptionally rugged roadways.
Though airplanes fitted for battle were being employed for the first time on
the European front, they played no part near the Caucasian front. Tanks were
also absent since it was impossible to transport them into the battle zone.
Artillery, mortars, and machine guns gave the Russians and Armenians some
advantage over the Kurds, who were equipped with nineteenth-century
weaponry and carried little more than swords, clubs, and hatchets alongside
their rifles.
Most of the fighting took place in landlocked or mountainous no-man’s-
lands. During the winter months, the snow would drift so deep that horses
were mired in their tracks, dying where they stood. Stranded on treacherous
heights, the thinly dressed soldiers froze by the thousands. Supply lines were
easily cut, adding to the distress of the troops. Surrounded by weak and
diseased men, the commanders had no choice but to abandon the wounded to
die where they lay. Typhus (spread by fleas), cholera, and famine killed
thousands more.
During their first months on the ground, Tehlirian’s company roamed
northern Persia spoiling for a fight. The bitter winter winds brought sleet and
snow, slowing the action and making confrontation infrequent. Even as the
Russians pushed forward, the Ottoman troops simply melted away,
abandoning the region and retreating westward. Combat was confined
primarily to skirmishes with the local Kurdish tribesmen.
Tehlirian and his cohorts had no idea that the cataclysm of the Armenian
Genocide had begun. Virtually overnight in the spring of 1915, on the evening
of April 24–25, prominent Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire had
been swiftly rounded up as a prelude to what was to come. In the first series
of arrests in Constantinople, gendarmes roused over two hundred doctors,
editors, pharmacists, teachers, authors, and statesmen in the middle of the
night, usually under the pretext of some minor violation, and ordered them to
report to the local police station. These important members of the Armenian
community dutifully arrived at their respective precinct houses, whereupon
each was placed under arrest. In effect, each police station acted as a
collection point for its precinct. In the early morning hours of April 25, the
arrested men from all over Constantinople were marched through the streets
to the “new prison” near Topkapi Palace. (Today this prison has been
refurbished as a fancy hotel and restaurant. You can enjoy a four-star meal at
the very location where the genocide began in the capital.) The men remained
imprisoned for a few days, confused as to why they had been arrested in the
first place. Families were allowed to pass food and bedding to the inmates
through the barred windows.
Two nights later, the entire group was woken a few hours before dawn
and again marched through the old city down to the docks, where a small
steamer lay anchored. It was becoming clear to all the men, Constantinople’s
Armenian elite, that this was more than simple harassment. The men were
hustled aboard, and within the hour the steamer was ferrying them across the
Bosphorus to the Asiatic side of the city, where they were herded onto
passenger trains. The journey from the city was broken only once, when the
prisoners with political affiliations were segregated, removed from the
carriages, shackled, and taken away on carts. These men would receive
special torture. The end of the line was the fortress town of Cankiri.3
In Constantinople, arrests continued as the authorities sought every
Armenian man with an education or who had the potential for any kind of
leadership. This pattern of arrests was repeated in all the major cities of the
empire where large Armenian communities existed. In the end, thousands of
“notables” were collected up. Some were held as prisoners for months
before being deported in the death caravans, others were tortured and killed
on the spot, and others, in a confusing but relentless pattern, were moved
from prison to prison before being murdered. Some of the most politically
sensitive prisoners (former parliamentarians) were transferred far to the east
“for trial” and, while in transit, killed “by bandits” on the open road.
The CUP had achieved a major goal: the destruction of the Armenian
leadership at the outset of the larger genocide. Some of the men were spared
death but were left so traumatized that they went mad. A prime example was
the composer Gomidas Vartabed. Internationally known, Gomidas, a priest
and creator of haunting liturgical music, was the greatest Armenian composer
of the modern era. His composition for the Armenian liturgy is considered a
masterwork. After Gomidas was arrested and deported on April 24, pressure
by Turkish and American VIPs forced his return. But the damage had been
done; no longer capable of caring for himself, Gomidas, one of the most
brilliant minds of the late Ottoman period, spent the remainder of his life
institutionalized.4
The German humanitarian and Armenophile Johannes Lepsius testified:
“The Young Turks and the Armenians made the revolution together. The
leaders were friends and supported one another’s election. During the first
months of the war, relations between them seemed amicable. Suddenly on the
evenings of April 24 and 25, 1915, to the complete surprise of everyone in
Constantinople, 235 Armenian intellectuals [meilleure société] were
arrested, jailed, and then sent to Asia Minor.… Practically all of the
Armenian intellectual leaders in Constantinople were wiped out in this
manner.”5
Among those not immediately arrested were author and parliamentarian
Krikor Zohrab and another deputy, Hovhannes Seringiulian (known as
Vartkes). Both had been on friendly terms with Talat before the roundups, so
they believed they could persuade the interior minister to release their
cohorts. Visiting Talat at home, Zohrab engaged him in a friendly game of
cards. When queried about the whereabouts of the arrested men, Talat
answered, “During our time of weakness, your people pushed for reforms
and were a thorn in our side; now we are going to take advantage of our
favorable situation and disperse your people so that it will take you fifty
years before you talk again about reforms.”6 To Zohrab, perhaps the most
sensitive and intelligent leader of the Armenian community (and not a
member of the ARF), the message was clear. The CUP was in the process of
“solving” the Armenian question.
About a month after the first arrests, Zohrab was detained. At the end of
the summer, Zohrab, poet Daniel Varoujan, and three others were moved to
another location “for trial.” While in transit, the group was stopped by orders
from the CUP. When Varoujan resisted, his eyes were gouged out and he was
disemboweled. The parliamentarian Krikor Zohrab was shot once in the
chest and died on the spot.7 Around this same time (the summer of 1915),
twenty Hnchagian activists who had been imprisoned for almost a year were
hanged in Sultan Bayazid Square in Constantinople. The Armenian
leadership had been nullified.

Harassment and massacre of Armenians had become commonplace, but

during the momentous spring of 1915, as Tehlirian’s battle group moved
through the Turkish provinces six hundred miles east of his hometown of
Erzincan, it still was not clear to them that an all-out eradication program had
begun. The confusion of war interrupted communications and obscured the
grave intent of the deportations. Tehlirian was overwhelmed by the
experience of war nonetheless. Caught between the Cossack advance guard
of the Russian army and the Kurdish tribesmen, the civilian populations in the
region had been decimated. Towns had been razed, wells poisoned, stores
looted. Anyone unlucky enough to have been born on the wrong side of the
religious fence had been massacred.
As Tehlirian’s battalion chased the Ottoman army, the empire’s fighters
became “bestialized,” to use the jargon of the period, wreaking death as they
passed through the defenseless villages. The Muslim fighters were well
aware of acts of atrocity that the Russian army had committed against their
Bulgarian brethren during the Balkan wars only a few years before. Attacks
on civilians were nothing new. The legacy traced back almost a thousand
years to the Mongols, the brutality of the Christian Crusaders, and even
further back to the Romans. The chain of terror had been forged link by link
over centuries and had come to define normal warfare. Atrocity was a means
of terrorizing the population and breaking their will to resist. Each side
blamed the other, while the civilians paid the price.
In his autobiography, Tehlirian describes the stench of burnt wood and
unburied corpses, the plagues of flies. What had begun as an adventure had
become an excursion through hell. His psychic torment found no relief in the
excitement of battle because the Ottoman army was not there to be
confronted. The young Armenian had come to fight the Turks; instead, he
buried the dead. Not yet twenty years old, in six short months Tehlirian had
traveled a long way, both geographically and psychically.
One evening as dusk fell, after a long day of marching, Tehlirian and his
group discovered a cluster of twenty young female corpses, their “eyes
glassy with fear.”8 His mind reeled. Was this happening everywhere? Was
this going on in Erzincan? What about his own family? Were they safe?
Violence was dismantling Tehlirian’s sense of self. Fainting spells plagued
him. He suffered from graphic nightmares in which cadavers burst from their
graves, shook off their dirty shrouds, and morphed into armies of vengeful
skeletons.
Tehlirian was finally issued a weapon and saw sporadic action. Untested
and unreliable, he was not a natural-born fighter. He prayed for his life as
bullets whizzed past his head while, mortally wounded, his friends fell all
around him. He was not a coward, but he was too agitated to throw himself
into the battle with unthinking energy. At one point the fighting built to such
intensity that he passed out in the midst of a firefight.
In May of 1915, the Russian and Armenian forces had finally entered
what remained of Van, a major fortress city on the eastern edge of the empire.
Before the war, Armenian Christians had represented a majority of the
population in Van. Over the decades, along with Zeitoun, another
mountainous enclave in the middle of Anatolia, Van had become one of the
most independent-minded of Christian provinces. As such it attracted
revolutionaries, not to mention the attention of the Ottoman government.
Earlier that winter, certain they were about to be attacked by the Ottoman
army, the local Christians fortified their city and prepared for battle. These
preparations incited the military to attack, and soon a full-scale battle for the
city was under way. The Turks called it a “revolt” and brought in the artillery
regiments. The Armenians stood their ground and a bloodbath ensued.9
Tehlirian was seeing for the first time the destructive force of full artillery
regiments. He was seeing for the first time the complete destruction of a
major Armenian population center.
By August 1915, Tehlirian had ended up back in the Armenian city of
Yerevan, well behind the Russian-Ottoman lines. Refugees, terrified of what
might befall them should the Ottoman army catch up, had trailed the Russian
troops, now unexpectedly in retreat, as they relinquished territory. Thousands
of starving refugees poured into the city. Bit by bit, Tehlirian discovered the
fate of the Armenians back in Erzurum vilayet. He devoured an Armenian
newspaper from Tiflis that described a ragged caravan of deportees arriving
in Kharpert after having traveled for two months, deprived of adequate food
and water. The caravan had been deported from his hometown of Erzincan.
Tehlirian also set a task for himself: collecting up orphans. Some of the
children had seen their parents murdered. Some had escaped the caravans.
Starving mothers, no longer able to care for their children, would arrive from
distant villages and abandon their young ones in the streets of Yerevan,
hoping for the best. The children had “gone crazy, gone wild,” and clung
together in packs, having learned to avoid adults. They were always on the
move, begging for scraps of bread as they scratched at the lice infesting their
rags. Tehlirian recounts, “Such [children] could only be caught at dawn,
asleep in the doorways of stores, under tree trunks, at corners of deserted
streets, or among the ruins of destroyed buildings, because as soon as they
awoke, they could not be caught.” The most difficult children were the little
boys who had escaped the Kurds and were trying to find their way back to
their villages. These traumatized boys, eight to twelve years old, were quiet
and defensive. When queried about the whereabouts of their parents, they had
a standard response: “They all killed.” Tehlirian, confused and frightened
himself, sought solace by soothing the anxious children. He tells the story of
one boy bursting into tears as he described how his parents were “killed in
an oven.”10
 Collecting the children became Tehlirian’s single focus. Tashnags
believed that each child was precious, essential to the future of the Armenian
people. They were symbols of hope. Soghomon needed these children to live
and to thrive so he could believe that there was a future, any future. He knew
that with most adults gone, these small boys needed men in their lives to act
as father figures. He would take on that role, even though he was not yet
twenty himself. Tehlirian’s work had doubly changed him: it had sickened
him physically and it hardened his will to fight.
In early 1916 the Armenians had grown increasingly demoralized. The
British general Ian Hamilton had abandoned the overland campaign to take
Gallipoli, and thus any attempt to invade Constantinople. This was a
significant turn: if the British could not take Turkey proper, the killings of
Armenians would continue until the war was over. Tehlirian and his cohorts
also understood that Russia and Great Britain had never formed a true
coalition, that the so-called Allies were fighting two separate wars.
In March 1916 the Russians made one last push into Asia Minor. The
thrust got as far as Erzurum and Tehlirian’s town of Erzincan. Entering the
ruined streets, Tehlirian could see that the Turkish sector had been left intact,
although Russian flags now flew over the buildings. But when he entered the
Armenian district, he found that “everything was gone.” Portions of walls
were all that remained of the burned-out buildings. Only the Armenian
church, the center of the neighborhood, remained. In his words, Soorp Sarkis
Church had become “orphaned.” Even the fruit orchards had been chopped
down. “Everything was wrecked.” Directly opposite the church stood
Tehlirian’s former home. He approached it with trepidation. A Russian
officer stopped him and asked him to state his business. Tehlirian replied,
“This is our house. I want to see it.” The officer asked him where his family
was now. He answered, “I don’t know.” The Russian took out tobacco and
offered it to him in sympathy. The house had been turned into a barracks for
Russian soldiers.11
Alone, Tehlirian wandered into the garden running alongside the house.
Dread welled up in his chest, the stench of blood filled his nostrils, and
before he knew what was happening, he had collapsed onto the moist spring
earth. He woke to the sound of cawing crows perched in the bare branches
above as darkness gathered. Trembling uncontrollably, unsure of how he had
ended up in his childhood garden, Tehlirian found his way out to the square.
Disoriented, lost, and hollow with fear, he staggered toward the household of
former neighbors.
A vision materialized before him. His older brother was standing in the
yard. But this was not a hallucination; it was Misak in flesh and blood! The
siblings fell into each other’s arms. Tehlirian’s brother had just arrived from
Serbia and was also looking for the family. Aware that Soghomon was ill,
Misak led him into the neighbor’s home.
After conversion to Islam, the neighbors had been allowed to remain
behind in Erzincan unmolested. In the early days of the killings, this was
policy. Conversion meant real salvation—literally, a means of saving one’s
neck. “In order to sidestep the clutches of the CUP dictatorship, many
Armenians saw themselves obliged to convert.”12 The focus was primarily
on the children: “While the Ottoman authorities were intent on murdering all
adult male Armenians, they occasionally presented women and children with
the option of becoming Muslims.”13 At first there was also some leeway
given to Catholic Armenians, clearly a political move on the part of the
Sublime Porte. Over time, though, the option of conversion as a means to
avoid a death sentence was retracted, and even those who had converted
were ordered away.
With the publication of the best-seller My Grandmother in Turkey in
2004, more light was shed on the fate of the children who were converted
and absorbed into Turkish society almost one hundred years earlier.14 My
Grandmother is the story of Seher, the matriarch of author Fethiye Cetin’s
extended Turkish family. In 1975 Seher summoned her twenty-five-year-old
granddaughter to join her for a chat. Seher told her, “My name was
Heranush.” This made no sense to Fethiye, as it was a Christian Armenian
name. How could her Muslim grandmother have had a name like that? The
old lady explained that when she was very small, she and her brother were
adopted by separate Turkish families to save them from deportation. Her
brother Horen worked in a nearby town as a shepherd. Heranush had been
taken in as a household servant girl. Life was not easy, but the deportation
caravan left without her, possibly sparing her life. Fethiye slowly came to
realize what her grandmother was telling her: she, a Turk, had Armenian
ancestry.
 After the war, Heranush’s father, who was working in America at the time
of the deportations, traveled to Aleppo. There he hired a smuggler who
worked the Turkish-Syrian border. The plan was for the smuggler to find the
children and slip them out of the country to Syria. The plan was only half-
successful. Horen made it; Heranush didn’t. The little girl grew up Muslim,
as a member of a Turkish family. As far as everyone was concerned, she was
a Muslim Turk. Now, near the end of her life, she was letting her
granddaughter in on the secret because before she died, she wanted to make
contact with her brother. She believed he had been living in America all this
time, and knowing that Fethiye had friends in academia, she concocted a plan
to have her granddaughter find him. In fact, on a trip to Chicago, one of
Fethiye’s fellow academics checked a phone book and discovered the family
of Horen Bedrosyan, Heranush’s brother.
Sadly, Horen died soon after, and brother and sister were never reunited.
Still, the connection had been made. Fethiye’s grandmother lived to be
ninety-five years old, dying in 2000. She never met her extended American
family. But Fethiye, the granddaughter, did make it back to Chicago and
visited the Bedrosyans, who embraced her as the long-lost family member
she was.
The publication of My Grandmother shook Turkish society. The memoir
suggested that thousands of formerly Christian “grandmothers” had survived
in Turkey, maybe tens of thousands. If this were true, what did this say about
“Turkishness”? Pure-bloodedness? As the introduction to the book declares,
“There are, by some estimates, as many as two million Turks who have at
least one grandparent of Armenian extraction.”15
In a grotesque twist on the question of faith, foreign missionaries would
sometimes give thanks to God for the steadfastness of their Armenian
disciples even though they were being led to a certain death. Maria Jacobsen,
a Danish missionary, writes in her journal for 1915 (July 10): “Now we have
heard that anyone becoming a Mohammedan will be allowed to remain here
in peace, and they come one after the other, to ask for our advice. Of course,
we cannot advise anyone to let their faith down.” On October 24 she writes
of one man who exclaimed, “They will try to make us Moslems, but I have
taken my stand. I cannot do it. I would rather be killed.” Jacobsen follows
with her blessing: “God help him to hold out to the end.” By 1917, as she
watches the last remaining survivors starve to death before her eyes,
Jacobsen writes, “Here there are still people who belong to the Lord and
who have not soiled their garments with sin.”16

Tehlirian sat quietly in the dining room of the neighbors’ half-ruined house as
survivors told stories from their travels and a feast of sweet choereg bread,
eggs, cheese, and pickles was laid out. Gossip was shared. Misak and
Soghomon were hailed as brave soldiers. But Soghomon found himself
unable to smile. Of the 25,000 Armenians who had been living peacefully in
Erzincan, little could be said. The truth was too horrible to face.
Five years later, when Soghomon Tehlirian took the stand at his trial, he
knew that the people of his hometown had been rounded up and killed, but he
still didn’t know the details of the killings. Historians have since pieced
together how the Armenians of Erzincan were disposed of. 17
As usual, the first act of the deportation was to round up the politically
oriented notables. After their arrest, these men were tortured and summarily
executed. Then, on Sunday May 16, 1915, the local priest of Erzincan, Father
Mesrob, was ordered by the local Turkish authorities to alert his people to a
deportation. On May 18, the sixteen most affluent families of the town were
deported to Konya, a dry, inhospitable town, deeply Islamic, some five
hundred miles from Erzincan. (It is doubtful that the families actually ever
made it there.) On May 23, a force of twelve thousand gendarmes (Turkish
police), Special Organization chetes, and Muslim peasants arrived and
began the process of herding Armenians from the town and the neighboring
villages. Able-bodied men were separated and “either shot or had their
throats cut in trenches which had been dug in advance.” Women and children
were sent to the Erzincan Armenian cemetery to be concentrated in
preparation for transfer to the killing areas. On May 28, deportees were
dispatched from town in groups at one-hour intervals. They followed a road
that ran along the top of the Kemah Gorge (actually a series of gorges)
approximately three hours from the city. Here the cliffs along the Euphrates
River are hundreds of feet high. According to the French historian Raymond
Kévorkian, “the Armenians were caught in a trap from which there was no
escape: on the one side was the turbulent Euphrates and, on the other, the
cliffs of the Mt. Sebuh mountain chain.” The victims were stripped of their
belongings by squadrons of the Teskilat-I Mahsusa (Special Organization).
“Veritable slaughterhouses had been set up, in which some 25,000 people
were exterminated in one day. Hundreds of young women and children joined
hands and leaped into the void together.”
Back in the town, in the Armenians’ municipal park, “200 to 300 children
between the ages of two and four had been gathered; they had been given
neither food nor water, and some were already dead.” Another witness
reported that “six-month-old and seven-month-old babies… were being
collected in sacks in the villages of the plain and thrown into the Euphrates.”
Anyone who attempted to run or hide was hunted down and killed.
Thousands of Armenian army conscripts from the region who had been
working in labor battalions were summarily slaughtered, their bodies thrown
into mass graves. The few women who survived the killings were “taken into
the households of the gendarmes and the dignitaries with the heaviest
responsibility for the massacres, now having finally been given permission to
‘marry’ Armenian women.”
The full truth of what had happened in Erzincan was not known to
Tehlirian upon his return to his hometown. Still, it was impossible not to see
and understand that something tragic had happened there. He could not
escape his surging emotions. Feeling another attack coming on of what would
later be termed epilepsy, Soghomon left his brother and the others and
wandered upstairs, found a bed, and lay down. He was overwhelmed by a
sense of impotence compounded with disgust. Why couldn’t he focus on the
problem? “People who have the goal of survival and determination are not
like me,” he thought. As he lay there, a vision of Talat Pasha appeared before
his eyes. The minister of the interior raised his hand and Tehlirian imagined
cutting it off. In his autobiography (written more than thirty years after the
assassination), he describes this as a moment of revelation. “Is it possible to
believe that one day, whenever it may be, a just judgement could occur?”18
As he fell into a tortured sleep, vivid dreams danced in Tehlirian’s head.
They began as his waking day had begun, with his arrival in Erzincan after a
long journey. As he made his way down the road, he was surprised to see a
head rolling on the ground toward him, coming to rest at his feet. It was his
mother’s head and it was speaking to him: “Go there! So that they don’t see
you, my child!” The head rolled off, and when he followed it into the garden,
Tehlirian found his lost family waiting for him. “My brother Avedis with
open eyes is looking up at the sky. My mother’s head has gone to sleep next
to her body. I see my sisters. Suddenly, my brother looks at me and asks,
‘Who are you and what do you want from us?’ ” Tehlirian screamed, “Don’t
you remember me?” Avedis answered, “No!” “Suddenly the moon comes out
from behind the clouds… and I now see that my brother’s skull has been
smashed. ‘I am Soghomon, Avedis,’ I say. Bending down, I want to embrace
the head but suddenly his face darkens and a cold smile appears on his lips.
‘Yes you resemble him. Where were you when we fled here? Why are you
not lying here with us and why have you come back to caress me like a thief
in the night? Go, go, I do not know you.’ ” Tehlirian broke from his fever
dream to find his brother Misak standing over him.19

In the fall of 1916, the Armenians attempted to resettle their devastated

towns. As the Russians consolidated their advance, they began to rethink
their attitude toward their Armenian comrades. The official Russian position
no longer promised an autonomous Armenian territory—no longer promised
any territory at all. The tsar was offering only religious and educational aid
to the beleaguered Armenians. Tehlirian reports: “[Russian overlords] filled
the region with Armenian-hating officials. Turkish spies, who remained in the
guise of civil officials in Erzinga after the retreat of the Turks, swarmed
about everywhere.”20
As a “nation” physically caught between two empires, Russian and
Ottoman, the Armenians were at the mercy of geopolitics. The Armenian
vilayets of the Ottoman Empire (as well as the Caucasian-Russian provinces)
were a buffer zone dotted with hundreds of villages, a vast unprotected area
that was now a contested battleground. In the end, the tsar and the Ottomans
saw the Armenians as little more than pawns in a much larger game. Besides,
the tsar had an imminent and serious problem on his hands. The Ottomans had
closed off shipping through the Bosphorus, past Constantinople. Russia was
boxed in, no longer able to move grain from its warm-water ports. A
swooning economy and massive loss of life on the eastern front had
weakened the tsar’s hold on power.
In the early months of 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution gathered
momentum in Russia. Civil war broke out. By March and April, the Russian
army itself had split into two camps mirroring the Red (Bolshevik) and
White (tsarist) sides of the conflict. Soldiers deserted the front and headed
home to join the domestic fighting. The tsar abdicated in March, clearing a
path for the communist takeover. The Bolsheviks couldn’t afford the
distraction of an external war as they struggled to secure their hold on power.
They decided to abandon the conflict. Armistice was declared between
revolutionary Russia and the Ottoman Empire on November 7, 1917,
removing Russia as a threat on the Caucasian flank of the empire. Upon the
signing of the treaty, Russian troops abandoned eastern Anatolia altogether,
including the Armenian provinces of Erzurum, Bitlis, and Van. By the end of
the year, the Bolsheviks had pulled every soldier out of the Ottoman
occupation. The Armenians were left on their own to continue what would be
a futile struggle to hold the territory.
While the Russians were preoccupied by the civil war between the
“Reds” and the “Whites” that followed the revolution, the Caucasian nations
of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and a newly independent Republic of Armenia began
a shaky attempt to form a “Trans-Caucasian” confederation. Georgia and
Armenia, both Christian countries, seemed to be natural allies. Muslim
Azerbaijan’s leaders saw their counterparts in Ottoman Turkey as their
cousins. Yet Georgia and Azerbaijan had reasons to strike an alliance, in
spite of the fact that neither the Russians nor the Allies were going to allow
Baku (in Azerbaijan) and its vast oil fields to break away. Ottoman, German,
and British armies flooded into the region from all directions in an attempt to
secure Baku, the prize.
In February 1918, around Erzincan, an epic battle between the Armenians
and the Ottoman troops began. Despite the overwhelming odds against them,
the Armenians managed to slow the eastward Ottoman advance, opening a
tiny window of opportunity for the terrified populace to abandon the region
with their lives. The civilians, wearing “worn-out coats, blankets, even
tablecloths,”21 were unprepared for the exodus. Women trudged and stumbled
along, clutching crying children to their bosoms. The crowds of civilians
hampered the movements of the Armenian military, the main target of the
Ottoman forces. When the Kurds charged the columns, the refugees would
panic and scatter, sowing chaos.
As they struggled through the rocky mountain passes, hundreds of soldiers
and civilians froze to death. Corpses lay jumbled amidst the discarded
artillery and crates of supplies too heavy to move. Munitions stores were
blown up to prevent them from falling into the hands of the pursuing Turks.
People staggered through the deep snow until they could go no farther and
simply gave up. Tehlirian reports finding the icy cadavers of officers lying in
the middle of the road, abandoned, impossible to bury in the frozen ground.
He describes weather “cold enough to break stone,” the air “like ice cream
melted in a man’s mouth.”22 No matter how many died alongside them, the
troops had no choice but to push eastward toward Armenia. Certain death
was the alternative.
The major players in the war wanted much more than to simply secure the
region militarily. Each wanted to guarantee that any postwar decisions by the
Great Powers would not be affected by any lingering presence of the
opposing side. In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had presented
his “Fourteen Points” to Congress. Among his recommendations was a
guarantee that “a people” have a right to their own representation. The
twelfth point applied to the Armenians: “The Turkish portion of the present
Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other
nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an
undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of
autonomous development.”23
Wilson defined “a people” as the ethnic group constituting the majority in
a region, without taking into account that “ethnicity” was likely to come
down to religion—Muslim or Christian. Such a vague definition only
guaranteed more ethnic cleansing. The Ottoman government wanted to be
very sure that the Great Powers could not claim a Christian “majority”
anywhere in Anatolia. Talat, having assumed the role of of Grand Vizier in
February 1917, had made it clear through his directives that no vilayet should
be left with more than ten percent non-Muslim population. This program of
Turkification had been an underlying rationale for the genocide. But now,
each side bent to the task of killing as many from the opposing side as
possible. This was true of both Muslims and Christians.
In March 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was concluded, formalizing
Russia’s exit from the war. As part of the treaty, the new Soviet government
conceded the key cities of Ardahan, Kars, and Batumi to the Ottomans. This
freed up Russian troops to deal with the civil war at home in the Russian
Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.24 Many sectors that Russia had
conceded to the Turks lay within the newly established Georgian and
Armenian states. Worse, the Russians committed to “utilize every available
means to disperse and destroy the Armenian bands operating in Russia and
the occupied provinces of Turkey.”25
Moving eastward, with Russian troops abandoning the region, the
Ottoman army took Erzurum on March 11. The Armenians, left with no
options, retreated. As they moved, so did the bloody fighting. Twelve
hundred Armenian soldiers were attempting to hold off over a hundred
thousand Turkish soldiers. After receiving a severe wound to his right arm,
Tehlirian was removed from the ranks of fighters in order to seek
hospitalization behind the lines in Yerevan. Surrounded by the chaos of
refugees streaming out of the territory, Tehlirian’s train once again passed
through Kars, and by noon of his day’s long journey, the young soldier had
returned to Alexandropol in Armenia. Three years earlier he had passed this
way en route to the front. Crowds of fearful relatives searching frantically for
lost family members had replaced the cheering throngs applauding the troop
transport trains heading for the front. By evening Tehlirian was back in Tiflis,
Georgia, where he was sent to Hospital Number Four.
Upon his release from the hospital Tehlirian found his favorite
coffeehouses deserted. The massive deportations and killings back in Turkey
were no longer a secret, and a depressing pall hung over the Armenian
quarter of the city. Every Armenian in Tiflis had relatives who had vanished
without a trace. Many expats hailed from towns and villages that no longer
existed. Nishan Tatigian, Anahid’s father, sought out Tehlirian and brought
the quiet young man home to the only refuge that remained for him.
Three years had passed since Tehlirian had said farewell to Anahid. In
his usual earnest style, his autobiography recounts how surprised he was to
find the girl had grown into a young woman of great beauty. Soghomon and
Anahid shared their worries about her brother in the army and what had
happened to friends back home. They dared to discuss the notorious labor
battalions and the cold-blooded executions of the Armenian soldiers in the
Ottoman army. But their relationship had changed. They were no longer
teenagers. Tehlirian was a seasoned soldier now, potentially dangerous, not
to be trusted. Anahid kept her distance.
On April 22, 1918, Transcaucasia was declared an independent state. But
the fragile coalition of the three new “nations,” Georgia, Armenia, and
Azerbaijan, was already dissolving as each one tended to its own needs. The
Turkish army took advantage of this instability to advance deep into the
disputed Armenian territory. Then, on April 24, 1918, Akaki Ivanovich
Chkhenkeli, the Georgian premier-designate of the Transcaucasian
Federation, surrendered Kars to the Ottomans.
Within weeks, Turkish forces surged forward, invading the new
democratic Republic of Armenia, no longer protected by any kind of
Transcaucasian alliance or by the tsar’s army. The Georgians brokered a deal
with the Germans, hoping for their support against the looming threat of the
new Soviet Republic. At the same time, Azeris intent on connecting with
their Turkish Muslim brothers attacked Armenians in Baku. All efforts to
save an independent Armenia came to naught. The little nation was doomed.
Furious and unfettered, Armenian troops roamed the countryside,
sporadically attacking both Turkish troops and Muslim civilians. The
Ottoman government protested publicly. Tehlirian claims that reports of
atrocities were “baseless,” stating, “Supposedly Turks and mosques were
burned.” The Turkish command began to use Armenian-Kurdish clashes
which it was encouraging (and in which both Armenians and Kurds were
killed) as grounds for complaint against Armenian actions. Tehlirian gives an
example: “Supposedly, we on January 12 burned the Turkish village of
Zeggiz 18 kilometers to the southeast of Erznga. Supposedly, we raped the
women of the Turkish villages of Kesg southeast of Ardas, and massacred the
men; supposedly, after the Russian troops of Erznga withdrew, partial
massacres were conducted in the region.” He admits that Turkish troops were
killed but insists that no violence against civilians occurred.26 The atrocities
committed by these troops were nevertheless recorded and publicized. They
would become an important weapon in the denialists’ arsenal of counter-
history to the genocide.
By mid-May 1918, Ottoman troops had entered Alexandropol, seventy-
five miles from the Armenian capital of Yerevan. In a final, hopeless battle
against the Turkish nationalists, the Armenians drew a line in the sand at
Karakilisa, Bash Abaran, and Sardarabad, managing to stop the advance only
twenty or so miles from the capital city. Invasion was imminent.
Back on his feet, Tehlirian ran into friends who had served as volunteer
fighters just as he had. The war-wracked veterans harbored feelings of
bitterness and resignation. Some Armenian fighters in Georgia wanted to
fight on, to head for Baku as the British and Turkish forces converged on the
oil city. But as the Turkish armies moved northward through Armenian
territory, it became clear that a battle on Muslim territory could not be won.
Tehlirian and Anahid’s family, trying to put as much distance as possible
between themselves and the war front, migrated northward and deeper into
Russian territory along the Black Sea coast. Along the way, Tehlirian ran into
the grizzled Armenian General Torkum (Arsen Arshag Harutiwn Nakashian,
1878–1953), who urged him to travel to London, where Armenian fighters
were gathering to join the still active British and French armies to attack the
Turkish Mediterranean littoral. Tehlirian decided against joining these men,
claiming in his autobiography that he replied, “Colonel, forgive me, but I
have no capacity for diplomatic activities. This is not my work.”27 Perhaps
he was also prescient, as the French-Armenian invasions of Anatolia would
lead to disaster.
Now that he was reasonably healthy, Tehlirian needed to come to some
kind of understanding with his beloved, Anahid. Was it time to propose
marriage, break off from the fighting and settle down? Have children? Wasn’t
the war almost over? Hadn’t the Armenians been soundly defeated? But what
about his mother, his little brother Avedis? Tehlirian knew he could never
settle into a normal life as long as their faces haunted him. Until he made
some kind of peace with his guilt over “abandoning” his family, he could
never start one of his own.
On October 30, 1918, the Armistice of Mudros was signed and World
War I officially ended for Turkey. Constantinople, now occupied by British
and French forces, became a safe haven for the likes of Tehlirian, a former
enemy combatant. In the Ottoman capital city, the British were arresting
members of the CUP in preparation for war crimes tribunals. The time
seemed right for Tehlirian to head for Constantinople to see if he could
discover what had happened to his mother, his sisters-in-law, and his
younger brother.
Concurrent with this plan, another scheme was beginning to take shape. If
he could not find his mother or his family, Tehlirian would find revenge. He
wasn’t sure what he was going to do exactly, but if it was something
consequential, perhaps he could gain some sort of peace. Perhaps he could
move on with his life.
Tehlirian said good-bye to Anahid and the Tatigian family in the port of
Novorossiysk on the Black Sea and headed for Odessa, where he caught a
passenger ship to Constantinople. As the steamer Euphrates churned down
the Bosphorus and entered the harbor of the imperial city, the great mosques
came into view. Tehlirian was twenty-two years old and only weeks away
from his first kill.
 CHAPTER FIVE

The Debt

“War crimes” are defined by the winners. I’m a winner. So I can

make my own definition.
—Adi Zulkadry, Indonesian executioner in the documentary film The
Act of Killing

Soghomon Tehlirian arrived in Constantinople a twenty-two-year-old

burnout on December 15, 1918, having spent the previous four years camping
on the bare ground of deserted villages, rescuing refugee orphans, and
burying mutilated corpses. He had covered thousands of miles, crossed many
borders, survived a war zone, and wandered the ruined streets of his
hometown. In the heat of battle, and while trudging across frozen wastes, he
had watched as friends and strangers died. Now, although the fighting was
over and an armistice had been declared, Tehlirian could not wake from the
nightmare. He was lost in a haunted landscape of grief and pain.
In a state of shock, he wandered along the quays and crossed the teeming
plazas, through the Grand Bazaar and past the hammams, the centuries-old
bathhouses. He gazed up at historic façades he had only read about in books.
Here was Constantine’s venerable Saint Sophia Cathedral, there the
imposing gates of Topkapi Palace, where sultans had lived during the heyday
of the empire. The famous Blue Mosque. The Hippodrome. He heard the
muezzin’s call to prayer from the minaret of the awesome Suleymaniye
Mosque, built on the orders of Suleiman the Magnificent four centuries
earlier. Following the throngs, Tehlirian descended back down to the
wharves and crossed the new Galata Bridge, where fishermen stood shoulder
to shoulder. He climbed the hill past the medieval Genoese tower and
entered the European neighborhood of Pera, where foreign soldiers mingled
with desperate refugees. The British and the French recruits sauntered
through the streets, all but oblivious to the hurly-burly surrounding them. It
struck Tehlirian that the foreigners seemed amused by the neediness of the
populace everywhere on display. Tehlirian cautiously stepped past
decommissioned Ottoman soldiers in tattered uniforms lying on benches or
crouched in doorways. These had been his enemy; now they slept in the parks
or sold lemons outside the bazaar, destitute yet happy to have survived hell
on earth. Tehlirian cursed them under his breath. These were the dogs who
had killed his fellow Armenians, killed his friends and family. The young
soldier had entered the belly of the beast.
Tehlirian had come to Constantinople to discover the fate of his missing
mother and sisters-in-law. Fearing that they were dead, he needed to believe
there was a possibility, no matter how slim, that they had survived. Perhaps
they had been moved to some distant refugee camp or had emigrated to
Greece or to France. There was little chance that they had returned to
Erzincan, because going home was a dangerous option for any Armenian.
Though armistice had been declared and British and French troops had
secured Constantinople, eastern Anatolia was caught up in an anarchic civil
war as nationalist troops, loyal to the CUP’s Ittihad regime, skirmished with
Armenians and Greeks in the countryside.
Months earlier, in the fall of 1918, the Great War between Germany and
the nations of the Triple Entente had officially ended. In anticipation of the
arrival of British and French occupying forces, Talat and most of the top
CUP officials had resigned on October 8. On November 1, with the
“approval” of German diplomats, the key Central Committee members of the
CUP had boarded a German torpedo boat, the Lorelei, and slipped out of
town. With Talat were the remaining two thirds of the triumvirate, Djemal
Pasha and Enver Pasha, as well as Dr. Bahaeddin Shakir, Dr. Mehmet Nazim,
former Trebizond governor Djemal Azmi, and the notorious Bedri Bey,
police chief of Constantinople. The Lorelei had steamed up the Bosphorus to
the Russian port of Sevastopol in the Crimea. Safely beyond the reach of the
British and French occupiers, the fugitives split up. Some headed for Berlin,
others to Moscow or Rome.1
Lacking a legal government, the empire drifted like a ghost ship. The pro-
British Sultan Mehmed VI, who had inherited the figurehead position from
his half brother Mehmed V, who in turn had picked up the reins of power
after Abdul Hamid abdicated in 1909, held no real power and so ingratiated
himself with his British and French overseers. Sultan Mehmed hoped for
reasonable terms for the last days of the Ottoman Empire as treaties of
surrender were hammered out. And perhaps he could also hold on to some
small piece of the sultanic treasure. Everyone could see that the empire was
finished. The “sick man” was on life support.
With the dreaded Ittihadist leaders gone, the Greek patriarch took it upon
himself to step into the power vacuum and enthusiastically declared
independence for Greek subjects living in Constantinople, granting them
independence from Ottoman law. Blue-and-white flags hung from windows
throughout the Greek quarter. The Greek Christians of Turkey, subjects of the
sultan for centuries, aspired to more than freedom from Muslim oppression.
They dreamt of a “Great Idea” (Megali Idea), in which the neighboring
country of Greece would invade and occupy the Turkish-Aegean coastal
regions surrounding Smyrna, a territory historically populated with a
majority of Turkish-speaking Christians who traced their lineage back to the
Byzantines. Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George (a great friend of
Greece’s King Alexander, who would famously die in 1920 from an infected
monkey bite), supported a Greek troop invasion of the Turkish mainland.
France did its part by training Armenian volunteers to bolster this post-
armistice military occupation. Italy, too, wanted its piece of the pie and sent
troops. Britain, having already occupied Mesopotamia (Iraq), was happy
with the status quo. The British had also secretly agreed with France to share
the conquered Arab lands. With the secret Sykes-Picot accord of 1916,
France would gain control of Syria and the Levant.
Constantinople itself was divided into zones governed by the British,
Italian, French, and Greek contingents. Non-Muslim high commissioners
enjoyed powers that superseded even those of the sultan. The Allies had left
thousands of dead behind on the beaches and bluffs of Gallipoli and suffered
a grotesque defeat in the desert city of Kut. They memorialized their
thousands of fallen brethren by stomping on Ottoman pride.
 Marshal Louis Franchet d’Espèrey of France entered the capital city
riding a white horse, a symbolic gesture of victory harking back to the
Crusades. Greeted by cheering crowds of Armenians and Greeks, d’Espèrey
occupied Enver Pasha’s mansion at Kuru Chesme. An armada of hundreds of
British, French, and Italian ships lay anchored in the Bosphorus and the Sea
of Marmara. The streets of Constantinople were crowded with thousands of
foreign troops, Muslim refugees from Christian lands, Turkish refugees from
Arab lands, Armenians, even Russians escaping their civil war. There was
no room for optimism; the good old days, if they had ever existed, were
surely gone forever. “The only Turks who prospered were black marketers
and criminals.”2
At the offices of the ARF newspaper Jagadamard (Battlefront),3
Tehlirian placed a notice of inquiry listing the names of his mother, his
younger brother Avedis (the one he had met in his dream), and his older
brothers’ wives and children. After chewing the fat with the editor about
what he had seen in the east, Tehlirian was approached by a woman,
Yeranuhi Danielian, who introduced herself as a friend of friends, a teacher
who lived with her mother nearby. She invited the young soldier to dinner. At
least, that is the way the story has been told many times. In fact, Danielian
was an Armenian activist and her mother’s home was well known to
politically minded Armenians in Constantinople. However it came to pass,
the meeting was propitious.
Danielian was a Hnchag, not a Tashnag like Tehlirian. In the world of
Armenian politics, the Hnchags were rivals to the Tashnags, espousing a
more Marxist revolutionary agenda. The Hnchags, like the Tashnags,
embraced violence to draw attention to their cause. The schism between the
Hnchags and the Tashnags had worsened after the latter chose to ally
themselves with the Committee of Union and Progress in 1908. But both
Tashnags and Hnchags had been targeted by the CUP, and now, ten years
later, all surviving Armenians were fighting on the same side.
On their way to supper, Tehlirian learned for the first time that Talat,
Enver, Djemal, and the leaders of the Special Organization had fled and were
hiding out in Europe. The young soldier also learned that the arrests and
murders that had begun on April 24, 1915, in Constantinople had eviscerated
the Armenian political elite. Armenians needed to take action on many fronts,
particularly getting aid to survivors and caring for orphans, and yet with most
of the leadership dead, the community was effectively paralyzed. What was
worse, many Ottoman leaders and their allies who had planned and executed
the destruction of the Armenian community were still at large, in many cases
securely tucked away in what was left of the Ottoman bureaucracy. For
example, the muhtar of Danielian’s district, Harutiun Megerdichian, an
Armenian who had helped compile the lists of names used for the April 24
arrests, was now residing comfortably only a few blocks away.
This last piece of news shocked Tehlirian. He demanded, “Why don’t
they take vengeance?”4 Danielian explained that the surviving Armenians of
Constantinople no longer had the stomach for violent retribution. Many who
had remained hidden during the war had not seen what Tehlirian had seen,
had not lived through what he had lived through. These were city folk,
accustomed to hanging out in coffeehouses and debating politics, not soldiers
trained for action. Anyone with the guts to stand up to the authorities had
been arrested and killed. Tehlirian made note of the name: Megerdichian.

While Tehlirian was making connections in Constantinople, peace

negotiations had stalled in Paris. In a last-ditch attempt to create headaches
for Russia, Britain had recommended that the United States assume a
“mandate” over Armenia. “Mandates” and “protectorates,” terms that rang
with a benevolent air, were the new way to describe the links between
stronger and weaker states. In the post–World War I era, all the major
powers would “protect” weaker nations once thought of as “colonies.” But
this greater “Armenia” (not to be confused with the tiny Republic of
Armenia) was unusual because it had no natural borders, and in fact the
Armenians themselves did not constitute a majority in most of the territory
considered a potential homeland for them.
Though the president of the United States had sponsored this plan at first,
it was an untenable concept. Any mandate would require stationing American
troops in Anatolia, an unstable and foreign territory with no port to protect it.
The British then went further and suggested that the United States “protect”
all of Asia Minor (Turkey). Their motives were transparent. If the United
States, under the guiding hand of Woodrow Wilson, occupied the eastern half
of Asia Minor, it would in effect create an impregnable wall between Russia
and Britain’s significant oil-rich territorial possessions in Persia and
Mesopotamia. If Russia were to make any attempt to invade southward, it
would be forced to engage the Americans. This was an appealing scenario
for British leaders, who thought they could sell such a plan to the idealistic
and inexperienced American leadership.
As for the nationalistic Tashnags and Hnchags, although in the past they
had never specifically lobbied for an independent territory carved from the
Ottoman Empire, a mandate would solve many problems. It even suggested a
rebirth of the ancient Armenian kingdom. Also, a mandate would
immediately end the ongoing conflict between the tiny embattled Republic of
Armenia and what remained of the Turkish troops in the eastern end of the
Ottoman Empire. Those hostilities had persisted while talk of a mandate had
only served to inflame Turkish nationalism.
Despite Wilson’s seemingly good intentions, the United States had little
will to enter into such a deal, let alone enforce it. A mandate for Armenia
could not be sold to Congress, where the proposal died, along with Wilson’s
celebrated League of Nations and his famous Fourteen Points. The Wilsonian
era was at its end. By the fall of 1919, the president could no longer lobby
for his agenda. He had suffered a stroke from which he would never fully
recover. Moreover, now that the war was technically over, powerful men in
the United States like Cleveland Hoadley Dodge, who publicly supported the
Armenian cause and had helped raise millions for Near East relief, were
now thinking of Turkey not so much as an antagonist than as a future partner.
To further complicate matters, the Americans were not allowed to participate
directly in the Turkish component of the Paris peace talks because the United
States had never officially declared war on the Ottoman Empire.
Likewise, the Armenians had hoped for inclusion in treaty negotiations in
Paris. Instead they were barred from the room because the infant Republic of
Armenia had not been a party to the war proper. Two Armenian delegates
had arrived in Paris nevertheless: Avedis Aharonian and Boghos Nubar,
representing the two distinct aspects of the embattled Armenian nation.
Nubar was the Armenian son of Egyptian aristocracy and a former member of
the Ottoman elite. He represented what remained of the former Armenian
Ottoman establishment, in which church and business leaders tried to work
with the authorities. He lobbied for the conservative upper crust of the
Armenian diaspora. Aharonian was a Tashnag who had been imprisoned by
the Russians, and was now an active leader in the new Armenian state. He
represented a stubborn nationalism, as well as socialist ideals.
Boghos Nubar complained in a letter to the New York Times:

Our volunteers fought in the French Foreign Legion and covered

themselves with glory. In the Legion d’Orient they numbered over
5,000 and made up more than half of the French contingent in Syria
and Palestine, which took part in General Allenby’s decisive victory.
In the Caucasus, without mentioning the 150,000 Armenians in the
Russian Armies, about 50,000 Armenian volunteers under Andranik,
Nazarbekoff and others, not only fought for four years for the Entente,
but after the breakdown of Russia, they were the only forces in the
Caucasus to resist the advance of the Ottoman Empire, whom they held
in check until the Armistice was signed. They helped the British in
Mesopotamia by preventing the Germano-Turks from attacking
elsewhere.5

Two years earlier, as the Bolsheviks abandoned the war, they had upset
the international applecart by publicizing the secret Sykes-Picot agreement,
which would partition out Turkey’s territories and resources to the predicted
“winners,” Britain and France. The plan was amended after the Bolsheviks
made it public, because Woodrow Wilson (who had been ignorant of the
secret accord) had expected the United States to share in any divvying up of
the Ottoman Empire. The Americans entered the war late, but their men and
matériel had saved the day, so they felt they had a right to any spoils.
The Ottoman prize consisted of three parts. The first was control of the
highly strategic port of Constantinople and the Bosphorus straits, of vital
importance to the Russians. Second were the regional territories: France
wanted the Lebanon-Syria-Cilicia region; Greece desired the Aegean
Islands, the adjacent littoral, and Smyrna; and the Armenians wanted eastern
Anatolia, the so-called “six vilayets” constituting an Armenian “homeland”
as well as Cilicia on the Mediterranean coast. The third piece was control of
raw materials, particularly the Mesopotamian and Arabian oil reserves.
These were claimed by Britain along with a pipeline partnership with
France. The remaining portions of the empire—the Balkans, Thrace, Egypt,
Libya—had already broken free of the Ottoman orbit.
As the war was winding down, Prime Minister Lloyd George, a great
champion of the Greek nation, encouraged the former Ottoman possession,
which had been independent from Turkey since the early nineteenth century,
to invade the Turkish lands along the coast in an attempt to “reclaim” its
ancient littoral. To the Greeks this made sense, because there still existed
large Greek populations in the city of Smyrna, in villages along the coast, and
in the Aegean Islands. This ill-considered move would result in the tragic
destruction of the city of Smyrna in a devastating fire.
In addition, the war crimes trials gearing up in Constantinople added
insult to the injury of defeat. In the spring of 1915, Britain and its allies had
promised that when the war ended, those Turks guilty of “crimes against
humanity” would be severely punished. Though the newly constituted
Ottoman government under Sultan Mehmed had little real power, it objected
to foreigners standing in judgment of Turkish nationals and so insisted on
holding its own trials. A tug-of-war began between the Ottoman government
and the occupying forces. Delays in the trials, and later in the peace talks,
gave the Turkish nationalists, most of whom were former members of the
CUP, time to regroup. Foot-dragging on every level of the bureaucracy held
back any real response to the war crimes, while ex-CUP military leaders led
by Kemal strengthened their forces in the east.6
And so the new sultan’s government began its own lengthy series of trials
to ascertain the guilt or innocence of the arrested CUP members. Many of the
key players (like Talat and Shakir) had to be tried in absentia, as they had
fled Constantinople. Others had been arrested by the British and locked up on
the island of Malta to prevent their escape. The trials were further hampered
by the fact that most evidence of the CUP’s wrongdoing had been either
destroyed or hidden by CUP officials in the fall of 1918. (Rumor is that there
exists to this day a trunk of evidence secreted in a Swiss bank vault.) The
trials relied on the damning witness testimony almost exclusively.
Transcripts were published daily in official government newspapers. These
clearly indicate that in 1919 and 1920, many members of the non-CUP
Turkish elite were highly critical of the CUP, its alliance with Germany, its
thuggish tactics, and the destruction of the Armenians. Records of those
proceedings would be assiduously hidden and denied by future Turkish
governments. All the same, Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Djemal Pasha, Dr.
Nazim, and Dr. Behaeddin Shakir were sentenced to death in absentia.7
As tensions rose in Constantinople, Tehlirian grew increasingly obsessed
with Megerdichian, the quisling who had provided Turkish authorities with
the names of Armenians leading to the arrests of April 24, 1915. Hanging out
in the neighborhood for weeks at a time, staking out the muhtar’s house, the
young Armenian had become a fixture in a small café in the neighborhood by
March 1919, even trying to get a job there. Though the locals had no interest
in taking action against “the traitor,” they were perfectly happy to gossip
about his social life and his family. The general understanding was that he
was untouchable, protected by the authorities.
According to his autobiography, one night, Tehlirian stationed himself
outside Megerdichian’s home and observed a gathering through a large
window. He identified Megerdichian as the man leading toasts in the midst of
his guests. After debating with himself whether a shot to the heart or the head
would be more effective, Tehlirian fired his pistol through the window and
watched Megerdichian fall.
Wildly agitated, Tehlirian raced back to his room and lay low. When he
emerged hours later, the news of the shooting was on the lips of every
Armenian in the community. Apparently Megerdichian had not died on the
spot but had been gravely wounded and rushed to a hospital. Tehlirian
berated himself for not attempting a head shot. His funk evaporated the
following morning when Danielian arrived, shook his hand, and whispered in
his ear, “I congratulate you, my brother.” She had visited the hospital where
Megerdichian had been taken, and a Greek doctor working there informed
her that his days were numbered. The muhtar died the next day.8
Tehlirian had crossed his Rubicon, from anonymous insurgent to assassin.
He was twenty-three years old.

