An Account of the Genocide against the Armenians: Henry Morgenthau 1913-1916
April 23, 2026
by Mihran Kulhanjian
The United States Ambassador to Turkey
Henry Morgenthau 1913-1916
AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU’S STORY
by Henry Morgenthau (Published 1918 Doubleday, Page & Company)
I am fortunate to have an original first printings of this book by Ambassador Henry Morgenthau. In the book he gave his account dealing with the evil perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. This book is now in public domain and can be read, printed or downloaded at no charge by Project Gutenberg (Gutenberg.org). I recommend all to read this book for it gives a personal first-hand account of what occurred during Morgenthau’s time in Turkey, including his conversations with Talaat Pasha (the architect of the genocide), Enver Pasha and missionaries stationed in Turkey.
Prior to 1915, there were other mass murders of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks under the satanic, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, known as the “Red Sultan.” In 1894-96 he murdered over 300,000 Armenians. These series of murders were known as the Hamidian Massacres. Then in 1915 the “Young Turks” formed the Committee of Union and Progress, which continued the murders on an unprecedented scale unmatched in human history until roughly twenty-five years later Adolph Hitler pursued the extermination of the Jews. Hitler even noted the Armenian Genocide by saying “who remembers the extermination of the Armenians” (paraphrased), meaning the international community did nothing to stop the murders and they will not do anything that I do to the Jews or anybody else.
Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Jemal Pasha were the principal perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. Talaat Pasha (Minister of the Interior) was the chief designer of the Armenian Genocide. And shortly after the First World War, Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), in the 1920-21, began his campaign to destroy the rest of the Armenians. He seized half of the territory of the newly independent Democratic Republic of Armenia. This campaign resulted in Turkish control over major areas, including the city of Alexandropol, which is now the city of Gyumri, only about 80 miles from the capital of Armenia, Yerevan. Ataturk professed publicly that he hated Armenians and would drive them out of Anatolia by any means. And he did. The allied powers: America, Britain, and France had enough from the war and left the Armenians to fend for themselves. President Wilson, dropped the ball and then had a stroke which left him incapacitated and the plans he had for drawing an Armenian nation in eastern Anatolia vanished.
A purported one million five hundred thousand (1,500,000) Christian Armenians were murdered. Beginning in the 1870s thru the 1920s this number is closer to the murder of two million Armenians. According to Ambassador Morgenthau all the main perpetrators (Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Jemal Pasha) and even Ataturk were atheists. And who were the mass murderers of all time? Atheists who made themselves god: Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong were all atheists. But many who did the killings for the Turkish leadership did it for Allah as jihadist. It was a caliphate to rid non-Muslims from all Anatolia. Convert to Islam, renounce Christianity or die.
There were perhaps thousands of Turks and Kurds who plotted murder and other atrocities against the Armenians. In one book: British Foreign Office Dossiers of Turkish War Criminals, at lease fifty-nine murderers are noted with their crimes. They murdered not one or two Armenians, but each of these noted were responsible for tens of thousands and some hundreds of thousands of Armenians which they murdered over a period of weeks and months. Many of these noted were Vali’s, Provincial Governors of regions appointed by the Minister of the Interior. The Minister of the Interior was Talaat Pasha: he gave the orders. Not excluded from the Armenians, were other Christian minorities, Greeks, Syrians and Coptic’s.
Excerpt from Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story
In the northeastern part of Asia Minor, bordering on Russia, there were six provinces in which the Armenians formed the largest element in the population. From the time of Herodotus this portion of Asia has borne the name of Armenia. The Armenians of the present day are the direct descendants of the people who inhabited the country three thousand years ago. Their origin is so ancient that it is lost in fable and mystery. There are still undeciphered cuneiform inscriptions on the rocky hills of Van, the largest Armenian city, that have led certain scholars—though not many, I must admit—to identify the Armenian race with the Hittites of the Bible. What is definitely known about the Armenians, however, is that for ages they have constituted the most civilized and most industrious race in the eastern section of the Ottoman Empire. From their mountains they have spread over the Sultan’s dominions, and form a considerable element in the population of all the large cities. Everywhere they are known for their industry, their intelligence, and their decent and orderly lives. They are so superior to the Turks intellectually and morally that much of the business and industry had passed into their hands. With the Greeks, the Armenians constitute the economic strength of the empire. These people became Christians in the fourth century and established the Armenian Church as their state religion. This is said to be the oldest Christian Church in existence.