In the spring of 1919, as Soghomon Tehlirian was stalking Megerdichian,

Turkish nationalists began to push back at the postwar Allied invasion of
Asia Minor. Allied forces had failed to secure vast remote territories of
Turkey. The Allies never understood that although the CUP leadership had
fled Constantinople, the key members were alive and well in every corner of
Turkey. Perhaps even more important, the Central Committee—safely in
hiding in Berlin, Rome, and Moscow—continued to communicate with mid-
level bureaucrats in Constantinople, particularly those who were still free
because they could not be linked to the destruction of the Armenians. The
British had even tasked some of these hidden CUP sympathizers with
creating the successor government to the CUP’s regime. So it was easy to
mislead the occupation high commissioners while nationalist forces gathered
strength in the hinterlands in order to commence what Enver Pasha would
call “the second phase of the war.”9
The nationalists had the will, the manpower, the strategic high ground, and
they had resources. In the challenging terrain east of Constantinople,
reassembled Turkish military units exhumed caches of weapons that had been
hidden years earlier with the specific intention of fostering insurgency should
the war be lost. Armenian and Greek financial assets seized during the war
had been converted to foreign currencies in Switzerland and the Netherlands
and were used to purchase fresh arms for the resistance. The Bolsheviks,
hoping to nurture a profitable alliance, had also made big contributions to the
Turkish nationalists.
The Young Turks were committed to resuscitating the “sick man,”
whatever it took. Rearmed, the nationalists began a guerrilla war against the
invading Greeks and whatever remnants were left of the Armenian army,
securing as much Turkish territory as possible and creating a vast base from
which to operate. These rebel Turkish units were now fighting under several
former Ottoman generals. One general in particular, Mustapha Kemal, would
in time take command of all the forces and coordinate an unrelenting series of
victories. Already famous for successfully leading his men against the British
at Gallipoli, Kemal, later known as Ataturk (Father of the Turks), was a born
leader of rare genius. His confidence was infectious. Referring to the Greeks,
French, and Armenians, General Mustapha Kemal disdainfully predicted,
“Just as they have come, so too they will go.”10
The British had underestimated General Kemal, believing he was a
supporter of the occupation-sponsored regime. In May 1919, when the
British-controlled Ottoman government sent him to quell disturbances in the
Samsun region near the Black Sea, the thirty-eight-year-old general switched
sides upon arrival and joined the rebel forces. Once he was safely beyond
the reach of the British military, Kemal commenced reorganizing the army,
throwing what was left of the Turkish forces against multiple fronts: the
Armenians in the Caucasus, the Greek army invading the southwest, and the
French-Armenian forces invading Cilicia, just north of Syria. The occupation
government in Constantinople responded by issuing a warrant for Kemal’s
arrest, but it was too late. Kemal and his allies declared that the government
in Constantinople was bankrupt, that it no longer represented the Turkish
people. They established a new capital, Ankara, and a new government.
Furthermore, Kemal declared that the sultan was being held hostage by the
West, and because “the shadow of God on earth” represented Islam to
millions, he had to be rescued!
By the fall of 1919, it had become clear that the postwar punishments
against the Ittihad could never be fully implemented. Most of those who had
organized or prosecuted the annihilation of the Armenian population had
either evaded arrest altogether or been granted their freedom in exchange for
the release of British prisoners kidnapped in the east by Kemal’s nationalists.
To make matters worse, the few executions of war criminals that did take
place were immediately met with an enormous negative backlash from the
Muslim population. Former CUP members were emboldened to speak out
against the British occupation and fire up the popular resistance.
The nationalist Turks under Kemal were winning the war of attrition
against the Allied occupiers. The British were essentially on their own; the
Americans could not establish a mandate, a protectorate, or anything like it.
Russia would no longer support the Armenians in the east while the Turkish
National Movement’s General Kazim Karabekir had Yerevan surrounded.
Medz Yeghern—the Great Crime—was going unpunished, unanswered, even
as massive numbers of refugees continued to perish on the outskirts of and
within the Republic of Armenia.
Certain prominent ARF members demanded that action be taken to “clear
the debt.” Assassination was one answer, but the ARF “Bureau,” as the
official Tashnag leadership was known, were not enthusiastic about such a
scheme. Armen Garo, of Bank Ottoman fame, now the special ambassador
for the new Armenian Republic, and his fellow Bureau member Shahan
Natali were persistent, and presented the plan before the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation’s Ninth General Congress in Yerevan in
September–October 1919. A heated debate arose concerning reprisals. Many
were not so keen on violent retribution, believing that the best revenge would
be to strengthen the young nation and find an answer to the massive influx of
refugees there. Vast numbers of starving, diseased refugees were crowding
into the tiny state, which had neither enough food nor adequate health
facilities for them. Even as the Armenian soldiers continued to fight,
thousands died in the streets, victims of rampaging typhus and desperate food
shortages. In what remained of the deportation camps in Syria, a parallel
universe of illness and starvation was destroying what was left of the
survivors there. Indeed, many saw the very survival of the Armenian people
as itself a kind of revenge. For these Armenian nationalists, preserving the
beleaguered nation was the first and only concern. Nonetheless, Garo and
Natali prevailed upon the General Congress to approve a secret resolution
titled the “Special Mission” (Hadug Kordz). Garo would be the executive in
charge.
The first step in the creation of “Operation Nemesis” was the compilation
of a list of the former Ittihadists and Ottoman leaders responsible for the
deportations and massacres. In fact, lists had already been compiled for the
tribunals in Constantinople; these lists were reviewed and became
prioritized for the meting out of lethal punishment. The men on the final list
would become the targets of specially assembled assassination squads. The
actual lists are buried in Tashnag archives, but some are said to be as long as
two hundred names. They would include Enver Pasha, Mustapha Kemal
Pasha, and Djemal Pasha; notorious governors like Cevdet Bey (Van),
Muamar Bey (Sivas), and Djemal Azmi Bey (Trebizond); police chiefs Bedri
Bey and Azmi Bey; ruthless commanders like Topal Atif and Kara Kemal;
and leaders of the Special Organization, Dr. Behaeddin Shakir and Dr.
Mehmet Nazim. At the top of the list was Talat Pasha, minister of the interior
and finance and, during the last months of the war, Grand Vizier. For the
Nemesis conspirators, Talat would be known as “Number One.”11
The highest level of secrecy was maintained, while almost a year went by
as the logistics were ironed out. Operation Nemesis was christened on July
8, 1920, in Boston, at the twenty-seventh regional conference of the
Armenian Revolutionary Federation.12 It would operate out of Watertown,
Massachusetts, with Shahan Natali (Hagop Der Hagopian), former editor of
Hairenik newspaper, as operational coordinator. Natali had become an
American citizen in 1915 and was living in Watertown under an assumed
name, “John Mahy.” CPA Aaron Sachaklian, a man Armen Garo trusted
totally, then residing in Syracuse, New York, would act as bursar and
logistical leader. Later, General Sebouh (Arshag Nersesian) would
immigrate to the United States to replace the ailing Garo. A protégé of
General Antranig, Sebouh had seen almost twenty years of continuous
fighting and had been Tehlirian’s commanding officer in northern Persia. The
assassination team’s efforts would be financed by the Hadug Kumar, or
“Special Fund,” which in turn would be fed by a stream of donations from
wealthy (mostly American) Armenians who may or may not have suspected
where their donations were going. The teams of “avengers” volunteering to
“service the debt” were called the Hadug Marmin, or “Special Corps.”
There would be no shortage of volunteers.

Tehlirian, having decided on his own to find and kill Talat, was ignorant of
the ARF’s decision to sanction this plot to avenge the genocide. For months
he had knocked around Constantinople, seeking sponsorship for his own one-
man crusade. He had even approached the Armenian patriarch Zaven Der
Yeghiayan, seeking funds to underwrite his mission of revenge. The former
leader of the Armenian millet in Constantinople, like the entire Armenian
community, was aware that this youthful soldier had gunned down
Megerdichian. Zaven blessed the young man but, as a man of the cloth, would
not help Tehlirian.
Hiding out in Constantinople, Tehlirian became distraught. His mother
haunted him in his dreams. He saw himself as having little worth, as he had
not been able to avenge his family’s murder. Frustrated that he could not find
a sponsor, and in the hopes of running into Danielian, Tehlirian moved to
Paris in November 1919. He had received a postcard from her inscribed
with a poem. He believed he was being sent a cryptic message and that he
would soon be called to action.
Tehlirian arrived in Paris restless and adrift, annoyed by the hustle and
bustle of the big city. The streams of speeding automobiles reminded him of
flocks of crows. Unsuccessful in locating Danielian, he dropped in on Avedis
Aharonian, the Armenian diplomat in Paris who was lobbying on behalf of
Armenia in the peace talks. Tehlirian was received politely but then quickly
shown the door. Aharonian could not jeopardize his position by being linked
directly to a man who might be an assassin. His primary concern, as Turkish
troops moved closer and closer to Yerevan, was survival of his fledgling
republic.
Tehlirian bided his time in the French capital, finding work as a cobbler.
As the months dragged on, his obsession with Talat grew, as had his
obsession with Megerdichian. While he mended shoes, he fantasized about
the various ways he might kill the ex-leader, revisiting the problem over and
over in his mind, breaking it down into steps. The first step was obvious: to
find the man hiding somewhere in Europe. This would require funds as well
as the proper passports and visas to travel freely. He would need access to
the kind of privileged information to which only government agencies were
privy. He would need a weapon. Where could he obtain a pistol? What sort
of pistol would be most effective? And, assuming he found him, what if the
burly Talat somehow fought back? Or what if Talat were surrounded by
bodyguards? Would Soghomon lose his nerve? Would he be willing to die in
his effort? And what if he succeeded? How would he escape? What if he
couldn’t escape? Could he face execution? It would be worth it. He pictured
Talat’s face as “the monster” died. The fantasy sustained the nervous young
man.
Bound by the shackles of guilt and hatred, Tehlirian found himself both
energized and disgusted by his daydreams. He was a prisoner of destiny. He
now believed he could travel no other path than the one that led directly
toward a confrontation with Talat. He loved Anahid, he loved life itself, but
all his passions faded before his one overweening obsession: revenge.
Disciplined by his budget and his self-appointed role as Talat’s executioner,
he ate little and led the life of a monk. He rarely socialized, and when he did,
he avoided discussion of the massacres. He preferred to live in isolation,
with but one thought in mind: his target.
It was during this period that a brief glimmer of optimism appeared for
the Armenians. In January 1920, the Allied Supreme Council, the British
command tasked with coordinating war efforts, formally recognized the new
Democratic Republic of Armenia. Though no borders had been set, it now
seemed possible that Armenia could achieve a foothold in eastern Anatolia.
A few months later, at the Allied conference in San Remo, a division of
territories was postulated. The Arabs would get Mesopotamia. A
“Kurdistan” would be established for the Kurds. The Aegean would go to the
Greeks. By August 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres had been finalized. This
agreement proposed ceding major territory to the Armenians and the Greeks
while making Constantinople (Istanbul) an international zone. Had such a
plan gone into effect, there would have been little left of the Ottoman Empire
but a fraction of its former self.
In late summer 1920, Tehlirian learned that Danielian was trying to find
him. An intermediary instructed him to pick up a letter at the Armenian
delegation in Paris. According to Jacques Derogy: “It was a letter from the
secretary of the Tashnag Central Committee in Boston, Hamo Paraghamian, a
member of the editorial team of Hairenik, the party’s paper in America:
‘Your ticket for New York will be collected by Mr. Hanemian, who has
received instructions from Armen Garo for the financing of your trip.’ ”13 No
other details were given. Tehlirian understood that he was being ordered to
head to Boston and assumed that the trip had something to do with Talat. But
why was he being asked to travel to the United States? Was “the monster”
there? What Tehlirian couldn’t know was that because of his success in
dispatching Megerdichian, he had been nominated by Danielian to spearhead
the “Special Mission.”
Tehlirian was being summoned to Boston not only to be recruited as the
Berlin assassin but also to be vetted as to his presentability to the public. A
key element in Garo and Natali’s plan would be the intentional surrender by
the assassin in Berlin, followed by a well-publicized trial. This trial would
offer a unique opportunity for the Armenians to make their case—to present
the facts of the genocide and decry the lack of justice—before the eyes of the
world. Shahan Natali, the coordinator of the team, explained in an article
published in 1964 that when Tehlirian received his final instruction, he was
clear:

Understand, dear Soghomon, why Berlin has been chosen first,

[because this is] where the Armenian-murdering criminals have taken
refuge.
And why no matter if it is day or night, in the street or in a store,
whether he is alone or before the eyes of the police, you will explode
the skull of the number one nation-murderer. You will stay at your
place with your foot on the dead body and you will surrender to the
 policemen who come, who arrest you.
And in the Berlin court you will become the prosecutor also against
Germany in the name of our millions of victims.
Only in this way will the judgment be fully just.14

With that plan in mind, Garo had to make certain that the future representative
of the Armenian people would cut a sympathetic figure. He had to meet
Tehlirian face-to-face.
Though Tehlirian had neither the necessary paperwork nor the funds to
pay for his trip to the United States, within a few days his contact at the
delegation arranged a fresh passport with visa attached and a third-class
steamship ticket to New York City (costing about a hundred dollars). He
would enter the United States as an ordinary southern European immigrant,
one among the thousands who were arriving weekly. Departing from
Cherbourg on August 19, Tehlirian crossed the Atlantic to New York in
seven days aboard the Olympic, the “twin sister” of the ill-fated Titanic.
(The Olympic had been part of the massive rescue effort eight years earlier.)
Like the Titanic, it was a huge ship, fitted out as a troop carrier in 1915 and
now totally refurbished as one of a new class of luxury liners servicing the
burgeoning traffic between the continents.
Tehlirian’s travel arrangements were modest but not spartan. The White
Star Line’s third class was equivalent to second class on most other lines.
The cabin he shared with three other immigrants was supplied with bunks,
electric lighting, and a washbasin. One bath down the hall was sufficient for
all the men in steerage, as most avoided bathing. (A common belief at the
time was that taking baths resulted in lung disease.) Meals were simple but
nourishing, with typical menus including oatmeal, coffee, canned herring,
boiled beef and cabbage, biscuits, and canned peaches.
For the first time in his life, Tehlirian experienced the vastness of the
ocean. Losing sight of land and gazing out at the rolling Atlantic for hours at a
stretch gave him time to think deeply on the difficult mission before him. He
lost himself in his meditations and, unlike his fellow passengers, was neither
fascinated by the massive ship nor bored by the long voyage. The
transatlantic crossing was merely prelude; his adventure would begin only
after the ship docked. After waiting patiently for two years, Tehlirian was
finally moving forward.

As the ship steamed into port, the twenty-four-year-old stared in wonder at

the skyscrapers towering over New York Harbor. This was neither frantic
Paris nor crumbling Constantinople. This was the city of the future, of new
beginnings. This was where he would find a new beginning. According to
Ellis Island records, Tehlirian entered the United States on August 25, 1920,
as “Solomon Telarian” and used his shaky command of the French language
to report his ethnicity as Armenian with a residence in Paris.
After processing through immigration and a short ferry ride across the
Hudson, Tehlirian hailed a taxi and handed the driver a slip of paper on
which was written the address of the New York Tashnag “clubhouse,” 53
Lexington Avenue at Twenty-fifth Street, just south of the Armory. As he
traversed Manhattan, he marveled at the energy of the city “bubbling like a
furnace everywhere.”15 Inside the club, fellow countrymen surrounded him
and peppered him with queries in the mother tongue. Tehlirian tried at first to
satisfy the interest of his peers, then found the enthusiastic curiosity repellent.
He grew silent. Soghomon could not bear casual discussion of what
Armenians were now calling Medz Yeghern (the Great Crime).
Tired and angry, Tehlirian made a move to leave. One of the older boys
collared him and asked him what he was upset about. Frustrated, he blurted
out that he was on a mission under the direction of the Tashnagtsutiun, that he
didn’t have time for gossip. The mood in the room shifted. The young men
surrounding him finally understood: this skinny war veteran was not just one
more newcomer to America, peripherally associated with the Tashnag
organization, but a genuine fedayee who was part of something deeper and
much darker. He was quickly escorted to the recently refurbished Grand
Central Station, where he caught a train to Boston.
Tashnag operatives picked up the fiery young man at Boston’s South
Station and drove him to the editorial offices of the Hairenik newspaper. The
newspaper’s offices, like those in Geneva and Constantinople, provided a
safe haven for revolutionaries. Newspapers factored greatly in the
dissemination of radical ideas and provided a natural cover for those who
organized the intellectual superstructure of revolution. All over the world,
newspapers had become the first real mass media. They were cheap to print
and circulate, and could target specific ethnic minorities, consolidating their
agenda. Newspapers created a sense of unity for factions, political parties,
and revolutionaries.
Stepping into the offices, Tehlirian found himself shaking the hand of the
Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s Central Committee secretary, “Hamo”
Paraghamian. Paraghamian, an insurance salesman by trade, was an
extrovert, a man with great appetites, evidenced by his large girth. His jolly
demeanor disguised an intense commitment to the assassination effort. It
would be Hamo’s job to transfer the funds that Aaron Sachaklian collected
through charitable contributions and wire them to the Nemesis operatives in
Europe.
Tehlirian did not understand that in the world of spies, appearances are
deceiving. He had crossed an ocean to do whatever was asked of him, yet
once again found himself surrounded by people who spoke casually about the
task at hand. This angered the young fedayeen. As Hamo made small talk,
Tehlirian felt distant, ill at ease with this “Armenian American” with his
tailored suit and chubby cheeks. This man was nothing like the fierce fighters
Soghomon had known and loved on the front. Everywhere he went, the
Armenians here used big words, had soft hands, soft eyes. They were not to
be trusted. Tehlirian found it hard to focus.
Hamo explained to Tehlirian that Talat and his confederates were
working with European associates to resuscitate the Turkish state as a
prelude to the return of the former leadership. A big part of that effort would
be to improve the reputation of Turkey with the West. The former Ittihadists
had met with Italians to broker loans and foster military assistance for
General Mustapha Kemal’s rebel army. In addition, the Turkish nationalists
had been receiving funds from the Soviet Union and had used this cash to
order fresh weapons. In Baku, Enver Pasha had made an appearance at the
first Soviet-sponsored Congress of the Peoples of the East, claiming to
represent the North African Islamic nations. The former CUP bosses were
playing a complex game, testing the waters with the Russians, the British, and
the Germans, all at the same time, as they sought to build new alliances. The
former Ottoman leadership, though chased out of Turkey, was regaining its
strength and poised to rise again.
Tehlirian was overwhelmed by what he was hearing.16 He wanted to grab
this fat man’s lapels and shout in his face, “Just tell me where the monster is!
Is he here in the States? Where is Talat? And how can I get at him? I am a
weapon, aim me.” But he bit his tongue and waited. It was important to
remain calm. A familiar feeling was stirring in his chest, the illness that had
felled him on the front and in Erzincan. It would be very bad if he fainted
here in front of these people after coming so far. Another man entered the
room.
Tehlirian instantly recognized Armen Garo of the Bank Ottoman attack,
Garo who had served in parliament with the murdered Zohrab, Garo who
was ambassador for the government of the new Armenian Republic.
According to Tehlirian’s memoir, his mood lifted instantly as he realized he
was in the presence of a genuine hero of the Armenian nation. Clearly the
affinity was reciprocated. Garo shook Tehlirian’s hands “with paternal love
and fraternal warmth.”
The horrific killings in Asia Minor had eroded Garo’s spirit, and to
Tehlirian he seemed worn. Garo had fought the good fight, had done
everything he could, had been a leader during a time when the Tashnags were
working with the CUP to overthrow the sultan. When the war began, he had
joined the military, he had traveled thousands and thousands of miles. Yet
despite all his efforts, a tragedy of epic proportions had transpired during his
watch. Garo understood the full dimensions of the debacle more than most.
He was soul sick.
The older man outlined all the work that needed to be done, and Tehlirian
felt himself growing buoyant with purpose. He was being invited to join the
front lines, to make a difference. “We were like members of a family,” said
Tehlirian, the man who had grown up barely knowing his father. Now he had
found one. And Garo, who wanted to believe that all his efforts on behalf of
his people had not been futile, needed someone who would have complete
faith in him and who could bravely pick up the torch he himself had carried
for so long. He needed someone whose passion equaled his own. Garo
suggested they get something to eat. They ended up at the Koko Restaurant,17
only a short walk down the hill.
As the two men became more comfortable with each other, Garo regaled
Tehlirian with stories from his glory days as gadfly to the powerful Talat. He
recounted how in June 1914, only a few months before the war began, Garo,
as a member of the Turkish Assembly, had visited Talat in his office. Talat
had complained that the Armenians were once again seeking outside help
from Europe for their grievances. The minister of the interior fixed his glare
on the Armenian parliamentarian. “Why do you not come to us for help? Why
do you have to bring the British in on this?”
Garo had replied that the CUP leaders were not abiding by the spirit of
the reforms. As Garo laid it out to his new protégé, he knew he was in the
right and had refused to give in to Talat’s bullying. The age of the subservient
Armenian was over. As far as Garo was concerned, Armenians and Turks
were all Ottomans, equal citizens within the empire. It said so in the
constitution.
As the argument wore on, Garo could see that Talat was toying with him,
“smiling satanically.” Garo realized that there was no point in continuing the
debate. But Talat wouldn’t let the matter drop. He insisted on an answer.
Garo knew he was being patronized; the time for argument was past. And
then, in his next breath, Garo warned Talat that he and the Ittihad were
leading the empire down a road to ruin.
Talat replied, “You’ve changed.”
Garo’s last words to Talat were: “We will bring down the great edifice of
the Ottoman Empire. It’s only a matter of time.” By relating this dialogue,
Garo was painting a picture for the young soldier. He meant to inspire him
just as he had been in the Geneva ARF offices almost twenty-five years
before. This effort, this “Nemesis,” was not only about revenge. It was about
one nation pitted against another. It represented a historic battle. And Garo
was inviting Tehlirian to be part of it.
What Tehlirian could not see was that for Garo, probably more than any
of the other Nemesis conspirators, the attack on the former Turkish
leadership was both political and personal. Garo had watched Talat gloat as
he made plans to destroy the Armenians. Nemesis had become necessary not
only as a vendetta but also as a way to restore some vestige of dignity to a
people who had been crushed so mercilessly. Nemesis was about pride as
much as it was about vengeance. Tehlirian was ready to die for his family.
Garo was already dying, even as he spoke, of heartbreak.
Garo handed Tehlirian photographs of Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Djemal
Pasha, and their spouses clipped from newspapers and journals. Three
copies of each man’s photograph had been prepared. Since Tehlirian viewed
these Turkish leaders as monsters, he was surprised by how appealing their
wives were. In his autobiography he asks himself how these women with
faces like angels could live with such murderous men, again revealing his
naïveté.
Focusing on the photo of Talat, Tehlirian made note of the man’s muscular
arms and square shoulders. The former interior minister cut an imposing
figure. What if something went wrong and he had to attack Talat with his bare
hands. Would he have the strength to be able to overcome such a bull? It
made no difference; he would welcome the opportunity to grapple with Talat.
Tehlirian then examined the photographs of Enver and Djemal. The
twisted points of Enver’s mustache and the young general’s ramrod posture
revealed the arrogance of a peacock. That would make him a more
vulnerable target in the end. Turning to Djemal, he saw in his eyes a cunning
and an appetite for barbarity. Tehlirian stared at the photographs until they
swam before his eyes. These men had killed so many. Hundreds of thousands
of mothers and children. Innocent people like his own kin had died because
of these men. Garo broke the silence. “You know that after 1909, Djemal was
governor of Cilicia. After the massacres in Adana. He wanted to break away,
form a kingdom of his own.”
Garo handed Tehlirian a new photograph. “This is Bedri Bey. He was
head of the police in Constantinople who rounded up our brothers in April
1915. He supervised the tortures, the killing of Zohrab. He escaped with the
rest of them in November 1918.” Soghomon knew Bedri Bey because he was
an associate of his first victim, Megerdichian. “Also Doctor Shakir and
Djemal Azmi. These men are in communication with one another, we are
fairly sure of it. Naji Bey, Said Halim Pasha, the Grand Vizier before Talat…
they are all preparing to return, only waiting for the right moment to re-enter
Turkey. You know who Azmi is, right?” Yes, Tehlirian had heard of Azmi’s
crimes. This was the governor of Trebizond who had executed hundreds of
young Armenian men serving in the labor battalions. In addition, Azmi had
emptied his vilayet of its Armenian civilians, sending them out into the Black
Sea on fishing boats to be drowned. Tehlirian quietly murmured, “Yes, I
know.”
Garo continued, “Azmi ended up in Baku where he continued his
massacres.” Tehlirian felt the familiar floating sensation about to overwhelm
him as he concentrated on Garo’s words. He must not faint at this important
moment. Soghomon was prepared to do anything for this man whose face
reminded him of his uncles in Serbia. Whatever was asked of him. He
refused to squander this opportunity.
It was after midnight when the two finally finished. Garo left the
restaurant and did not return. Hamo walked Tehlirian back to the offices of
Hairenik, where a room with a bed had been prepared. He was alone for the
first time in weeks. In the dark, Tehlirian closed his eyes but could not find
sleep. He tried to conjure his beloved Anahid, but instead the photographs of
the villainous Turks crowded his mind. “The monstrous faces jumped up and
down before my eyes,” he recalled.18
Tehlirian returned to Europe on a steamship to Le Havre. There he
boarded a train and went directly to Paris, where he was handed a fresh
passport, issued on November 18, 1920, by the Persian consulate. This new
paperwork would identify him as a subject of Persia rather than of the
Ottoman Empire. Once he reached Germany, it would be important for the
young Armenian to mask his nationality as thoroughly as possible. Turkish
agents would be on the lookout for Armenian spies and killers.
From Paris, Tehlirian traveled to Geneva, where he visited the editorial
offices of Troshag (The Flag), the official newspaper of the ARF. These
were the offices that doubled as ARF headquarters, the same headquarters
Armen Garo had visited as a student. Here Tehlirian met with the editor,
“Mr. Anton,” who explained to Tehlirian that “our representative” (Shahan
Natali), who had passed through a few days earlier, was certain that Talat
was in Berlin.19 Anton arranged for Tehlirian to obtain a Swiss student visa,
which would allow him to enter Germany without any difficulty. He urged
Tehlirian to get to Berlin as soon as possible so that he could sign up as an
engineering student before the schools closed registration for the next period.
Tehlirian left Geneva on December 3 and arrived in Berlin the same day. The
agents in Geneva reported back to Boston that “Simon Tavitian,” the code
name Tehlirian had been given, had moved on to Berlin.20
 CHAPTER SIX

The Hunt

I am the son of peasants and I know what is happening in the

villages. That is why I wanted to take revenge, and I regret nothing.
—Gavrilo Princip

Assassination has had a very long tradition in the Ottoman Empire. The
murderous competition between heirs for the royal throne was key to the
sultanic succession. Should a prince ascend to the throne, all of his brothers
and male cousins, regardless of age, were smothered or garroted to ensure
that royal competition would not endanger the dynasty itself. Murder was an
essential ingredient to the successful management of the state.
Murder wasn’t always preemptive. Sultans were routinely dispatched by
rivals. In the most famous case of sultanicide, the mother of Sultan Ibrahim,
Valida Sultana Kiusem, ordered her son to be murdered and replaced by his
eight-year-old brother in order to maintain her own control over the empire.
On the eve of World War I, the CUP secured its shaky hold on power by
gunning down the minister of war and then, six months later, the new Grand
Vizier.
The term “assassin” dates back almost a thousand years, rooted in
medieval Islamic power struggles. It refers to the followers of Hassan-i
Sabbah, a rebellious eleventh-century Ismaili Shi’a who vengefully sent out
his followers to murder his enemies. Holed up in a remote and impregnable
castle in the mountains of northern Persia, Hassan would extort protection
money from potential targets, terrorizing rulers hundreds of miles from his
base.
The psychological impact of terror was an essential ingredient in
Hassan’s modus operandi. His assassins always killed with daggers, forcing
a bloody face-to-face confrontation. Ironically, Hassan’s first successful
assassination was that of the Grand Vizier of the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al-
Mulk. Nineteen hundred years later, Soghomon Tehlirian would follow in the
footsteps of the first assassins when he murdered one of the last of a long line
of powerful Ottoman Grand Viziers, Talat Pasha.

On December 3, 1920, the very day when Tehlirian arrived in Berlin to begin
hunting for Talat, General Mustapha Kemal’s Grand National Assembly of
Turkey signed the Treaty of Alexandropol with the tiny Democratic Republic
of Armenia. With the stroke of a pen, Armenia formally recognized the new
Kemalist Republic of Turkey (something the Allies were not willing to do
just yet). This paradoxical treaty, an act of desperation on the part of the
Armenians, was meant to mollify the Turkish forces that were on the brink of
finishing off the fledgling nation. This recognition of the new Turkish state
outraged those Armenians who had fought for the homeland vilayets, and
some, like General Antranig, refused to stop fighting. The dream of a
“Wilsonian” Armenia was dead.
Kemal’s role in the destruction of the Armenians has never been
completely explored. As Christopher J. Walker noted in his book on
Armenia, “Mustafa Kemal was known personally to hate fanaticism and to
despise religious extremism, and to be devoid of anti-minority sentiments
that had characterized Turkish leaders in the past.”1 But Kemal was also a
pragmatist, a master of survival, and for that reason his government, and
those governments that carried on his legacy, would continue to pursue and
destroy Christians in Turkey, as well as Kurds.
The Treaty of Alexandropol kept Kemal’s forces at bay, but it did not stop
the Russians. Concurrently with this futile maneuver of recognition, the
Soviet Union completed its annexation of the Armenian state. From check to
checkmate. Despite the treaty with the Turkish nationalists, it was only a
matter of time before Kemal’s armies would invade Armenia. To fight on
against the Turks without an alliance with the Soviet Union would mean total
destruction of what little there remained of the Armenian people in the
Caucasus. Thus, on virtually the same date as the signing of the Treaty of
Alexandropol, the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was born.
On that dark day for what was left of any independent Armenian state,
Soghomon Tehlirian arrived in Berlin. A stranger to the city, unable to speak
a word of German, he did not know one face in this vast and hectic
cosmopolis. His tiny support network was ragtag and diffuse. In contrast,
Talat and his comrades had surrounded themselves with a well-organized
underground network of former police, spies, and diplomats as well as the
full, if unacknowledged, support of the German government. Swiss and
German bank accounts holding millions in gold would sustain the Ittihad
exiles, while the Nemesis conspirators relied on an austere budget of
thousands of dollars. While Talat’s cohorts enjoyed the freedom of
unrestricted funds, Shahan Natali would have to argue for every penny spent,
down to the smallest purchase.
After a full day on the train from Geneva, followed by an apprehensive
cab ride across Berlin, Tehlirian arrived cold and hungry at the Tiergarten
Hotel around ten p.m. on December 3. He found his contact hunched over a
Turkish-language newspaper. The man did not look up. Instead he pointed to
a newspaper article reporting on the various Turkish expat factions
squabbling amongst themselves in Berlin. He whispered, “The big game is
indeed here.”2
The Armenians would be trying to find one man among a population of
four million. To make the pursuit more difficult, the city these men had
entered to hunt their “big game” was teetering on the brink of chaos. This
was Weimar Berlin, the metropolitan center of a country still reeling from
years of pointless war. Two million German soldiers had died, while the
surviving demobilized veterans had little to show for their service.
Unemployment was soaring. Soon, hyperinflation would reduce the German
mark to worthless paper. What was worse, the punitive treaties about to be
signed with the French would further humiliate the defeated nation and
hobble the economy for years to come. In January, Germany would be
ordered to pay 226 billion gold marks.3 Vast border territories had been
partitioned and handed off to Poland and France. The war had left a sour
taste in everyone’s mouth.
Enraged at the Kaiser, German citizens had abandoned the monarchy
altogether and embraced what would become known as the Weimar
Republic. This new parliamentary government was an unstable mess,
allowing dozens of extremist political parties to rise up and flourish. These
armed factions literally fought each other in the streets. Among them were the
“Freikorps” reactionaries, mostly disaffected veterans who would later
morph into the SA (Sturmabteilung), or “Brownshirts,” of the
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the Nazi Party. In early
February, the NSDAP would hold its biggest rally yet, at Circus Krone.4
Extremism radicalized every aspect of German life. A heady mix of
modernism and postwar euphoria gave way to a permissive and lawless
underground. “The streets became ravines of manslaughter and cocaine
traffic, marked by steel rods and bloody, broken chair legs.”5 Friedrich
Bayer & Company had invented a new wonder drug called heroin, which
joined alcohol and tobacco as a scourge of the masses. Only a few years
earlier, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Picasso, and Duchamp had tossed realism
out the window; now reality itself had become surreal. The decadence and
near-anarchy of the Weimar Republic provided a perfect backdrop for the
rise of Hitler’s thugs, men who would soon sweep away an inconvenient
legal system and usher in the Third Reich. This was the anarchic atmosphere
in which the Nemesis conspiracy found itself in Berlin.
The circle of Armenian conspirators was led by the deeply committed
Shahan Natali (born Hagop Der Hagopian in 1884 in Kharpert), a histrionic
man whose short stature and idiosyncrasies were offset by his intensity and
dedication. Natali had lost both his father and an uncle during the Hamidian
massacres twenty-five years earlier, and he remained burdened by memories
of helping his tearful mother bury his murdered father. In 1904, twenty-year-
old Natali had joined the ARF, then immigrated to Watertown,
Massachusetts, where he found employment at a shoe factory. In 1908, after
the Young Turk revolution brought the CUP to power, Natali returned to
Turkey; like many, he believed that a new day had dawned in the Ottoman
Empire. After the Adana massacres chilled Armenian-Turkish relations,
Natali returned to the United States to study philosophy and theater at Boston
University. By 1912, eager to reenter Turkey, he traveled first to Greece, but
as an Ottoman citizen, he was prevented from crossing the border at passport
control. Returning to Boston one more time, where he would become an
editor of the ARF newspaper, Hairenik, Natali was consumed with rage as
he tracked the wartime action from thousands of miles away. Nothing about
Natali’s feelings regarding “the Turk” was moderate. His hatred was deep
and his focus absolute.
While logistical support and financing were run by Aaron Sachaklian,6 a
CPA living in Syracuse, New York, Natali remained in Europe and kept
close watch over the agents in Berlin. In addition to Tehlirian, the group
included “Hrap” (Hrach Papazian, going by the alias “Mehmed Ali”),7
“Vaza” (Vahan Zakarian),8 “Hazor” (Hagop Zorian),9 and “Haigo” (Haig
Ter-Ohanian).10 Code names were consistent with a system used to befuddle
the sultan’s spies going back to the 1890s. (In correspondence between the
conspirators, Tehlirian would be referred to as “Simon Tavitian” or “the
engineering student.”) Assisting this core group were expat Armenian artists
and writers living in Berlin.11 Armenian diplomats based in Europe who had
been associated with the republic facilitated passport and visa paperwork.
Newspaper offices and embassies provided enough middlemen to handle
communications and logistics. According to Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy in
her book, Sacred Justice, Shahan Natali bribed border guards and police in
Berlin to alert him to the comings and goings of Turkish nationals in
Germany.12
Oblivious to the politically unstable world of the Weimar Republic
surrounding him, Tehlirian saw the city of Berlin as nothing more than a vast
and complex maze in which to track his quarry. Upon his arrival, he learned
that his fellow agents had already deduced that a small tobacco and carpet
shop near the Tiergarten was owned and operated by Djemal Azmi, the
infamous former governor of Trebizond. The shop, visited only by Turks,
existed as a kind of nerve center for the Ittihadists living in the city. Publicly,
Azmi presented himself as an immigrant merchant, but the Armenian spies
knew his résumé well. His list of war crimes was long. The tribunal in
Constantinople had sentenced Azmi to death in 1919. Like Talat, Azmi had
eluded capture by both the current Turkish government and the British. His
name was high on the Nemesis hit list.
Tehlirian wanted to storm the shop and “shoot the dog.” But Azmi was not
“Number One,” and Tehlirian opted to stand down. “It was important to act
cautiously and not allow the prey [Talat] to escape.” Natali had warned
Tehlirian that although there were many who deserved to die, he must not
forget that Talat was unique in the eyes of the world. In other words, this
operation needed resonance beyond revenge. The killing would have to
appeal to the sympathies of a world outraged by the Armenian massacres.
Joining the stakeout was twenty-seven-year-old Hazor, who, unlike the
sorrowful Tehlirian, was easygoing and affable. Once again Tehlirian was
put off by an Armenian’s apparent lack of grief. He felt the same confusion
he’d experienced when meeting with the organizers in Massachusetts. How
could this man smile and tell jokes? How could anyone from back home ever
smile again? In fact, Tehlirian’s brooding nature set him apart from his
fellow commandos. His motivation to find and kill Talat was born out of
something deeper than anger or the need for revenge. Something deeply
mournful that sought to appease the need of those who were no longer alive.
In this respect he was different from the others with a more straightforward
determination.
Some of the fedayeen found the hunt for the Ittihad criminals to be an
adventure, a thrilling game of cat and mouse. Others, like the politically
violent everywhere, had always been tough characters, inured to bloodshed.
They had always been at war with the Turks. Their reflexive response to the
crimes of the CUP was to push back, hard. All were men who lived through
action, obeying a simple code: an eye for an eye. If Turks committed
atrocities against Armenians, they, as Armenians, would commit atrocities
against Turks. It was that simple.
Or not. As individuals, these men were avenging the deaths of hundreds of
thousands, but there was also an institutional aspect to their actions. Both the
ARF and the CUP were underground organizations with no compunctions
about deploying violence in order to achieve their goals. They were neither
democratic nor entirely legal, dependent on secrecy and hierarchy for smooth
operations. As a result, each recognized in the opposing party a shared code
of violence and clandestine methodology. Raymond Kévorkian, the venerable
historian of the Armenian Genocide, put it this way when he spoke with me
in Paris: “You must understand. The Tashnags and the Ittihad, they were like
lovers who now hated one another.”13
 Tehlirian was different. He had no taste for violence, nor did he want to
deal in payback. Rather, he was an idealist who had volunteered to fight in a
patriotic war and been transformed by the experience. After the
disappearance of his family, the fight had become nothing less than an
existential mission. Without it, he feared he might lose his sanity. This deep
resolution, founded on the sanctity of his objectives, made his discipline
absolute. He constrained himself, through illness and depression, to focus on
his objective, no matter what he had to do to reach it. Manifesting such
singleness of purpose, Tehlirian himself became exactly what the Tashnag
organization wanted: a virtual weapon that would get the job done.
Though he had no aptitude for languages, he did the best he could to learn
German. He familiarized himself with the Stadtplan of Berlin, memorizing
the location and layout of all major train stations. He ignored his own poor
health. Finally, he forced himself to remain as patient as a stone. Tehlirian
understood that allowing his passions to get the better of him could endanger
the ultimate goal of killing the man who had murdered his mother. Tehlirian
removed every aspect of himself that in any way hampered his mission. His
personal needs were the last thing on his mind. Unlike Garo, Natali,
Shiragian, and the others, Tehlirian seems to have been almost egoless. In
this respect, Tehlirian was unique.

The hunt began in earnest while Berlin, wrapped in a damp, penetrating cold,
was relatively quiet. During the stakeout one day, the Nemesis team noticed a
striking woman wrapped in a black astrakhan coat entering Azmi’s shop.
Hazor wandered inside and eavesdropped as she conversed with Azmi. All
he could make out were her words “Yes, if he agrees.” As the mysterious
woman departed the shop, Tehlirian insisted on following her despite the
group’s misgivings. She stopped at number 165 Wilhelmstrasse. Beyond a
snow-encrusted garden door, the woman in black ascended the stone steps,
produced a key, and entered the building. This house became a new spot to
watch.
It was dusk by the time Tehlirian returned to the Tiergarten Hotel. He
found Hazor with two new “friends”: Vaza and Haigo. The young men traded
notes, and it was revealed for the first time that Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, the
notorious former head of the Special Organization, was also in Berlin.
Perhaps Enver was here as well? Was it possible that the woman Tehlirian
had followed was Enver’s wife? The two locations were kept under
surveillance for a full two weeks, but the woman was not seen again.
Servants came and went; nothing more. The lead had gone nowhere.
Enver Pasha’s presence in Berlin was significant because Enver
represented the wing of the Ittihad that was seeking solidarity with Islamic
rebels in Central Asia. This subgroup of Turkish nationalists envisioned a
pan-Turkic or even a fabulous “pan-Turanist” empire that would include
those “homeland” regions of Central Asia where Turkic peoples represented
a majority. “Pan-Turania” was a nationalist dream, a chain of revived
Turkic/Muslim khanates extending from the Mediterranean to China. In the
pan-Turanist scenario, Turkey would link up with Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan,
and Kazakhstan to establish an Islamic/Turkic empire running along the entire
southern flank of Russia.
The pan-Turanist ambition was a variant of the “pan-Islamic” dream in
which every Muslim-majority nation would unify to form a vast multinational
Islamic empire. That scenario had never been popular with Turkish leaders
because they viewed Arabs as subordinates and adversaries, not
confederates. Still, Islamic unity in either a pan-Turanist or pan-Islamist
scenario was appealing to the former CUP leadership. First of all, such ideas
would be attractive to Muslims all over Europe and Asia, building a populist
base. Second, Islamic or Turkic revolution threatened British and Russian
interests, providing Enver and his cronies leverage when dealing with the
major powers.
Talat and Enver disagreed in their opinion of these pan-Islamic and pan-
Turkic alliances. Enver wanted the pan-Turkist movement to be coordinated
from Moscow, where he had begun to set up a base of operations. Enver had
ingratiated himself with the Soviet leadership, claiming that he could be the
man to resolve the friction with their Muslim territories. He had even
attended the Soviet-sponsored First Congress of Peoples of the East in Baku
in September 1920, claiming to represent the Islamic nations of the Maghreb
(Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). Enver’s courting of the Soviets was
in line with the Turkish nationalists who wanted to preserve good relations
with this powerful neighbor. Kemal’s forces fighting in Anatolia desperately
needed the hard cash and weapons the Soviets were, for the time being,
supplying.
 Talat, by contrast, never trusted Lenin or Stalin as true allies. As Talat
would explain in an interview only days before his death, “The Turk and the
Bolshevik [have] nothing in common but a temporary alliance, a convenience
from the point of view of Russia that answered a need from the point of view
of Turkey.”14 Talat envisioned a completely different scenario. Unbeknownst
to Enver, he was testing the waters for an alliance with the British, a
relationship that Enver would never have agreed to.
Because Talat did not see an upside to a partnership with Moscow, he
wanted any secret pan-Turkic organization to be based in Berlin. Once things
settled down in the heartland of Turkey proper, Talat hoped to return home
and join Mustapha Kemal, planning to share in the supervision of the
reconstituted nation. As far as the exiled CUP leadership was concerned, the
war with Great Britain and France was not over. There was much unfinished
business, particularly in the form of any peace treaties. Talat, Enver, and
their cohorts understood that they should bide their time until these treaties
were settled in a way that was favorable to Turkey. After that, it would be
safe to return to Turkey and continue business as usual.
But Talat and Enver had to wait for Mustapha Kemal to decide it was
time to allow them reentry into the territories he controlled. (They could not
return via Constantinople because they had been condemned to death in
absentia and would be arrested by the British authorities there.) To Talat’s
consternation, Kemal was biding his time. He explained to his fellow
Ittihadists that before the former CUP leaders could return, a beachhead for
the new Republic of Turkey had to be firmly established. Grudgingly, Talat,
Enver, and the others busied themselves beyond the borders, trying to build
unity among the non-Ottoman Soviet Islamic/Turkic republics.
In other words, Talat, Enver, and the former CUP leadership needed
Mustapha Kemal, but with every passing month of conflict, Kemal needed
them less. If he succeeded in chasing the Greeks, French, and British out of
Asia Minor, he wouldn’t need them at all. “The Young Turks, anxious for
restoration of their power, were the rivals of Kemal, and he prudently kept
them from gaining control of his movement.”15
Around this time, the Nemesis agents in Berlin would meet regularly at
the home of a diplomat named Libarit Nazarian, an old friend of the German
humanitarian Johannes Lepsius. Nazarian was vice consul of the Republic of
Armenia in Berlin. Without being privy to operational details, Nazarian and
his secretary, Yervant Apelian, assisted Shahan Natali in pursuing the exiled
Turkish leaders. Utilizing diplomatic prerogative, Nazarian was able to act
as a conduit for communications from Geneva, Boston, and Yerevan. (The
conspirators communicated chiefly through letters written in Armenian and
utilizing code words, usually with reference to a metaphorical “wedding.”)
In addition, he could counsel the team with his own political insight. For
example, Nazarian believed that Enver was intentionally spreading false
rumors about his whereabouts in order to confuse those who were trying to
find him. In Nazarian’s opinion, it was pointless to wait for Enver in Berlin.
At the same time, Hrap (Hrach Papazian) was passing himself off as
“Mehmed Ali,” a rich expatriate Turk. The handsome young Armenian moved
easily through Ottoman society in Berlin. Fluent in Turkish without a trace of
an accent, he had attended law school in Turkey and had gone so far as to
have himself circumcised so that he might pass as Muslim without suspicion.
With his particular talents, Hrap easily picked up snippets of news from the
Turkish students with whom he socialized.
Hrap reported to Shahan Natali that the Turkish underground had met with
Egyptian sheik Abdul Aziz and a Druze emir, Shakib Arslan, as well as
several Muslims from India. Arslan, who was an ardent pan-Islamist, wanted
to bring the Turks and Arabs together in an alliance. An Arab contingent,
headed by Amir Faisal (who also represented the Arabs at the Paris peace
conference), had reached out to Talat with the hopes that a coalition of some
sort could be formed. These were the actors the British were hoping to
motivate against the Ottomans during the war. Thus the pan-Islamic circles
with which T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) had been involved had a
relationship with the exiled Ittihadists. Though the young Armenian fedayeen
could not fully parse this information, it clearly indicated that the Ittihadists
were regrouping, finding allies, and preparing for anything but concession to
Allied desires.
Also, though the Nemesis operatives did not know it at the time, in a
classic case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the British viewed the
Tashnag agents as allies. The British were keeping an eye on Talat (they
knew just where he was but claimed otherwise) and were following the
Armenians as best they could. Old hands at spycraft, the British had no
compunctions about employing or abetting assassination if necessary. Not
only Talat, but Enver, too, was in their sights.
The British were determined to counterbalance any moves that might
threaten their hegemony in the east (Mesopotamia, Persia, and India). They
were well aware of the pan-Islamists’ intentions, and had even encouraged
them when they were at war with the Ottoman Empire. But now they were
alarmed by the continued attempts at alliance among Muslims in Egypt, the
Levant, and India. T. E. Lawrence warned the Foreign Office “of the mischief
which might follow a pact between Faisal and Ataturk or Russian penetration
of the region [as] Faisal fruitlessly sought a common front with Turkish,
Kurdish and Egyptian nationalists.”16 Secret British documents from the
period report at length on these potential dangers and alliances and Britain’s
fears reminiscent of the “Great Game.” The Armenians could not possibly
have been aware of all the particulars of the deals being proposed by the
Turks, Arabs, and Muslims amongst themselves. But what they did
understand was that if Enver Pasha prevailed and received endorsement for
an alliance with the Russians, Talat—if he was actually in Berlin—might
depart the city altogether, and they would lose him.
Why had Talat settled in Berlin in the first place? The primary reason was
probably the fortune in gold that the CUP had stashed outside the empire.
Berlin provided easy access to these funds, which were located in Swiss and
German banks. Moreover, Germany was the safest place for an exiled
Ittihadist to reside. France was swarming with Armenians who would be
happy to seek vengeance. Britain could never harbor a man it had repeatedly
labeled a war criminal. Likewise, any of the Balkan regions would be very
dangerous for a Muslim seeking safe harbor. The United States was out of the
question. This left Germany, which was tolerant of its former ally’s presence.
German authorities also liked the fact that as long as Talat stayed in Berlin,
they could keep an eye on him.
The British certainly knew that Talat was hiding out in Germany.
Intelligence officer Sir Andrew Ryan had personally demanded that Germany
return Talat and his associates to Turkey for trial. Ryan was “the last of the
Dragomans” stationed in Constantinople before the war.17 (A “dragoman”
was an enhanced translator, stationed at each embassy, who would interpret
what was being said in negotiations and act as a mediator as well, and thus
held a position of power.) German officials answered Ryan with coy
stubbornness, demanding to see papers showing that these persons had been
found guilty. Only then would they cooperate, but even if they did decide to
do so, they claimed to have no idea where these persons were. This attitude
enraged the British, who had suffered huge losses at the hands of Ottoman
armies at Gallipoli and in the Mesopotamian desert. Documents show clearly
that, unable to extricate Talat from Germany, British spies kept tabs on him
and knew exactly where he was living.18

While deep currents of international intrigue flowed around them, the

Nemesis squad had lost the scent of their quarry. All leads had gone
nowhere. In fact, rather than moving toward their goal, they were losing
ground. Long hours of surveillance in Berlin’s cold, damp weather were
wearing Tehlirian down. And the fainting spells continued to plague him.
Would he be able to rise to the occasion should Talat suddenly appear? He
had no choice but to lie low and recuperate.
When Tehlirian finally got back on his feet, Apelian moved him out of the
hotel to a room in his own apartment building on Augsburgstrasse in an effort
to settle him closer to Azmi’s tobacco shop, where most of the surveillance
was going on. Despite the scarcity of apartments in Berlin, “the secretary of
the Armenian legation, Yervant Apelian, arranged with the landlady of his
flat, an elderly spinster, Elisabeth Stellbaum, to rent him a student room in
the same building, 51 Augsburgstrasse, where there was another student,
Levon Eftian.”19
Over these months Tehlirian had met many Armenians, none of whom
knew his real reason for being in Berlin. For them, he was nothing more than
a melancholy fellow immigrant. Most of them felt sympathy for Soghomon
because they knew he had seen the worst of it, and they made every effort to
gather him into the fold of the growing Armenian German society. Tehlirian’s
first instinct was to keep his head down and avoid interaction. But with his
move to the new apartment and his growing friendship with Eftian,
socializing was unavoidable.
Levon Eftian, who had first met Soghomon in Paris, was unaware of his
friend’s true mission in Berlin, and so was particularly critical of Tehlirian’s
poor command of German. He was concerned that Tehlirian would never
succeed at the university without mastering the language. Eftian’s plan was
for Tehlirian to work with his girlfriend, a lovely German fräulein named
Lola Beilinson, who would dedicate herself to improving Soghomon’s
language skills. Despite Tehlirian’s resistance, Eftian persuaded him to take
weekly lessons, arguing that doing so would be “a favor” to Lola, since she
so ardently wanted to help the sad-eyed foreigner.
Tehlirian cautiously widened his circle of young Armenian friends
through the oblivious Eftian. As he met more and more young Armenians in
Berlin, he was dismayed to find that most were not incapacitated with
mourning. In his memoirs, he notes with amazement that these Armenians had,
after only a short five years, begun to move on and live full and successful
lives in Germany. To be sure, most of them had not been as engaged with the
violence as Tehlirian had. Some had simply packed up and left Turkey as
trouble loomed. Some were from Constantinople, where the deportations had
not been so thorough. All were fluent in German. All had jobs. And like
young people everywhere, they socialized as often as they could.
One such occasion was a birthday party for Eftian. Upon arriving,
Tehlirian found himself wrapped in a bear hug by a former muleteer named
Karekin. Karekin was from Mush, a town west of Van that had been
particularly hard hit. Over a hundred thousand Armenians had died there
when the Special Organization in concert with Kurdish Hamidiye emptied the
town and the surrounding villages of Christians. Tens of thousands were
deported, but just as many were killed on the spot. In 1915 Mush had been
hell on earth.
In contrast to Tehlirian’s persistent and indelible grief, Karekin seemed to
revel in his status as a survivor. In Tehlirian’s words, for Karekin, “the days
of misfortune appeared as a desirable past.”20 The muleteer of the desert,
having established himself as a manual laborer in Berlin, replaced
mournfulness with a bittersweet nostalgia for the harsh life he had endured in
Anatolia.
Happy to see a familiar face, Karekin peppered Tehlirian with questions
about old friends and allies. Soon everyone at the party was trading stories
about what had happened to their respective families. Karekin launched into
a long story about how all three of his sisters had been kidnapped before
reaching the Euphrates. He added that the smaller children had hidden in the
fields with his mother, but the dry grass was set on fire. Snatched up by the
gendarmes as they tried to run, the children were corralled into nearby
stables, where they were forced to accept Islam or die.
Tehlirian begged Karekin to stop. Karekin’s lined face broke into a
wincing grin. “Why, did I strike a nerve?” Tehlirian replied that he himself
was overflowing with stories and had no room in his heart for more. Levon
Eftian, in an attempt to break the tension between the two men and redirect
the conversation, cursed Talat’s name. Others repeated the oath. But this was
exactly the sort of ineffectual demonstration that Tehlirian hated: people
histrionically ranting against the “bloody Turks” but doing nothing, taking no
action. Bottling up emotions he could not express, Tehlirian felt a black
mood building. “It was our own fault,” he muttered. “We are the guilty ones
and not Talat, for having trusted him after the Adana massacre.”21 He
glowered at Karekin. The muleteer struck his table with his fist and shouted,
“What is this person who calls himself Armenian, he is defending Talat!” and
stormed out of the party.
The encounter left Tehlirian upset and at loose ends. Memories of his
family, and of their anguish, flooded into him. A deep anxiety seized him.
What if he slipped up while in the company of these silly people and
inadvertently exposed the plot to hunt down Talat? But what choice did he
have? He had to stay the course; he had to continue to interact with these
impotent complainers, pretending to be one of them. He would try to avoid
debating the pros and cons of the tragedy, but these conversations were
inevitable. These happy Armenians were, in Tehlirian’s view, consciously
shirking their duty to the dead by living their lives as if nothing had
happened. Something had happened. And someone must answer for it.
Someday they would see what people with a conscience could do.
One afternoon Eftian and Apelian arrived at Tehlirian’s room
unannounced. “You are coming with us to take dancing lessons.”22 Tehlirian
didn’t understand. Learn to dance? He knew how to dance! Apelian slipped
an arm around his waist and whirled Tehlirian around his room. “Like this!
The way they dance here!”
Tehlirian, immersed in his sunless world where dancing was unthinkable,
replied, “Are you crazy? Is this a time to dance?”
Apelian didn’t hesitate. “Of course! Spring is here. It is the time for dance
and love! And you will improve your German as well. You’ve been here for
over a month and you can’t speak two words!”
“I’m not a dancer,” Tehlirian protested simply.
Levon chimed in, “You have no choice. We’ve already spent the money!”
At the dancehall, the robust and glowing young students were greeted by
the dance instructor, Professor Friedrich. The Victrola was cranked, the
turntable was set spinning, Herr Professor blew into a tiny whistle, and
everyone launched into a whirling polka. Tehlirian was lost. He knew only
one sort of dance, the traditional circle dance of Anatolian weddings and
baptisms. The strange set of movements spinning all around him only thrust
him deeper into his misery. He began to fantasize about the way they used to
dance back in Erzincan, in the days when everyone was happy, when
everyone… The scent of blood flooded his senses, his knees grew weak, and
Tehlirian collapsed onto the dance floor.
The incident saved young Soghomon from dance instruction that day. It
also served to remind him that the seizures were not abating. What if at the
moment of truth he was not able to execute the order? What if all this effort
was leading up to a colossal failure? The “sickness” was not as serious as it
had been in Yerevan, but it was active nonetheless. The next day, when he
attended his language lesson with Lola, he couldn’t focus. His “Fräulein
Lehrer” would testify six months later that he was “preoccupied.”
In the first days of 1921, Tehlirian, despite his erratic health, resumed his
surveillance. The work was both tedious and agonizing as the winter weather
grew bitter. Eyes drooping with fatigue while standing at his post one day,
Tehlirian realized he was watching the approach of two familiar-looking
men. It was Drs. Shakir and Nazim, the notorious leaders of the Special
Organization. They entered 47 Uhlandstrasse. Fifteen minutes later, Shakir
exited the building and Tehlirian followed him, leaving a man behind to
cover Nazim.
Fighting the Berlin cold, Tehlirian trailed Shakir block after block while
the former head of the Special Organization maintained a feverish pace
—“like fire,” in Tehlirian’s words. Exiting the neighborhood, they rounded
the sprawling Tiergarten park, which covered the center of old Berlin.
Hurrying along for over half an hour, Tehlirian wondered why Shakir had not
taken a car. Did he suspect that he was being followed?
Shakir made his way from one end of the Tiergarten to the other,
eventually arriving at the old British embassy on Wilhelmstrasse. The former
SO leader entered the building. Lacking the credentials to follow him in,
Tehlirian waited outside, stamping his feet, blowing on his frozen hands, his
head aching from fatigue. Suddenly the doctor appeared between the columns
of the front portico and raced down the steps. He immediately resumed his
rapid pace. Tehlirian followed for a few steps then felt the peculiar
sensations that always preceded a fainting spell. His slowed to a standstill,
his eyesight dimmed. Shakir slipped into the crowd as Tehlirian collapsed
onto the pavement. He awoke to find himself surrounded by curious
onlookers peering down at him. Tehlirian rose weakly to his feet, only to find
that his man was gone. But perhaps a new piece of the puzzle had been
discovered. Why was Shakir visiting the British? Brushing himself off,
Tehlirian pushed through the onlookers and staggered back to his room. The
next day, Vaza took him to the doctor.23
By the end of January, Tehlirian was consumed with nerves and
frustration. It was time to act! Why were they waiting? He was obviously
running out of strength and out of time. If he could not discover Talat’s
whereabouts, then at least he could attack Shakir and Nazim, two mass
murderers. Tehlirian lobbied his co-conspirators. “Let’s just kill them. They
are as bad as Talat.” Shahan Natali refused to give the go-ahead. It had to be
Talat, because killing Talat assured a highly publicized trial, and such a trial
would reveal to the world what the Turks had done.
Around this time, Hrap heard rumors that a meeting of the former CUP
leaders would soon be taking place in Rome. If the rumors were true, Talat
would be forced to emerge from hiding and reveal himself when he boarded
the train for Italy. The gathering of the Ittihad leadership-in-exile was
confirmed in an article in an Italian Fascist newspaper. Shahan Natali
prepared to go to Rome but had trouble getting his paperwork together. He
missed the train that would have gotten him to Italy in time to stake out the
meeting. Boarding a train two days later, Natali found himself seated in a
coach with Turks who had no notion that this man in Western dress could
comprehend their every word. He understood that others would come to see
these Turks off before the train left the station.

Natali’s and Tehlirian’s accounts of what happened in that train station do not
jibe perfectly, but they do agree on the central point.24 A man arrived at the
train platform to see the others off (one of whom Natali would later identify
as Bedri Bey, the notorious former police chief of Constantinople and cohort
of the assassinated Megerdichian). This man, the “Man of the Station,” as
Natali labels him, was heavyset and carried a cane. But more important was
this man’s obvious superior status relative to the men surrounding him.
Tehlirian, who was at the station to see Natali off, observed the heavyset
man carefully. Who was he? Could this be our man? Could this be Talat? But
he was clean-shaven; he lacked Talat’s signature thick black mustache. As
the round-faced man approached several “students” on the sidewalk, the
group sprang to life, arranging themselves like soldiers in an honor line. One
kissed the large man’s hand and said, “They are already inside, pasha.” The
heavyset man stepped up to the train and, with his cane, rapped on Bedri
Bey’s window in a farewell gesture. He then rejoined the others, and they all
backed away as the train slowly chugged out of the station. The group moved
toward the exit, allowing the man they called “pasha” to take the lead.
Hazor and Haigo appeared. “Is that him? Who is that?”
“They called him ‘pasha’ ”
“Every dog of the days of the deportations is called ‘pasha’ now.”
The Nemesis agents trailed the group and noticed that the entourage
lagged a few steps behind two “leaders,” the heavyset man with cane and “a
dark-faced one.” Tehlirian tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The
one they called “pasha” was large and powerfully built. His thick trunk was
right for Talat. But the face… Collecting his thoughts, Tehlirian let his fellow
spies walk ahead. The route passed the Tiergarten, now a familiar
neighborhood, one that the agents had traversed several times while
following their targets. The three “students” accompanying their superiors
bowed deeply, said their good-byes, and moved off.
The two men, “heavyset” and “dark face,” were standing before a
comfortable apartment building: number 4 Hardenbergstrasse. Hazor and
Haigo sidled up alongside Tehlirian. “We’ve been here before. On this
street!”25
“Yes.” The young Armenians shrank back into the shadows of the leafy
boulevard and watched the building for over an hour. Neither suspicious
individual reappeared. Tehlirian was excited. He had not felt this way since
the retreat from Erzinga.
 Was the man living at 4 Hardenbergstrasse Talat Pasha? It must be! How
could they determine the truth? As a foreign national, Talat would have had
to register with the police, but any visit to the local precinct house to make
inquiries would bring suspicion upon the Nemesis gang. Besides, how likely
was it that Talat was living in Berlin under his real name? One of the men ran
up to the door to take a peek at the brass plate affixed there. In Arabic script
was written the name Ali Salih Bey.
The following day, Vaza rang the doorbell at number 4 Hardenbergstrasse
and introduced himself as the representative of a Swiss insurance company
looking for a room to rent. The bored landlady, welcoming the distraction,
invited the young Armenian in. “How many rooms do you need?”
“Only one.”
The landlady replied that the current tenant still had three months on his
lease, then cheerfully explained that three people were living there: a
merchant, his beautiful wife, and a third man. The merchant was a Turkish
businessman by the name of Ali Salih Bey. She explained that “Salih” had not
signed the rental contract himself. Rather, the arrangements had been taken
care of by the secretary at the Turkish embassy. Vaza smiled. “He must be an
important man.”
“Oh yes. He is very well off. But perhaps you can come to an agreement
with my tenant? He has a lot of room.”
Vaza demurred. “That would be impossible. I cannot rent in the building
in which a Muslim keeps his wife.” Anxious to return to his cohorts, Vaza
thanked the chatty landlady and departed.
When Vaza delivered the new information, it threw Tehlirian into a funk.
This news was tantalizing but inconclusive. No businessman would have had
a room rented for him by the consulate. If this was indeed Talat, it was vital
that they act quickly, before he could escape. But then where could Talat
escape to? Another city? If he had not joined the others in Rome, that must
mean that his presence was needed here. His thoughts chased one another.
Talat must be planning something. It was necessary that he be present here as
a leader. His collaborators could not be brought from place to place… But
could he not change his residence? He could, especially if he was
suspicious. Did we make him suspicious?
In his memoirs Tehlirian clearly states that he was ready to kill the man
living at 4 Hardenbergstrasse. He was possessed, plagued by morbid dreams
in which he wandered landscapes littered with bodies or in which his mother
appeared carrying her head in her hands. He fantasized enormous armies of
skeletons being led by famous dead Armenian heroes like Murad of
Sepasdia, the legendary Tashnag fighter who had also fought in the Caucasus
and western Armenia with Tehlirian, and was killed in Baku in 1918.
Tehlirian would wake early every morning and stake out the house on
Hardenbergstrasse. He would follow the heavyset man as he traveled from
one residence to another, one appointment to another. It soon became clear to
Tehlirian that “Salih” stuck to a consistent schedule, routinely leaving his
house between ten and eleven in the morning every day. Tehlirian studied the
photographs of Talat that Armen Garo had handed him in Boston. He would
stare at the photos until his head ached.
In frustration, Tehlirian scratched off the prominent mustache in Talat’s
portrait. Lacking the mustache, the face was transformed into an entirely
different visage. This was the man they had seen at the train station. This was
the man Tehlirian had been following. This was Talat Pasha. Yet when he
presented his evidence to his comrades, they remained unconvinced. This
was not proof, and murdering an innocent man would be unconscionable.
“We might lose him by delaying, but it would be worse if we are wrong.”
Tehlirian and his band had no way of knowing that British intelligence
knew exactly where Talat Pasha was living. Eighteen months earlier, in
September 1919, Aubrey Herbert, a former diplomat (and as such connected
to intelligence operations), had received a letter from Talat. Talat had known
Herbert when he had been a member of the British delegation stationed in
prewar Constantinople, and the two men had become friendly while attending
the obligatory social functions. After the war, when Talat wanted to send a
message to British policy makers, he thought of Herbert as someone he could
trust. In a September 1919 letter (written in French), Talat requested an
opportunity to meet with Herbert so that he could explain Turkey’s position
vis-à-vis Britain, adding that he also wanted to explain any supposed
wrongdoing against the Armenians.
Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert (1880–1923), second son of
Henry Herbert, fourth Earl of Carnarvon (the “second sons” of the British
aristocracy had traditionally been the great reservoir of manpower for
overseas service), was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Herbert’s
family estate was the impressive Highclere Castle (now famous as the setting
for the popular television show Downton Abbey). He was educated at Eton.
His half brother George Herbert was one of the discoverers of the tomb of
Tutankhamen. Aubrey Herbert was father-in-law to novelist Evelyn Waugh.
Herbert possessed all the essential features of a man who came from the
British ruling class.
In addition, Herbert was a part of that small subset who thought of
themselves as “Orientalists,” men fluent in Turkish and with a great fondness
for, and curiosity about, things Middle Eastern. As Britain became more and
more involved in Middle Eastern affairs, first in Egypt, then Persia, and then
Mesopotamia and Palestine, these specialists (T. E. Lawrence being the most
famous of the bunch), with their wide-ranging if disorganized knowledge of
all things Arabic and “Oriental,” became integral to British foreign policy.
These men and women loved the exoticism and visceral excitement of
exploring Muslim lands and society.26
After the war, with the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany and the
success of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the political scene in Europe became
highly dynamic. Scotland Yard had its hands full tracking and reporting on the
multitude of political factions vying for power in Europe, the Middle East,
and India. Perhaps Aubrey Herbert was not a spy per se, but he was often
where the action was, and he was trusted by those in the highest positions.
Herbert had proven himself in World War I by negotiating an armistice in
Gallipoli and attempting to secure the release of British prisoners in Kut
(Mesopotamia). He had strong bonds with a number of significant players in
the Middle East of the early twentieth century, specifically Gertrude Bell
(who had a hand in the creation of Iraq in 1921), Mark Sykes (who
negotiated the Sykes-Picot agreement), and T. E. Lawrence. Although
historians have barely focused on Herbert, he was a key actor behind the
scenes in the acquisition of oil territories.
In 1919, when Herbert received the letter from Talat, the war had been
over for barely one year. Tensions between Great Britain and Turkey were
still running high. Not only was the former minister of the interior a onetime
enemy leader; he was also a fugitive from justice. In his letter, Talat
proposed that he and Herbert meet in any “neutral country of his choosing.”
Talat wanted an opportunity to convince Herbert that “good relations
between Britain and Turkey were essential to the welfare of both peoples”
and that “he was not responsible for the Armenian massacres. That he could
prove it and was anxious to do so.”27
Unsure of how he should reply, Herbert contacted a good friend described
in his memoirs as “a distinguished man who is famous for his spotless
integrity.” This man was Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (Lord Edgar Algernon
Robert Gascoyne Cecil), who would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
1937 for his role as a founder and supporter of the League of Nations. (Cecil
was also a patron of the Bryce report on the Armenian Genocide.) According
to Herbert, upon reading the letter, the viscount leaped to his feet “as if he’d
been stung.”
“What did you want to bring me into this for? Couldn’t you have left me
out? It’s illegal to correspond with the enemy!” Chagrined, Herbert wrote
back to Talat to say, “I was very glad to hear that it was not he who was
responsible for the Armenian massacres, but… I did not think any useful
purpose could be served by our meeting at that time.” But the matter did not
end there. Word of Talat’s letter found its way to Sir Basil Thomson, at
Scotland Yard (and the Directorate),28 the man who had been coordinating all
wartime intelligence. Thomson decided there would be much to gain by a
meeting between Aubrey Herbert and Talat. Scotland Yard and the
Directorate had been keeping tabs on the former Grand Vizier. Secret memos
from October 1920 confirm that British intelligence knew where Talat was
living, even if the Armenians didn’t. They also knew that Talat had been very
active, meeting with his former government in Berlin and in Rome.
On February 18, 1921, Basil Thomson suggested that Herbert meet with
Talat in Germany. Though Soghomon Tehlirian could not have known it on
that freezing day when he doggedly chased Dr. Shakir halfway across Berlin,
Shakir’s visit to the British embassy marked the moment when
communications between Talat and the British resumed. This is why Talat
had not lingered in Rome. He was needed in Germany for the meeting with
Herbert. It is also why he disappeared from sight a few days later.
Aubrey Herbert left Victoria Station in London on the afternoon of Friday,
the twenty-fifth of February, 1921, took the ferry from Dover to Calais, then
boarded a train, arriving in Cologne early the next morning. On the evening
of the twenty-sixth, Herbert arrived in Hamm, a small town about four hours
from Berlin, which he describes as “a miserable industrial village, that
seemed to be inhabited by potential suicides.”29 Herbert checked in at the
hotel, and Talat joined him around nine p.m. They ordered dinner sent up to
Talat’s room in order to maintain secrecy. According to Herbert, Talat had
grown thinner, his black hair streaked with gray. “His eyes were very bright,
glittering while he talked like the eyes of a wild animal in the dusk.” Herbert,
evaluating Talat’s overall dress, could see that he was “obviously poor.”
Finding Hamm shabby and lacking the proper facilities, Herbert suggested
that the two men take a short train ride to Dusseldorf, where they could
converse in more civilized surroundings. Over the two days they spent
together, Talat explained his position as Herbert patiently listened.
Talat Pasha, perhaps believing that the British would welcome any
scheme that caused distress for the Soviet Union, informed Herbert that he
and Enver were planning to stir up Islamic revolution against the Russians in
the Muslim Soviet republics. In describing the “six Red republics” (the
Muslim states of the Communist Russian Federation), Talat observed, “They
are red, but not deep red”—in other words, these former khanates were
ready to break away from their Soviet masters if given the opportunity. Talat
made threats (as quoted by Herbert): “Turkey is at war with England, and we
are engaged in propaganda throughout the East, and inciting India, though not
very effectually. Turkey is, in fact, pursuing a policy of enlisting as many
people as she can against Great Britain and undertaking all possible reprisals
open to her.”
Talat made this menacing point only moments after claiming great
affection for Britain, stating, “Before the war, I was anxious that England
should be her [Turkey’s] teacher.”30 In his next breath Talat explained how
Turkey would fight Britain to the last man: “Our geography is a fortress to us,
a very strong fortress. Our mountains are the strongest of our forces. You
cannot pursue us into the mountains of Asia; and stretching back into Central
Asia are six republics, composed of men of our blood, cousins, if not
brothers, and united now by the bond of misfortune.”
After hearing him out, Herbert assured Talat that he would deliver the
message to his superiors in England. Herbert also asked Talat a strangely
prophetic question: “Aren’t you afraid of assassination?” Talat answered that
“he never thought of it. Why should anyone dislike him?” Herbert continues:
“I said that Armenians might very well desire vengeance.… He brushed this
aside.” This was not the first time Herbert had asked Talat about
assassination. Years before, in Constantinople, he had queried him along the
same lines. According to Herbert, Talat had then replied, “Life was so hard
that, if one had to fear death also, the burden would be too heavy to bear.”
Herbert returned to Scotland Yard, wrote out his report, and then met with
Basil Thomson the next day. What happened next is unclear. Mim Kemal Oke
(a prominent Turkish “denialist”) claims:

Talat Pasha also dared to make the threat that he was going to incite
the Pan-Turanist and Pan-Islamist movements against England, unless
she signed a peace treaty favorable for Turkey. This courageous action
of Talat Pasha made the British very anxious. Their intelligence
service established contact with its counterpart in the Soviet Union to
evaluate the situation. Talat Pasha’s plans made the Russian officials
as anxious as the British. The two intelligence services collaborated
and signed among them the death warrant of Talat Pasha. Information
concerning his physical description and his whereabouts was
forwarded to their men in Germany. However it was decided that
Armenian revolutionaries carry out the verdict.

In other words, Oke claims that British intelligence was asking itself, “Why
go through the trouble of killing Talat when the Armenians are ready to do the
job?”31
An entry in Aubrey Herbert’s journal is interesting:

Friday March 4th, 1921. Reached London on Tuesday, wrote my

report that night and Wednesday morning, sent it in yesterday. To-day, I
went to see Sir Basil Thomson, to tell him that I thought that he much
better send it to Lord Curzon. It seemed to me much better to meet
trouble half-way. Alan [sic] Leeper dined last night. I saw he knew
something. He is a curious fellow, all light and no heat, all brain and
no soul, and an Australian accent in his heart. Basil Thomson quite
agreed with me. He also seemed to have given it away, pretty freely,
on his own, but said that he had been going to write and ask me if he
could not do what I suggested.32
There is definitive proof that assassination of Turkish leaders had been put
on the table by the Brits as early as 1919. A cable dated August 12 of that
year from the American ambassador to Great Britain, John W. Davis, to
Secretary of State Robert Lansing reads in part: “I also met General Bridges
who has just returned from scene of operations.… He also says that by his
advice, British government has offered or will offer price of 35,000 sterling
on the head of Enver Pasha who is now in Asia Minor leader of the Young
Turks and growing pan Islamic movement. He, as well as Curzon, anticipates
disorder following withdrawal of British troops. He remarked casually that
‘The thing to do is for us to do the job and you to pay for it.’ ”33
Given Britain’s obsessive anxiety about revolution among Muslims living
in Arab territories as well as in Persia and India, Talat’s threats, as reported
by Herbert, were taken very seriously by Scotland Yard. What Talat didn’t
seem to understand was that although the British may have welcomed any
plots against the Russians, Islamic revolution was their greatest fear. Britain
had three prize possessions in that part of the world: the Arab mandates, with
their rich oil reserves; the Suez Canal, the vital artery to India; and India
itself. As each of these was either populated by millions of Muslims or
surrounded by Muslim territories, they were especially vulnerable to Islamic
revolt. In fact, with India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia under his command, King
George V ruled over more Muslim subjects than any other monarch in the
world. Should an Islamic revolution be sparked within the USSR, there was
a great danger that such a movement could ignite rebellion in the British
possessions as well. Pan-Turanism was an exciting idea for Turkish
nationalists. It was a potential nightmare for the British.
What is known is that Herbert was debriefed by Basil Thomson upon his
return to England (probably on the Monday, the twenty-eighth of February).
Furthermore, British intelligence had pinpointed Talat’s exact location two
full months before Tehlirian arrived in Berlin. The address “4
Hardenbergstrasse” is mentioned explicitly in the briefs. Though there is
little doubt that Tehlirian and his crew did track down Talat in Berlin, they
could not absolutely confirm that “Ali Salih Bey” was in fact Talat Pasha.
Caught up in Hamlet-like indecision, the conspirators sought some kind of
concrete evidence that the man who lived at 4 Hardenbergstrasse was indeed
the former leader of Turkey. Apparently they got the proof they needed.
 A few days before the assassination, Tehlirian and his friends received a
ciphered telegram from Geneva confirming that the man living at that address
was their man. Was it possible that British intelligence tipped off the
Tashnags? It would have been very easy for Scotland Yard to let the ARF
leadership in Geneva know where Talat was living. Geneva could then
contact Natali, and no connection could be traced back to the British.
Is it just a coincidence that Tehlirian moved to Hardenbergstrasse only a
few days after Herbert met with Talat? What is also interesting is what
Herbert does not say. Herbert obsessively kept a daily journal, but he writes
nothing on the day Talat is killed. He claimed that he had food poisoning and
could not write. The day after the assassination he states in an offhand
manner, “This morning the papers told me of the murder of Talaat.” This is an
intriguing entry, given that Herbert had just spent two full days with the man
only three weeks before his death. He had written a report on that meeting.
He had discussed Talat with his superiors. But when Talat is murdered, he
only learns about it in the newspapers? No one phoned him or sent a memo?
He continues: “I am very sorry. I think that he was a great influence for
peace.” There is a strikeout and then: “He may or may not have been a
criminal. I cannot tell, but he was a very unusual man, and had remarkable
attraction.”34
Until his death in 1923, Aubrey Herbert continued to receive very
sensitive assignments. In 1922, weeks after the Smyrna debacle, he was
asked to serve as liaison between Churchill and Mustapha Kemal. A. J.
Sylvester, private secretary to the prime minister, advised Lloyd George in a
memo on September 26, 1922: “Mr. Churchill thinks that the suggestion that
Aubrey Herbert should go and see Kemal is very important. The difficulty in
this respect is that Aubrey Herbert is almost blind, and from what I hear is
practically out of the picture for this work.”35
In Constantinople, the British ambassador begged Herbert to stay away
from Kemal.36 The British had promised the French that they would not deal
with Kemal behind their back. In fact, the French were already secretly
working with Kemal. Herbert never made it to Ankara and died a year later,
eighteen months after the assassination of Talat. Perhaps he was not an out-
and-out spy. But Herbert did serve as a model for the fictional character
Sandy Arbuthnot in John Buchan’s best-selling spy thriller Greenmantle,
published in 1916. One character says of Arbuthnot: “I know the fellow—
Harry used to bring him down to fish—tallish with a lean, high-boned face
and a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl’s. I know his record too.… He
rode through Yemen, which no white man ever did before. The Arabs let him
pass, for they thought him stark mad and argued that the hand of Allah was
heavy enough on him without their efforts. He’s blood brother to every kind
of Albanian bandit. Also he used to take a hand in Turkish politics, and got a
huge reputation.”37
It is not hard to see why British leaders would embrace the idea of
working solely with Kemal. If Talat and Enver could be taken out of the
picture (as they were), General Kemal would be the only man with whom
Britain would have to negotiate. Though Talat was no longer in charge in
Turkey, he had every intention of returning to power once the fighting had
ceased in “the homeland.” Talat believed that he was first in line to lead
postwar Turkey. From his vantage point, the energetic Mustapha Kemal was
a general and no more than that. Talat could handle Enver Pasha, and he
could handle Kemal. This put the two leaders on an inevitable collision
course—one that was obvious to any serious observer of postwar Turkey.
In early March 1921, Kemal had big plans for the future Turkish republic.
The last thing he needed was for Talat to arrive on his doorstep to claim
leadership. (Decades after Talat’s death, either Kemal or those interested in
perpetuating the mythologies surrounding the Young Turk charter membership
would maintain that there was a great friendship and respect between Talat
and Kemal. There is no evidence of such a relationship.) To complicate
matters, during exactly this same period, the British were securing their hold
on Mesopotamia (Iraq), a vast region acquired during the war along with
other Arab territories. Though British leaders, particularly Lord Curzon,
would deny it at the time, it was well understood that valuable oil reserves
lay under the Middle Eastern sands. Only one man had the armies and the
strategic know-how to stand in the way of the British grand design for the
Middle East. That man was General Mustapha Kemal.
Kemal had proven himself a resilient and able foe. It makes sense that the
British would have wanted either to remove or to mollify this brilliant but
problematic young general. Assisting the new Turkish leader with his
domestic problems could smooth out any issues the British might have at the
Arab-Turkish border (roughly where Mosul lies). Removing or undermining
Talat and Enver would make Kemal happy. And the British wanted oil
concessions. Ergo, quid pro quo.
Kemal was also extremely cautious. The Great Powers had become very
sophisticated about stirring up trouble and deposing leaders who did not suit
their needs. Kemal was well aware of the power wielded by the United
States as it interfered in the Philippines and in Mexico, not to mention
Britain’s machinations in Egypt, the Hijaz, and Mesopotamia. Once he had
secured the borders of his state, the new leader of Turkey avoided
confrontation with the West. Combining boldness with caution would be a
trademark of Mustapha Kemal for his entire career. (Ataturk was so afraid of
assassination that he stayed away from Constantinople/Istanbul for decades
after his ascension to power in Turkey. His only real return to the imperial
city came at the end of his life, when he was dying.)
The British understood Kemal. Kemal understood the British. Although
there was probably never a direct line of communication between the two,
it’s interesting that Kemal did not launch guerrilla warfare against the British
occupation of the Arab lands. Despite the deep antipathy the Arabs felt for
the Turks, it remained an option. He carefully chose his battles, using the
Chanak crisis as leverage at the bargaining table, while understanding that
fighting for Mosul would put too much at risk. A brilliant pragmatist, Kemal
Ataturk knew how far to push the British and when to give in.38 A final
tantalizing piece in this jigsaw puzzle is that the nation of Iraq was
established by the British on March 16, 1921—one day after Talat’s
assassination. And as we’ve seen, among Aubrey Herbert’s best friends were
Gertrude Bell, Mark Sykes, and T. E. Lawrence—all people who were
deeply involved in British intervention in the Middle East.

The Armenian side of the assassination plot was complex as well. The ARF
was an embattled nationalist organization, and though revenge was high on
their priority list, survival of the nation was the primary concern of the
Tashnag leadership in 1920–21. For this reason, cooler heads than Garo,
Natali, and Tehlirian were firm with regard to establishing the target’s
identity while preserving absolute secrecy. It would be seen as a colossal
blunder if the avenging assassins managed somehow to upset negotiations in
Paris or in any way alienated the Allies and discouraged their assistance. For
all these reasons, it is interesting that it was around this time that Herbert met
with Talat in Germany. Within days after that meeting, someone confirmed
Talat’s whereabouts to the Nemesis crew, sealing his fate. A few days later,
Talat was dead.
According to the Tashnag narrative, in early March a coded letter arrived
from Geneva reporting that “Talat had been seen in Geneva at the beginning
of the month, in front of the British consulate.”39 The letter was postmarked
ten days earlier. The timeline was shaky, but the Nemesis team decided it
was still possible that Talat was the man living in Hardenbergstrasse and
decided to move Tehlirian as close to his quarry as possible. This would
facilitate surveillance with the least danger of discovery.
Within two hours of receiving the communiqué, Hazor had located a room
across the street from 4 Hardenbergstrasse at number 37. (The numerical
layout on older Berlin streets often runs in sequence up one side of the street
and then down the other side.) The second-story window overlooked the
street and had a clear view of the façade of number 4. The room would be
vacated in three days. Tehlirian could move in on March 5.
The next day, Apelian, unaware of the imminent assassination, arrived
from the consulate and delivered the bad news arriving from the Armenian-
Turkish front: the tiny republic was about to be overrun. Despite Soviet
occupation, the situation in the Caucasus was highly unstable. Tehlirian, too
preoccupied with Talat to be upset by this news, informed Apelian that he
would be moving soon. He asked his friend to explain to the landlady that his
doctor insisted he find an apartment with electric lighting. The dim gaslight
was affecting his nervous condition. Tehlirian begged Apelian to do his
talking for him because his German was still so faulty. The following
evening, while Apelian was out, Hazor came by and assisted Tehlirian in his
move.
The landlady of the new apartment at 37 Hardenbergstrasse, Frau
Dittman, was a young widow. Maintaining an immaculate and orderly
household, she employed a female servant, and her residence was quiet and
peaceful. Like most rented rooms of the period, Tehlirian’s room was
furnished with a dresser, a small desk and chair, an armchair, and a bed. The
entrance from the street was through a gate, then through a courtyard to a door
that led to a flight of stairs. The room itself was wide and airy, featuring a
large window hung with drapes.
Alone in his room, Tehlirian was drawn to a gap in the curtains. He
peered through. Below him lay the small avenue, bisected by a flower-
embroidered median strip. The thoroughfare was dense with traffic that
flowed between the important government buildings and institutions only a
few blocks away. Students, office workers, and tradespeople formed a
constant stream of humanity beneath the window. Many smoked or ate while
walking. Across the way stood the residence of “Ali Salih Bey.” Tehlirian’s
pulse quickened. A mere twenty-five meters separated him from the monster.
Tehlirian could not resist maintaining a constant vigil. The windows on
the second floor remained lit for hours, but he could detect no movement
within. In the middle of the night he woke up to find himself still seated at his
post. The apartment across the way was now shrouded in darkness. Wearily,
Tehlirian rose and finally made his way to bed. When daylight broke, he
jumped out of bed and stationed himself again at the window. In case Frau
Dittman should happen by, he opened a German lesson book on the desk
before him.
The team was ready to act. Natali and Tehlirian took a long stroll together
to review exactly how the killing was going to go down. Natali reiterated
that after the assassination, Tehlirian must wait by the body and allow
himself to be arrested. As they stood before Frau Dittman’s house, the
windows of 4 Hardenbergstrasse glowed with light. Hidden in shadow,
Natali handed Tehlirian the Luger pistol, telling him, “It has been tried and is
ready for the command of your index finger.”40
The next morning, Frau Dittman’s servant delivered tea, bread, and
cheese. Tehlirian ignored the food as he focused on the building across the
way with binoculars Natali had provided him. Like an eagle on a high perch,
Tehlirian searched for any sign of his prey. The clock had not struck nine
when the front door of 4 Hardenbergstrasse opened and “Ali Salih Bey”
jogged down the front steps, clutching a sheaf of papers. The heavyset man
paused when he hit the sidewalk, glanced up and down the street, then turned
left.
From his earlier reconnaissance, Tehlirian knew that this was not the
usual pattern. Downing a glass of cognac, he grabbed his pistol and raced
downstairs. As he took hold of the latch on the gate that led to the street, he
found it was frozen. Tehlirian could not escape the courtyard. Running back
into the house, he found the servant and dragged her into the courtyard, but as
the minutes ticked by, the gate would not budge. By the time the latch was
dismantled and Tehlirian lurched toward the Tiergarten, Talat was nowhere
to be seen.
Tehlirian states in his memoirs, “Having lost my mind, I pulled at the door
almost to the extent of destroying it—in vain.”41 He feared the worst—that
Talat had been alerted to the plot and slipped through their fingers. In a funk,
he headed for the stakeout outside Djemal Azmi’s tobacco store. As he made
his way there, he sensed a greater police presence on the street. Or was his
mind playing tricks on him? Why had Talat broken with his usual schedule
and left so early that morning? Had he been tipped off that he was being
watched? The men outside the tobacco store reported no activity. Tehlirian
returned home to find a locksmith repairing the street gate.
The following morning Tehlirian phoned Natali and in a shaky voice
insisted on meeting with him. Natali rushed to Tehlirian’s room, where the
nervous young man described how the broken lock had prevented him from
pursuing Talat and that he suspected Talat had left the city altogether. Natali
assured his protégé that there was no reason to believe Talat was suspicious
and that in fact it was better that things had gone as they did. Natali pointed
out that Tehlirian had left piles of evidence around his room, evidence that
would suggest the larger conspiracy. Better to clean things up, because once
the deed was done, there would be no time to cover their tracks. Natali
poured out a glass of cognac for Tehlirian and made a toast to “our sacred
mission.” When he left, he took with him the binoculars as well as a pile of
letters and notebooks.
The following morning a bleary-eyed Tehlirian once again stationed
himself at his desk, scrutinizing Talat’s building through the narrow slit in the
curtains. In the street beneath his window, all was normal as people dashed
to their early-morning jobs. The servant arrived with Frau Dittman in tow.
The landlady was freshly made up and spoke in a rapid chatter. Tehlirian felt
panic. Had he been caught spying? He concentrated on her words. What was
she saying? Something about the gate, the latch. Ah, she was apologizing for
the broken latch! Frau Dittman pressed a new key into Tehlirian’s hand.
Relieved, he thanked her profusely. There was an uncomfortable silence and
the young widow left, flustered. Tehlirian glanced around the room. It was
bare; no evidence of his real occupation remained.
By noon, Talat had not yet reappeared. Number 4 Hardenbergstrasse
seemed vacant. Had Talat ever returned at all? Another knock at the door. A
messenger was delivering a note from his compatriots. A coded cipher
received from Paris once again had confirmed that Talat was living at 4
Hardenbergstrasse under the name Ali Salih Bey. Tehlirian was feeling ill.
All appearances indicated that the building across the street had been
vacated. He had made a deal with Natali to call him every day. This would
be the way he signaled his superior. On the day that he received no call,
Natali would know that Tehlirian had gone into action, would know that it
was time to abandon Berlin.
Another endless night followed the fruitless day. Across the way, behind
the curtains, a lamp was switched on. Then off. Nothing more. The next day
Tehlirian kept his vigil until eleven p.m. but saw no one. Now he was certain
that Talat had escaped. Another night passed. Tehlirian became feverish. He
was wracked with nightmares. He obsessed about the lock on the gate. Why
had that happened? Was it fate? What did he think he was doing? Talat was
gone, he had failed. Without Talat to focus on, the walls of his room closed in
on him.
Thoughts of his mother haunted Tehlirian continuously. In his dreams they
walked to church together, shared bread and honey. Tehlirian wrote, “She
was like a blind woman, feeling my face, my body.” In his dreams, the sun
broke through the clouds and Tehlirian’s mother ran from him. He would
wake up in the morning to find his pillow wet with tears. “My nerves were
wrecked.” The constant vigilance and tension were taking their toll on a man
who was not well to begin with. With each dawning day, he splashed cold
water onto his face from the dresser washbasin, pulled on his clothes, and
resumed his vigil at the window.
At one point during the days prior to the assassination, an automobile
rolled up before 4 Hardenbergstrasse and the man the conspirators had
named “dark face” emerged, accompanied by a beautiful woman. The two
entered the building. There was no doubt in Tehlirian’s mind that this woman
was Talat’s wife, Hayriye Talat Bafrali. This was evidence that Talat was
still here. Two hours later, his body stooped with fatigue, Tehlirian allowed
himself a phone call to the Tiergarten Hotel, where the others were staying.
He was told that a ciphered letter had arrived by air mail from America.
“The comrades confirmed that Talat lives in Berlin at Hardenberg 4 under
the pseudonym Ali Salih Bey and asked that the Talat affair be ended through
all possible measures. This telegram was the answer to our question sent in
early February.”42 They understood this to mean that they were to bring the
operation to a conclusion: kill Talat.
On the morning of March 13, the woman Tehlirian identified as Talat’s
wife emerged from the house and made her way up the street. He wrote in his
autobiography thirty years later: “I knew from Istanbul that she had abilities
and was involved in her husband’s affairs.… It was said that she had a great
influence on her husband.” So he decided to abandon his observation post
and follow her as she headed for the Tiergarten, where she made her way to
a fountain. Tehlirian observed her from a distance. It was a surreal moment.
Struck by her beauty, Tehlirian had to reconcile this with the fact that “with
her knowledge and on the command of her husband, tens of thousands like her
were condemned to die from starvation in the deserts and to wither away in
Turkish harems.”43
The following morning, as Tehlirian was finishing his tea, Talat stepped
out onto his balcony across the way. “The monster” was still here. “Talat
hung his head.” Tehlirian mused, “Apparently life was not easy for him after
the crime he committed in the desert.”44 The former minister slipped back
into his suite. Since it was after ten in the morning, Tehlirian knew that Talat
would soon exit the building and go for his stroll toward Uhlandstrasse. Sure
enough, Talat, dressed nattily in a striped shirt, suit, and overcoat but no hat,
appeared at the door of the building and descended to the street. Tehlirian
found his pistol, checked it, thrust it in his pocket, and rushed down the
stairwell. The landlady would later note that Tehlirian left the building
around eleven a.m.
From across the boulevard, Tehlirian could see Talat was traveling along
his usual southeasterly path. The moment of truth had arrived. Before pulling
the trigger, it was crucial for Tehlirian to get a good look at Talat’s face in
order to make a positive identification. It was equally important not to alert
his target in any way, to catch his quarry unawares so that he could not avoid
the kill shot. Tehlirian had to hit his target square.
 As the world speeded up, and with his pulse pounding in his temples,
Tehlirian slipped along the opposite side of the street, duplicating Talat’s
path across the Hardenbergstrasse. The two men, each on his side of the
street, progressed in this manner for almost three blocks. Tehlirian knew that
Talat would cross the street at some point within the next hundred yards,
probably after passing the imposing Berlin University of the Arts. Tehlirian
was now fifty steps ahead of Talat. He jogged across the boulevard, then
turned and began striding toward his victim. Swinging his cane as he walked,
Talat displayed no sense of caution. Ten feet separated the men, now five,
now they were almost upon each other. Their eyes met.
Moments later, Talat Pasha lay on the ground, dead.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

The Trial

Glory to him who wielded the avenging thunderbolt! Soghomon

Tehlirian exercised holy vengeance. He is the symbol of our
Nemesis.
—Flyer circulated in the Armenian American communities

Soghomon Tehlirian’s June 1921 trial lasted only three days amidst a
charged political environment. A young man had assassinated a world leader.
Seven years earlier the Great War had been sparked when a twenty-year-old
Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria
and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in late June 1914. Now, another
young man in his twenties had killed another important political figure. This
time the killer was from Armenia, which, like Serbia, had been a longtime
territory of the Ottoman Empire. The powerless were killing the powerful
and the world was transfixed.
The drama was riveting also because not just a young man but an entire
nation was, by association, on trial. This trial was not only about Tehlirian
and Talat but also about the Armenians and the Turks. And it was taking
place in Berlin, of all places. The proceedings would shed light not only on
Ottoman war crimes but on a particularly shameful aspect of the war that
many Germans wanted to forget: the Reich’s complicity in the destruction of
the Ottoman Christians.
Many outside Germany believed that the Kaiser’s military had aided and
abetted the deportations and killings. At the very least, the German
commanders had done nothing to stop the carnage. This was yet another item
to add to Germany’s unenviable résumé as a warmonger and aggressor state.
The citizens of the Allied nations were almost unanimous in their belief that
the “Huns” were inherently violent and brutal, and most non-Germans were
certain that Germany should receive harsh punishment. Germany was
responsible for millions of war dead; now, here was further proof of its
barbarity, its alliance with Turkey. (In Leipzig, war crimes trials before the
Reichsgericht, or Supreme Court, were taking place concurrently with
Tehlirian’s trial in Berlin.)
Germany’s leaders could not afford to let the trial become an examination
of their involvement with the murderous Ittihadists because at that very
moment, terms that could dramatically affect the Fatherland were being
negotiated at the Paris treaty conferences. Minimizing reparations was a top
priority for German statesmen. Key to that effort was covering up Germany’s
role as accomplice. Since a trial was unavoidable, it was imperative to put
full responsibility onto “the Turk” rather than “the Hun.” This was not simply
a matter of reputation; this was about the survival of the German nation.
Germany could not move on until the treaties were signed. The trial must not
be allowed to make matters worse.
As Tessa Hofmann explains in her 1989 essay “New Aspects of the Talat
Pasha Court Case,” the German government made an effort to steer the trial
away from the political motivations for the assassinations while urging the
prosecution to focus on the obvious guilt of the unstable young man who had
pulled the trigger. Hofmann quotes the prosecutor in a communication to the
Prussian Ministry of Justice: “It is to be feared that the (coming) trial by jury
of the Armenian, who assassinated the former Turkish grand vizier, Talat
Pasha, on 15 March of this year, in Berlin, will escalate into a mammoth
political case.… Perhaps the defense will even try to investigate the stance
of the German government on the Armenian atrocities.… (As a result) of the
(given) political reasons, the (Foreign Office) would greatly appreciate
exclusion of the (public) in this matter.”1
Any suggestions of wrongdoing on the part of the Germans had to be
diluted. More than that, this trial must contribute to a new, more favorable
public image for Germany. The prosecution needed to paint the Turks with
the blackest brush possible. The Armenian defense team was well aware of
this. In a secret memo to fellow Tashnags, Armen Garo announced with
absolute certainty that Tehlirian would be acquitted, adding, “Our German
friends are determined to make this trial a forum for our cause.”2