In face of persecutions which have had no parallel elsewhere {288} these people have clung to their early Christian faith with the utmost tenacity. For fifteen hundred years they have lived there in Armenia, a little island of Christians surrounded by backward peoples of hostile religion and hostile race. Their long existence has been one unending martyrdom. The territory which they inhabit forms the connecting link between Europe and Asia, and all the Asiatic invasions—Saracens, Tartars, Mongols, Kurds, and Turks—have passed over their peaceful country. For centuries they have thus been the Belgium of the East. Through all this period the Armenians have regarded themselves not as Asiatics, but as Europeans. They speak an Indo-European language, their racial origin is believed by scholars to be Aryan, and the fact that their religion is the religion of Europe has always made them turn their eyes westward. And out of that western country, they have always hoped, would someday come the deliverance that would rescue them from their murderous masters. And now, as Abdul Hamid, in 1876, surveyed his shattered domain, he saw that its most dangerous spot was Armenia. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that these Armenians, like the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Serbians, aspired to restore their independent medieval nation, and he knew that Europe and America sympathized with this ambition. The Treaty of Berlin, which had definitely ended the Turco-Russian War, contained an article which gave the European Powers a protecting hand over the Armenians. How could the Sultan free himself permanently from this danger? An enlightened administration, which would have transformed the Armenians into free men and made them {289} safe in their lives and property and civil and religious rights, would probably have made them peaceful and loyal subjects. But the Sultan could not rise to such a conception of statesmanship as this. Instead, Abdul Hamid apparently thought that there was only one way of ridding Turkey of the Armenian problem—and that was to rid her of the Armenians. The physical destruction of 2,000,000 men, women, and children by massacres, organized and directed by the state, seemed to be the one sure way of forestalling the further disruption of the Turkish Empire.
And now for nearly thirty years Turkey gave the world an illustration of government by massacre. We in Europe and America heard of these events when they reached especially monstrous proportions, as they did in 1895-96, when nearly 200,000 Armenians were most atrociously done to death. But through all these years the existence of the Armenians was one continuous nightmare. Their property was stolen, their men were murdered, their women were ravished, their young girls were kidnapped and forced to live in Turkish harems. Yet Abdul Hamid was not able to accomplish his full purpose. Had he had his will, he would have massacred the whole nation in one hideous orgy. He attempted to exterminate the Armenians in 1895 and 1896, but found certain insuperable obstructions to his scheme. Chief of these were England, France, and Russia. These atrocities called Gladstone, then eighty-six years old, from his retirement, and his speeches, in which he denounced the Sultan as “the great assassin,” aroused the whole world to the enormities that were taking place. It became apparent that unless the Sultan desisted, England, France, and Russia would {290} intervene, and the Sultan well knew, that, in case this intervention took place, such remnants of Turkey as had survived earlier partitions would disappear. Thus Abdul Hamid had to abandon his satanic enterprise of destroying a whole race by murder, yet Armenia continued to suffer the slow agony of pitiless persecution. Up to the outbreak of the European War not a day had passed in the Armenian vilayets without its outrages and its murders. The Young Turk régime, despite its promises of universal brotherhood, brought no respite to the Armenians. A few months after the love feastings already described, one of the worst massacres took place at Adana, in which 35,000 people were destroyed.