The sensational killing had made headlines worldwide. A rootless immigrant

had murdered a convicted war criminal. The assassin was a hardworking
engineering student who suffered from chronic “epilepsy.” It was even
possible that the young man was mentally ill as a result of the fact that six
years earlier he had witnessed the brutal executions of his entire family. The
killer had few friends, no real plans, and apparently no means of
employment. The murdered man had been one of the most powerful men in
the world. The killer was an Armenian, the victim a Turk. The enmity
between these two nationalities was legendary.
On the first day of his trial, this loner, this misfit, the man the New York
Times described as an “undersized swarthily palefaced Armenian,”3 exuded
an aura of serenity and intelligence. Anyone could see that this was no crazed
maniac. Neatly dressed in suit and tie, clean-shaven and poised, Tehlirian sat
calmly at the defense table flanked by top-shelf lawyers and interpreters. The
expensive defense team had been underwritten by a well-endowed fund
covering all of the defendant’s needs. Prominent members of the Armenian
expat community, having no prior connection to the man, were eager to come
to the aid of their new hero. This young student had avenged the brutal deaths
of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, and Armenians everywhere were
rallying to his cause.
The trial took place in the high-ceilinged Victorian chamber of Berlin’s
Third District Court beneath a massive chandelier. Judge Erich Lehmberg,
with his counselors Karl Locke and Ernest Bathe on his left, presided over a
jury of twelve that included two landlords, a brick maker, a butcher, and a
locksmith. District Attorney Gollnick; Tehlirian’s three lawyers—Dr. Adolf
von Gordon, privy legal counselor, Berlin; Dr. Johannes Werthauer, privy
legal counselor, Berlin; and Dr. Kurt Niemeyer, privy legal counselor,
professor of law, Cologne University—were arranged at tables below the
judge, at floor level. Also present were the two interpreters for Tehlirian:
Vahan Zakarian (his fellow conspirator Vaza) and Kevork Kaloustian. A
gallery ran along the upper circumference of the chamber, and from there a
dozen or so reporters tracked the proceedings. Only a handful of women
were present.4
From the start, Tehlirian held the courtroom’s full attention as the
translator repeated his softly recounted story of the rape and murder of his
sisters as well as the bloody killings of his brothers and mother. His
interpreter translated into German and a court stenographer took notes. The
young man’s story was like an adventure novel. Left for dead, he had made an
astonishing escape from the killing fields, managing to cross the wastelands
of Kurdish territory and escape through the mountains. He was a thrilling
example of the triumph of the spirit despite all odds. He was brave in so
many ways, and now here he was, humbly standing trial, a man who had risen
above the heaviest of burdens. Only the hardest heart could remain unmoved
by a story so full of pathos.
The subtext was clear: Tehlirian had surmounted his victimhood. The
skinny kid had mustered up amazing courage and confronted evil directly. He
had survived the cruel deportation caravans and then outsmarted the Turkish
security apparatus in Berlin. He had struck at the “head of the snake.” His
actions had been bold, fearless. In the world’s eyes, Tehlirian was a David
standing up to the powerful Turkish Goliath. To many he was more than
sympathetic; he was heroic.
In contrast, it seemed that no one held any pity for the murdered man. First
of all, Talat was a Turk, and every well-read person in the West was familiar
with “the terrible Turk” and his perverse proclivities. Furthermore, he was
an Ottoman leader, and everyone was familiar with what seemed to be an
endless string of slaughters of the Armenians by Ottoman authorities. Since
the nineteenth century, massacres of Christians had been making headlines in
Europe and America almost weekly. Often, details of the atrocities were
almost too horrible to recount. Church groups in the United States, Britain,
and Germany had gathered and protested against the violence for decades.
When Tehlirian detailed the specifics of his family’s demise, his audience
knew what he was going to say before he said it. All Tehlirian had to do was
personalize it.
The judge, the jury, and the world also knew that about a year earlier, a
postwar tribunal in Constantinople had convicted Talat of war crimes and
sentenced him to death in absentia. But before the Great Powers had been
able to find Talat and arrest him for “crimes against humanity,” the former
interior minister of the Ottoman Empire and his cronies had escaped from
Constantinople in the dark of night on a German ship. The tribunal had
proceeded without them and had delivered its verdict. Talat was a
condemned man at the time of his assassination, and the court knew this.
Tehlirian’s sickliness also made him sympathetic. The young man suffered
from sudden fainting spells and nightmare-ridden insomnia. Several
witnesses had seen him collapse in public. Doctors examining him concurred
that these seizures, which arrived with no warning, were linked to the
massacre of his family. His experience as a captive of the Turkish criminals
was so severe that he had been psychologically damaged for the rest of his
life. For the duration of the trial, the judge would treat Tehlirian with kid
gloves, fearful of triggering an “epileptic fit.”
Any one of those aspects of the case would have made it complex and
difficult to judge. What capped the conundrum was the unimpeachable
justification at the core of what appeared to be a premeditated murder. The
man had seen his mother beheaded right before his eyes! For this reason the
killing seemed to exist outside the bounds of established law, in another legal
dimension altogether. And his mother had not been the only victim, nor only
his immediate family, but an entire nation! The man had not simply pursued a
personal vendetta; he had avenged the murder of his people.
As such an agent for retribution, Tehlirian represented not just himself but
all of humanity. The crimes against the civilian Armenian population of
Anatolia had been unprecedented in their scope and sadism. Never before in
history had so many died in such a brief period of time. Indeed, there seemed
to be no legal scale vast enough to measure what the Young Turks had done.
Likewise, there was no legal precedent for Tehlirian’s particular form of
first-degree murder.
And since Talat had been the one who had given the orders for the
destruction of the Armenians, since the lives of hundreds of thousands of
people were on his head, wasn’t Talat’s life a small price to pay in exchange
for the deaths of thousands upon thousands? The implications of the case
before Judge Lehmberg strained the rule of law, went beyond strict legal
concepts of guilt and innocence, generating moral, philosophical, even
existential questions. Anyone could see that the man on trial had no guilty
conscience. Tehlirian was so certain of his right to kill Talat that he could
look the judge in the eye and confidently claim the moral high ground. As far
as Tehlirian was concerned, he had no free will in the matter; he was
compelled by his very soul to kill the man who had killed his family. Who
could debate him?
For all these reasons, the trial favored Tehlirian. But there was one catch.
If Tehlirian told the “whole truth and nothing but the truth,” he didn’t stand a
chance. Premeditation might be overlooked, but acting as the spearhead of an
international conspiracy to assassinate a world leader would send the young
Armenian straight to the gallows. And even if Tehlirian was prepared to
sacrifice himself on the altar of justice, it was nevertheless crucial that he
lie. He had to provide cover for those who had financed and planned the
killing—the operatives working in Boston, Syracuse, Paris, Berlin, Geneva,
and Constantinople. He had to protect them so that they could plan and
execute more reprisals.
One more factor, invisible to the court, loomed over the proceedings: the
leaders of Operation Nemesis wanted to use this trial to reveal to the world
what had happened to the Armenians in 1915 and 1916. This trial would be a
means of laying bare the crimes committed by Talat and his Committee of
Union and Progress. Tehlirian had been specifically instructed to linger by
the body, to allow himself to be arrested so that he would be tried. In the
tumult of the moment, he had panicked and run. But he had not run far. And
now here he was, on trial, representing a nation’s tragedy.
Tehlirian would be walking a tightrope as he balanced truth and fiction.
He had to escape punishment while furthering the cause of the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation. It was imperative that Operation Nemesis remain
hidden from view. Even as Tehlirian was stepping into the defendant’s box,
his confederates in other major European cities were laying the groundwork
for the next assassination, and the one after that.
To achieve this goal of obfuscation, a well-coached Tehlirian would offer
mere fragments of “truth,” snippets of narrative representing the alternative
history he needed the court to accept. Because Tehlirian was presenting a
version of events that had in fact never actually taken place, it was essential
that the details dovetail and that no slipups be made. So he avoided
specifics, never giving his interrogators an opportunity to uncover a flaw in
his story.
For example, he had to explain his whereabouts between the time when he
supposedly “escaped” the Turks (in 1915) and the date he arrived in Berlin
(in December 1920). In an era before credit cards and automatic telephone
logs, Tehlirian’s defense attorneys knew that the Berlin prosecutors would
never be able to track his travels in detail. When the prosecution did make an
effort to question his movements, Tehlirian replied with a logic bordering on
the absurd. When asked why, prior to arriving in Berlin, he had visited
Geneva (where the ARF maintained its headquarters), Tehlirian, a country
boy from Anatolia, answered that hadn’t wanted to miss the opportunity to
visit the Swiss city. Judge Lehmberg asked no follow-up questions. When
queried about how he had passed his time in Berlin (since apparently he was
neither a registered student nor employed), rather than explain that he spent
all day stalking Turks, he gave vague answers about attending German
language classes.
No one seemed to notice that this man who supposedly took German
classes every day could hardly speak the language. At the same time,
ironically, Tehlirian’s mediocre language skills provided an additional layer
of protection when he was testifying. He repeatedly misunderstood questions
and requested they be asked again, buying time as he prepared an answer.
This stratagem would prove especially invaluable whenever he was
cornered in a fabrication. Caught in contradictory statements, he would stick
to a hazy storyline, made even more vague by his awkward rhetoric. Often he
refused to understand a question or avoided answering it at all. He was
rarely challenged.
As the trial began in the early summer of 1921, Tehlirian held center stage
in a state of super-consciousness while playing the part of a sweet and
slightly incoherent man who had acted solely out of passion. He focused all
of his attention on Judge Lehmberg, the most important individual in the
room. Unlike trials in the United States, this trial would not be a contest
between prosecution and defense. Instead, Lehmberg would lead a free-form
investigation more like an inquest, asking questions as he saw fit. In
Lehmberg, Tehlirian had an ally. The judge would repeatedly “lead” the
defendant while brushing aside queries and objections made by the
prosecution.
Judge Lehmberg opened the trial by establishing that Tehlirian was born
on April 2, 1897, in the village of Pakarij (in his autobiography, he claims
that he was born in 1896), moving to the larger town of Erzincan when he
was a small boy. Tehlirian explained, through his interpreter, that the men in
his family were coffee merchants, adding, as he mixed fact with fiction, that
he had two brothers and three sisters. The judge asked, “Did all these
brothers and sisters live in your parents’ house until 1915?” To which
Tehlirian replied, “They all lived there except one sister who was married.”
In fact, by 1915, not only was Tehlirian’s father not living in Erzincan, but
Tehlirian and his older brother were likewise long gone. Though he admitted
that his brother Misak had been a soldier (ostensibly home on leave and
“caught” by the Turks when the deportations began), Misak was in fact
hundreds of miles away at the time, on the other side of the Russian front,
fighting against the Turks. As was Tehlirian.
The prosecuting attorney repeatedly tried to get the judge to focus on the
murder (and Tehlirian’s part in it), but Lehmberg preferred to explore
Tehlirian’s story: “We wish to hear from the defendant in detail regarding
what led to the massacres and what his family experienced.”
According to the transcript of the trial, Tehlirian recounted a typical story
of what we now call “ethnic cleansing”:

After the war began in 1914 and Armenian soldiers were conscripted,
in May 1915 came the news that the schools had to be shut and that the
city’s notables and teachers were going to be sent away to camps.… I
was scared and didn’t want to leave home. After these convoys were
taken away, rumors started spreading that the people who’d been
deported earlier had already been killed. And through a cable we
learned that out of all the deported people from Erzincan, only one
man was still alive: Martirossian.
In early June the order came that the people of Erzincan had to be
ready to leave. We were also told that all our money and valuables
could be handed over to the authorities for safekeeping. Three days
later, early in the morning the residents were taken out of the city.…
After the order came that the people had to leave the city, they were
mustered and herded together outside. The line of people then moved
forward in caravans and convoys.

The judge asked, “How many days did you march?” Tehlirian replied, “I
do not know. After leaving the city, already on the first day my parents were
killed.”
Justice Lehmberg continued to lead the witness:

LEHMBERG: Who escorted the caravans?

TEHLIRIAN: Gendarmes, soldiers on horseback, and other soldiers.
LEHMBERG: A large number?
TEHLIRIAN: They came from both sides of the road.
LEHMBERG: They were also in front and behind?
TEHLIRIAN: They came from both sides.

Helpfully, the judge added, “To prevent someone getting away?”

Tehlirian: “Definitely.” Lehmberg then asked, “Now, how did your parents
and your brothers and sisters die?”

TEHLIRIAN: When the column was some way from the city, we were
ordered to stop. The gendarmes began to plunder and tried to get
hold of the column’s money and valuables.

When Lehmberg asked, “How did they justify this?” Tehlirian took advantage
of the question to instruct the greater public who would be reading about the
trial: “They didn’t say. No one in the world can explain it. Things like that
take place in Asia’s interior.” Lehmberg helped Tehlirian along: “So
something like this takes place without people being able to understand the
reasons?”

TEHLIRIAN: Yes. It happened.

LEHMBERG: With other nationalities as well?

Tehlirian promptly replied, “Only the Armenians were treated this way by
the Turks.” He continued, “During the plundering those of us in the column
took rifle fire from up front. One of the gendarmes then dragged away my
sister, and my mother cried out, ‘Please, let me go blind!’—I can’t remember
that day any more. I don’t want to keep on being reminded of that day. I’d
rather die right now than continue describing that black day.”
Tehlirian went silent.
Lehmberg, taking Tehlirian’s distress at face value, was compassionate
but firm: “I’m obliged to let you know that the court must lay the strongest
importance on learning about these things from you, in particular as you are
the only person who can say something about this deed. Perhaps you can pull
yourself together and overcome your distress.” Tehlirian’s story drifted into a
surreal concoction of place and time. “They took everyone away and beat me
as well. Then I saw how my brother’s skull was split apart with an ax.”

LEHMBERG: Your sister was taken away? Did she return?

TEHLIRIAN: Yes, my sister was taken away and raped.
LEHMBERG: Did she return afterwards?
TEHLIRIAN: No.
LEHMBERG: Who split open your brother’s skull with an ax?
TEHLIRIAN: When the soldiers and gendarmes began their massacre,
ordinary people showed up too. That’s when my youngest brother’s
skull was split open. My mother fell down.
LEHMBERG: Why did she fall?
TEHLIRIAN: I don’t know why, if it was a bullet or something else that
caused it.
LEHMBERG: Where was your father?
TEHLIRIAN: I didn’t see my father; he was farther up ahead, where
there was also fighting.
LEHMBERG: What did you do yourself?
TEHLIRIAN: I felt a blow to my head and fell down then. I don’t know
what happened afterwards.

Judge Lehmberg made no attempt to clarify in what order the rapes and
bludgeonings occurred. Rather, he prodded Tehlirian to continue.

LEHMBERG: Did you remain lying in the spot where the massacre took
place?
 TEHLIRIAN: I don’t know how long I lay there. Maybe two days. When
I woke up I saw many corpses close by, because the entire caravan
had been killed then. I saw very long piles of corpses. But I
couldn’t make out everything well since it was pretty dark. First, I
didn’t know where I was; then I saw the truth, that it was corpses.
LEHMBERG: Could you make out your parents, brothers, and sisters
among the corpses?
TEHLIRIAN: I saw my mother’s body lying on its face, and my brother’s
body lay on top of me. I couldn’t make out anything else.… When I
stood up I saw that my leg was wounded and that my arm was
bleeding.
LEHMBERG: Was your head injured?
TEHLIRIAN: I was first hit on the head.
LEHMBERG: Do you know what kind of implement you were wounded
with?
TEHLIRIAN: While the massacre was taking place I ducked my head
down, so I couldn’t know that. I only heard screaming.
LEHMBERG: You said the guards were gendarmes and soldiers on
horseback. Then you said that ordinary people were also there.
What do you mean by that?
TEHLIRIAN: The Turks living in Erzincan.
LEHMBERG: They were present and also participated in the massacre?
TEHLIRIAN: All I know is that when the gendarmes started to kill, those
people were there.
LEHMBERG: And now after a day or two you regained consciousness
and realized your brother’s body was lying on top of you. But you
didn’t see your parents’ bodies there as well?
TEHLIRIAN: I saw my oldest brother’s body on top of me.
PROSECUTOR: I think it was the younger brother whose head had been
split open with an ax.
LEHMBERG: Was it your younger brother’s body?

Zakarian, the translator, clarified the point: “No, the oldest brother’s.”
 LEHMBERG: But from behind you saw that your younger brother had
been struck with the ax?
TEHLIRIAN: Yes.
LEHMBERG: Have you seen your parents since that day?
TEHLIRIAN: No.
LEHMBERG: And your brothers and sisters?
TEHLIRIAN: No, also not.
LEHMBERG: So they’ve vanished, disappeared?
TEHLIRIAN: Up to now I haven’t found a trace of them.

It’s hard to tell if Lehmberg was trying to trip up Tehlirian on his earlier
testimony in which he says he saw his family murdered, indeed saw their
corpses, or was simply trying to understand what he was saying. Clearly the
testimony is inconsistent, and yet Judge Lehmberg (and the prosecuting
attorney) gave Tehlirian a pass.
Tehlirian next recounted how he had eventually found his way back to his
hometown of Erzincan (neglecting to mention that he did so as a volunteer
soldier in the Russian army).

TEHLIRIAN: News came that Erzincan had been taken by the Russians
—then I wanted to go back to look for my parents and relatives. I
also knew very well there was still money at home and wanted to
get it.…
When I arrived I found all the doors shattered and part of the house
was destroyed. And after I entered the house I collapsed.… After I
came to, I went to two Armenian families who had converted to Islam;
they were the only families in the entire city who had been saved…
two families and here and there individual people, altogether around
twenty people, but only two families.… I found various utensils,
everything else had been burnt and was gone. But there was still
money there, buried in the ground… forty-eight hundred Turkish
pounds.
LEHMBERG: You took that with you?
TEHLIRIAN: Indeed I did.
According to this version of the story, Tehlirian, after escaping Turkey, made
it to Tiflis, Georgia, turned around, crossed the Caucasus once more, and
returned to his home village in Turkey, covering a distance of five hundred
miles, traversing a war zone twice. No one in the court questioned how he
accomplished this. Whether Tehlirian actually retrieved hidden loot or not,
this narrative would explain to the court how he’d gotten his hands on enough
money to travel freely around Europe, find lodging in Berlin, and pay his
expenses while apparently unemployed. The recovery of the 4,800 Turkish
gold pieces (a small fortune) would have been more than enough to cover his
traveling expenses for years.
By 1919, armistice had been declared and Constantinople, now under
British control, was flooded with refugees. Tehlirian testified that he had
traveled to the imperial capital because he wanted to place an advertisement
in a newspaper in the hope of locating his lost relatives. He repeats this story
in his autobiography. What he did not mention in court was that while he was
in Constantinople, he assassinated the muhtar Megerdichian, establishing his
credentials as a dependable “weapon” for the ARF.
Having delivered a disorderly and inexact account of his whereabouts
prior to his sudden appearance in Berlin, Tehlirian was permitted to step
down. At this point, Judge Lehmberg moved to take Tehlirian’s plea. But
before that could happen, there was one more attempt on the part of the
defense team to shift blame onto the murder victim.

DEFENSE ATTORNEY VON GORDON: I would like to ask the accused if

he had read in the papers that Talat Pasha had been sentenced to
death by the military court in Constantinople on account of this
atrocity.
TEHLIRIAN: I read it and was in Constantinople when Kemal [Kemal
Bey, not to be confused with General Mustapha Kemal], one of the
massacre’s organizers, was hanged already. At the time the papers
wrote that Talat and Enver Pasha had also been condemned to
death.

The reporters in the courtroom took Tehlirian’s testimony at face value.

Strangely, when the New York Times had first reported the assassination over
two months earlier, a greater conspiracy had been hinted at: “The authorities
are skeptical as to Tehlirian’s boast that his discovery of his victim’s
whereabouts and identity was entirely his own work. They are inclined to the
view [that] he is an agent of the Armenian Revolutionary Committee and find
support for this theory in the fact that his passport was issued in Paris and
has a Geneva visa.” In a follow-up article, the Times reported that “a check
for 12,000 marks which Salomon [sic] Tehlirian the assassin of Talat
received two days before the crime was committed leads the authorities to
believe that this money was sent to him by conspirators to enable him to fly
after the deed.”5 The “newspaper of record” mentioned a conspiracy and
named as co-conspirator the Tashnag (ARF) organization within two days of
the killing. Curiously, the Times never followed up on its own suspicions
while reporting at great length on the trial. And neither a conspiracy nor the
ARF was ever mentioned in court.
Judge Lehmberg preferred the uncomplicated narrative of atrocity and
revenge to getting mired in the swampy complexities of political terrain. The
court refused to entertain the notion that Tehlirian was anything more than
what he said he was. That he might be a pawn in a much larger game was
also never hinted at. The indictment was read by the court’s clerk:

The alleged student of mechanical engineering Salomon [sic]

Tehlirian, Charlottenburg, Hardenbergstrasse 37, c/o Dittman, since
16 March 1921 in pretrial custody, born 2 April 1897 in Pakarij,
Turkey, Turkish citizen, Armenian Protestant, is accused of having
intentionally killed the former Turkish Grand Vizier Talat Pasha on 15
March 1921 in Charlottenburg, and of having carried out the homicide
with premeditation. Crime according to Article 211 of the Penal Code.
For reasons explained, custody is continued.
Berlin, 16 April 1921.
Regional Court III, Criminal Division 6.

The reading of the indictment triggered another visit to Tehlirian’s version

of reality.

LEHMBERG (to the interpreter): Please explain to the accused that the
 indictment accuses him of having killed Talat Pasha in a
premeditated manner.

The defendant remained silent.

LEHMBERG: If you were to answer this accusation with yes or no,

which answer would you give?
TEHLIRIAN: No.
LEHMBERG: On earlier occasions you indicated otherwise. You
admitted having carried out the deed with premeditation.
TEHLIRIAN: When did I say that?
LEHMBERG: So today you prefer not having said that? Let’s now go
back to developments up to Paris. On various occasions, at various
times, you admitted that you made the decision to carry out the deed,
to murder Talat Pasha.
DEFENSE ATTORNEY VON GORDON: I request that the accused be asked
why he considers himself not guilty.

Lehmberg directed the question to the defendant.

TEHLIRIAN: I consider myself not guilty because my conscience is

clear.
LEHMBERG: Why is your conscience clear?
TEHLIRIAN: I have killed a man. But I wasn’t a murderer.
LEHMBERG: You say that you feel no remorse? Your conscience is
clear? You don’t have any self-reproaches? But you certainly have
to ask yourself: Did you then intend to kill Talat Pasha?
TEHLIRIAN: I do not understand this question. After all, I killed him.
LEHMBERG: Did you have a plan?
TEHLIRIAN: I had no plan.
LEHMBERG: When did the idea first occur to you?
TEHLIRIAN: Around two weeks before the deed I felt lousy and I again
saw visions of the massacre. I saw my mother’s corpse. This body
 stood up and stepped over to me and said, “You’ve seen that Talat
is here and you’re completely disinterested? You’re no longer my
son.”
LEHMBERG (repeating those words to the jury): What did you do now?
TEHLIRIAN: I suddenly woke up and decided to kill the man.

Once again Lehmberg led the defendant.

LEHMBERG: When you were in Paris and Geneva and when you came to
Berlin, had you not yet decided this?
TEHLIRIAN: I’d made no decision.
LEHMBERG: Did you even know that Talat Pasha was staying in Berlin?
TEHLIRIAN: No.

When the district attorney mused, “Just one thing seems odd to me—that
the accused man found an apartment in Hardenbergstrasse so quickly,” the
point was rapidly passed over and the line of questioning dropped. Had this
anomaly been given any attention by the police, they soon would have
uncovered Tehlirian’s associates.
Piece by piece, the facts at hand were either fitted into Tehlirian’s version
or discarded. When he was asked whether he had scars on his body, he
replied, “Indeed I do!” implying that the scars were a result of his experience
in the death caravan. But he had not received his wounds as a hostage; he had
received them as a soldier. His fainting spells were attributed to the trauma
of the deportation. He was not asked whether he had always suffered from
these fits. No one questioned his version of how he came to have so much
cash on him at the time of his arrest. No one questioned how a young man
from the Anatolian countryside was able to travel around Europe with such
easy familiarity. No one questioned how he spent his time in Berlin, hour
after hour, day after day. Did he really study German all day, every day?
And where had the gun come from?
A gunsmith, “expert witness Barella,” testified. “The pistol has an eight-
to nine-millimeter-diameter barrel. It has been officially approved for use by
the German army. It’s a so-called ‘self-loading weapon,’ from which eight
bullets can be fired. It is war surplus and carries the year nineteen fifteen
from the Deutsche Waffen-und Munitionsfabrik. The ammunition is also war
surplus.” The pistol used was probably a Luger P-08. The 9mm Parabellum
has more explosive kick than the normal 9mm because the automatic
mechanism gives the bullet more of a surge. Also the bullet is larger than the
normal 9mm. The Luger was a soldier’s handgun.

LEHMBERG: Defendant, did you ever use the weapon earlier on?
TEHLIRIAN: No.

Tehlirian’s first landlady stated that she never saw a pistol in Tehlirian’s
luggage. Testimony was provided that the pistol was in good condition if not
new. So where did the Luger come from? Apparently there was no interest in
providing an answer to this mystery either. Furthermore, Tehlirian,
supposedly a student with no military background whatsoever, had killed a
man with one shot. How had he been able to do that? No one bothered to ask.
In the most illogical reasoning of the trial, even when it was clear that
Tehlirian had moved to a new apartment directly across the street from his
victim only a few days before the killing, he insisted that there was no
premeditation.

LEHMBERG: On the fifth of March you moved in at Frau Dittman’s. For

what reasons?
TEHLIRIAN: When my mother appeared before me, I made the decision
to kill Talat. I changed apartments for this reason.
LEHMBERG: And, so to speak, prepared the deed?
TEHLIRIAN: After my mother ordered it, the next day I told myself I had
to kill him.
LEHMBERG: And from that time on you tried to convert the thought into
action?
TEHLIRIAN: After moving into the new apartment, to some extent I
forgot what my mother told me.
LEHMBERG: Forgot?
TRANSLATOR ZAKARIAN: This can’t be translated. We could say
 “dropped it,” let the thought drop.
LEHMBERG: I think [you’re saying] you’d just moved into the new
apartment because your mother reproached you for being
unconcerned.
TEHLIRIAN: I started to reflect. I told myself: How can you kill
someone?
LEHMBERG: You asked yourself how you could be capable of killing
Talat Pasha?
TEHLIRIAN: I told myself: I’m not capable of killing someone.
LEHMBERG: I don’t really understand this. Earlier you answered that
since that day you had decided to move to Hardenbergstrasse; so
you must have known that Talat Pasha lived across from you.
TEHLIRIAN: Yes.
LEHMBERG: So you wanted to live near him?
TEHLIRIAN: When my mother said that to me.
LEHMBERG: Then you decided—and what was the decision?
TEHLIRIAN: That I want to kill him.
LEHMBERG: Now tell us: Is it correct that already beforehand you’d
realized Talat Pasha was living in Berlin?
TEHLIRIAN: Yes, about five weeks earlier I saw him.
LEHMBERG: Where?
TEHLIRIAN: He was walking on the street with two other men from the
direction of the zoo. I heard Turkish being spoken near me and one
of the men being addressed as “pasha.” I turned around and saw that
this person was Talat Pasha. I walked behind them until I came to a
cinema. Before the door of the cinema I saw that one of the other
men was leaving. He kissed Talat’s hand and addressed him as
“pasha.” The two other men entered a house.
LEHMBERG: At the time that you, so to speak, made this acquaintance,
did the idea already occur to you to kill Talat?
TEHLIRIAN: The idea didn’t occur to me. I only felt bad, and when I
was walking into the cinema it seemed to me that all the pictures of
the massacre were rising up before me, and I walked back out of the
cinema and went home.
 LEHMBERG: And that was, as you said today, four to five weeks before
this move to Hardenbergstrasse?
TEHLIRIAN: Yes.
LEHMBERG: So it’s not correct that you’d already learned earlier that
Talat Pasha was staying in Berlin?
TEHLIRIAN: No.

Lehmberg addressed the court, clarifying, “I’m asking this because in earlier
proceedings the defendant said at one point he came to Berlin because he
wanted to study in Berlin and also had learned that Talat was staying in
Berlin.”

DEFENSE ATTORNEY VON GORDON: What’s been said today roughly

corresponds to the defendant’s last previous statement that around
two weeks before the deed the appearance of his mother’s spirit
sparked the decision to kill Talat Pasha. He thus also last indicated
that he moved to Hardenbergstrasse for this reason.
TEHLIRIAN: Yes.
LEHMBERG: From that point onward, did you make it your business to
observe and control Talat Pasha in his everyday life?
TEHLIRIAN: No, after moving into the new apartment I wanted to do my
usual everyday work.

A smorgasbord of facts had been served up. The court was informed
when Tehlirian first saw Talat, when he first decided to shoot Talat, and that
he soon “forgot” about his decision. And yet he’d moved to an apartment
directly across the street from Talat’s residence. At this point von Gordon
addressed the judge.

DEFENSE ATTORNEY VON GORDON: I didn’t entirely understand a

remark made a little while ago. Did I understand correctly that after
finding the apartment in Hardenbergstrasse in order to be close to
Talat, the defendant afterwards at times dropped the idea [of
murdering Talat] because the thought occurred to him: You can’t kill
 another person?! To put it briefly: Did this decision he made after
the spirit’s appearance stay firm, or did he sometimes drop it and
then devote himself to his usual occupations, because he said to
himself: You can’t kill someone?
LEHMBERG: That’s indeed what he said; he wavered in his decision.
TEHLIRIAN: I did waver. Whenever I felt sick, I wanted to honor my
mother’s command. But when I was well again, I said to myself:
You can’t really kill someone.

This “wavering,” in combination with Tehlirian’s proclivity for fainting,

became the linchpin of the defense. This convoluted logic was argued back
and forth to the very end of the trial. When did he decide to kill Talat? How
confused was he when he experienced his fainting spells? The court,
avoiding the problematic logic of Tehlirian’s preparations to kill Talat,
roamed to and fro while trying to gain some insight into the man himself.
When directly asked why he had happened to move across the street from his
victim, Tehlirian repeated an unsubstantiated medical reason, something
having to do with the amount of light in his room. Again, he was never
questioned directly about the clearly predatory nature of his actions.
The assassination was described, moment by moment. Tehlirian did not
deny stalking Talat, passing him, shooting him in the back of the head, and
throwing the pistol away. The court became entangled in trying to understand
why Tehlirian had walked past Talat before shooting him. They found his
actions confusing because they did not understand that they were dealing with
a seasoned assassin. Seen from that perspective—that Tehlirian knew what
he was doing—everything Tehlirian did made sense: He tracked his victim
by walking in a parallel path on the other side of the boulevard. He then
hurried forward, crossed the street, and walked past Talat, getting a good
look at his face so he could be absolutely certain of his victim’s identity.
Immediately after passing his target, Tehlirian turned and shot Talat once in
the base of his skull. He said so himself: “One shot.” Intelligence agents the
world over know that absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal
cord in the cervical region. Tehlirian’s efficiency was noted but disregarded.
Tehlirian was no amateur; his first priority was to complete his
assignment. As he had explained to a police officer when he was first
interrogated, shooting Talat from the front risked the possibility of Talat’s
making some sort of defensive maneuver. Shooting him from behind
decreased the possibility that Talat might dodge or deflect the bullet.
Tehlirian’s job was to effect the man’s death, not satisfy some personal
emotional need. He was clear about this.

LEHMBERG: What sort of feeling did you have when Talat Pasha was
dead? What did you think at that point?
TEHLIRIAN: Right afterwards, I don’t know.
LEHMBERG: But sometime afterwards, what happened must have
become clear to you?
TEHLIRIAN: After I was brought to the police station, I knew what had
happened.
LEHMBERG: What did you think about the deed then?
TEHLIRIAN: I felt satisfaction in my heart.
LEHMBERG: And what about now?
TEHLIRIAN: Now as well, I’m satisfied with the deed.
LEHMBERG: Of course you know that under normal circumstances no
one may take on the role of judge, even if many things have
happened to him?
TEHLIRIAN: I don’t know—my mother said I had to kill Talat Pasha
because he was guilty of the massacre, and my soul was so
transformed I didn’t know I still was not allowed to kill.
LEHMBERG: But you certainly know that our laws forbid murder, forbid
killing a human being.
TEHLIRIAN: I don’t know the law.
LEHMBERG: Does the custom of blood vengeance exist among the
Armenians?
TEHLIRIAN: No.
DEFENSE ATTORNEY NIEMEYER: You said something while the crowd
was beating you and you were bleeding. Can you recall what you
said at the time, a statement in your defense facing the crowd?
LEHMBERG: He has indicated that he did not run away, that he saw
blood flowing, and that people stood around and some grabbed hold
 of him. (To Tehlirian) Now, do you know if one of the onlookers
who’d come running confronted you, or if perhaps you
spontaneously said something to one of those people in self-
defense, because you’d been grabbed hold of and beaten?
TEHLIRIAN: I said I was a foreigner and the man I’d killed was also a
foreigner: What did the Germans have to do with it?
LEHMBERG: You’re supposed to have said you knew what you’d done.
That it was no loss for Germany.

Tehlirian then repeated his previous words.

Character witnesses followed: the two landladies as well as Tehlirian’s
non-Tashnag friends, his tutor, and his doctor. Everyone described a
melancholy, sweet man who would sit alone in his room, singing to himself
in the dark, a traumatized refugee who refused to talk about what had
happened during the war. The young student was clean and neat, even to the
point of polishing his own shoes (usually the responsibility of the landlady)
—a point both Tehlirian and Frau Dittman saw fit to mention. Dittman further
testified that on the day before the murder, Tehlirian had been drinking
cognac and crying.
His friend Levon Eftian summed it up: “He always looked sad.”
When it was learned that Tehlirian had not mentioned sighting Talat in
Berlin to any of his (non-Nemesis) Armenian cohorts, the prosecutor tried to
force him to admit the logical contradiction.

LEHMBERG: Defendant, but you did run into Talat? After the encounter,
why didn’t you say anything about this important event to your
countrymen?
TEHLIRIAN: I thought they’d make fun of me.
LEHMBERG: Why would they do that? If Talat was generally considered
the main author? Witness [Christine] Terzibachian always wanted to
talk about it. Why didn’t you mention it?
TEHLIRIAN: I didn’t speak about it.
LEHMBERG: Why did you keep it to yourself?
TEHLIRIAN: I didn’t have any interest in speaking about it.
 LEHMBERG: But we’re interested in this.
TEHLIRIAN: If I had spoken about it, they would have asked many
questions.
LEHMBERG: You didn’t want your countrymen to become upset and
assail you with curious questions?
TEHLIRIAN: I was in such a state that I didn’t want this discussed.

One more thread was left dangling.

Next to testify was Geheimer Justizrat Schulze, a jurist as well as an
official, probably a reasonably high one, who had been present at Tehlirian’s
arrest.

SCHULZE: I still remember the defendant’s statements rather precisely.

He readily admitted having killed Talat intentionally and with
premeditation. When asked for the reasons, he answered that Talat
was the one responsible for having murdered his relatives, or some
of his relatives, in Armenia. As a result he had decided to avenge
his relatives and came here to Germany, to Berlin.
LEHMBERG: When did he make his decision?
SCHULZE: In his homeland. He bought a pistol. He tried to learn which
apartment Talat was staying in, and after he succeeded, he rented a
place across from him so that he could observe him furtively. He
then did watch him furtively from his window, and, he indicated,
when he saw Talat go out on the day in question, he took his
revolver and followed him.
He said that to make sure there was no mistake, he first walked past
Talat, then turned around or walked back toward him, looked him more
closely in the eye, then, when he was sure, shot him from behind in the
head with the revolver. This is what he indicated.

The lawyers for the defense insisted that Schulze’s testimony be thrown
out. They pointed out that Tehlirian had been running a fever and his head
was bandaged at the time of the questioning. Clearly he had been incoherent
when he was interrogated by the court officer. Lehmberg gently questioned
Tehlirian.

LEHMBERG: Defendant, on the sixteenth of March you admitted that

already at that time, in nineteen fifteen, when you had to flee from
Erzincan, you decided to kill Talat.
TEHLIRIAN: I don’t remember having said that.
LEHMBERG: So you didn’t mean to state that a deed planned over a long
period was involved here?
TEHLIRIAN: No, how could I have said that?
LEHMBERG: But you must have actually said that then. You were
questioned by the interpreter, were you not?
TEHLIRIAN: It is possible that I stated something like that, because my
head was still injured and bandaged.

The defense attorneys accused the original police station interpreter of

putting words in Tehlirian’s mouth, charging that he was no friend of
Tehlirian’s. But apparently the opposite was true.

SCHULZE: The interpreter was very calm. But he had a pile of sweets
for the prisoner—pastries, chocolate, and so forth—and asked him
to help himself. I said, “What, you want to actually offer the
murderer sweets?” Then he said, “What kind of murderer?! He’s a
great man we all admire!”
 CHAPTER EIGHT

The Big Picture

THEY SIMPLY HAD TO LET HIM GO!

—New York Times headline

It was now time to tell the world about the destruction of the Armenians
living in the Ottoman Empire. A series of witnesses was called to the stand
to fill in the big picture. An Armenian survivor, Christine Terzibashian,
testified about her own, very real ordeal. It would prove to be consistent
with reports from missionaries and other observers.

TERZIBASHIAN: When we had left the city and stood before the Erzurum
fortress, the gendarmes came and searched for weapons. Knives,
shields, and so on were taken away from us. From Erzurum we
went to Bayburt. As we passed by this city we saw piles of
corpses, and I had to step over corpses so my feet were stained
with blood.
LEHMBERG: Were the corpses from earlier groups that had come from
Erzurum?
TERZIBASHIAN: No, these were from Bayburt. Then we arrived in
Erzincan. We had been promised shelter, but we were not allowed
to live there, and we were also not allowed to drink water. We even
had to give up our oxen; these were driven into the mountains.
LEHMBERG: Now, what led up to the massacre in which your relatives
 perished?
TERZIBASHIAN: When we marched on, five hundred young people were
selected from the groups. Including one of my brothers. But he
managed to escape and join me. I dressed him as a girl so he could
stay with me. The other young people were herded together.
LEHMBERG: What happened with those who had been selected?
TERZIBASHIAN: They were all tied together and thrown in the water.
LEHMBERG: How do you know this?
TERZIBASHIAN: I saw it with my own eyes.
LEHMBERG: That they were thrown in the river?
TERZIBASHIAN: Yes, they were thrown in the river, and the current was
so strong that all those thrown in the water were carried away.
LEHMBERG: What happened with those remaining?
TERZIBASHIAN: We screamed and cried and did not know what to do.
But we were not even allowed to cry but were driven forward by
stabbing.
LEHMBERG: Who did that?
TERZIBASHIAN: Thirty soldiers, and a detachment of soldiers.
LEHMBERG: Were they beating you?
TERZIBASHIAN: Yes.
LEHMBERG: What happened next with your relatives?
TERZIBASHIAN: We arrived in Malatya with those we could carry on
our backs. There we were taken to the mountain and the men were
separated from the women. The women were now around ten
meters away from the men and could see with their own eyes what
happened to the men.
LEHMBERG: What happened with the men?
TERZIBASHIAN: They were murdered with axes and tossed from the
land into the water.
LEHMBERG: Were the women and men really massacred in this way?
TERZIBASHIAN: Only the men were murdered in this way. When it was
a little dark, the gendarmes came and sought out the most beautiful
women and girls and took them for themselves as wives. A
gendarme also came over to me and wanted to make me his wife.
 Those who did not wish to obey, who did not wish to give in, were
pierced with bayonets and their legs torn apart. Even pregnant
women had their ribs cut through and the children taken out and
thrown away.

According to the transcript there was an “uproar in the courtroom” as

Terzibashian raised her hand and said, “I swear to this.” Lehmberg
responded, “And is all of this really true: Is this not fantasy?” Her reply
triggered another wave of commotion: “What I’ve told is still far less than
the reality. It was much worse.”

Terzibashian was followed by three “star witnesses”: Dr. Johannes Lepsius,

a revered humanitarian who had published books on the massacres of the
1890s; General Otto Limon von Sanders, the highest-ranking German military
official in Turkey during the war;1 and Krikoris Balakian, a refugee
Armenian bishop who had traveled from Manchester, England, to testify. All
three men had known Talat personally, and all three were comfortable in the
spotlight.
Lepsius was the greatest Western expert on Armenian culture, history,
and, specifically, the Hamidian massacres of twenty-five years earlier. In his
reports, essays, and books, Lepsius had made every effort to call the world’s
attention to the plight of the Armenians in Asia Minor. Like England’s
William Gladstone, who had been prime minister in the 1880s, Lepsius
believed that the Turkish government was a unique criminal enterprise that
should be suppressed or removed altogether.
In the spring of 1915, when Lepsius learned what was happening to his
Armenian friends in Anatolia, he did what he could to publicize the
deportations. The German government quickly stepped in and warned the
venerable scholar that as a German citizen, he was barred from disparaging
the nation’s wartime allies, the Ottoman Turks. For the duration of the
conflict, Lepsius remained silent. Now the war was over, and the disgraced
Kaiser’s government was no longer in power. The Tehlirian trial gave
Lepsius an opportunity finally to have his say.
For an Armenophile like Lepsius, making a clear case regarding the
deportations and mass killings was not only about exposing what had
happened. It was also an attempt to assist in establishing an independent
Armenian nation. Yet even as he charged the Turks with destroying the
Armenians, Lepsius whitewashed German complicity. In his testimony he
was careful to edit himself and suggest by omission that Germany had had no
control over the killings:

Approximately one million four hundred thousand Armenians were

deported.
What did this deportation mean? In a decree signed by Talat, we
find the statement, “The goal of the deportation is nothingness.” In line
with this order, it was seen to that from the entire population
transported southwards from the eastern Anatolian provinces, only
around ten percent arrived at the deportation’s goal; the remaining
ninety percent were murdered in transit or, to the extent that women
and girls were not sold by the gendarmes and abducted by Turks and
Kurds, killed by hunger and exhaustion. The Armenians were
transported to the edge of the desert from western Anatolia, Cilicia,
and northern Syria, so that gradually a substantial mass of human
beings—in total several hundred thousand—were brought together in
concentration camps; they were largely exterminated through
systematic starvation and periodic massacres. Namely, as new trains
filled up the concentration camps and there was no place left for the
mass of people, they were brought to the desert in groups and
slaughtered there. Turks have explained that the idea of the
concentration camps came from the example of the English with the
Boers in South Africa. What is officially declared is that the
deportations involved preventive measures; but privately,
authoritative persons have indicated with complete openness that the
goal was to exterminate the Armenian people.

Lepsius scored points against British brutality as he described the Turkish

use of deportations to destroy a population: “Until the present, the Armenians
have only been a means to an end in the diplomatic game between England,
Russia, and France. As the publication of the German documents will show,
Germany has always taken a benevolent and understanding approach in the
Armenian question since the Berlin Congress, and in response has been
blackened by the entire world as that power behind which all wicked deeds
of the sultan and the Turkish government stand.”2
Lepsius went on to give a short history of Armenian-Turkish relations
under the sultan, with specific reference to his fears about secession. (The
empire had been losing territory continuously since the early nineteenth
century.) Lepsius also talked about Great Power interference in the Ottoman
Empire. He ended with the reforms that had been enacted just as World War I
broke out:

Two European inspectors general were meant to be responsible for

supervising the reforms. It never came to that. War broke out and both
reformers were sent home. I was in Constantinople in 1913. During
the negotiations, the Young Turks were extremely upset that the Great
Powers were again concerned with the question of Armenian reform.
And they were doubly embittered when the question was settled in a
manner hoped for by the Armenians as a result of the agreement
between Germany and Russia. At the time a statement came from the
Young Turkish side: “If you Armenians don’t keep your hands off the
reforms, something will happen in comparison to which Abdul
Hamid’s massacres were child’s play.”

Next to take the stand was Lieutenant General Otto Liman von Sanders,
who was such a renowned military leader that his very presence in the
courtroom made the trial significant. He was also the direct link between
Germany’s war effort and the Ottoman command. In fact, he had been
arrested by the British during the occupation. His first priority at the trial
was to clear Germany’s name. Two major indictments against the Germans
stood. First of all, there were reports that German soldiers had participated
in the rounding up and killing of Armenian civilians. Second, since the
German government was well aware of the atrocities, and since it was the
more powerful partner in the alliance with the Turks, by not stepping in and
halting the killings, it was complicit. (In fact, Germany did intercede when
doing so served its needs. The ongoing construction of the Berlin–Baghdad
railway line underwritten by Deutsche Bank employed many Armenian
railroad workers, who were protected.)
More sinister motives could be traced back to before the war, when
German theorists considered Anatolia a vast unexploited territory waiting to
be cleared of Armenians and other problematic indigenous peoples. With
railroads and irrigation, Anatolia could become a fertile breadbasket for
Germany. (As in the case of the United States and Africa, railroads were
opening up substantial areas for settlement, agriculture, and mining.
Indigenous peoples were seen as a problem to be solved.) These expansive
theories were a favorite theme of the German philosopher Paul Rohrbach and
related to notions made popular by General Friedrich von Bernhardi.
Bernhardi had popularized the term Lebensraum in his 1911 book Germany
and the Next War, in which he stated simply, “Without war, inferior or
decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements
and a universal decadence would follow.” “Lebensraum,” “natural
selection,” “decaying races”—these were all ideas that German social
philosophers subscribed to and would form the foundation of Adolf Hitler’s
thinking in the coming years.3
Liman von Sanders, like most Germans, especially those in the military,
had little respect for the Turkish leadership or their armed forces.4 Like most
Europeans, he believed that the Turkish government was essentially corrupt.
For Germany, Turkey was a resource to be exploited, inconveniently guarded
by a wily old sultan and his retinue of crooked functionaries. It is true that the
Kaiser had lavished praise on the Ottomans when visiting Constantinople
fifteen years earlier. But for all his speeches about friendship between the
countries and his love of Islam, the real relationship between Germany and
Turkey was economic, and was secured by military men like Liman von
Sanders. The Ottoman Empire was a client state of Germany and, as such,
subordinate.
Now that the war had been lost, there was no longer any reason to pretend
to admire the people of Turkey or its leaders. Never very happy with his
relationship to the Turkish military, especially Enver Pasha, von Sanders was
finally free to say what he thought. He took pains to shift any blame for
massacres away from Germany and onto Turkey. He told the court:

In my view, everything that took place in Armenia and that is

 summarized with the term “Armenian massacre” needs to be separated
into two parts. The first part is in my opinion an order of the Young
Turk government concerning the Armenian deportations. For this the
Young Turk government can be held responsible, for this order in
itself, for the consequences only in part. But the other part is
comprised of the battles that took place in Armenia, because in the
first place the Armenians defended themselves vigorously, didn’t want
to accede to the disarmament ordered by the Turkish government,5 and
because, second, as has been proven beyond any doubt, they partly
came out on the side of the Russians against the Turks. This naturally
led to battles and, as is commonplace, to mowing down the inferior
side. I believe these are matters that do need to be distinguished from
each other. The government ordered the deportation, and indeed in
response to both the highest military and civilian authorities, both of
which considered the clearance of eastern Anatolia to be necessary on
military grounds.

Liman von Sanders circumvented the unasked questions: Why didn’t you stop
the deportations when you understood that they were homicidal? In what way
did German artillery abet the destruction of Armenian strongholds? And why
was Talat, an exile convicted of war crimes, granted safe haven in Germany?
Liman von Sanders denied vehemently that any German soldiers had
committed atrocities. He expanded on this theme:

I would like to emphasize that the army leaders and commanding

generals in the Caucasus were always Turks, because so much that is
false and incorrect in this question [of guilt] has been asserted against
the Germans. These army leaders and the civil authorities reported to
Constantinople precisely what I have said previously, and the
execution of the deportation order that was issued then fell into the
worst conceivable hands!… Concerning ourselves, I can say—
because as Herr Dr. Lepsius has been kind enough to point out, we
have been subjected to boundless suspicion—that no German officer
ever participated in a measure against the Armenians. To the contrary,
we intervened when we could.
 While Liman von Sanders defended Germany, he condemned Turkey. Of
course, this is exactly what Tehlirian’s defense attorneys wanted. The
general’s testimony established (1) that the government of Turkey had
planned and executed the destruction of Armenian civilians, and (2) that there
were dedicated death squads (the Special Organization) that had been
directed by the Committee of Union and Progress (and Talat) to commit the
most horrific atrocities.
Recently opened East German archives indicate, however, that German
officers actually were involved with the Turks, in a way that modern
statecraft might describe as “counterinsurgency.” The Germans assisted the
Turkish army in destroying Armenian “strongholds” with Krupp heavy
artillery. These operations focused on leveling Armenian neighborhoods and
towns. The German leadership decided to ignore the deportations, despite
their brutality. If the Turks wanted the Armenians out of the way, the Germans
would not interfere.
Although Germany’s leaders denied responsibility for assisting the Young
Turks in their destruction of the Armenians, new evidence proves otherwise,
and the parallels between the murder of one million Armenians and six
million Jews thirty years later are numerous. Two ancient peoples, primarily
identified by their religion, were methodically exterminated in what would
be defined as “genocide.” Though Raphael Lemkin was responding to the
Jewish Holocaust when he coined the term in 1943, he specifically cited the
destruction of the Armenians as a prime example. In fact, Lemkin had
carefully followed Tehlirian’s Berlin trial of 1921 and pondered the ethical
dilemma created by Tehlirian’s actions.6
There is no doubt that many Germans were familiar with what had
occurred in Asia Minor. It is probable that hundreds of German soldiers who
served in the Ottoman Empire during World War I went on to become
Schutzstaffel or “SS” officers in Nazi Germany. In fact, Germany had set a
precedent for deportation massacre earlier in the century in German South-
West Africa (Namibia), where General Lothar von Trotha successfully
pursued an eradication of the Herero by forcing the defenseless indigenous
people into the desert, where they died. In addition, one of Hitler’s closest
friends, Max von Scheubner-Richter, had been a German officer in Turkey
during World War I. He had also served as vice consul in Erzurum, placing
him in the center of the action. Scheubner-Richter witnessed and later wrote
about the attacks against the Armenians.7 In fact, he was subpoenaed to
appear at Tehlirian’s trial but was not called to testify. If Hitler somehow
missed the news of Tehlirian’s trial in Berlin, certainly Scheubner-Richter,
as a veteran who served in Ottoman territories, must have discussed the war
with him. How close was Max von Scheubner-Richter to Adolf Hitler?
Scheubner-Richter would be shot and killed, his arm linked through Hitler’s,
on the night of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.8
As National Socialism found its footing in Germany, the Committee of
Union and Progress in Turkey, the Ittihad, stood as an example of what could
and could not be accomplished within a modern “constitutional” government.
An autocratic and clandestine political faction, the CUP had muscled its way
into power. While stoking the furnaces of nationalism, this secretive cabal
had arrested its detractors and murdered its foes. Having gained control of
the government, these Young Turks liquidated a large and successful minority
group and stole their assets. Adolph Hitler has been quoted as declaring,
“Who remembers the Armenians?”9 He was saying that there would be no
significant reaction to an attack on Jewry in Europe because there had been
no real punitive consequences following the destruction of the Armenians.
There are many parallels between the modus operandi of the Nazis and
that of the Ittihad. First of all, though the CUP and the Nazis were supposedly
political parties, both were born as underground organizations, and by the
time they had consolidated their power, both “parties” were illegal by any
definition of the term. The Nazis, like the Ittihadists, were nationalists who
built their philosophy upon a foundation of myth and pseudoscience. Both
were convinced that the minorities in their country were akin to an
“infection” that was contaminating the body of the nation. The alleged
“decadent” nature of the minority was contrasted with the purity and
wholesomeness of the pureblooded majority.10
Both the Ittihad and the Nazis employed deception to eject victim
populations easily from their villages and towns, telling them that they were
being “moved.” Once dislocated from the familiarity and safety of their home
region, they became disoriented and more vulnerable to the killing machine.
Both the Nazis and the Ittihad enslaved their minority victims. Both
performed medical experiments on their victims.11 And in both cases, it was
religion that identified the target group. (In a sad irony, male circumcision
was proof of faith. The majority Muslims on the one hand and the minority
Jews on the other underwent ritual circumcision, unlike their neighbors, the
Christian Armenians and Germans. So in Turkey, if you were circumcised,
you might survive. In Germany, if you were circumcised, you were
condemned.)
Despite the fact that both genocides were couched in theory, both the CUP
and the Nazis used concrete and nontheoretical methods. Property belonging
to the murdered minority populations was confiscated. It is well documented
that the Nazi regime subsidized itself with money, art, and factories stolen
from wealthy Jews. Likewise, the Ittihad stole land, businesses, and property
from wealthy Armenians all over the empire.12 According to Ittihad
economic theory, these “Turkified” properties would provide the basis for a
Turkish middle class, which in turn would lead the country to its destiny as a
homogeneous Turkic nation.13 The stolen wealth was also used to pay for the
deportations and concentration camps themselves. When genocide is on the
agenda, “leaders, planners, and killers need the sight of gold as well as the
smell of ink.”14
The Ittihad and the Nazis both took advantage of the latest technologies to
intensify the killing. Mass media propaganda prepared the general population
for the violence against the hapless civilians, convincing the average German
or Turk that Jews or Armenians were wrongdoers if not actually evil. The
telegraph sped up orders to the territories, increasing the element of surprise.
(Talat had worked as a telegrapher before undertaking his political career.
He had a personal telegraph installed in his home.15) In both the Ottoman
Empire and the Third Reich, railroads (cattle cars specifically) were used to
move large numbers of the condemned quickly and efficiently.
The Ittihad and the Nazis alike set out to “solve” a problem by
exterminating a people who had lived peacefully within their borders for
centuries. In both cases, it is possible that an original plan that called for
ethnic evacuation (through deportation) devolved into mass murder. In both
cases, “room” was being made for the majority populations. For example,
Balkan refugees were settled in emptied Armenian villages; years later,
Baltic Germans were moved to Poland to replace the Jews who had been
forced from their homes.
 It is not a coincidence that Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS and so
directly in charge of the Holocaust, was made minister of the interior in
1943. Talat’s official designation as a leader of the Ottoman Empire was
also minister of the interior (until he took over the job of Grand Vizier in
1917). “Population control,” as it was euphemistically called in both
countries, was the responsibility of the Interior Ministry.
There were great differences, of course, between the two tragedies.
Armenians were forced out of an ancestral homeland that existed within the
borders of the Ottoman Empire, while the Nazi attempt at the total destruction
of the Jews extended far beyond Germany’s borders. Some Armenian
political groups were seeking to establish an autonomous Armenian region,
whereas it was beyond anyone’s imagination that a Jewish state could rise
within the borders of Germany. Still, the parallels stand. And the fact remains
that methods for removing a population group were developed and refined by
both the Ottomans and the Germans. Not only in its execution but in its theory
and economics as well, the Armenian Genocide was instructive for
prosecutors of the Jewish Holocaust.16

Expert testimony at Tehlirian’s trial came from Armenians as well as

Germans. The Reverend Krikoris Balakian was a worldly, educated
Armenian cleric who had been living in Constantinople when he was
arrested on the evening of April 24, 1915, along with hundreds of other
members of the Armenian elite. Unlike the majority of his peers, Balakian
survived.17 And unlike Lepsius and Ambassador Henry Morgenthau,
Balakian was an eyewitness to the atrocities, going so far as to interview
Turkish soldiers during his own deportation. The soldiers freely described
atrocities to Balakian because they didn’t believe he would live to repeat
what they had told him. Finally, Balakian knew Talat personally. For all of
these reasons, he was an invaluable witness and was able to put the big
picture together. Balakian described his time in a deportation caravan:

Between Yozgat and Boghazlian alone, forty-three thousand

Armenians were cut down, with children and women. We also were
 afraid we were going to be killed. Because although the official name
was “deportation,” what was really involved was a policy of
organized extermination. But since we had money, together around
fifteen thousand to sixteen thousand pounds in gold, we thought that in
line with the general custom in the Orient of obtaining everything with
“baksheesh,” we could use it to save our lives. We hoped that with
gold we could accomplish everything we could not accomplish
otherwise. We were not mistaken. If I’m here alive today, it’s because
of baksheesh.
When we came to Yozgat, which was the bloodiest place, we saw
nearby, four hours away in a valley, a couple of hundred heads with
long hair, which is to say heads of women and girls. A gendarmerie
captain named Shukri was with us—he had led us. (We were around
forty-eight men, and with us were perhaps sixteen gendarmes on
horseback.) I asked the captain: I had heard that the Armenian men
were being killed, but not the women and girls. Well, he answered, if
we only kill men and not women and girls as well, then in fifty years
there are again a few million Armenians. So we have to also kill
women and children, so that there is no internal or external disorder
forever.

Balakian, because of his status as a member of the elite, had greater

freedom than most in the caravan and was allowed to have conversations
with the soldiers guarding the deportees.

The captain explained very simply, “We killed everyone, but not in the
city.” That was forbidden, because in eighteen ninety-five to ninety-
six, Abdul Hamid had ordered everyone in the city killed. The
European nations learned about this, the entire civilized world, and
did not want to allow this. So now no person was to remain, so that no
one would appear as a witness in court.
“I can tell you about all of this because you’re going into the desert
and are going to die from hunger there and have no opportunity to
bring this truth to light.” He now gave us details. First of all, fourteen
thousand men were taken out of the city of Yozgat and environs and
killed in the valleys. The remaining families of those killed were told
the men had arrived safely in Aleppo, they were doing well there, and
they had asked the government to allow the families to join them. The
government had allowed this, they were told, and also their taking all
their movable property with them. The families would find apartments
ready for them there. The families then packed everything up—their
gold and silver items, their jewelry, carpets—they took all their
movable property with them. The very same captain who dragged
away the caravan told me about this. He himself, he explained, had
had forty thousand Armenians killed between Yozgat and Boghazlian,
as the gendarmerie commander. So the women now believed their
husbands were living and they made preparations to join them. There
were around eight hundred and forty wagons, including around three
hundred and eighty ox carts, the rest being drawn by horses. Many
women and children had to go on foot. A total of some sixty-four
hundred women and children marched off to Aleppo.
I now asked the captain, “Why did you do this?” Then he said, “If
we had killed the women and children in the cities, then we wouldn’t
have known where the valuables were being kept, whether they were
buried in the ground or had been destroyed somewhere. For this
reason we ‘allowed’ them to take all their jewelry with them. When
we had moved forward another four hours,” the captain continued his
account, “we came to a valley which had three watermills. We had
around twenty-five to thirty Turkish women with us.” They now began
to examine the clothing of the Armenian women and girls and take
away their jewelry and gold things. Because there were so many
women and girls, around sixty-four hundred, this examination took the
Turkish women around four days.
When the examination was finished, the captain told the Armenian
women a new order had come from the government, a “pardon”: the
women had permission to return to their homes.
Namely, on the way back, around an hour’s distance, there was a
great plain. The wagons and drivers had been sent back earlier. The
women asked why. They were told that since the pardon had come
allowing them to return, they of course no longer needed any wagons,
since Yozgat was only four hours away.
 (The captain himself told me this. He didn’t speak like I am doing
here, one thing after the other; rather, I always had to ask him in order
to get an answer. My thought was that maybe I could use what I heard.)
Now, when the women tried to return to Yozgat on account of the
“pardon,” many gendarmes were sent into the provincial villages, and
the peasants were invited to participate in a holy war. Around twelve
or thirteen thousand peasants came with axes for chopping wood and
other iron implements. They were allowed to kill everyone and take
only the most beautiful girls.

Balakian specifically addressed Talat Pasha’s guilt:

I am a member of the synod of the Armenian Patriarchate of

Constantinople and for a long time have had many opportunities to
become familiar with Turkish circumstances. I naturally also knew
Talat personally. He had great influence. He did everything in full
awareness. When we wanted something from the Armenian
Patriarchate, he would tell us, “You don’t need to go first to the other
ministers; just come straightaway to me. You don’t need to put things
in writing; you can explain everything to me personally and I’ll take
care of it!” He acted as if he had full responsibility and had no need to
give anyone an accounting.

At another point in his testimony Balakian stated unequivocally about an

incriminating telegram, “The telegram was signed ‘Talat.’ I saw it with my
own eyes.” At this point in the interrogation, other damning telegrams
collected at the end of the war by Aram Andonian were introduced. A debate
ensued as to whether the telegrams should be admitted as evidence. Defense
attorney von Gordon made his case:

But I must state what the wires contain. The wires are meant to
demonstrate that Talat personally gave the order in these five wires to
seize all Armenians, including Armenian children. Initially the order
was given to keep alive only those children who were not in a
position to remember what happened to their parents. Later, in March
 1916, the order was narrowed, so that all those in orphanages were to
be removed and exterminated because, after all, only elements
damaging to Turkey would come from these children. The witness
Andonian will be able to testify concerning the authenticity of these
wires: he received these wires directly at the sub-directorate, which
was made accessible to the Armenian delegation after occupation by
the British. I personally consider it possible, even probable, and hope
that the jury members believe the defendant in his insistence that he for
his part was firmly and not without good reason convinced—not
superficially but deep within his heart—that Talat was the author of
these fearful atrocities against the Armenians and is responsible for
them. I can waive presenting a motion to submit evidence only if you
become convinced of this.

The district attorney was tired of the lecturing on the part of the defense.
He addressed the judge:

I request that such a motion be denied. In a very extensive manner,

Your Honor has already allowed a discussion of whether or not Talat
is guilty of the Armenian atrocities. But this question is entirely
extraneous. For in my view there can be no doubt that the defendant
was of the opinion that in Talat, the man bearing the guilt for these
atrocities stood before him. This fully explains his motive. I also
believe that clarifying the question of Talat’s guilt is completely out of
the question in this courtroom. For a historical judgment would have
to be made, then, that requires entirely different material from what is
available here.

As the Tashnags had hoped, the trial of Tehlirian had become the trial of
Talat Pasha.

After the VIPs testified, five doctors and psychiatrists, including those who
had cared for Tehlirian before his arrest, took the stand. They reported on his
symptoms (fainting spells, nightmares) and offered their theories. They
attempted to define the term “epilepsy.” Their testimony would determine
from a medical perspective whether or not Tehlirian was in his right mind
when he pulled the trigger. According to a Dr. Stormer:

He was never seriously ill until nineteen fifteen, when he was a

witness to the massacre that has already been sufficiently discussed
today. In a deeply emotional way, he told me that both his parents and
all his brothers and sisters were killed. Shuddering with terrible fear,
he recalled the moment in which he saw the ax of a Turk descend on
his brother’s head and split it in two. He himself received injuries in
the event, a head wound that is not serious but nevertheless is there,
and injuries to his left arm and knee. The horrible impression of these
murderous deeds, combined with the physical injuries and exertion,
robbed him of consciousness. He was unconscious for three days and
finally woke up covered with corpses and awakened by the intense
corpse stench that has stamped him for all eternity and has gained a
firm foothold in the organs of his soul. He says that whenever he reads
of horrifying events, and above all when he recalls the massacre, the
smell of the corpses repeatedly penetrates his olfactory organ—and in
such a way that it is of decisive importance since he cannot get rid of
it.

The doctors determined that Tehlirian’s illness was not a figment of his
imagination. The symptoms followed a pattern: subsequent to feeling weak
and seconds before fainting, Tehlirian always smelled blood. There was no
reason to doubt that he had had these experiences. People who had seen him
fall into one of the seizures later reported that his whole body would tremble.
He would then lose consciousness. Upon awakening, he would feel pain in
his legs and arms. Exhausted, he would become very thirsty and eventually
fall into a deep sleep. (Such symptoms could be typical of epilepsy.)
The doctors who had examined Tehlirian also found scars all over his
body. He told them that the Turks had attacked him physically, and the
wounds seemed to be definitive proof that he had in fact been attacked while
a hostage in the caravan. The possibility that he might have received the
wounds in another way—for instance, as a soldier in battle—was never
brought up during the testimony.
Every single person in that courtroom knew that the war had brought with
it horrors never before experienced. Over fifty percent of the soldiers
serving in “the war to end all wars” were either killed or wounded. There
had been World War I battlefields with casualties numbering in the hundreds
of thousands. World War I veterans had been subject to types of warfare so
terrible that these weapons would soon be outlawed. Poison gas alone left
hundreds of thousands of men with severe facial scars, blindness, and
respiratory problems that plagued them for the rest of their lives. Most had
been exposed to the nonstop rattle of machine gun fire and bursting bombs, to
grenade and mine shrapnel. Some had endured starvation or survived bouts
of cholera or typhus. Young men returned home wrecked and stupefied from
witnessing the massive carnage. A syndrome never before identified was
added to the list of war injuries. It was called “shell shock.”
By 1921, the science of the mind had captured the imagination of the
medical world. This was the era of Freud. One year earlier, in February
1920, the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute had been founded, and the idea that
actions could be motivated by subconscious forces was gaining favor. Within
this context, Tehlirian presented a fascinating case to the doctors tasked with
examining him. Here was a man who had suffered trauma during a violent
episode and apparently committed murder five years later as a result of that
trauma. The vivid dreams in which his mother commanded him to kill added
another layer of complexity for analysis. In addition, the five doctors who
testified were taking the stand publicly; their reputations were at stake. For a
few days, all eyes were on them, forcing them to defend their pet
psychological theories. Each doctor felt obliged to weigh in with a lengthy
and verbose analysis of the symptoms and what those symptoms might
indicate.
The debate in the courtroom boiled down to determining exactly what
level of “free will” Tehlirian possessed at the moment when he pulled the
trigger and killed Talat. Was it possible that his epileptic fits could create a
kind of insanity that would force him to do things against his will? Also,
what about these “appearances” by his mother? Did he really believe she
was actually standing there before him? When asked if he believed his
mother was viscerally present, Tehlirian answered yes, adding another piece
to the jigsaw puzzle of his mental illness. Doctors offered the theory of the
“compulsive precept,” defined as an overwhelming psychological
compulsion that had grown out of the shock of the experience of seeing his
family murdered (which in fact had never happened).
The consensus view was that Tehlirian had been traumatized by the
experiences he claimed to have had in Anatolia. The verdict from a medical
perspective was clear: the Turks had done terrible things to Tehlirian, he was
psychologically damaged, and his condition had contributed to his murderous
impulse. In sum, the doctors gave Tehlirian’s defenders exactly what they
were looking for.

In the end, the judge and jury being completely ignorant of Operation
Nemesis, there was only one verdict they could hand down. In under two
hours, the verdict was arrived at: “not guilty.” At first Tehlirian didn’t
understand what was being said. He turned to Vaza, his co-conspirator and
translator: “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re free.”
People in the courtroom applauded. Women rushed toward Tehlirian with
bouquets of flowers. Zakarian moved Tehlirian out of the courtroom through
the back and into a waiting car, requesting that no pictures be taken. He knew
that from this day on, Tehlirian would be a target. No reason to give his
hunters any more ammunition than they already had.18
In the words of a New York Times headline, “They Simply Had To Let
Him Go.” The opinion piece that followed was prescient: “The court before
which the case was tried practically has given, not only to this young man,
but to the many others like him and with like grievances, a license to kill at
discretion any Turkish official whom they can find in Germany.” The Times
writer criticized the jury’s decision, calling it “a queer view of moral
rightness [that] opens the way to other assassinations less easily excusable
than his or not excusable at all.” Yet, the editorialist added, “what other
verdict was possible?” The whole logic of the court was explained: “An
acquittal on the ground of insanity, the usual device of jurors who do not
want to punish a killing of which they approve, would have been more than
ordinarily absurd in the case of a man as obviously sane as this Armenian is,
and to have hanged him, or even to have sent him to prison, would have been
intolerably to overlook his provocation.” The commentator puts it in a
nutshell: “The dilemma cannot be escaped—all assassins should be
punished, this assassin should not be punished. And there you are! The
solution lies further back and long ago, when German officers in Turkey
permitted the massacres of Armenians, though they had the power to prevent
them.”19
The Times never returned to the theory, outlined only days after
Tehlirian’s arrest in March, that he might be a member of a revolutionary
organization. There is no further mention of skepticism on the part of the
authorities. The writer does not return to the loose threads the Times itself
had tugged on earlier, such as Tehlirian’s Paris passport and visa stamped in
Geneva or the large amount of money he had in his possession.
If the authorities themselves had had any such suspicions, they were never
raised in court. The ARF was not mentioned once during the proceedings.
Tehlirian was never asked if he was a member of a revolutionary group or an
assassination squad or even if he had received assistance from others. Vague
references were made to the money that had been found on him after his
arrest, his visit to Geneva, his knowledge of political events. Nothing more
was ever asked of him in court.
Having been acquitted,20 Tehlirian was set free in early June 1921. The
Turkish expatriates living in Berlin were outraged. The Turkish nationalist
newspaper Yeni Gun eulogized Talat: “Our great patriot has died for his
country.… We salute his fresh tomb and bow low to kiss his eyes. Talat was
a political giant. Talat was a genius. History will prove his immense stature
and will make of him a martyr and an apostle.… Talat will remain the
greatest man that Turkey has produced.”21 Talat’s widow, Hayriye Talat
Bafrali, requested an appeal but was refused. The acquittal stood.
In hindsight, given the new barbarity that would soon blanket Europe,
defense attorney Adolf von Gordon’s last words at the trial are ironic: “I
should be far from passing a final judgment on Talat the man. What can be
said objectively I said at the start. But I do wish to state one more thing: like
many of his comrades, he certainly worked for the extermination of the
Armenian people in order to create a purely pan-Turkish state; he certainly
here used means that seem intolerable to us Europeans.”
PART III
 CHAPTER NINE

The Work Continues

Our organization had no extermination plan. It inflicted punishment

on individuals who had been tried in absentia and found guilty of
mass murder.
—Arshavir Shiragian

Within three years of its founding, the Nemesis conspiracy located and
killed seven high-level Ittihadists and their confederates (Djemal Azmi, Said
Halim Pasha, Khan Javanshir, Djemal Pasha, Khan Khoyski, Behaeddin
Shakir, and Talat Pasha). At least ten armed assassins carried out the
executions. (In addition to Tehlirian, the list includes Bedros Der Boghosian,
Stepan Dzaghigian, Yervant Fundukian, Haroutiun Haroutiunian, Artashes
Kevorkian, Misak Kirakosyan, Arshavir Shiragian, Misak Torlakian, and
Aram Yerganian.) Another dozen lookouts, spies, and organizers assisted. In
addition, diplomats and other behind-the-scenes personnel provided
intelligence and funds. The Nemesis conspiracy operated in seven countries
across three continents.
Tehlirian was deported to Turkey after his acquittal in order to prevent
any “further investigations which otherwise would have been realized
similar to those against Young Turk leaders in absentia.” The twenty-five-
year-old assassin was sent to Turkey via Serbia, where “Tehlirian could
escape.”1 Jacques Derogy, who had access to secret ARF archives, reports
that Tehlirian then traveled to Manchester, England, with Bishop Krikoris
Balakian (one of the star witnesses at the trial), making it almost impossible
for Turkish agents to find him. A few months later, Tehlirian crossed the
Atlantic for a victory lap of Armenian communities in the United States.
Everywhere he went, grateful Tashnags embraced him and kissed his hands.
Small babies were placed in his arms, as if physical contact with this saint
would bless their lives.2
Though Nemesis had more “work” to do in Europe, Armen Garo and
Shahan Natali decided to retire their champion. The operation had succeeded
beyond their wildest hopes. All over the world Tehlirian was now hailed as
a sympathetic hero even by non-Armenians. To quote the Philadelphia
Inquirer: “The verdict of the Berlin jury which acquitted the slayer of Talaat
Pasha must be approved and even applauded as an act of substantial
justice.”3 The Tashnag conspirators saw no reason to disturb that image.
Preserving the myth of the lone gunman was also a pragmatic decision. The
leadership couldn’t risk Tehlirian’s getting caught in another assassination
attempt. Such an arrest would undermine his story and endanger other agents
in the field. The effectiveness of Nemesis depended on the greater truth
remaining hidden.
Within a year of his acquittal, Tehlirian returned to Serbia, where he
married Anahid. In 1924 the young couple, accompanied by Anahid’s sister
Araxie, traveled to Paris for a vacation. Photos reveal a relaxed and happy
man, apparently at peace with himself. Soghomon could finally rest. He had
honored his family and killed “the monster.” Despite the fact that Tehlirian
had answered in the negative when Judge Lehmberg asked if he felt that he
had participated in an act of revenge, he had found a kind of resolution, and
he could now go on and live his life.
Tehlirian settled in Valjevo, Serbia, joining his father and uncles in their
wholesale coffee business. He changed his name to Soghomon Melikian and
fathered two children with Anahid. Protected by the Serbian Christian
community, Tehlirian enrolled in the local gun club, where he would
occasionally take target practice with the chief of police. Here his mild
manner manifested itself. Though Tehlirian was reputed to be a very good
shot, he refused to join hunting parties. He could not kill another living thing.
After World War II, Turkish agents continued their search for Tehlirian in
Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, forcing him to emigrate to Morocco with Anahid
and his two sons, Shahen and Zaven. Perhaps because of rising antipathy
toward non-Muslims in Islamic countries in the mid-fifties, the Tehlirians did
not linger in Morocco. With a final move to San Francisco in 1957, Tehlirian
lived out the rest of his days peacefully as “Saro Melikian,” working for
George Mardikian, a successful Armenian entrepreneur who had “come
over” in 1922. Mardikian was the nephew of an important Armenian
revolutionary who had fought with Generals Antranig and Drastamat
Kanayan, better known as General Dro. Awarded the Medal of Honor by
President Harry Truman after World War II, George Mardikian was happy to
sponsor and protect “the Armenian eagle.”
Despite Tehlirian’s retirement, the “work” continued. Within weeks of his
acquittal, the Nemesis commandos resumed their hunt and by late summer
1921 were in full pursuit of former Ittihad leaders in Rome. Six or seven
men, utilizing only a minimal but sufficient support structure, hung out in
coffee shops and tracked the likes of Dr. Nazim and Enver Pasha, both of
whom continued to prove elusive. Shahan Natali crisscrossed Europe, as
Aaron Sachaklian in Syracuse, New York, continued to collect and disperse
funds, all the while maintaining the absolute secrecy that ensured the survival
of Nemesis.4
With the success of the Berlin operation, Tashnag leaders in Boston and
Constantinople lobbied their superiors to continue the work of Nemesis on
several fronts simultaneously. The Special Fund had been fattened with
contributions to Tehlirian’s defense. These donations included money from
some of the most conservative leaders in the Armenian diaspora, like Boghos
Nubar, founder of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, a very non-
Tashnag operation. Nubar was at the time living in Paris, where he and
Avedis Aharonian jockeyed for participation at the peace conference. He
also had known these CUP leaders personally, yet apparently had no
reservations about sponsoring their demise.
As the defense funds were redirected, Armen Garo crowed, “Money is no
problem.” He instructed Sachaklian in Boston to continue to forward money
directly to Natali in Paris, adding, “What is left over [from the defense of
Tehlirian] will in fact be used to continue the work, but without the
committee knowing.”5 The “committee” Garo was referring to was the “Body
Responsible Abroad” or ABM (Ardasahmani Badaskhanadu Marmin), the
Tashnag board that oversaw all of the ARF’s affairs at the highest level. It
was the final arbiter of the Hadug Marmin, or Special Corps, that is, the
Nemesis operation.
The ABM suspected that Garo and Natali were acting independently of
their oversight, so they clarified their instructions: “The money collected
must be used for the purpose for which it was collected.”6 The ARF were
demanding that any surplus funds be returned to the organization. Garo and
Natali wanted to use this surplus to continue the pursuit of former Ittihadists.
The schism between Garo and Natali and the rest of the Tashnag
leadership had deepened, and there was a clear disagreement as to how far
this revenge conspiracy against the former CUP leadership should proceed.
By the mid-1920s, the ABM felt that the primary mission had been
accomplished and wanted Nemesis shut down.7 (The ABM was even
exploring an anti-Soviet pact with Turkey.)8 Natali was livid. He believed
that the “work” had only begun. But revenge was far from the minds of the
Armenian leadership. While Nemesis was intent on assassinating Turkish
leaders, the first Republic of Armenia was quickly becoming a historical
footnote as the Soviets and Kemalist forces from Turkey surrounded and
closed in on the tiny mountain nation.
Kemal had forced the British, in particular, to make a crucial decision:
either give up on the Wilsonian notion of a partitioned postwar Turkey or
commit to full-scale war with no end in sight. The seasoned general
understood that the Allies had lost their taste for battle, while his men, though
exhausted, would continue to fight for survival. There was no way of
knowing what the consequences would be if a Wilsonian mandate or a Treaty
of Sèvres could be effected. Kemal sensed that the British would jump at any
excuse to abandon the front. On the other side of the border, Yerevan was
teeming with starving, disease-ridden Armenian refugees and orphans.
Thousands upon thousands were dying of hunger and typhus. It was in that
context that Operation Nemesis continued its “work.”

Khan Javanshir (Constantinople, July 18, 1921)

A few weeks after Tehlirian was acquitted, Misak Torlakian, assisted by

Haroutiun Haroutiunian and Yervant Fundukian, gunned down Behbud Khan
Javanshir outside the Pera Palace Hotel in Constantinople. Javanshir was the
former Azerbaijani internal affairs minister in Baku. Because of the massive
oil reserves there, Baku in Azerbaijan was a vital strategic city within the
Russian Empire. Pan-Turanist Turks saw Azerbaijan as an extension of a
potential Turkish empire, one that could extend eastward all the way to
China. Javanshir was aligned with the Young Turks in this respect.
The Armenians of Baku had traditionally been the businessmen who
traded in petroleum products. (Before oil was used for internal combustion
engines, it was in demand for lamps and machine lubrication.) In this role
they constituted a significant segment of the middle class and as such were
the focus of Muslim resentment. The Soviets, to the degree that they had any
ability to control the city, tried to suppress the constant Muslim-Armenian
feuding, but in March of 1918, harsh fighting broke out. Atrocities were
committed in Baku against the Muslim population.9 Then in September 1918,
as Enver Pasha’s “Army of Islam” invaded the city, the local Azerbaijanis
meted out payback to the Christian Armenians of Baku. Some ten to thirty
thousand ethnic Armenians died in the violence. The Tashnags blamed
Javanshir, who had been minister of internal affairs at the time, for the
massacres. After the Soviets locked down Azerbaijan, Javanshir escaped
Baku, moving to Constantinople, where he hoped to enjoy the protection of
British occupation. The Tashnags knew he was residing in the Pera district of
Constantinople and approved the hit.
Misak Torlakian was more experienced with firearms and combat than
Tehlirian; in fact, he was given his first pistol when he was twelve years old.
He had been a gunrunner for the Tashnags, a reconnaissance scout with the
Russian army, and under General Dro had fought in the final battles to save
Armenia. Like Tehlirian, he had returned to his home village to find it
depopulated. Nearly everyone in his family had been murdered. The only
survivor was a sister who had been taken by a Muslim as his wife. Like
Tehlirian, Torlakian sought to avenge his family, and the Tashnags recruited
him in Constantinople.
On July 18, 1921, Khan Javanshir was gunned down as he returned to his
suite at the luxurious Pera Palace after seeing a show at the Petit Champ
theater. Torlakian and his cohorts had spent hours lying in wait for Javanshir
and his entourage in a nearby garden bistro, and when Javanshir appeared,
Torlakian charged up to him and fired. Wounded, Javanshir grabbed
Torlakian’s wrist. The twenty-nine-year-old assassin fired two more rounds
into his victim’s chest. Javanshir fell to the ground with a groan. Chaos broke
out on the crowded street, allowing Torlakian to slip away, but upon hearing
the moans of the wounded Javanshir, he ran back and shot the Azerbaijani
point-blank in the head.
French military police quickly arrived on the scene and arrested
Torlakian. He was beaten into unconsciousness and awoke the next day
locked in a cell, facing trial for murder in occupied Constantinople. Under
instructions from his handlers, he commenced to feign the same symptoms of
“epilepsy” that had worked so well for Tehlirian. He made sure that his
fellow inmates saw him collapse and foam at the mouth. Like Tehlirian, he
contrived a story about witnessing firsthand the slaughter of his family. (In
his fictional narrative, Torlakian moved the location of his family’s demise
from Trebizond on the Black Sea to Baku, thus giving him a motivation to
seek Javanshir’s death.) In late August, only months after Tehlirian’s
acquittal, Torlakian was brought before a British tribunal arranged by the
occupying government. His defense team exploited the intense British
antipathy toward the Turkish.
This trial, like Tehlirian’s in Berlin, was embraced by the Tashnags as a
way to publicize Muslim atrocities, particularly the attacks on the Armenians
of Baku. The Azerbaijanis, perhaps alert to what had transpired at the Berlin
trial, summoned their own witnesses, who testified in court that the
Armenians had committed atrocities against them first (in March of 1918)
and that from their perspective the Armenians were exaggerating the Baku
massacres of September 1918. The trial devolved into a he said/she said tug-
of-war, with no clear resolution. Unlike the proceedings in Berlin, this trial
operated under the auspices of an occupying military force, in a major
Middle Eastern capital. Javanshir was unknown outside Turkey and
Azerbaijan. No supporting testimony was provided by the likes of a
Professor Lepsius or a General Liman von Sanders, and the international
press showed little interest. Yet once again the focus of the trial was shifted
from a political murder to a public forum on violence against Armenians.
As in the Tehlirian trial, a slew of doctors and fellow inmates testified to
the accused’s mental instability and fainting spells, and raised various
theories as to whether such a person could act rationally and commit cold-
blooded murder while under the influence of a psychological disease.
Torlakian testified on his own behalf that in 1918, in Baku, when the
massacres began, he had been confined to bed after having been shot on the
street. He explained that while he lay in his room fading in and out of
consciousness, Muslim paramilitaries had entered his apartment and
murdered his entire family. When confronted with his own crime, he stated,
“My conscience is completely at peace.”10
In November 1921 the British tribunal found Torlakian guilty of murder
but “unconscious and not responsible.” He was released to the Armenian
patriarch in Constantinople and a few days later boarded a steamer headed
for Greece. The trial had barely touched on whether or not Torlakian had
committed first-degree murder. In this way the Tashnags effectively made use
of the defense strategy from Tehlirian’s Berlin trial.11

Said Halim Pasha (Rome, December 5, 1921)

Nemesis struck again late that fall in Rome, a mere month after Torlakian’s
acquittal. Said Halim Pasha, the grandson of Egyptian leader Muhammad Ali
and the acting Ottoman Grand Vizier throughout most of the war, was
assassinated as he emerged from a horse-drawn coach only a few blocks
from the Borghese Gardens. The killer was Arshavir Shiragian, only twenty-
one years old, born and bred in Constantinople. Shiragian, like Tehlirian,
was an experienced killer, having already carried out the Nemesis
assassination of an Armenian collaborator named Vahe Ihsan (Yesayan), a
man who had provided Turkish police with the names and locations of
activists, and who, according to Shiragian, had a role in the April 24 arrests.
In that killing, Shiragian had been assisted by Arshag Yezdanian, a veteran
assassin who, on his own, had gunned down another “traitor,” Hmayag
Aramiantz.
Shiragian was the most dynamic of the Nemesis operatives. Barely a
teenager when the war broke out, he was an active member of the
underground resistance effort in Constantinople. Shiragian’s boyishness was
a useful cover as he moved weapons and fugitives from one clandestine
location to the next in the wartime city. His family home was often used to
hide young men from the relentless search for army recruits by the police.
These young Armenian fugitives were the so-called “Army of the Attics.”
 In all the Armenian districts of Constantinople, the attics, the cellars,
the spaces between outer and inner walls, the deep storage closets,
and the indoor wells became hiding places; it was a kind of
subterranean world, inhabited by thousands, into which the Turkish
police, guided by damned Armenian traitors, would at times penetrate.
Then the people in hiding—as well as the people who had offered
them shelter—would be dragged off to jail, and there would be
tortured and killed, or else they would be sent into the interior to
become victims of the massacre that was in progress.12

During the war, many Armenians led desperate and frightened lives, and
were careful to keep their heads down. But some Tashnags, like Shiragian, a
born fighter who took delight in clashing with the police and their allies,
relished the conflict. Where Tehlirian was sickly, Shiragian was robust.
Where Tehlirian was hesitant, Shiragian was cocksure. Shiragian had no
experience as a soldier, but he was a good shot and was comfortable around
firearms. Also, he was well known to the Tashnag leadership. Years of
experience outwitting the police while running weapons and fugitives had
made him a wily asset in the Tashnag camp. When the possibility was
discussed among Tashnag inner circles of an operation to assassinate former
Ittihad leaders, Shiragian was one of the first to volunteer. The Tashnag
bosses were reluctant to give such an important job to someone so young, but
after several fruitless attempts on the life of Vahe Ihsan, Shiragian was given
the order to stalk and kill the former policeman.
In his autobiography The Legacy, Shiragian describes shooting the
informant Ihsan:

My second bullet got Ihsan in the arm. When he realized that he would
not be able to use his gun, he started to run. I fired two more bullets
after him as I chased him. There was quite a commotion in the street.
Pedestrians were screaming and trying to take cover, and from nearby
windows people were throwing things at me—flowerpots, shoes,
anything. But no one dared to get in my way or grab me. Ihsan fell; his
head struck a stone. My third and fourth bullets had hit him, but he
didn’t seem human. He was still alive. He got to his knees and tried to
 stand. We were both being struck by the various objects which people
were throwing at us from the shelter of their homes. Taking advantage
of the confusion, Ihsan managed to get his revolver out of his pocket.
He started to take aim. I jumped on him and fired my last two bullets
into his head. Then I started to run away. But I couldn’t leave. I had to
turn back to make certain that he had stopped breathing. In my
nervousness and because of my inexperience, I had done a sloppy job.
His skull was shattered and his brains had splattered on the stones.13

Over the next few years, Shiragian would develop a more elegant killing
technique.
Shiragian was later identified by Ihsan’s bodyguard (who had run off
when the shooting started), and a warrant was issued for the young man’s
arrest. Meanwhile, the “organization” gave him a new assignment: Find
Enver Pasha and kill him. He was provided with a false alias and a
“Nansen” passport (passports issued after World War I by the newly formed
League of Nations, providing stateless refugees a means to travel). Strapping
a Russian-made revolver to his leg, Shiragian was smuggled onto a Black
Sea steamer heading for the Crimea, where the civil war between the Red
and White Russian armies continued to rage. From there, he crossed into the
newborn Republic of Armenia. From Armenia, he planned to sneak into
Azerbaijan via Georgia, on the trail of Enver Pasha.
Though Enver Pasha, like Talat, had abandoned Turkey, once he eluded
the British and French authorities, he formed the “Army of Islam” and
entered Azerbaijan with his men. Enver was intent on uniting the pan-
Turanistic and pan-Islamic forces in the region, after which he could take on
the role of their leader within the new Soviet system. Or not. It would depend
on which way the cookie crumbled. Once he had control of Azerbaijan, he
could just as well form an alliance with the Turkish nationalists fighting in
eastern Turkey. Either way, his presence in the region was of great concern to
both the Russians and the British.
Having arrived safely in Armenia, Shiragian was paired up with Aram
Yerganian, a veteran Nemesis operative who had assassinated Fatali Khan
Khoyski, another high-level Azerbaijani minister, in Tiflis, Georgia, earlier
that year. With Armenian diplomatic passports in their pockets, Shiragian,
twenty, and Yerganian, twenty-five, headed for Tiflis. Once in Georgia, they
would exchange diamonds, gold, and cash for Azerbaijani rubles. They
would assume Muslim aliases and present themselves as Turkish caviar
merchants. They would then cross the border into Azerbaijan and travel on to
Baku, where Enver had been sighted.
The two Tashnag would-be assassins of Enver Pasha arrived in Tiflis in
November 1920. No sooner had they settled into their hotel room than police
burst in and arrested them. In a matter of days, the two young men were
swallowed up by the state apparatus of Georgia, at the time on unfriendly
terms with Armenia. There was tension among the three “Transcaucasian”
nations: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All three were struggling with
their delicate geographical position as buffer zones between Turkey and
Soviet Russia. Though they maintained relations with one another, each
nation was fighting for its own survival as its agents moved from one
territory to the next.
Once in prison, the young men lost contact with their confederates in the
outside world. As far as their Armenian comrades back in Yerevan and
Constantinople were concerned, the two were either dead or soon to be
executed. Shiragian and Yerganian were brutally tortured and condemned to
solitary confinement in a rat-infested dungeon. The night arrived when they
were roused from bed and marched to the prison yard. It was time for their
final disappearance. As they were being led to a crumbling wall where they
would be lined up and shot, Shiragian grabbed hold of an old pump in the
middle of the prison yard and began to scream, waking the entire inmate
population. A riot ensued, and the clandestine execution was postponed. The
incident was reported via the prison grapevine, and the news that the two
men were still alive and in this prison made it back to their comrades in
Armenia.
The Tashnag spy network contrived an elaborate escape plan. Upon
learning that Shiragian and Yerganian would be moved from their prison to
another, more formidable and probably fatal incarceration, they went into
action. On the day of the transfer, as the prisoners left the building
surrounded on all sides by soldiers, a humble fruit seller approached the
entourage. Shiragian recognized the man as one of his fellow fedayeen.
Weapons materialized, the Georgian soldiers were disarmed, and Shiragian
and Yerganian were set free.
 Unfortunately, by this time the political climate in Armenia had
deteriorated for the Tashnags. The entire region was now under siege as
fighting broke out all around Baku. Although Constantinople was still
dangerous for Shiragian (since he was being sought for the murder of Ihsan),
he and Yerganian had few options. So they returned to the imperial city and
the de facto Tashnag headquarters, the editorial offices of the newspaper
Jagadamard.
Pursuit of Enver was put on hold and a new target was assigned: Said
Halim Pasha, the wartime Ottoman prime minister. Though Said Halim was
one of the CUP leaders arrested by Britain after the war, he had been traded
for British hostages held by the Kemalists and set free. Now he was residing
in a well-appointed villa in Rome on a fashionable street not far from the
Spanish Steps. Said Halim Pasha was, like the Armenian Boghos Nubar, a
member of the old Ottoman elite. Both had roots in the Egyptian aristocracy
established by Muhammad Ali, the man who had wrested Egypt from direct
control of the sultan in the early 1800s. (Today Muhammad Ali is considered
by many to be the “Father of Modern Egypt.”) For this reason Said Halim
was unlike the other Young Turks. He was not a military man, nor had he
fought his way up the ranks. Neither a hotspur nor an ideologue, Said Halim
actually had clashed openly with Enver and the “hawks” when Enver sought
an alliance with Germany at the outset of the war in 1914.
Though he was a moderate by Ottoman standards, Said Halim had
survived the revolution against the sultan in 1908 and was acting—some
would say “figurehead”—Grand Vizier during the actions against the
Armenian population. His signature had legitimized the deportation orders.
When the Armenian patriarch Zaven appealed to Said Halim and begged him
to spare his people, the Grand Vizier replied that reports of the arrests and
deportations were greatly exaggerated. For this reason, the Tashnags
considered him culpable and placed his name high on “the list.”
In Rome, Said Halim presided over a group of exiled CUP leaders who
awaited the inevitable victory of Mustapha Kemal and a triumphant return to
Turkey. He led meetings of the Ittihad in exile and, unbeknownst to Nemesis,
was about to sign off on a large loan with which to purchase arms for
Kemal’s rebels in Asia Minor. Secret British reports from the period are
detailed:
 Enver had gone to Moscow and had obtained support for Mustapha
Kemal in Armenia. Some two hundred thousand rifles and two and a
half million pounds had been delivered and promises of more had
been made. Enver’s supporters had been given “carte blanche” to
organize Moslems from Turkestan to Asia Minor to incite them to
embarrass English everywhere in the East. He did not approve of the
conditions which the Soviet Government was anxious to impose.…
Reverting to the present situation Talaat said the treaty of Sevres was
now driving the Turkish nationalists into the arms of the Bolshevists.14

In his introduction to The Legacy, Leon Surmelian writes: “It would be a

mistake to consider these political assassinations by Arshavir [Shiragian]
and his comrades—they were a handful of young men, six or seven altogether
—merely acts of vengeance, though they were that too. Arshavir fought
against the extension of Turkish power across the Caucasus and the Caspian
to Central Asia and Afghanistan: the cherished dream of Pan-Turkism.”15
Whether they supported a dream of an ethnically cleansed Anatolian
homeland or that of a vast pan-Turkic empire, the Muslims of postwar Turkey
felt the powerful tug of nationalism. The Greek invasion of the Turkish coast
(followed by Greek atrocities against Turkish citizens) hardened the
solidarity of the Turks. The Greek invasion was a crime against their
humanity, and every former leader would work to preserve what was left of
the Ottoman Empire and hope to see a new Turkey rise from the ashes of the
World War I debacle. Still, those residing outside Turkey, lacking the
protection of a fully operational police and spy network, were vulnerable.
The CUP leadership may have presented a united face to the rest of the
world—that of patriotic Turks committed to preserving the nation—but
Enver, Talat, and Said Halim had disagreed strongly when it came to
deciding how best to run the empire or any possible republic that might
follow. Most Ittihadists were fervent nationalists, but not all of them were
racists, especially when it came to Armenians. Some prominent Ittihadists
were reluctant pragmatists when it came to violence, and most subscribed to
some code of ethics. But others had committed war crimes with relish and
were motivated by greed or an appetite for sadistic violence in their
persecution of minorities. The men in the Central Committee of the CUP
were for the most part from Balkan Ottoman territories. They were very
familiar with the massacres of Muslims during the Balkan wars and had held
little sympathy for the Armenians once the decision was made to wipe them
out.
Memoirs indicate that high-ranking Young Turks in exile, like Bekir Sami
Bey, Kemalist minister of foreign affairs, were aware of being hunted. On
one or two occasions, in Berlin and in Rome, the quarry came face-to-face
with their Armenian pursuers. The Ittihadists in exile knew that the
Armenians were fluent in Turkish and could position themselves in public
places like coffeehouses to overhear key discussions, so when possible they
tried to meet in private. Dr. Nazim in particular was always on the alert,
surveying his surroundings whenever he stepped outdoors, moving his place
of residence often. (Nazim would be the one high-priority target who would
elude Nemesis completely.) A review of memoirs by prominent Ittihadists
living abroad at the time shows that their own spy networks were urging
caution only a few months later, by the spring of 1922. “Just about everybody
is changing their locations. Haci Adil Bey has left Munich, Nesimi and Halil
Bey are about to leave soon, but not right away in these days. But a second
assassination is to be expected after a period of calm. In here, I too survey
everywhere at all the times.”16

Shiragian’s assassination of Said Halim was the most flamboyant of the

Nemesis kills. After arriving in Rome, Shiragian befriended a young war
widow named Maria, who invited him to live with her. While stringing
Maria along, Shiragian located Said Halim’s villa at 18 Via Bartolomeo
Eustachio, only a short train ride from the city center. The former Grand
Vizier had established for himself the life of an Italian gentleman with an
entourage, having hired a full-time Italian chef, a Swiss woman as
housekeeper, a bodyguard Tevfik Azmi, as well as “the Moor Bilal,” a young
man Halim had adopted in Turkey who was always at his side. Loitering in
the neighborhood renowned as a lover’s lane, Shiragian began to woo a
young Greek girl who lived nearby, curbing any suspicions as to his
perpetual presence in the neighborhood. He made himself familiar with Said
Halim’s habits and schedule, particularly when he was likely to leave or
return to his villa.
 Like Tehlirian, Shiragian was impatient to act. But unlike his fellow
avenger, he was not going to wait forever for approval from higher-ups. Like
Tehlirian, Shiragian was plagued by a fear of failure, but his solution was to
move forward. (Perhaps because he had not been a soldier, he was not as
obedient to the chain of command.) Fearing that Halim might suddenly decide
to leave Rome, Shiragian made a decision to act. Unlike Tehlirian, who had
spent the night before Talat’s assassination alone in his room weeping as he
sang sad songs, Shiragian went shopping. He bought eye-catching new
clothes designed to create drama and distract observers from his personal
features. He found a wide-brimmed black hat and a large black overcoat.
Perhaps anticipating a possible inspection of his corpse by the police
coroner, he made sure that everything he wore was brand-new, from his
underwear outward.
The next morning Shiragian cleaned and checked his pistol, caught the
train out to Said Halim’s neighborhood, and posted himself outside the villa.
Helena, his neighborhood girlfriend, happened by, and before Shiragian
could avoid it, he found himself engaged in amorous conversation. Trying to
keep his distance, he claimed that his father was arriving any minute and that
he couldn’t stop and talk to her. Helena was confused. Hadn’t Shiragian told
her that his father was dead? Also, why would he be meeting his father in this
neighborhood? Hardly paying any attention to her, Shiragian kept a lookout
for the approaching horse-drawn carriage.
According to his memoirs, having spied the carriage, Shiragian stepped
away from Helena into the middle of the street and placed himself directly in
its path. In one deft move, he raised his hand, forcing the horse to rear, then
slipped around to the side, stepped up onto the running board, and, face-to-
face with the startled former Grand Vizier, fired once. The bullet caught Said
Halim square in the middle of his forehead, killing him instantly. Shiragian
then turned his gun on the former Grand Vizier’s bodyguard, Tevfik Azmi,
and ordered him to throw his weapon out the window as the startled horse,
with the carriage in tow (and Shiragian hanging on to its side), raced down
the avenue. Shiragian, who was not only an able assassin but an effusive
narrator, describes the moments after the assassination with the imagery of an
action movie: “madly racing horses” and “the Pasha’s head dangling out of
the side of the carriage.” He sees himself in the starring role: “The strong
wind had caught my coat; it was flying straight out from my back and made
me look like a huge, black bird.”17
Contemporary newspaper accounts of the murder are not so colorful,
describing a more perfunctory killing, with Shiragian stepping up to Said
Halim as he paid his driver and shooting him in the head. However he
accomplished his task, Shiragian did kill Said Halim with one shot before he
ran. The coachman managed to give chase in his carriage, but traffic got in
his way and Shiragian made a clean escape. Though Shiragian does not
mention an accomplice on the day, eyewitnesses stated that when he lost his
coat and hat, another man quickly picked the items up and ran off in another
direction. Fortunately for Shiragian, “the Moor Bilal” rushed out of the house
just a few moments too late, telling a reporter for Il Messaggero, “If I had
reached him, I would have devoured him.”18
In his memoir Shiragian muses:

Many persons, informed of the details of my work and behavior, have

asked why I did not kill Azmi or others. I thought the answer obvious:
Azmi had no responsibility for the planning or the execution of the
massacres of the Armenian people. He had fought as a colonel during
the Gallipoli campaign, and as a reward for his bravery he had been
promoted and afterwards made secretary and bodyguard to Said
Halim. Our organization had not embarked on a program of mass
extermination-genocide. We were meting out punishment to persons
who had been tried in absentia and who had been found guilty of mass
murder. There were Armenian traitors high on this list as well.19

Shiragian found his way out of the neighborhood and back to Maria’s
place in the city. It was clear to him upon his girlfriend’s arrival home that
she had seen the banner headlines in the afternoon newspapers and had
deduced that her lover was the assassin. She dropped hints about a
“murderous Pasha” being assassinated, then teased the young killer about
what “bad boys” can and can’t do. Then she suggested the two retire to her
villa in the country for a couple of days to “rest,” an offer Shiragian couldn’t
refuse.20 Despite a massive manhunt for the assassin in the black hat, he was
never apprehended.
Behaeddin Shakir and Djemal Azmi (Berlin, April 17, 1922)

Though he was eager to return to Baku to continue his pursuit of Enver,

Arshavir Shiragian was handed a different assignment: he and five others
would head for Berlin to “finish the job” that Tehlirian had begun:
eliminating the other members of Talat Pasha’s council in exile. Shahan
Natali would accompany Shiragian and bring along his trusted cohort Aram
Yerganian (with whom Shiragian had shared the Georgian dungeon).21
The Nemesis team resumed their reconnaissance in Berlin. Again Hrach
“Hrap” Papazian posed as Mehmed Ali, Turkish playboy. Along for the ride
was Seto Jelalian and Arshag Yezdanian (Yezid Arshag). Seto, who had been
the Yerevan police chief during the short-lived republic, would be a problem
due to his unreliable reports. For every Shiragian or Tehlirian there was an
operative like Seto, who reminded Shiragian of the nameless agent “M”
(possibly Grigor Merjanov) in Rome. Arrogant and preoccupied, “M” felt
that the younger men should shoulder most of the burden of stalking the
targets. Shiragian complains in his memoir of “M” coming up short time and
time again.
Yezid Arshag had problems, too, with anger management. When he drank,
his temper would flare up, potentially bringing unwanted attention to the
plotters. After the assassination of Talat, the game had become much more
dangerous in Berlin, and the tiniest slip-up could be fatal. Police all over
Europe were on the lookout for suspicious activity associated with Turks,
having concluded that the killings of Talat and Said Halim Pasha were not
isolated incidents but the work of an organized conspiracy. Yezid Arshag
was sent home.
To get closer to the targets, Hrap Papazian befriended Djemal Azmi’s son
Kemal, as well as Talat’s widow. This job was particularly difficult because
as “Mehmed Ali,” Papazian was expected to share stories from the old
country. The attacks on the Armenians were a favorite subject. At one dinner,
Papazian was forced to listen to Azmi’s boast that when he was governor of
Trebizond, “the fishes ate well that year,” referencing the mass drownings of
Armenians in the Black Sea.
Arshavir Shiragian, always eager to court danger, was residing with the
family of a local German policeman known to him as “Herr Sack.” Shiragian
had convinced Sack that he was the son of a rich Romanian Armenian oil
baron, and in that way gained the policeman’s trust. Shiragian even
befriended the family’s German shepherd, Robert, volunteering to take the
dog out for his daily walk. This familiarity with Sack would prove handy
when Shiragian needed to register as a foreign visitor to the city. It was
exactly this sort of registration that could expose Shiragian for what he was,
a secret agent. Sack, believing that he was doing nothing more than a
harmless favor, pushed the paperwork through, never suspecting that his
young tenant was a seasoned killer.
It was on a pleasant April night that the team, led by Shiragian, prepared
its attack. Shiragian and Yerganian shared a meal in a restaurant, morbidly
joking that it might be their “last supper.” Knowing that Shakir and his
entourage usually went for a walk after dinner, the two men hung around the
crowded avenue. About ten p.m. they caught sight of Djemal Azmi and Dr.
Shakir strolling with their usual entourage amidst the crowd streaming from
the local cinemas. This group, led by Dr. Rusuhi Bey, was followed by
Azmi’s wife, daughter, mother, and eldest son’s fiancée, in turn followed by
Azmi and Shakir, who strolled arm in arm. Bringing up the rear was Talat’s
widow, Hayriye Talat Bafrali, who accompanied Shakir’s wife. A blond
man, probably a hired German bodyguard, followed at a discreet distance.
Suspecting that Rusuhi Bey was armed, and wary of the blond German,
the assassins kept their distance, hidden in the shadows of an elm. The
entourage wended its way along Uhlandstrasse, not far from the
Kurfürstendamm. People streamed from every direction, smoking, chatting.
Shiragian notes that the great silent film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler was
playing at one of the film houses. The small knot of Turks seemed relaxed, at
ease in the crowd. Yerganian nervously whispered to Shiragian that they
should call it off, that the presence of the two armed men and the large
crowds would make the hit impossible.
Shiragian simply made the sign of the cross over his chest and, ignoring
Yerganian’s pleas, replied that Yerganian could join him or not but he was
going in for the kill, the only option being to attack the group from behind.
Drawing his weapon, Shiragian stepped out into the street. Yerganian
followed. Shiragian nodded and they ran full tilt toward the Turkish
entourage. Talat’s widow, seeing Shiragian’s pistol, screamed and tried to
grab him. He shoved her to one side, thrust his arm forward, and shot Azmi
below his left eye. Azmi fell dead.
Shiragian then turned to Shakir, who in terror simply cried, “Ah, ah, ah.”
Shiragian replied, “Yes, ‘ah’!” He fired, wounding Shakir. Yerganian
shouldered past Shiragian, fired his Mauser, and delivered the coup de grâce.
“Shakir fell across the body of his comrade murderer; their corpses formed a
hideous cross,” Shiragian writes in his memoir. Dr. Rusuhi fainted. Shiragian
does not say what happened to the blond German.
Shiragian and Yerganian ran. The crowd chased after them, shouting,
“Catch them! Stop them!” Recollecting the moment, Shiragian says he was
amused by his partner’s anger. “Like many other comrades, he had never
worked in a European city before.… Here in Europe, these strange Germans
were actually trying to catch us. ‘What do these people want?’ Aram shouted
angrily. ‘What are they saying?’ ”
Shiragian couldn’t resist circling back to the scene of the crime. There he
found the women crouched over the lifeless bodies of Azmi and Shakir. He
continues: “Nor did I feel sorry for their women, who were sobbing and
hysterical, bending over their corpses. Had these women shed one tear for all
the Armenian children, women and men who had been murdered by their
husbands and sons?” Understanding that the police were establishing a
cordon around the area, Shiragian struck up a conversation with a German
family standing in the midst of the onlookers. As the family moved on,
Shiragian exchanged a few words with one of the little girls, took her by the
arm, and together they slipped through the police cordon.

Djemal Pasha (Tiflis, Georgia, July 21, 1922)

The last high-level official remaining on the Nemesis list was Djemal Pasha,
who, along with Talat and Enver, had been one of the “ruling triumvirate” of
the Young Turk Ottoman Empire. Djemal had been in charge of the navy, as
well as commander of the Fourth Ottoman Army in the Arab lands south of
Anatolia. As such, he had overseen the forced surgun (population relocation)
of Armenians into Syria. Djemal was a member of the Central Committee and
was intimately involved in the decision-making process of the Ittihad.
Nonetheless, in 1922, when he published his account of his wartime
activities in a book, Memories of a Turkish Statesman,22 Djemal argued that,
rather than being a driving force behind the deportations, he was dedicated to
protecting and saving Armenians.23
The story was far more complex. In December of 1915, with the empire
fully embroiled in the First World War, an attempt at a secret truce was
brokered by a Tashnag, Dr. Hagop Zavrian (Zavriev). This truce, which
could have ended the war on the southern (Ottoman) flank, was founded on a
plan whereby Djemal would stage a coup against his cohorts, particularly
Enver and Talat. In exchange for a massive bribe and the guarantee that he
would be granted reign over a new state composed of “an independent
Asiatic Turkey consisting of Syria, Mesopotamia, a Christian Armenia,
Cilicia and Kurdistan as autonomous provinces,” Djemal would sue for
peace and end the slaughter of the Armenians. Wealthy Armenians outside of
Turkey stood ready to provide the cash for the bribe. Russia, Britain, and
France agonized over the proposal for months. Finally, “in their [the Allies’]
passion for booty,” the proposal was abandoned, since it deprived them of
the opportunity to take over those territories themselves. Djemal Pasha
would later point to this unconsummated deal as evidence of “protecting”
Armenians. In the end, however, he supported the government effort to
eradicate the Christian population in Turkey, or at least move it out of Asia
Minor.24 If Djemal convinced anyone of his paternal attitude toward the
deportees, Tashnag ears were deaf to his pleas. His name remained on “the
list.”
When the Regional Central Committee of the Tashnag Party operating in
Georgia learned that Djemal was en route to Moscow via Tiflis, it assigned
Stepan Dzaghigian to find and kill the former leader. Dzaghigian was a
veteran who had successfully carried out executions against “war criminals.”
Upon his arrival in Tiflis, Dzaghigian met with the agents who had been
tracking Djemal, and they informed him that Djemal always traveled with
two bodyguards.
Dzaghigian was backed up by his nephew Artashes Kevorkian, and by
Bedros Der Boghosian. When Djemal went for his daily stroll at four p.m. on
July 21, 1922, the killers moved in, surrounding the former leader and his
two bodyguards as they passed the secret Soviet Cheka headquarters. Djemal
Pasha and his young bodyguards died in a fusillade of bullets. Two hundred
Tashnags in Tiflis, Dzaghigian among them, were rounded up by Soviet
Georgian Chekists. Though General Dro, an Armenian fighter with influence
in Soviet circles, interceded on behalf of those arrested, Dzaghigian was
thrown into prison. There were rumors that, while in prison, Dzaghigian
created an underground organization to aid Armenian prisoners in the Soviet
Union. “Provisions and clothing were sent as far as Siberia.”25 But that’s
about the last we know of him. In time, Dzaghigian was exiled to the gulag.
There is no record of his death.

Enver Pasha (Cegen, Tajikistan, August 4, 1922)

Enver Pasha and Dr. Nazim were, of course, high on “the list.” Operation
Nemesis tracked both men but did not succeed in assassinating them. Since
they were targets, and because they died violent deaths, they must be
mentioned here.
Enver Pasha had developed a tenuous relationship with the Soviet
authorities while living in Moscow (where he befriended and was
interviewed by the journalist Louise Bryant, consort of John Reed). Enver
had at first entangled himself in Soviet politics at the 1920 Congress held in
Baku. But as he attempted to insinuate himself into Moscow’s good graces,
he found himself cut off from the center of power in Turkey. Mustapha Kemal
viewed Enver as a real threat to his authority. They were rivals in the
military hierarchy, and on March 12, 1921, only days before Talat’s
assassination, the Turkish Grand National Assembly issued a decree “to the
effect that Enver and Halil Pasha were prohibited from returning to
Anatolia,” as this would be “detrimental” to the workings of Kemal’s new
government.26 Louise Bryant also reports that Enver seemingly had little
affection for his fellow CUP leader Talat. In March, upon receiving word
that Talat had been gunned down in Berlin, “he read the message with no
show of emotion,” Bryant observed, “commenting only that, ‘His time had
come!’ ”27

Understanding that he had to consolidate his power using means outside the
control of Kemal, Enver traveled to Bukhara in Central Asia as a
representative of the Soviet authorities. Ostensibly he was there to help
suppress Islamic uprisings against the local Bolsheviks. Once he was in
Tajikistan, however, on the pretext of going hunting, Enver slipped away
from his Russian escorts and joined up with the local Basmachi rebels,
Central Asian and Turkic Muslims who were rising up against Bolshevik
rule. He assembled a new “Islamic Army,” comprised of Basmachi fighters
who accepted him as leader because of his credentials. In these ancient
Muslim khanates, it was meaningful to the faithful that Enver was the son-in-
law of a previous caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid.
The Russians had had enough of a man they considered a dangerous loose
cannon and began operations to eliminate Enver. At the same time, his
Basmachi followers began to melt away. In early August 1922, a young
Armenian Chekist named Georges Agabekov (Nerses Ovsepyan) led an
attack team into the heart of the daunting Central Asian desert.28 Agabekov
tracked Enver to his lair and then alerted Red cavalry stationed nearby, who
surrounded and ambushed his group. The story that an Armenian, Hagop
Melkumov (Melkonian), actually fired the rifle that killed Enver is
apocryphal.29 Other versions claim that Enver was so mutilated by machine
gun fire that it took two days to identify his body definitively. In 1996
Enver’s body was exhumed from its grave in Ab-i-Derya and returned to
Istanbul. Today his memorial gravesite stands a few yards from Talat’s on
Eternal Liberty Hill in Sisli, testimony to the restored reputations of both
leaders among the Turkish public.30

Dr. Nazim

Dr. Nazim Bey Selanikli (b. 1870) was a founding member of the Central
Committee of the CUP and a key leader of the Special Organization. He was
also instrumental in covering the CUP’s tracks before the leadership fled
Constantinople, destroying incriminating files taken from their headquarters.
Lacking the missing documents, the Turkish trials held in Constantinople
were hobbled and incomplete. The missing documents on the inner workings
of the CUP have left a gaping hole in the history of the organization ever
since.
Nazim managed to elude the Nemesis killers, but in the 1920s Mustapha
Kemal, as the supreme leader of the young Republic of Turkey, took steps to
stamp out any potential opposition to his power as he tightened his grip on
his nation. In 1926, in the wake of an apparent and probably fabricated
attempt on Kemal’s life, important former CUP members were rounded up.
After a dramatic and well-publicized tribunal, Dr. Nazim was implicated in
the conspiracy to assassinate Kemal. The man who had been so successful in
evading the Armenian hunters was found guilty of treason and hanged by the
Turkish government itself.31 Mehmed Djavid Bey, another original Young
Turk Central Committee member, was also implicated in the assassination
attempt and hanged. With the executions of Nazim and Djavid Bey and a
dozen others, Mustapha Kemal secured his hold on power. And another two
names were scratched off the Nemesis list.
 CHAPTER TEN

Aftermath and Ataturk

The memoirs of Soghomon Tehlirian are not the true and full story
of the death of Talat. The time has not yet come to give the public
the true history of the assassination. That will be the work of the
next generation.
—V. Navasartian, Executive Bureau of the Tashnag Party

On September 9, 1922, General Mustapha Kemal triumphantly entered the

city of Smyrna, where the rout of the Greek army had come to its terrible
conclusion. The vibrant Greek and Armenian neighborhoods of the
multicultural metropolis had been reduced to piles of rubble and blackened
timbers. Thousands of Christian civilians had been massacred or consumed
by the conflagration. Naval officers on board British ships at anchor in
Smyrna’s magnificent harbor calmly observed the carnage through binoculars
as hordes of terrified Christians crowded the quay, jumping into the water to
escape the fires raging behind them. Most drowned. The guns of the warships
stood silent as sailors onboard snapped pictures of the great city dying.
Kemal’s Turkish republican army had successfully pushed the Greeks, the
Armenians, the French, and the Italians out of Asia Minor. In the end, the
Allies did nothing to intervene. A decision had been made: Europe would no
longer directly interfere in Turkey. In the United States, Congress drifted
toward isolationism. In the Caucasus, border fighting between the Russians
and the Turks came to a standstill as the Soviets turned their attention on their
immediate neighbors. New alliances were being struck: Italy would sell
arms to Kemal’s nationalists; the Soviets would lend Kemal gold with which
to buy those arms. Britain would find ways to reach out to the Kemalists as it
prepared for the pumping of mineral wealth out from under the sands of
Mesopotamia and Arabia.
General Mustapha Kemal had become a national hero in Turkey. He and
his generals had succeeded in preventing Britain, France, and their allies
from parceling out and consuming their vatan (homeland). The 1920 Treaty
of Sèvres (which had conceded territory to the Armenians and distributed the
rest of Anatolia to the Greeks and Kurds) was scrapped. From his position of
strength, Kemal negotiated new terms. The Lausanne Treaty signed in Paris in
1923 would establish the new Republic of Turkey. As part of this treaty, a
massive and harsh population exchange of Christian (Greek) Turks for
Muslims living in Greece was sanctioned and put into motion, further
“purifying” the Turkish homeland.
Despite its success, the Nemesis operation was problematic for the ARF
by 1922. Sooner or later the plot would be discovered, putting Armenia at a
further disadvantage.1 There had been emotional satisfaction in revenge, but
the assassinations did not feed or clothe or heal the thousands of refugees
stranded in the highlands of the Armenian Republic. Pursuit of an ongoing
program of institutionalized assassination had no further upside, especially
now that Kemal had begun to strengthen Turkey’s connections with the West.
The ARF leadership ordered Garo and Natali to mothball Operation
Nemesis.
No longer the firebrand he had been decades earlier, and crushed by the
devastation of the Armenian population, Garo did not fight the order to stand
down. Shahan Natali, enraged by the decision, accused the ARF leadership
of placating the Turks in the hope of furthering relationships between
Armenia and Turkey. Like many Armenians, he felt that any future dealings
with Turkey were unthinkable. Natali’s objections fell on deaf ears. The
operation was shut down with the simple explanation that it was too
expensive.
The international Armenian community welcomed the news of the
assassinations. War criminals who had escaped Turkey had finally been
punished. More than that, the killings had shown the world that Armenians
were not “sheep,” that they could fight back. For those who had lost family
and friends during the genocide, taking an eye for an eye could give little
comfort, but it did provide some sense of justice. Barely fifty, the passionate
but weary Garo died in 1923. Natali returned to the United States and would
depart the ARF altogether by 1929. Soghomon Tehlirian moved to Serbia,
Arshavir Shiragian to the United States. Misak Torlakian would end up
joining General Dro’s forces fighting the Soviets during World War II. Aaron
Sachaklian, the finance and logistics manager, sealed his ARF records in
Syracuse and never spoke of the operation again, not even letting his own
family know what he had been part of. Hagop Zorian (Hazor) would end up
in Soviet Armenia, where he would be purged by Stalin and die in exile in
1942. Aram Yerganian would move to Argentina, where he died of
tuberculosis in 1934.
Those privy to the British side of these events had also made their exit by
the early 1920s. A year after Aubrey Herbert’s aborted trip to meet with
Kemal in 1922, in an attempt to alleviate his blindness, Herbert had a number
of teeth pulled (the operation had been suggested as a cure) and subsequently
died of blood poisoning at the age of forty-three. Basil Thomson, the man
who had sent Herbert to meet with Talat, was accused in 1921 of wasteful
spending in the Directorate. When he refused to agree to the Special Branch
coming under the control of another department, he was “in his own words,
‘kicked out by the P.M.’ ” When he was arrested while soliciting a prostitute
in Hyde Park in 1925, Thomson’s allies claimed that he’d been “framed.”2
The Protestant charitable organization Near East Relief raised $100
million in aid for orphans and displaced Armenians and other Christian
refugees (mostly in Syria). But with the almost complete eradication of the
Christians in Turkey, the missionary establishment, like the Tashnags, had to
redefine its mandate. With almost no Armenians, Greeks, or Syriac
Christians to attend to, attention had to be turned elsewhere. (A prominent
Tashnag, Hovannes Katchznouni, first prime minister of the Armenian
Republic, published a manifesto in 1923 titled The Armenian Revolutionary
Federation [Dashnagtzoutiun] Has Nothing to Do Anymore!) As the U.S.
mandate was debated in Congress, American Protestant missions modified
and softened their support for the Armenian cause. In the end, the missions
were forced to step lightly around the new Kemalist government. The
missionary organizations owned a great deal of property in Turkey. They
didn’t want it taken from them.3
Eleven days before Talat was killed, Warren G. Harding was sworn in as
the twenty-ninth president of the United States. Harding’s landslide victory
ushered in a deeply corrupt administration as well as a radically different
approach to foreign policy. During his campaign, the handsome Republican
nominee had promised a “return to normalcy,” casting aside the progressive
style of previous administrations, particularly that of the ailing incumbent,
Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Harding specifically rejected the concept of a
League of Nations. During Harding’s brief tenure (he died in 1923, before he
could complete his term of office), he would set an agenda in American
domestic and foreign policy that endures to this day. Harding’s cronies and
the likes of the Dulles brothers would make the needs of big business the first
priorities of foreign policy. Big oil became priority number one.
By the end of World War I, all the major powers understood that the
acquisition of petroleum resources was essential to preservation of the status
quo. Lacking a secure source of oil, armies, navies, and air forces could not
move. Without oil, commerce could not function. The tremendous reserves of
the Near East, what we now call the Middle East, had to be secured for the
West. When the World War I armistice was declared, British forces in
Mesopotamia did not lay down their arms but illegally advanced northward,
taking possession of the region surrounding Mosul, fairly sure that major oil
reserves lay there. As treaties were hammered out, the British claimed all the
Arab lands as part of their “mandate,” despite vigorous protestations from
the Turkish government (not to mention the Arabs). Maps were marked off
with red lines, and the territories were opened up for exploration and
extraction of the “liquid gold.”
Harding’s cronies’ appropriation of the massive Teapot Dome oil rights
and other domestic sites would trigger a major scandal in Washington. But
this didn’t reduce what would eventually become an insatiable appetite for
the world’s oil reserves. Allen Dulles would move to Paris to assist in the
peace talks; there he would develop a close relationship with the British high
commissioner of Turkey, Admiral Mark Bristol, and retired admiral William
Colby Chester. All of these men were committed to creating strong economic
ties with the new Republic of Turkey, seeing Kemal’s new nation as key to
providing a base of operations in the Middle East.
 The new men in power in Washington were savvy enough to allow
bygones to be bygones as far as the crimes committed by the CUP during the
war were concerned. Colby Chester’s characterization of the Armenian
deportations was breathtaking in its deliberate ignorance: “There are no
prejudices against Christians in Turkey, let alone killings of Christians.
Massacres of the past were enormously exaggerated by prejudiced writers
and speakers.” Referring to the deportations that killed hundreds of thousands
of people, Chester made the case that the Turkish government had done the
Armenians a favor by deporting them to the desert: “Those [Armenians] from
the mountains were taken into Mesopotamia, where the climate is as benign
as in Florida and California, whither New York millionaires journey every
year for health and recreation. All this was done at great expense of money
and effort.”4

Americans’ attitude toward intervention in Turkey would be influenced by

propaganda and lobbying. Two films, Auction of Souls and the aborted Forty
Days of Musa Dagh, illustrate the changing dynamic between Americans and
Turkey.
Auction of Souls, or Ravished Armenia (1919), was based on the story of
one young Armenian woman who had been captured by Muslims during the
genocide. After the war, Aurora Mardiganian was “saved” through a program
that existed between the end of World War I and the founding of Ataturk’s
republic in 1923. During this time, missionaries were able to operate
relatively freely in Anatolia, gathering up orphans or, in the case of abducted
Armenian women, buying their freedom. The missions would literally
purchase the young women outright from their captors. The price was one
gold piece for each “soul.”
Sixteen-year-old Aurora was the most famous of all the liberated girls.
She escaped capture, made it to Erzurum (around the same time Tehlirian
was passing through), then on to Tiflis and finally Saint Petersburg. She
immigrated to Oslo, where missionaries assisted her and then sent her to
New York City.
In New York, Mardiganian was in the charge of Nora Wahn, publicity
secretary of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (or
“Near East Relief,” renamed the Near East Foundation in 1930).5 Because of
public interest in what had happened to the Armenians during the Great War,
Mardiganian was interviewed by the New York Sun and the New York
Tribune, whereupon she came to the attention of a screenwriter named
Harvey Gates, who had her tell him the story of her trials. Gates and his
wife, who would become Mardiganian’s legal guardians, arranged for the
publication of her story in the United States and Britain. This narrative,
Ravished Armenia,6 became a best-seller. The book was then sold to
Hollywood. Renamed Auction of Souls, the silent black-and-white film,
directed by Oscar Apfel, was released in 1919. Much of the film stock has
been lost, but portions have survived and are available on the Internet.
Aurora was cast to play herself in the film version of her memoir, an
unpleasant assignment for the traumatized young woman. On her first day on
the set on a Santa Monica beach, she had an emotional meltdown when she
suddenly found herself surrounded by a hundred extras dressed as Turkish
military. Believing she was back in Turkey, she thought her nightmare was
beginning all over again. She had only the vaguest idea what a movie was.
According to Anthony Slide, a film scholar who exhaustively researched
the creation of the film and interviewed Mardiganian in 1988, the producers
worked Aurora relentlessly, paying her only fifteen dollars a week. On one
occasion she broke an ankle while shooting a scene. After it was bandaged,
she was forced to continue filming. Upon completion of the film, which
featured scenes of “ravishment” and massacre, the producers distributed it as
a high-minded examination of the Armenian massacres. At the time, the
American public was happy to embrace anti-Turk and pro-Armenian
propaganda. The producers set up black-tie fund-raisers all around the
country, using this sensational film as a centerpiece.
Aurora Mardiganian was compelled to make a personal appearance at
each of these events, heightening the excitement. Although the film was racy,
critics approached it as an earnest, socially conscious work and wrote
approving notices. Aurora Mardiganian found a certain level of stardom;
however, the pressure of the public appearances finally grew too much for
her, and she ran away. Seven Aurora Mardiganian look-alikes were hired to
make appearances along with showings of the film.

Ravished Armenia was released before Turkish denialists were conscious of

the value of film as propaganda, but as Hollywood grew in its power to
inform, and as the Turkish government began to focus on its Armenian public
relations problem, the next major film slated for production would be
stopped altogether. One of the most popular best-sellers of the early
twentieth century was Franz Werfel’s novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,
a fictional retelling of the story of an embattled Armenian village that fought
off the Turkish military. It is based on the true story of a village near the
Mediterranean coast whose residents resisted deportation and were
eventually rescued by the French navy.
In 1933 The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was a huge critical and
commercial success worldwide. In 1934, as the American edition was about
to reach the bookstores, Louis B. Mayer snapped up the rights for a film
adaptation by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. David O. Selznick, sensing that the
material might be of concern to the Turks, came up with the idea that the film
could avoid tarring all Turks with the same brush by featuring one
particularly evil antagonist. (This was a departure from the tone of the book.)
As a courtesy, through an intermediary, Selznick contacted the Turkish
ambassador and informed him that a production of the adaptation was
imminent.
The wheels of production began to turn, and Irving Thalberg assigned
Carey Wilson to write the Musa Dagh screenplay, with William Wellman as
director (later Rouben Mamoulian would be enlisted to direct) and William
Powell in the lead. Before the first book was sold in the United States, the
Turkish ambassador, Mehmet Munir Ertegun Bey, was in contact with
Wallace Murphy, chief of Near Eastern affairs at the State Department,
expressing his concern. Murphy in turn got in touch with Will Hays, head of
the powerful Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
(MPPDA) in Washington, also known as the “Hays Office,” which acted as
the official censor for the industry. Hays didn’t see why Turkey would have a
problem with the script and gave it his OK.
Turkish government officials let it be known, however, that they wished
production to cease. When this did not happen, objections became threats.
Through intermediaries, the Turkish government made it clear that the film
would be banned in Turkey and that “the Turkish authorities were prepared to
expend every effort all over the world to prohibit the picture.”7 Turkish
professionals and businessmen weighed in and warned the studio that in their
opinion, release of this film would only exacerbate tensions in Turkey. At
one point an MGM executive actually met with the Turkish ambassador. In
addition, MGM’s man in Turkey advised his bosses that the studio’s business
interests in Turkey would suffer. Even the tiny Armenian community in
Istanbul was pressured. Turkish Armenians contacted MGM to ask that the
film be shelved.
MGM would not relent. The story became front-page news in Turkey and
even “threatened Franco-Turkish relations via Muslims in North Africa.”
Eventually, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was drawn into the fray. He
contacted Will Hays and asked him to “dispose of the issue.” Though MGM
had a lot of money invested in the picture, in the end the Hays Office
(utilizing its power via the Production Code of 1930) supported the Turkish
government and refused to give approval for production to commence.
MGM-Loew’s executive William A. Orr “personally informed the Turkish
embassy of his complete support for the Turkish position. He agreed that
filming the novel would be harmful whatever the modifications. Preferably, it
would be better for all parties to drop the scheme altogether.” The Forty
Days of Musa Dagh would not be produced by a major Hollywood studio.
Ambassador Munir Bey saw the victory as confirmation that the story told in
the novel was fiction and he said as much. A version of the novel was finally
produced in 1982, though it fell short of the major studio production that had
been envisioned. The precedent had been set: with enough pressure, Turkish
authorities could affect how their nation was represented in other countries,
including the United States.8

Behind each decision made in and around the region, the United States and its
allies had always had oil in mind. Long before the onset of World War I,
Winston Churchill, then serving as First Lord of the Admiralty, knew that for
his navy to remain powerful, it must have a plentiful supply of oil. Millions
of barrels of petroleum were needed to float a navy that had as its
centerpiece the “super-dreadnought” battleship, the cutting-edge naval
weapon of its time. These massive ships could not run on coal.9 Churchill’s
observation still stands: “Mastery itself was the prize of the venture.”10
International oil cartels had been formed to distribute the oil and share the
wealth. The Americans and the French, who were the only other loud voices
here, were party to these cartels, so they did not interfere with British
acquisition of the Arab lands.
Great Britain relied on its vast navy to control the ports of its empire and
to make war on its enemies.By October 1911, Great Britain had 189 seagoing
vessels requiring fuel oil. Britain needed 200,000 tons of petroleum per
annum, but had no fully secure source for this natural mineral resource.
Neither did Germany. Baku in Azerbaijan had very large proven reserves,
but it lay within the Russian sphere of influence. As the years ticked by and
oil exploration became more sophisticated, the need to exploit the massive
petroleum reserves lying under Turkish, Arab, and Persian deserts became
irresistible.
This thirst for oil compelled a deeper involvement in the Ottoman
Empire. Complex negotiations over oil rights took place almost nonstop in
the decade preceding World War I. “The advantages conferred by liquid fuel
were inestimable,” said Churchill. “Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland
beyond our wildest dreams.”11 British, American, French, and German
leaders and businessmen felt that they had the rights to the mineral resources
in the former Ottoman Empire because they had “discovered” the oil in the
first place. It seemed obvious to the Europeans that the people who had
settled amidst the sand and rocks lying on top of these vast reserves were
irresponsible and backward and had no idea how to exploit what they had.
England, France, and Germany had the muscle to take what they needed. But
then there was the matter of legality. If oil was going to be extracted from
foreign territories, it was essential that this be done in a way that would be
legally binding. Forever.
Turkey’s leaders were aware of the value of this underground treasure,
but they did not have the technology or the engineers to exploit it. It made
better sense to license the lands to the highest bidder. But holding a
straightforward auction was no simple matter. First of all, in the years
leading up to World War I, the Ottoman government was in flux. The sultan,
still wielding power until 1909, had a personal fortune, the Liste Civile,
which included all the oil rights of Arabia. (The Liste Civile or Privy
Treasury was traditionally administered by an Armenian. Under Abdul
Hamid II, the minister of the Liste Civile was Hagop Kazazian Pasha.)
Second, negotiations in the Middle East were always complicated and
multilayered, especially when one was dealing with a bureaucracy as
labyrinthine as that of the Ottoman Empire. Bribes and backroom
negotiations were de rigueur. A middleman was needed.
Enter Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, a Turkish-born Armenian engineer
educated in London, who was a seasoned trader in kerosene and machine
lubricant. The sultan had consulted with Gulbenkian regarding the untold
wealth lying under his empire’s deserts and chose him as the man who would
act as the go-between for financial interests in London and Constantinople.
All Gulbenkian asked in return for his agency was five percent of the
proceeds. At the time, this didn’t seem like an outlandish request. The
respective boards of directors of corporations representing English, French,
and American interests agreed to this arrangement.12
As these contracts became more and more valuable, and as the world
realized the enormous extent of the Middle Eastern oil reserves (to this day,
the oil in the Middle East represents about fifty percent of all known world
reserves), Gulbenkian’s partners moved to renegotiate their arrangement with
him. Their reasoning was simple: five percent of the value of the oil gushing
from the sands would amount to billions of dollars and the net percentage
going to Gulbenkian was too much money for one man. Gulbenkian refused to
trim his percentage. So the national oil cartels, with the backing of their
governments, declared Gulbenkian’s contracts null and void and walked
away from their deal with him. Gulbenkian went to court. Afraid of losing
their legal grip on the concessions, the parties entered protracted negotiations
with Gulbenkian and eventually reached an agreement.
 The Red Line Agreement bound its partners to a “self-denial clause” or non-compete agreement in
which the major powers would share the petroleum resources of the Middle East. Calouste Gulbenkian
claimed to have drawn the original red-line map.
 In 1928 these contracts, in the form of the infamous “red line agreement”
which Gulbenkian would later claim to have authored, created a zone in the
Middle East in which the consortium could operate without interference. For
decades no one but the partners (the national cartels) could extract oil from
the region circumscribed by the red line. This region included all of Iraq,
Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates. The British already had
Persia (Iran) and Kuwait in their pocket.
The agreement was finalized just as the massive “Baba Gurgur” strike
near Kirkuk in northern Iraq began to flow. The field had been known since
ancient times for its eternal (natural gas) fires, but now it would become a
key source of petroleum for the modern world. The Kirkuk fields would
produce hundreds of millions of tons of oil, one of the many massive strikes
that would follow in the years to come. By the time of his death in 1955,
Gulbenkian’s fortune was estimated at between $280 million and $840
million, making him one of the richest men in the world. It’s interesting to
note that the man who originally helped Gulbenkian make contacts with the
Turkish elite was Nubar Pasha, Boghos Nubar’s father. Gulbenkian called
Nubar Pasha “Uncle,” which says a lot about the networks that existed
between the wealthiest Armenians and the highest-level Ottomans.13 The man
who brokered Middle Eastern oil and the man best known as the epitome of
dignified Armenian diplomacy were, for lack of a better term, cousins.14
It has often been argued that Armenia was “sold out” for oil. The loudest
voice here belonged to Vahan Cardashian, who made it his personal crusade
to let the world know how Standard Oil and the Harding administration had
colluded to abandon the Armenian cause in their drive to acquire a foothold
in the Middle East. And as it became more and more clear that Turkey was
digging in its heels and would fight to keep its last territories (namely,
eastern Asia Minor, what many Armenians call “western Armenia”), all
parties understood implicitly that what was important was Iraq. To sum up,
by 1923, the Armenians didn’t have anything that the West desired, but the
Republic of Turkey did.
Iraq, particularly northern Iraq, home to hundreds of thousands of Kurds,
was wild country. It was land that over the centuries had been ruled by
Ottomans, Arabs, Mongols, and Persians. What made it so very valuable now
was oil. Not that the British would ever admit that fact. Speaking in 1922, the
British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, couldn’t have made it more clear that
Britain’s seizure of Mesopotamia/Iraq was not about oil: “I do not know how
much oil there may be in the neighborhood of Mosul or whether it can be
worked at a profit, or whether it may turn out after all to have been a
fraud.”15 It is doubtful that Curzon was unaware of the value of northern Iraq.
Perhaps no direct connection can be made between the loss of the
“Armenian mandate,” or the genocide itself, and the world’s appetite for oil
and other mineral rights. But once the war was over, once the territories of
the former Ottoman Empire were divvied up to everyone’s satisfaction, any
lingering outrage and the impetus on the part of the West to defend and fight
for Armenian rights simply evaporated. Now that the exploitation of Turkey
was a fait accompli and access to oil (guaranteed by international
agreements) enriched all the parties involved, the tragedy of the Christians in
the Ottoman Empire became a footnote of history, one that many would work
hard to erase altogether.

Governments were moving on, but the abandonment of the Armenians was
felt far beyond the borders of Turkey. Only a few years after the war,
Armenians and other “ethnics” from southern Europe found that the welcome
mat so invitingly laid before America’s front door at the end of the nineteenth
century had been suddenly whisked away. When there had been a crying need
for factory workers, thousands upon thousands of immigrants were allowed
to flow into the United States. Hundreds of thousands of “Mediterranean
types” (Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews) had settled in the United States
between the late 1800s and the end of World War I. Who were these people?
Were they trustworthy? Or were they a corrupting influence? After the war,
Americans began to lose their fondness for these swarthy immigrants who
fried their food in olive oil and seasoned it with garlic.
The newcomers were “dirty.” They often had darker skin than most
Americans of northern European descent, many of whom wrongly suspected
that these “unclean” immigrants were the ones responsible for the devastating
“Spanish flu” that killed tens of millions of people after the war. Perhaps
worst of all, these immigrants were stealing scarce jobs away from “real”
Americans struggling in the postwar recession. In the South, the Ku Klux
Klan expanded its war on minorities to include persecution of the new
arrivals. Though the Klan originated as a hate group focused on black
Americans, it vigorously attacked Italians, Jews, and Catholics in the 1920s.
In response to a demand for action, Congress enacted immigration quotas,
with some officials citing the pseudoscience of eugenics, which had risen in
popularity in America, and which would eventually flourish in Nazi
Germany. During the 1920s, impoverished Americans were sterilized so they
could not transmit their defective genes to future generations.16
Were Armenians “white”? As absurd as this question sounds, it was
widely discussed in the early twentieth century. Since Armenians came from
lands east of the Bosphorus (the cartographical dividing line between Europe
and Asia), they could have been considered “Asians.” But after World War I,
the United States began to close off immigration from Asia, as a strict quota
was set with the aim of limiting the flow of Chinese entering the country; so
establishing the racial differentiation of Armenians from other Asians would
help preserve their right to immigrate. Thus the story of how Armenian
“whiteness” entered the annals of American jurisprudence in 1924 in a
federal court in Seattle, in the case of United States v. Cartozian.
Tatos O. Cartozian had to defend his right to American citizenship in
court to prevent his deportation, even though an earlier ruling in 1909 (In re
Halladjian) had already found that “scientific evidence” proved that
Armenians were white. Nevertheless, attorney John S. Coke argued, “It is the
contention of the government that it makes no difference whether a man is a
Caucasian or not or what the racial and language history of his people may
be if the man on the street does not recognize him as white.”17 In other
words, Armenians are not white because they don’t look white. The court
supported the earlier ruling. The deciding factor seemed to be that Armenians
practiced a “Western” religion, Christianity, and thus they were white. In this
way, Christian identity came to help define race.18
In Turkey, identity was also on Mustapha Kemal’s mind. In 1927 Kemal
gave a speech that, with intermissions, took three days to deliver. This
speech, presented at a political party convention, is so famous in Turkey that
it is simply called “Nutuk” (The Speech). In this marathon exposition of his
ideas, Kemal defined his nation and outlined his plans. He systematically
ironed out any problematic historical wrinkles by expunging or avoiding
facts like the CUP’s destruction of the Armenians or the existence of a
Kurdish people in the east.19 He also took all the credit for establishing the
new republic, giving none to his peers and comrades. Taking on the role of
the great paternal leader, Kemal explained to the Turkish people where they
had come from and where he saw them going. He outlined a blueprint for the
future of the nation.
The speech was delivered in the midst of the cultural revolution Kemal
had initiated after establishing the new Republic of Turkey in 1923. Once the
Lausanne Treaty was signed, Turkey was recognized by the major powers
and international relationships were normalized, Kemal began his program of
modernization. He abolished the six-hundred-year-old sultanate and, not long
after that, the caliphate itself, a major symbol of Islam for millions. Kemal
enacted suffrage for women, modernized the alphabet, and imposed
European-style clothing for all Turkish citizens (replacing the fez with the
hat). He negotiated and validated the borders of the new nation, borders that
have endured up to this day. He initiated the rewriting of the official history
of the country, placing the Turks squarely in the center of world civilizations.
In 1935 Kemal ordered the people of Turkey to adopt first and last names. He
himself took the name Ataturk, or “Father of the Turks.”
The charismatic Kemal Ataturk never missed an opportunity to share his
ideas with his nation and the world, becoming one of the most quoted men in
history. He sought to instill in his countrymen a sense of national identity,
repeatedly reminding them that they were “Turks,” a term that before this
time was mainly used by Ottomans to refer to country bumpkins. He
explained to his audience that they were an illustrious people who had
established one of the greatest empires in the history of the world. They were
conquerors, ghazi. (Kemal himself was hailed as “Ghazi” early in his career.
The word means “holy warrior.”) They were a people, a nation, a powerful
force of history. They were more than just Muslims. They were the inheritors
of a great legacy: Ottoman-Turkish culture, strength, and enterprise. To
maintain their vitality, it was imperative that they remain pure and proud.
In the early years of the republic, for the sake of international public
relations, Turkey officially expressed sympathy for the lost Christian
populations. Legislation was passed that seemed to welcome any surviving
Armenians back to their homes, and at least on paper, Christians and Jews
were to be treated like any other citizens in Turkey. But this was a very cold
and toxic embrace. The Turkish government was no longer engaged in an
organized system of deportation, but with Kemal’s endorsement, the ethnic
cleansing of Anatolia would continue. Even after the tragedy of World War I,
there would be no equality for non-Turks in Turkey. Armenians, Greeks, and
Muslim Kurds would be treated as second-class citizens and continue to
suffer. Laws regarding language, inheritance, religious expression, and
education put continual negative pressure on minority groups.20 Unequal
taxation, organized race riots, and persistent genocidal policies (particularly
against the Kurds) would make life very difficult if not impossible for non-
Turks in Turkey, whether they be Christian or Muslim.
Unlike Enver, Kemal showed no enthusiasm for an imagined Turkic
empire stretching across Eurasia. But he was a skillful pragmatist and
understood how important nationalism was to his revolution. In the new
Kemalist republic, all Muslims were welcome as long as they called
themselves Turks, and many communities of Muslims—Circassians, Tartars,
Allevi, Chechens, Laz, even Arabs—were allowed to officially claim Turkic
“roots” in Anatolia whether they had them or not.
Kurds made up as much as twenty percent of the total population in the
new republic at the time of its formation. (Today, Kurds form the vast
majority in the southeast regions of Turkey.) Kurds are Muslim but not
Turkic, and so presented a conundrum for the Kemalists. The solution was
that Kurds would no longer officially be considered a separate people. In
Ataturk’s republic, Kurds were simply Turks who had lost their way; they
were “mountain Turks.” On the ground, Kurds had a choice: be assimilated
or be eradicated. Like the Armenians before them, Kurds were discouraged
from speaking their own language. After World War I, their settlements
would be attacked repeatedly and viciously.
Greeks who lived in western Anatolia (most of whom were Turkish-
speaking) continued to present an entirely different quandary for the
nationalists. Although the 1922 debacle in Smyrna had erased a major
Christian population center and terrorized those who had managed to
survive, there were still hundreds of thousands of Greek Christians living in
Turkey. As part of the Lausanne Treaty, a massive population swap was
negotiated. For outsiders watching from Europe, such a swap seemed
logical. The plan was simple: all the “Greeks” in Turkey would “return” to
Greece and all the “Turks” in Greece “return” to Turkey. Sadly, these
“Greeks” and “Turks” were defined by religion only. Often the Muslim
“Turks” in Greece did not speak Turkish and the Christian “Greeks” in
Turkey did not speak Greek. As a result, the deportees faced discrimination
when they were “returned” and eventually, like the Kurds in the east, were
forced to live as less than full citizens.
The few Armenians who had survived the debacle and who tried to return
only found more hardship, sometimes death. Even Armenians who had
converted to Islam continued to suffer discrimination. As a final blow, the
Armenians as a people were excised from the official history of Turkey in
what Donald Bloxham has called “a systemic, state-sponsored rewriting of
Armenian and Turkish history.”21
Kemal’s revision of the historical narrative was formalized in 1932 at a
Turkish Historical Congress in Ankara. From this convention was born a
three-year project resulting in a spurious “Outline of Turkish History.” The
“thesis” on which it was based was complete fantasy, proclaiming that
Turkey was the “original” civilization giving birth to all other civilizations,
including Greek, Egyptian, and Roman. This “history” was backed up with a
pseudoscientific language analysis called “the Sun Language theory” (gunes-
dil teorisi), which claimed that all world languages had evolved from a
Turkic root language. With their radical distortion of the truth, these theories
never gained much traction, and were mostly abandoned after Kemal’s
death.22
Vestiges of these theories nevertheless persist in contemporary Turkish
culture. A tourist visiting the Archeological History Museum of Anatolia, a
major attraction adjacent to Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, receives an in-depth
survey of the history of the land now called Turkey (more or less Asia
Minor) spanning thousands of years. Bizarrely, the Armenians, who were
settled in the region for two thousand years before the Seljuk Turks arrived,
are not mentioned once. This museum is only one of more than fifty such
museums that exist all over the Republic of Turkey,23 contributing, along with
schools and publishing houses, to the education and mind-set of all Turkish
students. These institutions teach Turkish citizens the “truth” about their
country’s history with displays of artifacts and charts and maps. Because of
this concerted effort to misinform, most citizens of Turkey have only the
vaguest idea of who the Armenians were and what happened to them.24
Not far from Taksim Square, where in the summer of 2013 protests
against the Erdogan administration were met with police violence, stands the
immense Istanbul Military Museum, “dedicated to one thousand years of
Turkish military history.” Along a dark corridor deep within the building is a
large room labeled simply “Hall of the Armenian Issue with Documents”
(Belgelerle Ermenia Sorunu Salonu). This compact exhibition features along
its walls dozens of photographs of atrocities purportedly committed by
Armenian “gangs.” Many are dated in the summer of 1915, the very period
when the worst acts of violence were taking place against the Armenian
population living in eastern Asia Minor. In the center of the room is a large
glass case. In the case is a striped dress shirt, still stained with patches of
blood. This is the shirt Talat was wearing when he was shot. A plaque
outlines Talat’s biography. There is no mention of his conviction for war
crimes by the Ottoman courts in 1919. The final sentences simply say: “He
was killed in Berlin by an Armenian called Sogomon Tehlerian [sic] in
1921. His remains were taken to Istanbul in 1943 and reburied in the
cemetery at Hurriyet-I Ebediye Hill [Monument of Liberty Hill].” The
message of the hall is clear: Armenians constituted a real danger to Turkey
during World War I, culminating in the murder of a Turkish patriot. (Enver’s
remains are also interred on Liberty Hill.)
If you fly Turkish Airlines from one area of Turkey to another, the in-flight
magazine will feature a map of the region. Although all adjacent countries
are labeled on the map, only an empty unlabeled outline of the modern
country of Armenia can be found. On another flight within the country of
Turkey, I watched an in-flight video about the city of Van, the fortress city
once a bastion for Armenians which at the beginning of the genocide was
attacked and overwhelmed by the Turkish military. This city is today a tourist
destination, featuring lovely medieval Armenian Christian architecture.
Though Van was once a thriving center for Turkish Armenians, there are no
Armenians living there today. The promotional video, like so much of the
media that make up our modern history, makes no mention of Armenians
whatsoever.
The cult of Kemal grew alongside the concept of “Turkishness.”25 Even when
visiting Turkey today, it is impossible to venture very far without seeing
Ataturk’s ruggedly handsome face gazing down upon you. His portrait hangs
behind the counter in nearly every shop, on the wall of every office. His
image is printed on all currency. He is omnipresent. In this secular state,
Ataturk has replaced God as the ultimate authority. It is true that Islam
discourages naturalistic representation in religious art and architecture, and
for that reason Ataturk’s image stands out even more. But in some respects
Ataturk transcends even Islam, because he symbolizes Turkey itself.
The pervasive nature of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey is the product of his
own self-promotion. Like other world leaders of his period, he harnessed the
power of the mass media to win over a public vulnerable to the influence of
film and radio. For example, in interviews and speeches, he redefined his
role as an effective and able general at Gallipoli to “the man who saved
Constantinople.” This legend would only grow, and by the end of his life,
Ataturk was known to his countrymen as “the man who saved Turkey” and
“the father of the country.” For the rest of Ataturk’s life, every speech and
interview he gave would erode the reputations of his contemporaries while
elevating his own stature. Schoolchildren would begin each day pledging, “O
Ataturk the great! I swear that I will enduringly walk through the path you
opened and to the target you showed. May my personal being be sacrificed to
the being of the Turkish nation. How happy is the one who says: ‘I am a
Turk.’ ”26 To this day, Law 5816 makes disparaging Ataturk a criminal act.
This law has been used against journalists.27

To be the father of a people, there has to be “a people.” This is an essential

element of nationalism. “A people” can be defined culturally, linguistically,
religiously. But there is usually an underlying notion of “pure blood.” The
entire ideology of the Young Turks was built on this racist notion of pure-
bloodedness. Perhaps people with “pure blood” do exist in the most northern
reaches above the Arctic Circle or on some isolated Pacific island. But the
last place on earth where genetic “purity” could ever exist would be in the
territories of the former Ottoman Empire. Not only was this region an
enormous melting pot, but also the very nature of Turkish society and its
institutions guaranteed that non-Turkic “blood” would be continuously
intermixed with the genetic repository of the original invaders from the Far
East. Ataturk himself, with his blue eyes and light skin, appears to have been
descended from Slavic Europeans, not Turkic invaders.
Not only would Turkish history be rewritten by Ataturk, not only would
the Turkish government take the position that no coordinated extermination of
the Armenians had ever taken place, but also any previous written history
became essentially unavailable because it was literally unreadable. Until
1929, Turkish was written in an Arabic script; after 1929, a twenty-nine-
character Western alphabet would be employed. (Ironically, this new
alphabet was created by an Armenian, Hagop Martayan Dilicar, a favorite of
Ataturk’s.) Words themselves were altered to make them more “Turkish.”
Vocabulary was deleted, new words added.
Place-names all over the country were Turkified (for example, “Smyrna”
became “Izmir”), which only added confusion and another obfuscating layer
to the buildup of historical sediment. In fact, the Turkish language has
changed so radically since the time of Kemal’s “Nutuk” that a Turk living
today would not be able to understand his actual words. The speech literally
has to be translated for contemporary Turkish speakers. Most important, any
record, history, or document created prior to 1929 is totally unreadable by
all Turks and even most scholars. The impact of this makeover has been to
significantly impede historical research, and it is one of Ataturk’s most
devastating accomplishments.
In 1938 Kemal Ataturk’s lifestyle, fueled by little sleep, high-octane raki,
chain-smoking, and endless cups of black coffee brought his intense life to an
end. He was fifty-seven when he died of cirrhosis of the liver. By this time
his godlike status in Turkey was unassailable. Like Stalin and Mao, he had
held his country in thrall for decades, and when he died, new personalities
and institutions would try unsuccessfully to fill the void he left behind. The
struggle within Turkey that continues to this day is the legacy of Kemal
Ataturk’s radical reformation, made possible by his tremendous vitality and
charisma and his commitment to the goals of the Ittihad. That vision, of the
Ittihadists and, by extension, Kemal Ataturk, did not include the non-Muslim
population of what was once the Ottoman Empire.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

Post-Ataturk

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you
remember and how you remember it.
—Gabriel García Márquez

In the decades following World War I, the Republic of Armenia became

fully integrated into the Soviet Union. At the same time, the newborn
Republic of Turkey reinforced its alliance with the United States. Christians
in Turkey continued to be persecuted, while the Turkish government actively
refused to acknowledge the organized destruction of the Ottoman Empire
Armenians during the war. The prospect of violence constantly loomed. In
1933, an Armenian archbishop in New York City was murdered by members
of the ARF for his pro-Soviet posture. In the 1940s and 1950s, organized
harassment and killing of Armenians and Greeks in Turkey led to further
“purification” of the population. Military coups unseated at least three
Turkish governments. In the 1970s and 1980s, radical Armenian terror cells
calling themselves the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia
and the Justice Commandos murdered dozens of Turkish diplomats and their
associates. In 1991, in the midst of a war with neighboring Azerbaijan, the
Republic of Armenia broke free from the defunct Soviet Union. When the
outspoken Armenian humanist Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish periodical
Agos, was assassinated in broad daylight outside his offices in Istanbul in
2007, some saw the killing as a long-delayed reprisal for the murder of
Talat.
As the decades have passed, Kemal’s former opponents in the CUP, all dead
by 1930, were resuscitated as heroes in the Turkish national consciousness.
As a first step, on March 31, 1923, Turkey declared a general amnesty for all
those accused of planning the massacres.1 Families of the victims of the
“Armenian hit men” were bequeathed pensions and property, very often
property that had belonged to wealthy Armenians killed during the genocide.
In the 1940s, during the Nazi period in Germany, as his body was
ceremoniously returned to Istanbul, Talat was hailed as a hero of the republic
and a monumental gravesite was commissioned. Schools continued to teach
an alternative history in which no crimes were ever committed against
Armenians in Turkey. Turkish historians with few or no scholarly credentials
wrote long tracts “proving” that there was no such thing as an Armenian
people, let alone a genocide against them (just as it would also become
government policy to say that the Kurds were in fact “mountain Turks”).
Turkey claimed that Armenians had never existed, while the official Turkish
history of World War I reported that Armenians had committed massacres
against the Turks.
After Ataturk’s death, the Kemalist bias against Christian minorities
continued. In 1942, a special “wealth tax,” the Varlik Vergisi, was enacted by
Ataturk’s successor, Erdal Inonu. It was “a form of state racketeering that
found a particularly easy target in the vulnerable religious minorities.”2 The
tax, never enforced against Muslims, was ruinous for any Christian or Jew
who had somehow managed to hang on to property or a business in Turkey.
Those who would not or could not pay the tax were literally packed off in
chains to concentration camps in the mountains. There they spent their days
breaking rocks. Even the historian Bernard Lewis, who has taken a stand
against using the term “genocide” when describing the events of 1915 and
1916,3 has stated, “It soon became apparent that the really important data
determining a taxpayer’s assessment were his religion and nationality.”4
The Turkish public accepted this brutal treatment of minorities because
anti-Semitism and anger over war profiteering were trumpeted nonstop in the
Turkish press. From an opinion piece:

If you don’t believe it, stop by a bazaar, a covered market. [A

consignment of] wool arrived. You would order a sweater for your
 daughter but the shop owner tells you “All out!” Our Jewish
compatriot has purchased it. Some printed linen has arrived. You
would like to have a bathrobe made for your daughter-in-law, but the
shop owner tells you “All out!” Our Jewish compatriot has purchased
it. Rouge has arrived. There’s none left. Our Jewish compatriot has
purchased it. Some powder has arrived. There’s none left. Our Jewish
compatriot has purchased it. Socks have arrived. They’re all gone.
Our Jewish compatriot has purchased them.5

Newspapers ran political cartoons featuring scowling hook-nosed Jews and

Armenians licking their chops over obscene profits extracted from poor
Muslims. Later, when middle-aged businessmen were sent to the labor
camps, they were depicted in cartoons boasting of their skill at stacking
rocks because they were so good at stacking gold.
Over a thousand men were arrested and sent to hard labor. Many died. At
its peak in 1943, the program attracted the attention of foreign diplomats and
press. According to a British embassy report: “Thirty-two wealthy Istanbul
non-Moslems were deported to East Anatolia January 27 for hard outdoor
labor as punishment for non-payment of individual assessments of the recent
Turkish capital levy.… These 32 average over fifty-five years of age,
although the legal age limit for deportees is fifty-five. They include 15 Jews,
8 Armenians, 9 Greeks and no Turks. The deportation was marked by the
maximum psychological torture.”6 Scrutiny by the United States and Great
Britain embarrassed Turkey into rescinding the law in late 1943. Turkish
officials later denied that it had ever existed in the first place, painting a new
layer of secrecy over the old.
When World War II ended, Soviet Armenians lobbied Moscow to
reconsider its abrogation of pro-Armenia treaties with Turkey. (During
World War I, Russia had occupied eastern Anatolia, land that the Armenians
considered rightfully theirs. After World War I, the USSR relinquished this
territory to Turkey.) Victorious against the Nazis, Armenians saw no reason
why Soviet Armenia should not now reclaim these eastern Turkish
territories. As Russia massed its troops along the Turkish-Armenian SSR
border, preparing to reoccupy the “Armenian homelands” of Turkey,
President Harry S. Truman interceded in a way that would fundamentally
alter the world’s political landscape. Fearing that a Russian invasion of
Turkey would destabilize the Middle East (read: threaten the oil supply)
while furthering the spread of communism, Truman announced that any attack
on Turkey would be seen as an attack on the United States and would receive
the appropriate response. Russia backed down.
The era of the “Truman Doctrine” had begun. It bound Turkey and the
United States into a strategic partnership. Though this bond has been strained
at times, it has served the United States well and provided Turkey with a vast
source of arms and funding. Not long after the doctrine was initiated, the
United States began to pump money into the Republic of Turkey, with totals
eventually rising to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. (Combined
economic and military aid to Turkey since the inception of the Truman
Doctrine has reached almost $30 billion.) This money not only assisted
Turkey economically but also announced to the world that Turkey was now a
member of the postwar “family of nations” headed by the United States. In
addition to direct aid, Turkey received millions more as a participant in the
postwar Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe—this despite the fact that Turkey
sat out most of the war and no Turkish troops ever faced combat in World
War II. As a member of NATO, Turkey maintains the organization’s largest
standing army outside the United States.
After the war, as relations with the United States grew warmer, the
harassment and destruction of non-Muslim communities continued. On the
night of September 6–7, 1955, state-organized riots against Greek homes and
businesses in Istanbul (triggered by an alleged terrorist bombing of Ataturk’s
ancestral home in Salonika) brought a total end to the Greek presence in
Turkey. “In relatively few hours, forty-five Greek communities in the greater
Istanbul area had been savagely attacked by extensive arson and vandalism,
and the larger Greek community lay ruined in its homes, shops and
businesses, churches, cemeteries, medical clinics, schools and
newspapers.”7 Following the attacks, many Greeks remaining in Turkey
departed. The few Armenians living in Istanbul were also viciously attacked
during these riots. The eradication of a Christian business presence in Turkey
was complete.8
Though the actions of Nemesis committed during the 1920s had been far
from legal, the ARF found ways to advertise its clandestine activities.
Tehlirian’s autobiography, written in Armenian with Vahan Minakhorian (a
Tashnag minister of education who had been among those chased out of
Soviet Armenia in the 1920s) was published in Cairo in 1953. Soon other
memoirs and interviews would follow. These remained part of underground
lore but could not compensate for the fact that there had yet to be any real
recognition of the genocide in any official capacity. Armenians everywhere
feared that the memory of this colossal tragedy might be buried altogether by
the Turkish government’s concerted disinformation effort.

In 1951 a massive statue of Stalin was erected in Yerevan, the capital city of
Armenia. It was so huge that Vasily Grossman would write: “This monument
towers over Yerevan and the whole of Armenia. It towers over Russia, over
the Ukraine, over the Black and Caspian seas, over the Arctic Ocean, over
the forest of eastern Siberia, over the sands of Kazakhstan. Stalin and the
state are one and the same.”9 This statue symbolized the iron grip that the
Soviets had on the Armenians. From its inception, this grip had led to bloody
confrontations, the most dramatic being the murder of an Armenian
archbishop in New York City in 1933, which in turn created a schism in the
diaspora that would endure for decades.
The genesis of this schism lay in the nature of Armenia’s “salvation” by
the Soviets. For the Armenian diaspora, the new Armenian Soviet Socialist
Republic was a glass half-full. Here was a “soviet republic” made up almost
entirely of Armenians, many of whom had been either refugees from
Anatolian Turkey or children of those refugees. Though the fighting and
killing had finally ended, Armenia was a landlocked state with almost no
resources other than its weary populace. Yerevan could trace its history back
over two thousand years. Within its boundaries stood Etchmiadzin, the
fifteen-hundred-year-old holy city founded by Gregory the Illuminator.
Etchmiadzin was the home to the Catholicos of all Armenian Apostolic
Christians, making the city and the tiny SSR a kind of mecca for Armenians
scattered across the world. Yet for many Armenians living in the West, the
Republic of Armenia was on the wrong side of what would soon be labeled
the “iron curtain.”
 The Armenian revolutionaries who had led the republic during its short
life at the end of World War I had been ousted when the Armenian SSR was
founded. Most had sought safety in Iran or the new French and British
protectorates in the Levant. To further complicate the matter, while securing
the new SSR, Stalin broke off Armenian territories and “gave” them to
Azerbaijan (also an SSR). This move would preserve a violent enmity
between the nations which endures to this day. Those Tashnags remaining in
Armenia were disposed of by Lenin’s security forces, the Cheka.
An equal number of Armenians lived in the United States, France,
Lebanon, Syria, Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria (former possessions of the
Ottoman Empire) as lived in Armenia proper. Within each community were
thousands of survivors who had mixed feelings about Tashnags. Some sided
with the ARF, believing that in the years leading up to and including World
War I, the only appropriate Armenian response to Turkish violence was
strong revolutionary, often violent action. Others (and among these I would
include my own grandparents) felt that the politically activist Armenians
were troublemakers who willingly courted violence. These “moderate”
Armenians wanted to put the past behind them and live peaceably in their
adopted country, whether it be the United States, the Soviet Union, or
Lebanon.
As Turkey “emerged” as a state, Armenia had to contend with its own
complex kaleidoscope of truth. Stalin’s hold on Armenia was absolute.
Appealing to the nationalistic feelings of many diasporans, Stalin had invited
the scattered Armenians to return to the homeland, and many had accepted the
invitation. Unfortunately, this invitation was as much a trap as an opportunity.
As he would do so often, Stalin gathered up his imagined enemies so he
could more easily dispose of them. The secret police worked relentlessly to
root out anyone with even the slightest inclination toward independent
thought or self-determination, and thousands of these Armenian returnees
were exiled to Siberia. It is estimated that ten thousand Armenians died or
were sent to Siberia in the first two decades of the Armenian SSR. Life in
urban Armenia, as in all of Stalinist Russia, became paranoid and insecure.10
In the period between the wars, the Armenian communities in the United
States centered on the church. Virtually every Armenian attended church,
through which most social events were organized. Around the world, the
hierarchy of the church was complex, with patriarchs residing in Etchmiadzin
(near Yerevan), Jerusalem, and Istanbul, and Catholicoi in Sis (then in
Antelias, Lebanon) and Etchmiadzin. (Confusingly, the “Catholicos of All
Armenians” in Etchmiadzin also has the title of patriarch.) Since the Holy
See of Etchmiadzin was located within the Armenian SSR, the Catholicos
embraced the Soviet system for the sake of harmony with the mother country.
This position was unacceptable to the Tashnags, who held fast to their dream
of a totally independent Armenia. The Tashnags honored an alternative
Catholicos living outside the Soviet Union.
In the United States, Tashnags and moderate Armenians fought openly. In
New England, the Tashnags badgered Archbishop Ghevont Tourian, the
church’s representative in the eastern United States. Arriving at church-
sponsored events, nationalists would unfurl the flag of the short-lived first
Armenian Republic. Fights would break out. Archbishop Tourian held to the
position that since Etchmiadzin was the Armenian holy city, and since it
existed within the USSR, it was essential to maintain peaceful relations with
Moscow. The Tashnags were adamant, insisting that “a free, independent,
and united Armenia has been, and continues to be, the goal of Tashnag and
Armenian national aspirations.”11
On Christmas Eve 1933, Archbishop Tourian performed mass at the Holy
Cross Armenian Apostolic Church in the Bronx. As he made his way down
the center aisle, blessing the congregation as part of the Badarak, the holy
liturgy of the Armenian Apostolic Church, a parishioner in an overcoat stood
up from his pew and stepped toward the cleric. This man in the overcoat was
followed by another and then another. The men shouldered their way past the
acolytes on either side of Tourian and surrounded him. Blocking the view of
the congregation, Tourian was stabbed repeatedly with a long butcher knife.
As the holy father collapsed onto the Oriental carpeting, the men made for the
exits. Tourian would soon bleed to death as the terrorized churchgoers fled
onto 187th Street.
Several men were arrested, convicted of first-degree murder, and sent to
prison. Two received death sentences, later commuted to life imprisonment
by the governor of New York State. But the damage had been done. From this
point on, the diaspora in the United States would be split into clearly defined
Tashnag and non-Tashnag camps. New churches were built for the Tashnag
congregations. As a youngster I remember passing the Watertown Tashnag
church, Saint Stephen’s, and asking my father why there were two Armenian
churches only a few blocks apart. I’m not sure he knew himself.
The ARF was now isolated, yet it continued to see itself as the champion
of Armenian destiny. Armenian nationalism became the religion of the
Tashnag organization, with the Soviet state replacing the Ottoman Empire as
enemy. Then, in the late 1930s, the very same church fathers living in Soviet
Armenia who had tried to make peace with Moscow were rounded up by the
GPU, heirs to the Cheka security forces and forerunners of the KGB.
“Catholicos Khoren [I Muradbekyan] did not survive the Great Purges of
1936 to 1938.… [H]is death, on April 6, 1938, is believed to have been
ordered by the secret police.”12 A new sense of desperation set in.
In time, Tashnag and non-Tashnag Armenians would see that some kind of
uneasy unity was inevitable, especially since a new consciousness was rising
within Soviet Armenia itself. In the spring of 1962, the massive statue of
Stalin described by Grossman was replaced by an equally impressive statue
of “Mother Armenia.” On April 24, 1965, Armenians in Yerevan
memorialized the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide with a massive
demonstration. Uncharacteristically, the local apparatchiks refrained from
cracking down on the demonstrators. Political awareness and activism in
Armenia grew.
In the late 1980s, a series of major events ushered in a new era for
Armenia. A massive earthquake hit the country, leaving at least thirty
thousand people dead; war broke out with Azerbaijan over the disputed
territories; and Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika stimulated
the birth of freedom movements all over the Soviet sphere, especially in
Armenia. Seemingly overnight, the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991, as it
broke up into its constituent pieces. The Republic of Armenia was reborn.
As the Nemesis killings receded deeper into the past, the conspirators
began to publicly discuss those events more brazenly. Aram Yerganian’s
memoir, We Killed This Way, had been posthumously published in Armenian
by Shahan Natali in 1949. Tehlirian’s memoir was published in 1953. Misak
Torlakian’s The Course of My Life was published in Beirut in 1963. In 1964
Natali published an extended article explaining in impossibly lyrical
language how Operation Nemesis assassinated Talat. In 1965 Arshavir
Shiragian, by this time a successful American businessman (reputed to have
made millions selling parachute silk to the U.S. government during World
War II), appeared on American Armenian television and, speaking in
Armenian, described his involvement. Also around this time, Lindy V.
Avakian, the son of a close friend of Tehlirian’s, published The Cross and
the Crescent, a loose account of the conspiracy, much of it written in the first
person, in Tehlirian’s voice. This was followed by the publication of The
First Genocide of the 20th Century by James Nazer in 1968, a disturbing
collection of photographs and articles exposing the crimes against the
Armenians. The book concludes with portraits of Shiragian, Misak
Torlakian, Yerganian, and Tehlirian, labeling each an “Armenian National
Hero.” In 1976, a few years after his death, Arshavir Shiragian’s The Legacy
was published in Armenian, French, and English by the Tashnag organization.
It describes in detail how Shiragian’s assassinations were committed. Other
memoirs would follow, mostly published in Armenian, some translated. In
1986 the eminent French journalist Jacques Derogy researched Nemesis
thoroughly, augmenting Tehlirian’s account in his Armenian autobiography
with details gleaned from the secret ARF archives in Watertown,
Massachusetts, to which he had gained access through the archivist Gerard
Libaridian. In 1991 Edward Alexander, a former U.S. diplomat, would
publish A Crime of Vengeance, making Tehlirian’s story accessible to the
English-speaking American public. Not all the details in these memoirs
jibed, but the cat was out of the bag. Armenians had confessed to a campaign
of assassination against Turkish leaders in the 1920s.
Although Tehlirian had kept a relatively low profile in the years after he
moved to the United States, he continued to consort with fellow Nemesis
commandos. According to Vartkes Yeghiayan, who has published a
translation of the Tehlirian trial transcript, The Case of Soghomon Tehlirian,
“the three of them [Tehlirian, Torlakian, and Shiragian] always sat together at
the functions [at the Armenian Center in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury
district], and without exception always occupied the last row of seats at the
very back of the hall.… [T]hey were very unassuming, inconspicuous and
modest to the point of timidity, and acted as if they were unaccustomed to
socializing.”13
Nemesis had been disbanded and its agents were either aged or dead, but
its spirit continued to inspire new avengers. The persistent Turkish denial of
the genocide became intolerable for certain survivors and their descendants.
Some Armenians decided to go beyond the annual protests held around the
world each year on April 24 and organized new violence. Young men in
southern California and Lebanon, furious that the tragedy of their murdered
grandparents had been forgotten, found one another as their collective anger
compressed into a powder keg of pent-up fury. All that was missing was the
spark.
That spark was provided in 1973 by a seventy-seven-year-old
Californian, a survivor of the genocide named Gourgen Yanikian. In many
ways, Yanikian’s story was similar to Tehlirian’s. He was from the same
region of Asia Minor and, like Tehlirian, was born during the waning
decades of the Ottoman Empire. He had lost many members of his family
during the genocide. After the war, he settled in Iran. On moving to the United
States, Yanikian found that life did not get any easier. In January 1973, sickly
and out of funds, Yanikian made the decision to avenge the Armenian
Genocide on his own.
On January 27, 1973, Gourgen Yanikian contacted the Turkish consulate
in Los Angeles and, impersonating an Iranian expat, claimed to have in his
possession a painting that had been stolen from the sultan’s palace more than
a century earlier. Yanikian offered to make a gift of the painting (and other
items) to the Republic of Turkey, but insisted that the consul general, forty-
seven-year-old Mehmet Baydar, meet him in person to accept the items.
Baydar and his thirty-year-old vice consul, Bahadir Demir, agreed to the
rendezvous with Yanikian.
Once Yanikian was alone with the two diplomats in his room at the Santa
Barbara Biltmore Hotel, he confessed that he was originally from Turkey and
that he was an Armenian. He argued with the men, produced a Luger pistol,
and shot them both several times. As the two diplomats lay wounded on the
floor of his hotel room, Yanikian calmly opened a dresser drawer, removed a
Browning pistol, and fired two more shots into each man’s head.
As reprehensible as his actions were, Yanikian’s arrest and trial became a
cause célèbre for many Armenians, serving as a focus for the frustration that
had built up over decades of nonrecognition of a major crime against
humanity. (This bitterness had only been compounded by the sorrowful
recognition accorded to the Jewish Holocaust after World War II.) Many
Armenians found a certain satisfaction in the fact that because of Yanikian,
people were finally talking about the genocide. The killings were appalling,
but to many Armenians they seemed not that different from the endless horror
stories all had heard from their grandparents. Few could condone Yanikian’s
actions, but weren’t these violent deaths just one more consequence of the
genocide?
During his trial, echoing the attitude of his hero Soghomon Tehlirian,14
Yanikian admitted to killing the men but said he did not feel that he was guilty
of any crime. Claiming that his actions were designed to bring attention to the
genocide, he noted that other victimized peoples had had “their Nuremberg”
but the Armenians had not. He was indifferent to the fact that his victims
were too young to have had anything to do with the deportations. Yanikian
had come “to view the men not as human beings, but as symbols of decades
of injustice.”15 Before killing the diplomats, he posted a letter to an
Armenian-language paper urging Armenians to wage war on Turkish
diplomats.16
Yanikian was found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and
received a life sentence. While he was incarcerated, his cause was adopted
by a new wave of terrorists. Originally calling themselves the Prisoner
Gourgen Yanikian Group, ASALA (the Armenian Secret Army for the
Liberation of Armenia) consisted primarily of Lebanese-born Armenians
dedicated to terror bombings and the assassination of Turkish diplomats and
politicians. Their first victim was Danis Tunaligil in Vienna on October 22,
1975. By the mid-1970s, ASALA had launched a worldwide wave of terror
bombings and shootings. Before long it was competing with other Armenian
terrorist groups, particularly the Armenian Revolutionary Army, or Justice
Commandos, a group believed to have been created by the ARF in response
to ASALA.
By the time the killing ended in the 1990s, thirty-six Turkish diplomats
and those close to them (including wives, children, bodyguards, and drivers)
had been murdered. Dozens of others were injured. Four killings took place
in the United States, while other attacks occurred in Paris, Belgrade, Ottawa,
Tehran, and Sydney. One of the best-known incidents took place at the
Turkish Airlines check-in desk at Orly Airport in 1983, where a half kilo of
Semtex plastic explosive attached to bottles of gas packed into a suitcase
exploded prematurely, killing eight and injuring fifty-five others. Most of the
victims had no relationship to Turkey or Armenia. The Orly bombing created
a schism within the ASALA organization as disagreements broke out over
objectives and the underlying rationale for extremely violent acts.
ASALA members had received training and inspiration from the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut. In the PLO, ASALA saw a model
for terrorism as a political tool: a disenfranchised people who had no
political muscle would make their case through violence. Neither ASALA
nor the Justice Commandos ever hid the fact that Operation Nemesis was an
important model for their groups.17 Yanikian had set things in motion. In two
decades, ASALA, the Justice Commandos, and other groups committed
literally hundreds of “actions.”
In time, ASALA’s best-known leader, Hagop Hagopian (probably an
alias), would break from the PLO. Hagopian then allied himself with the
notorious Abu Nidal, founder of Fatah, and ASALA would become even
more ruthless and sinister. (Nidal’s trademark was random killing.)
Alienated members finally assassinated Hagopian in April 1988, whereupon
ASALA disintegrated. By this time the vast majority of Armenians were
disgusted by the killings of innocent people, and many spoke out clearly
against the actions of ASALA and other terrorist groups. The violence had
made the world more aware of the genocide, but murdering those who had
had no direct hand in the tragedy was sickening.
Bombings and killings within Turkey strained Turkish-American
relations, too. Turkey felt that the Western governments were not making a
genuine effort to apprehend the culprits. A U.S.-Turkish Committee on
Armenian Terrorism was formed in 1982 with an eye toward legislation to
curtail the operations.18 But ASALA and the Justice Commandos had fallen
into disarray on their own, and by the early 1990s, they were no longer
active. Nonetheless, many members of the Turkish diplomatic corps had
become hardened by the killing of their colleagues. Most people in Turkey
had forgotten the crimes of their elders, but a new generation of Turkish
officials would never forget the Armenian terror actions of the 1970s and
1980s. An indifference toward Armenians turned into a deep animosity,
stiffening a resolve never to admit to the “so-called genocide.”
In the early hours of November 3, 1996, on a dark and desolate stretch of the
Istanbul-Izmir highway near Susurluk, a speeding Mercedes rammed into a
gasoline tanker truck and exploded into a ball of fire. Three bodies were
pulled from the scorched wreck: a former deputy head of the Istanbul Police
Department; a fugitive hit man and heroin trafficker; and his “beauty queen”
lover. The sole survivor was Sedat Bucak, a member of the Turkish
parliament and a Kurdish tribal landlord who had formed his own militia to
fight Kurdish rebels.
False passports, pistols equipped with silencers, and machine guns were
found in the trunk of the wreck. The hit man, Abdullah Catli, was not only a
drug runner but also a former leader of the ultranationalist “Grey Wolves.”
(“Grey Wolf” is a term of affection synonymous with Kemal Ataturk.) For
years he had been wanted by the authorities for his involvement in the 1978
murder of seven leftist university students. On Catli’s body was found a false
diplomatic passport as well as a gun license signed by the Turkish interior
minister, Mehmet Agar.
 In size, contemporary Turkey and Armenia are fractions of their former realms, the Ottoman Empire
and the Kingdom of Armenia. Today, the two republics share a closed border.

After it was learned that Agar had met with the group just prior to the
accident, he was forced to resign. The “Susurluk Incident” ignited an uproar
in Turkey because it definitively revealed for the first time links between the
government, terrorist organizations, and drug traffickers. It exposed a long-
suspected underlying “Deep State” (Gizli Devlet) that secretly ran Turkey
behind an appealing façade of official democracy. It seemed that an invisible
network made up of politicians, military officers, and intelligence operatives
was collaborating with criminal organizations to form the true leadership of
the world’s “only Islamic democracy.” After Susurluk, the center of power
shifted in Turkey, and in subsequent elections an Islamic-oriented government
took over.
That was twenty years ago, and the political landscape of Turkey remains
in flux. As governmental factions struggle with one another, it is very clear
that Turkey is not a democracy in the sense that the West understands the
term. Censorship and cronyism, torture and corruption are the rule, not the
exception.19 “Islamist” leaders have not yet given way to “jihadist” leaders
in Istanbul, because to embrace religious groups too closely would be the
wrong move in “secular” Turkey. The veneration of Ataturk remains
supreme, while Kemalism as a political philosophy is seen to be in decline
under the current leadership.
Perhaps the “Deep State” is losing its grip as well. The trial beginning in
2008 involving the so-called Ergenekon conspiracy (a supposed secularist
clandestine group accused of plotting against the Turkish government) may or
may not be directed at a genuine organization. Many believe that the
Ergenekon arrests, in which hundreds, including journalists, military officers,
and opposition lawmakers, have been taken into custody and charged with
crimes against the state, are targeting a paper tiger for the purposes of
undermining enemies of the current regime.20
In January 2007, Hrant Dink, the Armenian Turkish editor of Agos, an
Armenian journal published in Istanbul, was gunned down as he stepped
outside his office. His killer was Ogun Samast, a seventeen-year-old Turk
with links to the nationalist, pro-Turanist organizations Great Union Party
and the Grey Wolves. Dink was a man of tremendous integrity who risked his
life by writing editorial appeals for reconciliation between Armenians and
Turks. His reasonableness and courage became an irritant to radical elements
in Turkey. His murder came after a year of death threats. After Samast’s
arrest, photographs of the killer were posted online. In one photo he is
flanked by genial Turkish policemen posing before a Turkish flag.
The Turkish public responded to Dink’s killing with a massive protest. At
Dink’s funeral, two hundred thousand mourners crowded the streets of
Istanbul carrying signs stating simply “We Are All Hrant Dink” and “We Are
All Armenians.” In September 2010, the European Court of Human Rights
concluded that the Turkish government had violated Dink’s right to life by not
trying to prevent his murder and, in addition, taking no concrete action to
punish the police for their inaction. Despite parliamentary, judicial, and civil
efforts to further expose this apparent action by the “Deep State” network,
there have been no significant consequences as a result of these
investigations.
As I write these last words of this book, I realize that in the end it is
impossible to communicate the immensity of the crime I’ve come to know
through my research. Though this effort is a tapestry of history and politics,
of leaders and soldiers and assassins, the core of what this book is really
about is almost unfathomable. As I checked my last edits of the manuscript
and rechecked some of my source materials, particularly Raymond
Kévorkian’s massive work on the genocide, Wolfgang Gust’s collection of
memoirs, and Verjiné Svazlian’s collection of eyewitness testimony, I was
overwhelmed by the vastness and sheer brutality of the crime.
Genocide is a word. Like the words “love” or “God,” it seems to be
comprehensible. But in fact it cannot be grasped, it cannot be taken in. It is
the unspeakable made verbal. Yet it is very much a part of our lives. Every
week we read in the newspaper about violence in the form of massacres and
terror attacks. And for this reason, we think we understand the meaning of the
word when we hear of genocide. But war or environmental calamity has the
quality of circumstances out of control. Genocide is different. What happened
to the Armenian population in Turkey during World War I was intentional.
Men made decisions, men made plans, and those men executed those plans.
The immensity of the Armenian Genocide is beyond conception. How can
human beings commit such atrocities? The crime defies an answer. What we
do know is that such a crime against humanity must be reacted to and that it
must be memorialized. Thus Operation Nemesis. Though the men and women
of Operation Nemesis broke the laws of man, they did so to bring some
portion of sanity to an insane world. The unthinkable actually cannot be
answered, but in the case of Armen Garo, Shahan Natali, Soghomon
Tehlirian, and others, to act was the only way to continue living. Otherwise
they too would have been consumed by the insanity.
The Nemesis fedayeen did not see themselves as terrorists. From their
point of view, their actions were driven by motives that far surpassed simple
retribution or revenge. As holy warriors, they believed their domain to be
spiritual, not political. Their job was to exact some fraction of justice. In
other words, killing Talat Pasha, Djemal Pasha, Behaeddin Shakir, and Said
Halim Pasha was an attempt to bring some kind of balance to the universe.
The CUP leadership, in the eyes of Garo and Natali, had evaded just
punishment for mass murder. Though the perpetrators were convicted by a
court of law in Constantinople, those convictions were later thrown out by
the new Ankara government. A new Turkish regime was taking shape, and it
was clear that the men who had organized and carried out the genocide
would participate in it. To let these men walk free would be wrong in the
deepest sense.
That does not make what Operation Nemesis did legal. One question that
surrounds these assassinations is this: If you desire a world where justice
prevails, then you must rely on laws. If you rely on laws, they must be
universal. Laws cannot be superseded simply because some feel that they are
wrong or because a person “knows” he has the right to break them. We live
in a world where we attempt to achieve consistency in rule of law. The
concept of “law” demands it. Yet the men and women of Operation Nemesis
did what governments could not. They were appealing to a higher, final
justice. One that exists somewhere between heaven and earth.

My grandfather told me stories from his life. It was his gift to me. Memory
lies at the center of the Nemesis story. It is the engine of an intense bloodlust.
We remember, but we remember differently. Our respective narratives lead
to different actions. Thus the conundrum of history. Were you there? Did you
actually see it? Who told you about it? How can you be sure?
Operation Nemesis is only one link in a historical chain that began long
before its actors were born and that continues to this day. The Hamidian
massacres of the late nineteenth century gave birth to Armenian revolutionary
groups that fought the Ottoman government in eastern Anatolia. The Ottoman
government under the Young Turks, shrouded by the fog of war, used this
activity as a justification for liquidating an entire indigenous population. And
though tribunals were held after the war, little was done in the end to bring
the perpetrators to justice. Operation Nemesis was born and carried out its
mandate. And then, a half century after the genocide, as the Turkish
government persisted in its refusal to acknowledge one of the greatest mass
murders in history, a new generation rose up and initiated an anarchic string
of assassinations. In 2007 one more link in the chain was forged with the
tragic assassination of the Armenian Turkish editor Hrant Dink.
And so memory and retribution are linked. But why? Why is it so
important to remember what happened? All people who live will die
someday, and in a few generations most of us will be forgotten altogether, so
why does it make any difference whether the details of our particular deaths
are remembered, violent or not? Perhaps the answer lies in the very fact that
we do all die, that no one cheats death. We come into this world with nothing
and we leave with nothing. We all know, either implicitly or explicitly, that
all we really have is our place in the memories of others. We exist to the
degree that we know and remember one another. Even the most isolated
among us. We share a collective understanding that we are all part of a
greater whole. Perhaps we will not be remembered as individuals, but we,
the living, move through life surrounded by what the dead have left for us.
The dead live on in the pages of thousands of books, in the bricks of
countless buildings, in the flickering shadows of old movies, in virtually
everything we see and touch, including our own children.
For this reason, we must respect the dead. It is this contract of respect we
have with those who have gone before us that demands we acknowledge how
they died and, if they died violently, to seek redress. The question that is
almost impossible to answer is what should we do if those who committed
the original crime go unpunished? What if those who follow in the footsteps
of those who committed the original crime insist on hiding the truth? What
then? In the end, is there such a thing as justice?
This book is an attempt to meditate on an answer, not only by providing
the facts as best we know them, but also by research and authorship, and
through your willingness to read what I have to offer. In that way we honor
those hundreds of thousands who were condemned to anonymous death and
burial, whose memory lasts only as long as our memories do.
 POSTSCRIPT

The year 2015 marks one hundred years since Talat Pasha and the CUP
ruled over the last days of the Ottoman Empire. One hundred years ago,
millions of Armenians lived in Asia Minor. Today, fewer than ninety
thousand people living in Turkey call themselves Armenian. In many ways,
the destruction of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire began a trend.
Throughout the Middle East, fewer and fewer Christians make their home
where Islam is the majority religion. Year by year, Turkey plays a greater
role as a major representative of the United States in the Middle East. Turkey
is now considered to be an irreplaceable component of American foreign
policy. The Turkish government has more than enough incentive to remain
silent about the genocide of one hundred years ago.
Whether Turkey wants to be part of the European Union or not, it binds
itself ever more tightly to the West with each passing year. What began as a
military relationship has become a deeply economic one, and that in turn has
affected civic life in Turkey. The institutions of the republic, particularly its
university system and judiciary, as well as its social life, can no longer exist
in concert with manufactured history. The truth is easily accessible, and
Turkish scholars and writers, young people using social media, anyone
watching television, must in time be exposed to it, despite the law forbidding
discussion of the genocide. Some brave souls are writing about it and
investigating it. The tide of truth is rising.
A rising tide floats all boats. And that includes the full history of the
Armenians who lived within and outside the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian
Genocide is a part of that history, but so is the story of the Armenian
revolutionary groups and their actions. And so are the contributions
Armenians made for centuries to Ottoman civilization. And so is Operation
Nemesis. We can only hope that serious scholars will someday be allowed to
enter the shuttered archives, Turkish and Armenian, to uncover the memories
we’re losing, the history we’ve lost, including the full and complete story of
this brave group of men possessed of remarkable will and courage.
Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Talat Pasha in Berlin in March 1921 and was subsequently freed by
the German court. (Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA,
[email protected])
Sultan Abdul Hamid II was the last sultan with any real power. He ruled for over thirty years, ever
wary of assassination. He created the Hamidiye militias in the east and fostered a “culture of
massacre” in the Armenian territories, leading to tens of thousands of deaths. Abdul Hamid was
deposed by the Young Turks in 1909. (Universal Images Group / SuperStock)
William Gladstone served as British prime minister during the late nineteenth century. His views
reflected the most virulent anti-Turkish sentiments. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
The fedayeen were paramilitary Armenian fighters who made it their “holy mission” to attack Turkish
troops and Kurdish militias. General Adranik is seated in the center. (CPA Media / Pictures From
History)
Kurdish Hamidiye were militias organized in the name of Sultan Abdul Hamid that were encouraged to
commit massacres against the Armenian population in Eastern Asia Minor. (CPA Media / Pictures
From History)
 Armenian deportations southward to the Syrian desert were designed to be unsurvivable. Deportees
were driven through harsh terrain while being systematically starved. Those who lagged behind were
often killed on the spot. Armenians who endured to the end of the line found themselves condemned to
a slow death by starvation or disease in concentration camps surrounded by desert. (The Art Archive at
Art Resource, NY)
A gathering of the Committee of Union and Progress sometime in 1909. The three men seated in the
center (Talat Pasha, Said Halim Pasha, and Djemal Pasha) were assassinated by Operation Nemesis
agents. Behind them, center, is Enver Pasha, assassinated by Soviet troops. Also in attendance were
former minister of finance Djavid Bey; Alusa Mussa Kiazim, former Sheik ul-Islam; Rifaat Bey,
president of the Senate; and Halil Bey, foreign minister. The man standing on Enver’s left has been
identified as Mustapha Kemal. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)
 Enver Pasha was an admirer of Prussian military culture. At the end of the war he escaped his
conviction for war crimes by moving to Moscow. After attempting to foster Islamic revolution in Central
Asia, he was hunted down and killed by Soviet troops. (akg-images / Interfoto)
 General Otto Liman von Sanders was Germany’s man in Turkey during World War I. He had little
regard for the Ottoman military leadership and disagreed openly with Enver Pasha’s tactics. Liman von
Sanders would testify at Tehlirian’s trial, denying German involvement in the destruction of the
Armenians. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis)
Talat Pasha was interior minister of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He was in effect the
leader of the CUP and directly responsible for the Armenian Genocide. Talat was assassinated by
Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin in the spring of 1921. (akg-images)
 Djemal Pasha was a key leader in the CUP government of World War I Ottoman Turkey. He
commanded the military in Arab regions and governed the populations there. After the war he objected
to his conviction by the war crimes tribunal held in Constantinople, claiming that he was a friend of the
Armenians. He was assassinated outside secret Cheka headquarters in Tiflis, Georgia, by three
Nemesis operatives on July 21, 1922. (© Robert Hunt Library / Mary Evans)
Along with Dr. Nazim, Dr. Behaeddin Shakir ran the “Special Organization” (Teshkilati Mahsusa), a
secret paramilitary outfit that organized the lethal deportations. With the approval of Talat Pasha,
Shakir’s priority was a full eradication of the indigenous Armenians as part of a program of
“Turkification.” He was assassinated by Aram Yerganian on April 17, 1922. (CPA Media / Pictures
From History)
 Misak Torlakian was the Nemesis fedayee who assassinated Azerbaijani leader Khan Javanshir in
Constantinople during the postwar occupation. Though he stood trial and was convicted, Torlakian was
released because the court was convinced that he was mentally incapacitated at the time of the murder.
Like Tehlirian and Shiragian, Torlakian would quietly spend his last years in the United States a free
man. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)
Shahan Natali (Hagop Der Hagopian) was a prolific author of short stories, plays, and poetry who ran
the Operation Nemesis actions in Europe. Placing a pistol in Tehlirian’s hand, Natali claimed to have
said, “It has been tried and is ready for the command of your index finger.” (CPA Media / Pictures
From History)
 Revolutionary Armen Garo (Karekin Pastermadjian) was the executive in charge of Operation
Nemesis. Garo was a seasoned operative and statesman who participated in the Bank Ottoman attack,
the Ottoman Parliament, and the first Armenian Republic. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)
While residing in the United States, Aaron Sachaklian oversaw strategy and kept the Nemesis books,
managing cash flow for the organization. When the operation was disbanded, he hid letters and
accounting and maintained silence on Operation Nemesis for the rest of his life. (Marian Mesrobian
MacCurdy / Transaction Publishers)
 Arshavir Shiragian was the most flamboyant of the Nemesis assassins, describing his exploits in his
memoir, The Legacy. Shiragian gunned down Vahe Ihsan in Constantinople, Said Halim Pasha in Rome,
and Djemal Azmi in Berlin. Though Shiragian wounded Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, Aram Yerganian is
credited with that assassination. (Sonia Shiragian / Hairenik Association)
Johannes Lepsius was a German humanitarian who attempted to publicize atrocities committed against
the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Testifying at Tehlirian’s Berlin trial, Lepsius laid the blame for
the Armenian deportations squarely on Talat’s shoulders. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)
Krikoris Balakian was an Armenian archbishop arrested and deported in the roundup of key Armenians
in late April 1915. Balakian managed to escape his caravan and Turkey. He was a star witness at
Tehlirian’s trial. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)
Calouste Gulbenkian was known as “Mr. Five Percent” because this was the commission he demanded
for negotiating key oil concessions in the Middle East. Though Britain and other clients fought him in
court, Gulbenkian eventually won his case, becoming one of the world’s richest men. (Photo 12 /
Polaris)
 General Mustapha Kemal made his reputation as a bold commander in Gallipoli. At the end of World
War I, as Young Turk leaders fled Turkey, Kemal successfully led what remained of the Ottoman army
against Greek and Armenian forces, compelling Britain to sharply modify its postwar plans for the
Ottoman Empire. Kemal would adopt the name Ataturk as founder of modern Turkey. (The Art Archive
at Art Resource, NY)
 Aubrey Herbert was a trusted British diplomat tasked with the most challenging assignments. Two
weeks before Talat Pasha was assassinated, Scotland Yard requested that Herbert interview the former
Ottoman leader in Germany. Herbert was a close acquaintance of some of the most significant
“Orientalists” of the period, including T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell. Though barely mentioned in
history books, Herbert was a key operator in Near East affairs. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)
Hailed as a hero of the Armenian people, twenty-eight-year-old Soghomon Tehlirian, seen here with his
young bride, Anahid, visited Paris in 1924, three years after he assassinated Talat Pasha. (CPA Media /
Pictures From History)
 In 1973, Gourgen Yanikian lured two Turkish diplomats to a hotel room in Santa Barbara, California,
under the pretense of making a gift to the Republic of Turkey. Yanikian then murdered both men in a
self-proclaimed act of revenge in the name of the Armenian Genocide. In a letter to the Los Angeles
Times he urged Armenians to wage terror attacks against Turkey. (Associated Press)
Born in Southern California, Monte Melkonian graduated from UC Berkeley before joining revolutionary
efforts in the Middle East. Melkonian would eventually become a member of ASALA, the Armenian
organization that committed dozens of acts of terror around the world. After spending three years in
French prisons, Melkonian immigrated to Armenia and would become an important commander in the
war with Azerbaijan. Melkonian died in battle at only thirty-five years old in 1993. (© Max Sivaslian /
Sygma / Corbis)
 Talat Pasha’s dress shirt is on display at the Istanbul Military Museum (Askeri Muze) in the “Hall of
Armenian Issue with Documents.” A brass plaque explains: “Blood-stained shirt worn by Grand Vizier
Talat Pasha when he was assassinated by an Armenian called Sogomon Tehlerian [sic] in Berlin on
May [sic] 15th 1921.” The display case is surrounded by photographic documentation of Armenian
atrocities against Muslims. (Eric Bogosian)
Hrant Dink was an Armenian Turkish editor of the journal Agos, in which he argued for memorializing
the Armenians who died during World War I. He was gunned down outside his Istanbul offices by a
young man affiliated with Turkish extremists incensed by Dink’s humanitarian views. At his funeral,
thousands of people took to the streets of Istanbul with placards that said “We Are All Armenians” or
“We Are All Hrant Dink.” (Associated Press)
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I must thank Aram Arkun for his dedication and
invaluable guidance during this long journey. Aram provided the translations
of Armenian and Turkish which were essential to a full investigation of the
story. He was there with an answer to my every question on Armenian and
Turkish history and politics. He vetted the manuscript several times. He was
there from start to finish. Thank you, Aram.
Thanks to Ted Bogosian and Marc Mamigonian, who made themselves
available from the very first with desperately needed informational and
emotional support. Thanks to Leslie Peirce for invaluable expertise.
Thanks to those people who shared with me their personal knowledge of
Operation Nemesis and Armenian revolutionary activity: Viken Hovsepian,
Gerard Libaridian, Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, Sylva Natali Manoogian,
and Melineh Verma.
Thanks to my history-writing coach and buddy Sarah Vowell, who was
also ready with strategy and a backslap when the going got rough. Thanks to
my old friend Joel Golb, who provided the rock-solid German translation of
the Berlin trial and hosted my visit to Berlin. Thanks to Eddy Vicken
Noukoujikian for a warm introduction to Armenian Paris. And to all the folks
at NAASR.
Special thanks to my agent Simon Green, who was always sure-footed
when I was off balance and fully confident was I was ready to scuttle the
boat.
Thanks to Geoffrey Shandler, who invited me into the Little, Brown fold
and encouraged a more ambitious book. Thank you to Reagan Arthur for
believing in this book, to John Parsley for his calm, steadfast presence, and
very, very importantly David Sobel, who diligently solved the unsolvable
and did not despair when faced with hundreds of pages of disorganized
manuscript.
Special thanks to those who provided research and editorial assistance:
Annette Vowinckel (Berlin), Dana Vowinckel, Maria Alegre, Ewan
Roxbourgh, Liz Seramur at Wyss Photo, Melissa Levine at the University of
Michigan, and at Little, Brown, Allie Sommer, Malin von Euler-Hogan,
Amanda Heller, Ruth Cross, and Betsy Uhrig. Thanks to the promotion team,
Catherine Cullen and Meghan Deans. Thank you to Jeffrey Ward for his
impeccable cartography.
When I was in the last draft of the manuscript I was very fortunate to be
invited to spend some time at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as a
guest of the Armenian Studies Program. The time I spent there exploring the
broader themes with experts in the field was an invaluable aid. Very special
thanks to Kathryn Babayan and Ronald Grigor Suny for inviting me. Thanks
to Kevork Bardakjian, Melanie Tanielian, and Tamar Boyadjian as well as
the postdoctoral fellows who provided much-needed interrogations: Ruken
Sengul, Michael Pifer, and Hayarpi Papikyan. Thanks to Zana Kweiser and
Michelle Andonian for enlarging my visit to Ann Arbor and Detroit. Finally,
special thanks to Fatma Muge Gocek for the long discussions and support.
A number of experts in the fields of Ottoman and Armenian history
donated their precious time to answer my questions and engage in naked
discussions of the topic. Thank you to Taner Akcam, Anny Bakalian (Middle
East and Middle Eastern American Center, CUNY), Peter Balakian, Michael
Bobelian, Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Ayda Erbal, Basak Ertur, Ara Ghazarians
(Armenian Cultural Foundation), Vartan Gregorian, Christopher Gunn, Rolf
Hosfeld (Lepsius Institute, Berlin), Jean Claude Kebabjian (Center for
Armenian Diaspora Studies, Paris), Raymond Kévorkian (AGBU Nubarian
Library, Paris), Stephen Kinzer, Vartan Matiossian, Khatchig Mouradian
(Hairenik), Nora Nercessian, Gregory P. Nowell, Donald Quataert, Verjiné
Svazlian, Alina and Zareh Tcheknavorian, and Ruth Thomasian (Project
SAVE).
During my visits to Istanbul, special thanks to Arzu Turkomen (Bogazici
University), Agah Okay Alkan, and Robert Koptas (Agos) for extending the
most generous hospitality and opening doors for me that would have
otherwise remained closed.
Thanks to Rolf Hosfeld and his staff at Lepsiushaus for their generous
contributions of time and material.
 Thanks to the New York Public Library and Kay Westcott and Jill
Clements at the Watertown Public Library.
I must thank Mark Stahlman, Grayson Fertig, and Radenko Miskovic, who
kept me in fighting shape and heard every word of this book before it was
written.
Finally, there is a mixture of friendship and concrete help that’s
impossible to quantify. Thanks to Philip Rinaldi, Vahak Janbazian, Sarah
Leah Whitson, Karren Karagulian, Debbie Ohanian, Lily Gulian-Bogosian,
Michael Morris, Jesse Drucker, Onick Papazian, Atom Egoyan, Arsinee
Khanjian, Kimberly Ryan, and Fred Zollo.
Thanks to Warren Leight. He knows I couldn’t have afforded to write this
book without his inspired sense of casting.
Finally, thank you Jo, my love, who is always there for me.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ERIC BOGOSIAN is an actor, playwright, and novelist of Armenian descent. He

was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his play Talk Radio and is the recipient of the
Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear award, as well as three Obie Awards and
the Drama Desk. In addition to his celebrated work in the theater and
onscreen, he has authored three novels. He lives in New York City with the
director Jo Bonney.

OperationNemesis
 Also by Eric Bogosian
NOVELS
Mall
Wasted Beauty
Perforated Heart

SOLOS
Men Inside
funHouse
Drinking in America
Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll
Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead
Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
100 (monologues)

PLAYS
Talk Radio
subUrbia
Red Angel
1+1

NOVELLA
Notes from Underground
 A SHORT GLOSSARY OF NAMES AND
TERMS

Armenia—A homeland to the Christian Armenians straddling the borders of Turkey, Iran, and Russia.
Two thousand years ago, Armenia was a kingdom and a power to be reckoned with. After World
War I, the landlocked Republic of Armenia, comprising a fraction of its original territory, was
founded in the Caucasus. This republic was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1922, and since 1991 it
has existed as an independent nation.

The Ottoman Empire—The Islamic empire established by the Turkish Osmanli dynasty. It endured
for over six centuries. At its peak, the empire stretched from the Balkans to Persia, as well as
Egypt and North Africa. The Ottoman Empire formally ceased to exist at the end of World War I.

The Republic of Turkey—The Turkish nation established by Kemal Ataturk and other Young Turks
after the demise of the Ottoman Empire. It is roughly congruent to the region called Asia Minor,
which stretches from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus and northern Iran and is bordered on the
north by the Black Sea.
Many names have changed over the centuries. The most significant is
that Constantinople officially became Istanbul in the 1920s. Smyrna
became Izmir, Salonika became Thessalonika, and so on. Sometimes the
new name sounds nothing like the old: today’s Elazig was Kharpert. In
this book I use the names that were prevalent in the respective periods.
The Hai Heghapokhakan Tashnagtsutiun refers to the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, or ARF,
founded in 1890. Members of this organization are referred to as Tashnags.

The Osmanli Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti refers to the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP). Members are often known as Ittihadists, Unionists, and sometimes Young Turks. The term
“Young Turks” originally referred to a variety of Turkish political activists, not only the CUP.

Central Committee—The ruling junta of the CUP from 1908 to 1918. Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and
 Djemal Pasha were members of the Central Committee.

Hnchags—Members of a socialist Armenian revolutionary group (the Social Democrat Hunchakian

Party, or SDHP), founded in the late nineteenth century, a few years before the ARF.

Hamidiye—Kurdish paramilitary fighters responsible for massacres of Armenians in rural eastern

Anatolia, particularly in the 1890s. These units were named in honor of Sultan Abdul Hamid.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II (Abdulhamid; Abd al-Hamid) was the last sultan with any real power. He
presided over the Ottoman Empire for the thirty years prior to World War I.

Talat Pasha (Mehmet Talat) was interior minister of the Ottoman Empire during the CUP years,
including World War I. By the end of the war he had assumed the position of Grand Vizier (1917–
18). He fled Constantinople at the end of the war and was subsequently convicted in absentia of
war crimes.

General Mustafa Kemal/Ataturk—The key Ottoman military leader during World War I. Later he
would command the nationalist insurgency that fought the Greeks and the Armenians. He would
found the Turkish Republic in 1923. As Ataturk, Kemal led his nation until his death in 1938.
Depending on the period, I use the name he was known by during that time.

Anatolia (Asia Minor)—A general term used in this book for loosely describing the peninsula of land
that roughly corresponds to today’s Turkey. Also known as Asia Minor. “Anatolia” is a political
term used by the Turkish government to describe all of its lands. Originally, Anatolia’s eastern
border was the Euphrates, and the farthest eastern reaches of what is now called Anatolia were
originally known as the Armenian plateau.

Smyrna/Izmir—Major city along the Turkish Aegean coast, destroyed by Kemalist troops as they
entered the city in September 1922.

The Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa)—A secret paramilitary organization formed by the
Committee of Union and Progress to perform extralegal operations, particularly conducting guerrilla
warfare and overseeing the Armenian Genocide.

Mahomet, Mehmet, Mohammed, Muhammad are equivalent names in Turkish and Arabic.

Patriarch refers to a leader of a Christian church. The Catholicos is the supreme head of the Armenian
Apostolic Church.

The Franks are the French and are equivalent in the Ottoman mind to the Catholic Crusaders who
arrived in the Middle East from Europe in the late Middle Ages.

Softas—Muslim students.
Caliph—Leader of the Islamic world.

Imam—In Islam, religious leader, specifically prayer leader.

Vilayet—Province.

Vali—Governor of a vilayet.

Sultan—Padishah. Supreme leader of the Ottoman Empire.

Pasha, Bey—Terms of respect equivalent to “Mr.” or “sir.” Pasha denotes a member of the highest
level of an elite.

Sublime Porte—A term referring to the Ottoman government, especially the offices of the Grand
Vizier.

Grand Vizier—The most powerful leader in the Ottoman Empire after the sultan, equivalent to a prime
minister.

Kurds—Muslim tribal people of eastern Turkey, northern Persia, and Iraq, sometimes led by warlords
and chieftains, who harassed Christian Armenians as well as fought Turkish troops.

Chete—A member of a guerrilla band. During World War I the term refers to the paramilitaries who
were particularly violent members of the Special Organization, often convicts released specifically
to employ terrorism against local populations.

Apostolic or Gregorian Church—The original Armenian Christian Church. “Monophysite” refers to

a doctrinal distinction that separated the Armenian Church from some other early churches,
particularly the Byzantine Church and what would later become the Roman Catholic Church.

Sharia—Islamic law. The Ottoman Empire was governed by Sharia in combination with sultanic law.

Zapiteh, gendarmes—Police.

Muhacir—Muslim refugees who emigrated into Turkey just prior to and during World War I, primarily
from the Balkans.

Millet—Community defined by its religious affiliation.

Raya—Flock, common folk subject to poll tax. Also derogatory, meaning “sheep,” when referring to
Armenians.
 A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

Almost every town and vilayet referred to here is known by at least three
names: its old Ottoman name, its Armenian name, and its current Turkish
name. When possible I have tried to use the Ottoman name, since most of this
story takes place during the era of the Ottoman Empire. To further complicate
things, spellings are phonetic versions derived from either old Ottoman
script or Armenian. These phonetic spellings vary from source to source.
I’ve tried to be consistent: I use “Kharpert” for “Harpoot” and so on. In
addition, today’s Turkish employs a different alphabet that is similar but not
equivalent to the alphabet we use in English. I’ve dropped the Turkish
special characters and used the accepted Western spelling, so, for example,
“Talat,” which would normally need a diacritical mark over the second “a,”
is spelled here as “Talat” rather than “Talaat” (or with the mark). Finally,
Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian are different versions of the same
root language. Western Armenian refers to the language of the Ottoman
(Turkish) Armenians. I have opted for Western Armenian when possible
here.
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P AMPHLETS
American Friends Service Committee. Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative
to Violence: A Study of International Conflict. American Friends Service Committee, 1955.
Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul. A History of the Sultanahmet Prison. Istanbul.
Katchznouni, Hovannes. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation [Dashnagtzoutiun] Has Nothing
to Do Anymore: The Manifesto of Hovhannes Katchaznouni, First Prime Minister of the
Independent Armenian Republic. Translated by Matthew A. Callender. Edited by John Roy
Carlson [Arthur A. Derounian]. New York: Armenian Information Service, 1923.
Les Musée des Civilisations Anatoliennes. Ankara: Dönmez, 1987.

OTHER SOURCES
2012 Declaration. “The Seized Properties of Armenian Foundations in Istanbul.” Hrant Dink
Foundation, Istanbul, November 2012. ISBN978-605-86570-0-7.
“Memoirs of Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian with Particular Relation to the Origins and Foundation of the
Iraq Petroleum Company Limited.” Testimony before the U.S. Congress, 1945. National Archives,
Washington, DC.
Privately published collection of ASALA interviews (1982), provided by Christopher Gunn.
CIA reports: “Global Terrorism: The Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide,” September 1984
(GI 84-10148); and “The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia: A Continuing
International Threat,” January 1984 (GI 84-10008 & EUR 84-10004).
FBI report: YENIKIAN report, 1973.
The Gust Guide (document 1915-07-21-DE-012).
http://www.sci.am/downloads/musgen/WolfgangGust.pdf, p. 59.
NOTES
P ROLOGUE
1. Aubrey Herbert, Ben Kendim: A Record of Eastern Travel, ed. Desmond MacCarthy (London:
Hutchinson & Co., 1924), p. 318.
2. This account is drawn from Soghomon Tehlirian, Verhisumner Hoosaber [Memoirs], ed. Vahan
Minakhorian, tr. Aram Arkun (Cairo, 1953), pp. 307–8; hereafter cited as Tehlirian memoir.
3. Ibid. p. 310.
4. Ibid.
5. Greeks, Syriacs, and other Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire were persecuted under the
Ittihad regime.
C HAPTER 1: THE R ISE OF EMPIRE
1. The term “Asia Minor/Anatolia” has historically meant the territory up to the Euphrates River—
meaning everything but the Armenian plateau; the Republic of Turkey favors the term to describe
its entire territory in Asia, thus eliminating mention of Armenia. This usage has altered the generally
accepted understanding of the term, and for the sake of simplicity in this volume I will use the terms
interchangeably to describe the entire peninsula extending from the Caucasus to the Mediterranean
Sea.
2. See Hovann H. Simonian, ed., The Hemshin: History, Society, and Identity in the Highlands of
Northeast Turkey (New York: Routledge, 2007).
3. Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 95.
4. The head of the Armenian faith carries the title “Catholicos of All Armenians.” It is not clear when
this term was first used. The first Christian churches were headed by bishops. See Malachia
Ormanian, The Church of Armenia (London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., revised ed., 1955), pp. 8–13.
5. Fred C. Conybeare, “The Survival of Animal Sacrifices inside the Christian Church,” American
Journal of Theology 7 (1910): 63.
6. Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for
World Power (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 28.
7. Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 13.
8. The summary of Armenian history given here is a simplification of a complex era in which the
Romans/Byzantines vied for control of the region with the Persians. For a complete history, see
Richard G. Hovanissian, The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times: The Dynastic
Periods; From Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century, 2nd ed., vol. 1, and The Armenian People
from Ancient to Modern Times: Foreign Dominion to Statehood; The Fifteenth Century to the
Twentieth Century, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).
9. For a complete explication of the term “monophysite,” see The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd
ed., vol. 9 (Washington, DC: Thomson Gale in association with the Catholic University of America,
2001), s.v. “monophysitism.” Also Malachia Ormanian, The Church of Armenia (London: A. R.
Mowbray & Co., 1955), pp. 96, 97.
10. There have been successive caliphates, Islamic governments headed by the caliph, going back to the
time of Mohammed. These would include the Rashidun Caliphate, the Umayad Caliphate, and the
Abbasid Caliphate. All were considered dar al-Islam. These preceded the Ottoman Caliphate, of
which the sultan was head. The history of Islamic dynasties is complex. For a complete history of
Islam, see Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2000).
11. The Mongols flourished during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At its height, the Mongol
Empire was the largest in contiguous landmass the world has seen. Though feared and destructive
during their invasions, the Mongols were an important civilization as well. See David Morgan, The
Mongols (London: Wiley, 2007).
12. “Pilgrims came from different clutures and spoke different languages—German, Flemish, Norman,
French, Provencal, and Italian—but their shared experiences instilled in them a common identity:
Now all were Franks.” Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for
Apocalypse (New York: Basic Books, 2011), p. xii.
13. Speros Vryonis Jr., Byzantium and Europe (London: Thames & Hudson, 1967), p. 152.
14. Serbs, Bulgars, and Bosnians were the people of the Balkans. Many other groups populated the
Ottoman Empire. See chapter 1, p. 19.
15. Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, p. 68.
16. Lord Patrick Douglas Balfour, Baron Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the
Turkish Empire (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 329.
17. Carter Vaughn Findley, The Turks in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.
115.
18. Quoted in Noel Barber, The Sultans (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), p. 46.
19. See Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), for a complete examination of the imperial harem; quotation
p. 76.
20. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, ed. John L. Esposito, 4 vols. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), s.v. “harem.”
21. Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924 (London: John Murray
Publishers, 1995), p. 96.
22. Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London: Phoenix, 2000), p.
85.
23. Alber Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1991), p. 47.
24. Mansel, Constantinople, p. 21.
25. The history of nineteenth-century Ottoman politics as they relate to the Armenians is a complex and
demanding topic, far beyond what I can get into here. For a clear overview, see Aram Arkun, “Into
the Modern Age, 1800–1913,” chapter 4 of The Armenians: Past and Present in the Making of
National Identity, ed. Edmund Herzig and Marina Kurkchiyan (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005),
pp. 65–88.
C HAPTER 2: R USHING HEADLONG INTO THE M ODERN ERA, 1800–
1914
1. See Washington Times, July 28 and August 17, 1914.
2. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), p. 106.
3. Daily life would for the most part appear unchanged. But larger systemic changes in economics and
the distribution of manufactured goods would alter the relationship between the Christians and
Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, exacerbating friction between communities. See Donald Quataert,
The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (New York: Cambrige University Press, 2005), chap. 7 for an
introduction to the topic.
4. Compare Hamidye raiders to the “official” Janjaweed paramilitary in the Darfur region of Sudan
today. For descriptions of Janjaweed raids, see Dave Eggers, What Is the What (New York:
Vintage, 2007) pp. 85–95.
5. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans
to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 1995), p. 121.
6. Though the terms “terror” and “terrorist” can be found throughout ARF literature from its earliest
days, the leaders of the Tashnags and their fedayeen did not see “terror” in terms of direct attacks
on innocent civilians. Assassinations of officials and “traitors” were the mainstay, though there could
be exceptions, as seen in the paragraphs that follow.
7. Mikayel Varandian, Murad of Sepastia, trans. Ara Ghazarians (Arlington, MA: Armenian Cultural
Foundation, 2006), p. 30fn.
8. Gerard J. Libaridian, Modern Armenia: People, Nation, State (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2007), p. 7.
9. “Kurdish Fiendish Cruelty,” New York Times, March 19, 1895, reprinted in Richard Diran Kloian,
The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from the American Press: 1915–1922, 4th ed.
(Richmond, CA: Heritage Publishing, 2007), pp. 1–30.
10. W. E. Gladstone, MP, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (London: John Murray,
1876), p. 9.
11. Von Trotha quoted in Clive Ponting, Progress and Barbarism: The World in the Twentieth
Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), p. 43. In 1904, the German army under von Trotha
forced the Herrero people, including women and children, into the desert to die.
12. Al. Carthill, The Lost Dominion (London: Blackwood, 1924), p. 94. “Al. Carthill” was the pen name
of Bennet Christian Huntingdon Calcraft-Kennedy, a mid-level administrator who had been stationed
in India.
13. Piers Brendon, Decline and Fall of the British Empire (New York: Vintage, 2010), p. 12.
14. “Mr. Herbert Morrison Replies to Critics of Empire,” Manchester Guardian, January 11, 1943.
15. Caglar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development (London: Verso,
1987), p. 64.
16. Yves Troshine, “A Bystander’s Notes of a Massacre,” Scribner’s Magazine, January 21, 1897,
48–69.
17. Armen Garo, Bank Ottoman (Detroit: Topouzian, 1990; originally published Boston: Hairenik Press,
1948), p. 155.
18. Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian
 Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963),
pp. 110, 168. Nalbandian’s history of the genesis of the Armenian political parties of the nineteenth
century is the most complete reference to date.
19. Libaridian, Modern Armenia, p. 83.
20. Edward Joris’s mystery-laden participation in the assassination attempt has been for the most part
ignored by English-speaking historians. Most references can be found in Belgian or Dutch
publications. See Mete Ozturk, “Edward Joris: De Belgische anarchist achter de verijdelde Yildiz-
aanslag,” Zaman Vandaag (Rotterdam), July 19, 2013.
21. Though the sultan was the leader of an Islamic empire, his role as caliph was a political rather than a
religious one. There is very little evidence of sultans ever being particularly religious. In fact, not one
sultan in the history of the Ottoman Empire ever went on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.
22. Quoted in Shirley W. Smith, James Burrill Angell: An American Influence (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1954), p. 265.
23. M. S¸ükrü Hanioglu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 312.
24. Keyder, State and Class in Turkey, p. 59.
25. Hanioglu, Preparation for a Revolution, p. 313.
26. Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to
Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 103.
27. Rolf Hosfeld, “The Armenian Massacre and Its Avengers,” IP Journal (Transatlantic Edition), Fall
2005 (original German edition, June 2005), http://www.armenews.com/IMG/original_TIP_3-
05_Hosfeld_1_.pdf.
28. Hanioglu, Preparation for Revolution, p. 283.
29. Henry Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1918), p. 13.
30. Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the
Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Watertown, MA: Blue Crane Books, 1996), p. 217.
31. In 2010, Chienne d’Histoire, a short animation based on the eradication of the dogs of
Constantinople, won a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=YMzp8v1AvzU.
C HAPTER 3: B LOOD F LOWS
1. For a complete recounting of the start of World War I with emphasis on Ottoman Empire
participation, see David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and
the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001).
2. Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918,
trans. Peter Balakian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), p. 42.
3. The story of Major Hovannes Karnik Papazian, an Armenian artillery officer stationed in Gallipoli, is
worth noting. Throughout the war, Armenians who were seen as irreplaceable were not deported;
instead they were retained to perform essential services. Though he was Armenian, Papazian had
risen up through the ranks during the short period after the reinstatement of the constitution when
Armenians were allowed to serve. In fact, he had gone to military academy at the same time as
Mustapha Kemal Ataturk. Papazian’s efforts on the battlements were significant enough to earn him
a medal for valor, the Harp Medalyasi. By 1915, realizing that his life was in danger, Papazian
escaped to Aleppo and in time settled in the United States. Author’s interview with Papazian’s
grandson Onick Papazian. See also http://www.tanerakcam.com/debates/sarkis-torossian-debate for
information on another Armenian Ottoman officer, Sarkis Torossian.
4. For a more complete investigation of property seizure, see Ugur Umit Ungor and Mehmet Polatel,
Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London:
Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011).
5. Mae M. Derdarian, Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide; Based on a Memoir by
Virginia Meghrouni (Los Angeles: ATMUS Press Publications, 1996), p. 38.
6. “Frequently, heaps of used Armenian clothing and sometimes children’s shoes were auctioned.
Auctions were conducted by town criers who received half of a 5 percent tax on auctioned goods
(the other 2½ percent was transferred to the government). Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent
Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 97, 98.
7. To give an air of legitimacy to the massacres and theft of Armenian property, two laws were
enacted by the Ittihad government. The Temporary Law of Deportation and the Temporary Law of
Confiscation and Appropriation were announced in the early summer months as villages were
emptied and property collected. The first law did not specify that the Armenians in particular were
to be moved, but it laid the foundation for the later argument that the Armenians were being moved
because of the ongoing war activity in their provinces. The second “law” was for the purposes of
providing an alibi. Denialists of the genocide note that laws concerning “abandoned property”
included clauses providing for the “safekeeping” of deportees’ possessions as well as procedures for
the eventual return of goods and land. These laws were only window dressing only. First of all, the
property was not “abandoned.” Second, even if people managed to survive, nothing was returned to
them. For additional information, see Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide
and America’s Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
8. See Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence,” The New Yorker (January 5, 2015), pp. 32–53.
9. Giacomo Gorrini, Il Messaggero (Rome), August 1915, quoted in James Bryce and Arnold
Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Documents Presented
to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce, ed. Ara Sarafian (Reading, UK: Taderon Press,
 2000), pp. 317, 318; hereafter cited as Viscount Bryce, “Blue Book.”
10. The United States did not enter the war until April 1917 and at that time made a declaration of war
only against Germany. The United States was never at war with the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), and
so its representatives retained a certain freedom of movement within the empire.
11. Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1918), pp. 215, 216.
12. See Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes (New York: Riverhead, 2011).
13. See Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Influence on
American Policy, 1810–1927 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 19.
14. Ibid., p. 7.
15. Ibid., pp. 11, 12.
16. H. G. O. Dwight, Christianity in Turkey: A Narrative of the Protestant Reformation in the
Armenian Church (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1854), pp. 8, 10.
17. Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies (1970; reprint,
Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984), pp. 287–88.
18. James L., Barton, comp., Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on the
Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915–1917 (Ann Arbor: Gomidas
Institute, 1998), pp. 12, 15.
19. From Maria Jacobsen, Diaries of a Danish Missionary: Harpoot, 1907–1919, ed. Ara Sarafian,
trans. Kristen Vind (Princeton: Gomidas Institute Books, 2001), p. 65 (May 30), p. 83 (July 29), p. 86
(August 7), pp. 86, 87 (August 14), p. 93 (October 2).
20. The quotations that follow are from Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American
Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, ed. Susan K. Blair (New Rochelle,
NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1989), pp. 8, 81.
21. United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, comp. Ara Sarafian (Princeton:
Gomidas Institute, 2004).
22. Military Mission B, no. 1950 Secret, Constantinople, November 17, 1916, in The Armenian
Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915–1916, ed. Wolfgang Gust
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), p. 686.
23. Heinrich Vierbücher, Armenia 1915: What the German Imperial Government Concealed from
Its Subjects; The Slaughter of a Civilized People at the Hands of the Turks, ed. Ara Ghazarians
(Arlington, MA: Armenian Cultural Foundation, 2006), p. 52.
24. Gust, The Armenian Genocide, p. 329.
25. From the Gust Guide (document 1915-07-21-DE-012), an extract from his publication on the
Armenian Genocide. See http://www.sci.am/downloads/musgen/WolfgangGust.pdf, p. 59.
26. Gust, The Armenian Genocide, document 1916-02-09-DE-001, pp. 542–55.
27. Khatchig Mouradian, “The Ottoman Archives Are Open… Almost: An Interview with Hilmar
Kaiser,” Aztag Daily (Lebanon), September 22, 2005.
28. Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to
Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 205.
29. Ibid., including p. 209, n. 8.
30. These accounts are all from Verjiné Svazlyan, The Armenian Genocide: Testimonies of the
Eyewitness Survivors, trans. Tigran Tsulikian and Anahit Poghikian-Darbinian (Yerevan:
“Gitoutoyun” Publishing House of NAS RA, 2011), pp. 384, 443, 270–71, 289.
31. The Kurds have officially recognized the Armenian Genocide as well as their part in it. They have
issued numerous apologies. See
 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdish_recognition_of_the_Armenian_genocide for a complete listing with
quotes.
32. Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 169.
33. Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus, p. 108.
34. The perpetrators understood at the time that the war would end someday and that this mass killing
would be viewed as a “crime against humanity.” On May 24, 1915, the Triple Entente nations had
warned the Ottoman Empire that “in view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and
civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold
personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as their
agents who are implicated in such massacres.” See Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman
Empire, 1914–1918 (1968; repr., Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1989), p. 210. A full English
translation of the original text can be found in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1915, supplement, p. 981.
35. Taner Akcam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic
Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
C HAPTER 4: TEHLIRIAN GOES TO WAR
1. Mikayel Varandian, Murad of Sepastia, trans. Ara Ghazarians (Arlington, MA: Armenian Cultural
Foundation, 2006), p. 5. The full quote reads, “Since Murad had not received any education, he was
almost illiterate, like Antranig and many others of our fighters.”
2. Tehlirian memoir, p. 50.
3. See Yervant Odian, Accursed Years: My Exile and Return from Der Zor, 1914–1919, trans. Ara
Stepan Melkonian (London: Gomidas Institute, 2009); also Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian
Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 251–53.
4. In addition to Gomidas, almost an entire generation of Armenian writers were rounded up and killed.
Significant authors on this list include Yervand Srmakeshkhanlian, Artashes Harutiunian, Ruben
Zardarian, Tigran Chrakian, Gegham Barseghian, Daniel Varuzhan, Tigran Cheokiurian, Ruben
Sevak, and Atom Yarchanian (Siamanto). See Agop J. Hacikyan, coordinating ed., The Heritage of
Armenian Literature, vol. 3 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), pp. 658–853.
5. Der Prozess Talaat Pascha: Stenographischer Prozessbericht [The Talat Pasha Trial], foreword
by Armin Wegner (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik, 1921), p. 60. This is the original
courtroom transcript, supplied to me by Rolf Hosfeld of Lepsiushaus, Berlin, and translated by Joel
Golb.
6. Ibid., p. 60.
7. Michael Bobelian, Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle
for Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), pp. 13–15.
8. Tehlirian memoir, p. 67.
9. Rafael de Nogales, Four Years beneath the Crescent, trans. Muna Lee (London: Sterndale
Classics, 2003), chap. 7, “The Siege of Van,” pp. 69–87.
10. Tehlirian memoir, pp. 75, 80.
11. Ibid., p. 90.
98. Jacques Semelin, Claire Andrieu, and Sarah Gensburger, eds., Resisting Genocide: The Multiple
Forms of Rescue, trans. Emma Bentley and Cynthia Schoch (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), p. 205.
13. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, eds., In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), p. 8.
14. The account that follows is drawn from Fethiye Cetin, My Grandmother: A Memoir, trans.
Maureen Freely (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 61–80, 86–88.
15. Ibid., p. ix.
16. Jacobsen, Diaries of a Danish Missionary, pp. 78, 102, 201.
17. The account that follows is from Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, pp. 309–10.
18. Tehlirian memoir, p. 95.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 103.
21. Ibid., p. 115.
22. Ibid., p. 116.
23. James B. Gidney, A Mandate for Armenia (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1967), pp. 64,
65.
24. This was the original name of the communist state that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1922 a
larger entity was born: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
25. Richard Hovanissian, ed., The Republic of Armenia, 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996), 1:21.
26. Tehlirian memoir, pp. 111–12.
27. Ibid., p. 157.
C HAPTER 5: THE D EBT
1. Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, p. 359.
2. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random
House, 2002), p. 372.
3. The former version of this newspaper, Azadamard (Struggle for Freedom), was shuttered on April
24, 1915. Its editor, Kegham Parseghian, was arrested on that date and subsequently murdered.
4. Tehlirian memoir, p. 190.
5. Quoted in Joan George, Merchants in Exile: The Armenians in Manchester, England, 1835–
1935 (London: Gomidas Institute, 2002), pp. 184–85.
6. The British were reluctant to bang the drum too loudly regarding “crimes against humanity” now
that the war was over. They did not want to call attention to their own record in the colonies.
7. Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akcam, Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), p. 196.
8. Tehlirian memoir, p. 206.
9. Sylvia Kedourie, ed., Seventy-Five Years of the Turkish Republic (London: Frank Cass Publishers,
2000), p. 48.
10. Andrew Mango, Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (Woodstock, NY:
Overlook Press, 1999), p. 196.
11. Marian MacCurdy credits Manoog Harpartsoumian, an attorney who was active in ARF
conferences, with compiling the “list.” Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, Sacred Justice: The Voices
and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
2015), p. 100.
12. Nemesis is the ancient Greek goddess often described as the distributor of retribution for evil deeds,
thus creating justice or balance in the world.
13. Jacques Derogy, Resistance and Revenge: The Armenian Assassination of the Turkish Leaders
Responsible for the 1915 Massacres and Deportations, trans. A. M. Berrett (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990), p. 71.
14. Shahan Natali, “On the Trail of the Great Criminal [Medz vojrakordin hedk`erov],” trans. Aram
Arkun, Nayiri (Beirut) 12, no. 1 (May 24, 1964), pt. 1, pp. 4–5.
15. Tehlirian memoir, p. 232.
16. The account that follows is drawn from Tehlirian memoir, pp. 236–39.
17. Sarkis Atamian, “A Portrait of Immortality,” pt. 1, “Soghomon Tehlirian,” Armenian Review 13, no.
3 (Autumn 1960): 50.
18. Tehlirian memoir, p. 248.
19. See Andon Kosh in Badmakrut’iwn Hay H’eghap’okhagan Tashnagts’ut’ean, vol. 2, p. 110.
20. Author interview with Marian MacCurdy April 15, 2013; see also MacCurdy and Libaridian, Sacred
Justice.
C HAPTER 6: THE HUNT
1. Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990).
2. Derogy, Resistance and Revenge, p. 74.
3. Kershaw, Hitler, p. 96.
4. Ibid.
5. George Grosz, An Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 119.
6. Aaron Sachaklian (1879–1964) was an immigrant to the United States who had established his
credentials as a CPA at a large insurance firm in Syracuse at the time of the conspiracy. His full
story is told in Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy and Gerard Libaridian’s book Sacred Justice: The
Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis.
7. Hrach Papazian (1892–1960) would serve in the Syrian parliament in 1932 and 1943 and was a
member of the ARF Bureau from 1947 to 1959.
8. Vahan Zakarian (1883–1980). In Germany he was one of the founders of the German-Armenian
Society, presided over by Johannes Lepsius. He was counselor of economic affairs at the Republic
of Armenia mission in Berlin. He would also serve as Tehlirian’s interpreter at the subsequent Berlin
trial.
9. Hagop Zorian (1894–1942) was a history student at the University of Berlin. In later life he would
become one of the leading economic historians of Soviet Armenia from 1925 until 1937, when he
was arrested during the Stalinist purges. He was tried in 1939 and sentenced on the charge of
having collaborated in Talat Pasha’s assassination. He died in exile.
10. Haig Ter-Ohanian (1883–?) was an active ARF member and author.
11. I am indebted to Vartan Matiossian for allowing me to read his unpublished lecture on Haigo,
presented at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research in Belmont,
Massachusetts, on June 5, 2014, from which the biographical information on these figures was
drawn. In this lecture he reveals for the first time the previously unknown true identity of agent
Haigo. Matiossian identifies one of the collaborating resident artists in Berlin as the renowned poet
Avetik Isahakian (1875–1957).
12. From a letter from Natali to Sachaklian, dated September 30, 1920. Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy,
Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015), p.166.
13. Interview with the author at the Nubarian Library, Paris, September 8, 2011.
14. Herbert, Ben Kendim, p. 321.
15. Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905–1920: The Shaping of National Identity in
a Muslim Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 160.
16. Lawrence James, The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (London:
Paragon House, 1993), p. 373.
17. Sir Andrew Ryan would also serve as chief dragoman, or high-level translator, during the peace talks
in Lausanne in 1921.
18. British National Archives, From Directorate of Intelligence, marked “SECRET,” C.P. 2192/A
Monthly Review of Revolutionary Movements in British Dominions Overseas and Foreign Countries
[no. 24, October 1920], 2, Whitehall Gardens, S.W., 30 November 1920: “Talaat Pasha, who lives at
 Hardenbergerstrasse [sic] 5 or 6 Berlin, is said recently to have been very active. He presides over
the Turkish Egyptian organization, which has 10 prominent members, one of them a cousin of Enver
Pasha. The German Foreign office is indirectly subsidising Egyptian students in Berlin. The money
passes through the hands of a certain Herr von Kardoff and Sheikh Shawish, and is finally
distributed by Talaat in order that the Egyptians and everyone else may believe that the money
comes from Pan-Islamic sources. The students in this way are induced to carry out Pan-Islamic
propaganda.”
19. Derogy, Resistance and Revenge, p. 77.
20. Tehlirian memoir, p. 290.
21. Ibid.
22. For quotations in this passage, see ibid., pp. 267–68.
23. Ibid., p. 272.
24. The quotations that follow are from Tehlirian memoir, pp. 274–76.
25. Many of the buildings on Hardenbergstrasse were destroyed during World War II. Number 4
Hardenbergstrasse is listed as “durch Sprengwirkung zerstörte,” or destroyed by bombing.
26. Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert
Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 33, 34.
27. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this portion of the chapter are from Herbert, Ben Kendim,
pp. 307–28.
28. Sir Basil Thomson was for a time both an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard and director of
intelligence at the Home Office.
29. Aubrey Herbert, Ben Kendim: A Record of Eastern Travel (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1924), p.
308.
30. Herbert, Ben Kendim, p. 318.
31. Mim Kemal Oke, The Armenian Question, 1914–1923 (Nicosia: K. Rustem & Brother, 1988), p.
269. Oke provides no citation for what he reports as “fact”: that the intelligence service made
contact with the Soviets.
32. Aubrey Herbert papers, British National Archives, London. Sir Reginald Wildig Allen Leeper, born
in Sydney, Australia, would eventually become head of Britain’s Political Intelligence Department.
During World War I he was an intelligence officer. He was also a member of the Lausanne
delegation.
33. U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to Foreign Relations, 1919, vol. 2, p. 830, University of
Wisconsin Digital Collection. General Bridges was Sir George Tom Molesworth Bridges, who had
extensive experience in the Greek and Turkish campaigns. Curzon was Lord Curzon, who was
foreign secretary at the time. Special thanks to Nora Nercessian for her assistance in this research.
34. Aubrey Herbert papers, British National Archives, London.
35. Parliamentary archives, British National Archives, London, LG/F/93/4/11. Churchill was at the time
secretary of state for the colonies.
36. Margaret Fitzherbert, The Man Who Was Greenmantle: A Biography of Aubrey Herbert
(London: J. Murray, 1983).
37. John Buchan, Greenmantle (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1916), p. 23.
38. Kemalist Turkey did eventually share in the Mosul oil wealth via its shares in the Turkish Petroleum
Company, which would be renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company.
39. Derogy, Resistance and Revenge, p. 82.
40. Shahan Natali, “On the Trail of the Great Criminal,” Nayiri 12, no. 4, June 14, 1964, pt. 4, p. 4.
41. The account that follows is drawn from Tehlirian memoir, p. 298.
42. Tehlirian memoir, p. 304.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., p. 306.
C HAPTER 7: THE TRIAL
1. Tessa Hofmann, “New Aspects of the Talat Pasha Court Case,” Armenian Review 4, no. 168
(1989): 41–53.
2. Derogy, Resistance and Revenge, p. 111.
3. New York Times, June 3, 1921, “Says Mother’s Ghost Ordered Him to Kill,” reprinted in Kloian,
The Armenian Genocide, p. 344.
4. All quotes from the trial are from Der Prozess Talaat Pascha. Also see Christoph Dinkel, “German
Officers and the Armenian Genocide,” Armenian Review 44, no. 1/173 (Spring 1991): 91.
5. “Assassin Boasts of Talaat’s Death,” New York Times, March 17, 1921; “Talaat Is Mourned as
Germany’s Friend,” New York Times, March 18, 1921. Both articles appear in Kloian, The
Armenian Genocide, p. 343.
C HAPTER 8: THE B IG P ICTURE
1. General Liman von Sanders was arrested in February 1919 by the British occupying force. He was
held for a brief time to stand trial himself for war crimes but was released before any trial could
take place. Dinkel, “German Officers and the Armenian Genocide,” p. 78.
2. I did not have access to the “German documents” Lepsius refers to here. The debate on the exact
nature of Germany’s cooperation is ongoing. See Vahakn Dadrian, German Responsibility in the
Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Watertown,
MA: Blue Crane Books, 1996); and the sources cited by Hilmar Kaiser and Donald Bloxham for the
two sides of the issue.
3. Dadrian, History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 254; see also Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany
and the Next War, trans. Allen H. Powles (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914), p. 19.
4. “As for the Turks, the German military personnel had so much mastery over them that no Turk,
irrespective of rank, position or class, dared to challenge them. Let one example suffice: When the
Turkish major in charge of the Mamure station dared to show reluctance to put a whole [train] car
at the disposal of forty German soldiers, an ordinary German soldier killed him with a shot of his
pistol. The matter—a German soldier having killed the Turkish station commander—was not even
brought before a court-martial.” Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, p. 312.
5. Liman von Sanders is referring here to embattled areas where the Armenians dared to resist
pressure from Ottoman troops. German artillery was decisive in the destruction of these holdouts.
See Raphael de Nogales, Four Years beneath the Crescent, translated by Muna Lee (London:
Sterndale Classics, 2003); Paul Leverkuehn, A German Officer during the Armenian Genocide:
A Biography of Max von Scheubner-Richter, translated by Alasdair Lean (London: Taderon
Press for the Gomidas Institute, 2008); Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the
Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Watertown,
MA: Blue Crane Books, 1996).
6. The exact definition of the term “genocide” is still being debated. The following from Wikipedia:
“Genocide is the systematic destruction of all or a significant part of a racial, ethnic, religious or
national group” via “(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Genocide also
entails conspiracy to commit genocide; direct and public incitement to commit genocide; attempt to
commit genocide; and complicity in genocide. It is important to note that the term “genocide” is not
rooted in “genetics.” Also, “genocide” is a legal term. Once it has been established that genocide
has occurred, legal attempts at reparations are possible. Actions do not have to be one hundred
percent effective to be a genocide. Denial has been called the last stage of genocide.
7. Paul Leverkuehn, A German Officer during the Armenian Genocide: A Biography of Max von
Scheubner-Richter (London: Gomidas Institute, 2009).
8. Dinkel, “German Officers and the Armenian Genocide,” p. 94; Kershaw, Hitler, p. 131.
9. For a thorough investigation into this attribution, see Kevork B. Bardakjian, Hitler and the
Armenian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute, 1985). The entire book deals with the
veracity and implications of the quote. On p. 1 (and in the footnote, p. 37) Bardakjian cites the
 source of the quote as Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, ed. E. L. Woodward
and Rohan Butler, 3rd ser., vol. 7 (1939; London, 1954), p. 257.
10. See Vahakn N. Dadrian, “The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation” in Jay Winter, ed., America
and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 70.
11. Vahakn Dadrian, The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War One Genocide of Ottoman
Armenians (New York: Pergamon Press, 1986), 169–92.
12. See both Ugur Umit Ungor and Mehmet Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk
Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011); and
Ungor, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
13. See Ugur Umit Ungor and Mehmet Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk
Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), pp. 31–
32.
14. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010),
p. 117.
15. See Akcam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity, p. 383.
16. Israel does not officially recognize the Armenian genocide. Many Jews see Hitler’s destruction of
European Jewry as a unique historical event, and any comparison to other genocides is viewed as
degrading to the memory of the Holocaust. The resistance to recognition is also grounded in
geopolitics. Israel is an on again, off again ally of Turkey, and both nations are major allies of the
United States. See Yair Auron, The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), p. 127.
17. For Balakian’s full story see his Armenian Golgotha, translated by his grand-nephew Peter
Balakian.
18. From a letter to Shahan Natali from Zakarian, dated June 11, 1921, in MacCurdy, Sacred Justice,
pp. 195–196.
19. “They Simply Had to Let Him Go,” New York Times, June 5, 1921.
20. The specific law that allowed Tehlirian’s acquittal can be found in paragraph 51 of the German
Penal Code. For a full examination of the legal aspects of the trial, see the unpublished thesis by
Osik Moses, “The Assassination of Talaat Pascha in 1921 in Berlin: A Case Study of Judicial
Practices in the Weimar Republic” (submitted to California State University, Northridge, May 2012),
p. 1. It is available for viewing on the Internet at
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/2103368/california-state-university-northridge.
21. From Levon Marashlian, “Finishing the Genocide,” in Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the
Armenian Genocide, ed. Richard Hovannisian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p.
127.
C HAPTER 9: THE WORK C ONTINUES
1. Hofmann, “New Aspects of the Talat Pasha Court Case,” pp. 47, 52 n. 25.
2. See Edward Alexander’s postscript to A Crime of Vengeance: An Armenian Struggle for Justice
(Lincoln, NE: IUniverse.com, 2000), p. 206: “But father, why were those women kissing his
hand?… Because with that hand he avenged our people. Never forget him!”
3. “The Slayer of Talaat Pasha Acquitted,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 6, 1921.
4. See MacCurdy, Sacred Justice. Marion Mesrobian MacCurdy is the granddaughter of Sachaklian.
5. Derogy, Resistance and Revenge, p. 111.
6. Ibid.
7. Author interview with Gerard Libaridian, former ARF archivist, April 17, 2013.
8. The plan of the “Prometheus Pact” was “to use Kemalist Turkey as the agent for overthrowing the
Bolsheviks in the Caucasus. It was established in Tabriz in mid-July 1921.” Walker, Armenia, p.
353.
9. Ronald G. Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian
Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 336–37.
10. See Vartkes Yeghiayan and Ara Arabyan, The Case of Misak Torlakian (Glendale, CA: Center
for Armenian Remembrance, 2006), p. 180.
11. Ibid., p. 273.
12. See Arshavir Shiragian, The Legacy: Memoirs of an Armenian Patriot, trans. Sonia Shiragian
(Boston: Hairenik Press, 1976), p. 13.
13. Ibid., p. 47.
14. Political and Secret Department Records (IOR/L/PS/11/170–IOR/L/PS/11/309), India Office
Records, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London, vol. 192, p. 225/1921, Turkey:
Views of Talaat Pasha, Communication, 5 December 1920, D’Abernon to FCO (Lord Curzon). Also
see references to transfer of funds by Enver and Talat from German banks to Swiss banks in memo
marked “Very Secret,” dated June 3, 1920 (1885 HA/615), and other activity in concert with Kemal
and the Bolshevik movement in “Mesopotamia Causes of Unrest Report No. II” by Major N. N. E.
Bray, special intelligence officer attached to Political Department, India Office, dated October 18,
1920, in British National Archives, London.
15. Shiragian, The Legacy, p. x.
16. See article published online at AVIM website by Professor Hikmet Ozdemir titled “Revanchism as
Blind Faith and the Dashnak-Asala Assassinations”
(http://www.avim.org.tr/yorumnotlarduyurular/en/REVANCHISM-AS-BLIND-FAITH-AND-THE-
DASHNAK-ASALA-ASSASSINATIONS-/3216), posted March 18, 2014, which goes into detail
on CUP fears, and the citation from that report: Huseyin Cahit Yalcin, Ittihatci Liderlerin Gizli
Mektuplari, p. 456.
17. Shiragian, The Legacy, p. 132.
18. “Un ex gran visir assassinato a Roma: Si tratta di un delitto politico?” [“A Former Grand Vizier
Assassinated in Rome: Was It a Political Crime?”], Il Messaggero, December 8, 1921.
19. Shiragian, The Legacy, p. 136. Though the word “genocide” appears in this quote published in 1976,
at the time of Said Halim’s assassination the term had not yet been coined by Raphael Lemkin.
20. Ibid., pp. 114, 115.
21. For the account in this section of the chapter, see ibid., pp. 145–80.
22. Djemal Pasha, Memories of a Turkish Statesman, 1913–1919 (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1922),
pp. 277–79.
23. Deportations moved through areas Djemal Pasha oversaw, in what we now call Syria. However, he
was not in charge of the concentration camps.
24. Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, p. 214; also Peter Hopkirk, Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to
Bring Down the British Empire (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), pp. 129, 130.
25. Hrach Dasnabedian, History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Dashnaktsutiun,
1890–1924 (Milan: Oemme Edizioni, 1989), p. 191.
26. Suhnaz Yilmaz, “An Ottoman Warrior Abroad: Enver Pasha as an Expatriate,” in Kedouri, Seventy-
Five Years of the Turkish Republic, p. 53, and n. 75, citing Turkish Republican Archives, Decree
of the Parliament concerning Enver and Halil Pasha, 3 December 1921, no. 731/385.
27. Louise Bryant, Mirrors of Moscow (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), pp. 158–59.
28. See chap. 6 of Georges Agabekov’s memoirs, Tche Kah za Rabatoi [The Cheka at Work] (Berlin:
Strela, 1930).
29. Fromkin, The Peace to End All Peace, p. 487.
30. The man who tracked down Enver Pasha, Georges Agabekov, is historically notable because he
was the first high-level Soviet intelligence agent to defect to the West. He was himself hunted by the
NKVD and killed in March 1938. See Boris Volodarsky, “Unknown Agabekov,” Intelligence and
National Security, June 28, 2013, 890–909, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2012.701440.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/research/canadaBlanch/PDF/Press%202013/6Nov13INS.pd
f.
31. Andrew Mango, Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (Woodstock, NY:
Overlook Press, 1999), p. 451.
C HAPTER 10: AFTERMATH AND ATATURK
1. Also see chapter 9, p. 240, n. 8 re: the Prometheus Pact.
2. Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2009), pp. 119–20.
3. See Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy, pp. 274, 275; also John A. DeNovo, American Interests and
Policies in the Middle East: 1900–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), pp.
160, 161.
4. Colby Chester, “Turkey Reinterpreted,” Current History 16 (April–September 1922): 344.
5. The following narrative is from Anthony Slide’s introduction to his book Ravished Armenia and the
Story of Aurora Mardiganian (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997), pp. 1–18.
6. Aurora Mardiganian, Ravished Armenia: The Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl
Who Lived Through the Great Massacres (New York: Kingfield Press, 1919).
7. See Edward Minasian, “The Forty Years of Musa Dagh: The Film That Was Denied,” Journal of
Armenian Studies 3, nos. 1–2 (1986–87): 63–73.
8. Pressure on media companies and the United States government continues to this day. In 1988,
three weeks before Ted Bogosian’s documentary An Armenian Journey was to be broadcast on
PBS stations across the United States, Turkey began a concerted campaign to block the broadcast
by lobbying the State Department and pressuring local PBS stations. As a result, some stations did
not air the program. Some of the few that did received death and bomb threats (for example,
WGBH in Boston and KCET in Los Angeles).
9. By 1910, the most significant armaments were the “fast battleship” and the “super-dreadnought.”
“Super-dreadnought” battleships, weighing over twenty thousand tons, were the atomic bomb of
their day, the ultimate weapon. Each ship was very expensive to produce but seemed worth the
expenditure because a super-dreadnought anchored in the harbor of any major city would ensure
control of that city. Super-dreadnoughts, as opposed to conventional coal-fueled battleships, could
not run without oil. Even for conventional warships, oil packed more energy per ton. Thus an oil-
burning ship had a “40 per cent larger radius of action.” Oil-fueled ships also had greater speed. Oil
was much more easily moved and stored than coal and, even more important, was more easily
injected into the engines. Half as many human stokers were necessary for smooth operation. The
ship could be refueled “with the greatest of ease” at sea. Finally, oil didn’t smoke like coal when it
burned, maintaining invisibility of the ship on the horizon. See Anton Mohr, The Oil War (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926), p. 114.
10. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918 (New York: Free Press, 2005), pp. 74–76.
11. Churchill quoted in Stephen Kinzer, Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future (New York: Times
Books, 2010), p. 26.
12. See “Memoirs of Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian with Particular Relation to the Origins and Foundation
of the Iraq Petroleum Company Limited,” testimony before the U.S. Congress, 1945, National
Archives, Washington, DC. Also see Edwin Black, British Petroleum and the Redline Agreement:
The West’s Secret Pact to Get Mideast Oil (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2011).
13. The Turkish Petroleum Company, which would later morph into the Iraq Petroleum Company, was
substantially owned by the National Bank of Turkey. The National Bank of Turkey featured a board
of directors in 1908 composed of both high-ranking CUP members and Armenians. This board
 would include the Armenian Egyptian Nubar Pasha and a “Mr. Essyan” as well as Said Halim and
Djemal Pasha. See Marian Kent, Moguls and Mandarins: Oil, Imperialism and the Middle East
in British Foreign Policy, 1900–1940 (1993; New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 90 n. 8.
14. See Ralph Hewins, Mr. Five Per Cent: The Story of Calouste Gulbenkian (New York: Rinehart
& Company, 1958), appendix, p. 259. Gulbenkian’s wife, Nvart, was related to Nubar.
15. Edwin Black, British Petroleum and the Red Line Agreement: The West’s Secret Pact to Get
Mideast Oil (Oshkosh, WI: Dialog, 2011), p. 153. See also my discussion in chapter 6 implicating
Curzon in a contract on Enver Pasha’s life.
16. See Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a
Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003).
17. As quoted in an essay by Joshua Binus on the Oregon Historical Society website:
http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/historical_records/dspDocument.cfm?
doc_ID=c5f74925-d75d-54f1-e441ea279f7a9402.
18. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 240.
19. Early in his career as leader of the new Republic of Turkey, Kemal did publicly denounce the
genocide, calling it a “scandal” and a “lowly act.” See Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akcam,
Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).
20. The Foundations Law of 1935 and other laws pertaining to taxes, ownership of property, and
inheritance are complex and barely investigated aspects of the Ottoman/Turkish institutional
structure. “Foundations” were a significant part of that structure. The idea was that certain facets
of social life, such as bathhouses, charitable institutions, soup kitchens, and the like, as well as
religious buildings, should not belong to anyone in particular. They belonged to God. And so these
and other material manifestations of charitable endeavors, from parks and public fountains to
mosques, were established by foundations. Royalty would finance foundations to build and preserve
the buildings and other elements. Foundations could include contributions from earned income (for
instance, a bazaar), which could be used to perpetuate the foundation. The foundations were created
under the auspices of the sultan in his role as caliph. They were created at his pleasure. Since
millets also had churches and other charitable elements, millets also needed foundations.
When the republic was created by Kemal Ataturk, the issue of foundations had to be addressed
for at least two reasons. First of all, Ataturk’s was a secular state, and so the state controlled
religious activity. Thus the state had to control the foundations that held the religious equities. In this
way, the power of Islam could be checked. Second, minority religions could be suppressed by laws
that addressed the foundations. Also, some foundations were barely solvent, so other foundations
traditionally could be created to aid them. But the Foundations Law of 1935 forbade one foundation
from aiding another. See “2012 Declaration: The Seized Properties of Armenian Foundations in
Istanbul,” published by the Hrant Dink Foundation, Istanbul, for a more complete look at the subject.
21. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction
of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 209.
22. M. Sukru Hanioglu, Ataturk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2011), p. 164.
23. Esra Ozyurek, ed., The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2007), p. 42.
24. Visiting a pottery shop while touring in Turkey, I mentioned to the gracious owner that my family
originally came from Turkey and that they were Armenian. He nodded and said with a smile, “Many
 Armenians lived here once. They all went away.”
25. “Insulting Turkishness” (Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code) became a punishable crime in
Turkey in 2006. Authors Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak have faced prison time for their mention of
the Armenian genocide in their writing.
26. Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepan, eds., Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 166.
27. The actual wording of the law is as follows:

Article 1. To anyone offending or insulting Ataturk’s memory, a sentence from one year to
three years of prison should be applied.
To anyone breaking, destroying, or soiling statues, busts, and monuments representing Ataturk
or Ataturk’s grave, a sentence from one year to five years in prison should be applied.
To anyone encouraging others to perform the above-mentioned crimes, the sentence will be the
same as for the actual crime.
Article 2. For the crimes listed in Article 1: if the crimes are performed by two or more people
in a collective fashion, or in public or in places open to the public or through the press, the sentence
to be applied is augmented by half.

See Human Rights Watch website: http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/turkey/turkey993-09.htm.

C HAPTER 11: P OST-ATATURK
1. Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akcam, Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), p. 265.
2. Nicole Pope and Hugh Pope, Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey (Woodstock, NY:
Overlook Press, 1997), p. 76.
3. In April 1985 Lewis was one of sixty-nine scholars who co-signed a petition requesting Congress
not to support a resolution condemning the Armenian Genocide. The petition was published in two-
page ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post. In 1993 he made statements in France
that resulted in a civil proceeding against him. See Yair Auron, The Banality of Denial: Israel and
the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), pp. 227, 228.
4. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), p. 298.
5. Rifat N. Bali, The “Varlik Vergisi” Affair: A Study on Its Legacy with Selected Documents
(Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011), p. 47.
6. Ibid., p. 93.
7. Speros Vryonis Jr., The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6–7,
1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul (New York: Greekworks.com,
2005), p. xxvi.
8. For a more complex take on how the city changed, see Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the
City, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage International, 2004).
9. Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler (New
York: New York Review of Books, 2013), p. 5.
10. See the 1990 documentary film by Zareh Tjeknavorian, Enemy of the People,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV3H4YxdSfs&list=UU8mkGExJ3OEWkbaJ_dxr5OQ.
11. This motto of the Tashnag organization has been quoted many times. I’m quoting here from Levon
Thomassian, Summer of ’42: A Study of German-Armenian Relations during the Second World
War (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2012), p. 36.
12. Simon Payaslian, The History of Armenia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 179.
13. Yeghiayan and Arabyan, The Case of Misak Torlakian, p. x.
14. Author Lindy Avakian sent an inscribed copy of The Cross and the Crescent to Yanikian. Internal
FBI report dated February 24, 1973; courtesy Christopher Gunn, who has obtained FBI and CIA
reports on ASALA and other Armenian terrorist groups with a FOIA query.
15. Michael Bobelian, Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle
for Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009).
16. Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1973.
17. One cell called itself the Shahan Natali Guerrilla Group (ASALA publication of interviews, 1982,
courtesy Christopher Gunn). See also Markar Melkonian and Seta Melkonian, My Brother’s Road:
An American’s Fateful Journey to Armenia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). Markar was the sibling
of one of the more remarkable members of ASALA, Monte Melkonian, a young Armenian
American from southern California who had embraced Armenian nationalism and moved to
Lebanon to join the radical groups operating there. Monte Melkonian would commit violent acts and
go to prison in France as a member of ASALA. As Monte’s brother Markar explained in the 2008
 biography/memoir of his brother, Monte chastised himself after killing a young Turkish woman but
continued to believe in the “cause.” In time he would break away from ASALA altogether and form
a splinter group, the ASALA Revolutionary Movement. During the Armenian war with Azerbaijan
in the 1990s, Monte Melkonian volunteered to fight, becoming an important military leader. In a
battle that is still shrouded in controversy, he was gunned down in an ambush and died in Karabagh
in 1993 at the age of thirty-five. He is revered as a national hero in Armenia.
18. See the CIA reports “Global Terrorism: The Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide,”
September 1984 (GI 84-10148); and “The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia: A
Continuing International Threat,” January 1984 (GI 84-10008 and EUR 84-10004).
19. For a description of torture practices in modern Turkey, see Mehdi Zana, Prison No 5: Eleven
Years in Turkish Jails (Watertown, MA: Blue Crane Books, 1997).
20. For the most complete discussion of Ergenekon, see Gareth H. Jenkins, “Between Fact and Fantasy:
Turkey’s Ergenekon Investigation,” Silk Road Paper, Central Asia–Caucasus Institute Silk Road
Studies Program, August 2009.
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 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Introduction
Prologue

PART I
Chapter 1. The Rise of Empire
Chapter 2. Rushing Headlong into the Modern Era, 1800–1914
Chapter 3. Blood Flows

PART II
Chapter 4. Tehlirian Goes to War
Chapter 5. The Debt
Chapter 6. The Hunt
Chapter 7. The Trial
Chapter 8. The Big Picture

PART III
Chapter 9. The Work Continues
Chapter 10. Aftermath and Ataturk
Chapter 11. Post-Ataturk
 Postscript

Photos
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Eric Bogosian
A Short Glossary of Names and Terms
A Note on Language
Bibliography
Notes
Newsletters
Copyright
 Copyright

Copyright © 2015 by Ararat Productions, Inc.

Cover design by Allison J. Warner
Cover photographs of Constantinople and Mehmet Talat Pasha (middle) © Granger, NYC; Djemal
Pasha (top) © Underwood Archives / Getty Images; Behaeddin Shakir (bottom) public domain
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Selections from The Legacy by Arshavir Shiragian reprinted with permission from Sonia Shiragian and
Hairenik Association; and from The Armenian Genocide: Testimonies from the Eyewitness Survivors
reprinted with permission from Verjiné Svazlian.

The photograph of Aaron Sachaklian, courtesy of Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, is published in her book
Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis, Transaction
Publishers, 2015.

Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

ISBN 978-0-316-29201-6

E3