And now the Young Turks, who had adopted so many of Abdul Hamid’s ideas, also made his Armenian policy their own. Their passion for Turkifying the nation seemed to demand logically the extermination of all Christians—Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians. Much as they admired the Mohammedan conquerors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they stupidly believed that these great warriors had made one fatal mistake, for they had had it in their power completely to obliterate the Christian populations and had neglected to do so. This policy in their opinion was a fatal error of statesmanship and explained all the woes from which Turkey has suffered in modern times. Had these old Moslem chieftains, when they conquered Bulgaria, put all the Bulgarians to the sword, and peopled the Bulgarian country with Moslem Turks, there would never have been any modern Bulgarian problem and Turkey would never have lost this part of her empire. Similarly, had they destroyed all the Rumanians, Serbians,{291} and Greeks, the provinces which are now occupied by these races would still have remained integral parts of the Sultan’s domain. They felt that the mistake had been a terrible one, but that something might be saved from the ruin. They would destroy all Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, and other Christians, move Moslem families into their homes and into their farms, and so make sure that these territories would not similarly be taken away from Turkey. In order to accomplish this great reform, it would not be necessary to murder every living Christian. The most beautiful and healthy Armenian girls could be taken, converted forcibly to Mohammedanism, and made the wives or concubines of devout followers of the Prophet. Their children would then automatically become Moslems and so strengthen the empire, as the Janissaries had strengthened it formerly. These Armenian girls represent a high type of womanhood and the Young Turks, in their crude, intuitive way, recognized that the mingling of their blood with the Turkish population would exert a eugenic influence upon the whole. Armenian boys of tender years could be taken into Turkish families and be brought up in ignorance of the fact that they were anything but Moslems. These were about the only elements, however, that could make any valuable contributions to the new Turkey which was now being planned. Since all precautions must be taken against the development of a new generation of Armenians, it would be necessary to kill outright all men who were in their prime and thus capable of propagating the accursed species. Old men and women formed no great danger to the future of Turkey, for they had already fulfilled their natural function of leaving {292} descendants; still they were nuisances and therefore should be disposed of.
Unlike Abdul Hamid, the Young Turks found themselves in a position where they could carry out this holy enterprise. Great Britain, France, and Russia had stood in the way of their predecessor. But now these obstacles had been removed. The Young Turks, as I have said, believed that they had defeated these nations and that they could therefore no longer interfere with their internal affairs. Only one power could successfully raise objections and that was Germany. In 1898, when all the rest of Europe was ringing with Gladstone’s denunciations and demanding intervention, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second had gone to Constantinople, visited Abdul Hamid, pinned his finest decorations on that bloody tyrant’s breast, and kissed him on both cheeks. The same Kaiser who had done this in 1898 was still sitting on the throne in 1915, and was now Turkey’s ally. Thus for the first time in two centuries the Turks, in 1915, had their Christian populations utterly at their mercy. The time had finally come to make Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks.
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On every one of these points I had plenty of arguments in rebuttal. Talaat’s first objection was merely an admission that the Armenians were more industrious and more able than the dull-witted and lazy Turks. Massacre as a means of destroying business competition was certainly an original conception! His general charge that the Armenians were “conspiring” against Turkey and that they openly sympathized with Turkey’s enemies merely meant, when reduced to its original elements, that the Armenians were constantly appealing to the European Powers to protect them against robbery, murder, and outrage. The Armenian problem, like most race problems, was the result of centuries of ill-treatment and injustice. There could be only one solution for it, the creation of an orderly system of government, in which all citizens were to be treated upon an equality, and in which all offenses were to be punished as the acts of individuals and not as of peoples. I argued for a long time along these and similar lines.
“It is no use for you to argue,” Talaat answered, “we have already disposed of three quarters of the{338} Armenians; there are none at all left in Bitlis, Van, and Erzeroum. The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them. If we don’t, they will plan their revenge.”
“If you are not influenced by humane considerations,” I replied, “think of the material loss. These people are your business men. They control many of your industries. They are very large tax-payers. What would become of you commercially without them?”
“We care nothing about the commercial loss,” replied Talaat. “We have figured all that out and we know that it will not exceed five million pounds. We don’t worry about that. I have asked you to come here so as to let you know that our Armenian policy is absolutely fixed and that nothing can change it. We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else.”
I still attempted to persuade Talaat that the treatment of the Armenians was destroying Turkey in the eyes of the world, and that his country would never be able to recover from this infamy.
“You are making a terrible mistake,” I said, and I repeated the statement three times.
“Yes, we may make mistakes,” he replied, “but”—and he firmly closed his lips and shook his head—”we never regret.”
I had many talks with Talaat on the Armenians, but I never succeeded in moving him to the slightest degree. He always came back to the points which he had made in this interview. He was very willing to grant any request I made in behalf of the Americans or even of the French and English, but I could obtain no{339} general concessions for the Armenians. He seemed to me always to have the deepest personal feeling in this matter, and his antagonism to the Armenians seemed to increase as their sufferings increased. One day, discussing a particular Armenian, I told Talaat that he was mistaken in regarding this man as an enemy of the Turks; that in reality he was their friend.
“No Armenian,” replied Talaat, “can be our friend after what we have done to them.”
One day Talaat made what was perhaps the most astonishing request I had ever heard. The New York Life Insurance Company and the Equitable Life of New York had for years done considerable business among the Armenians. The extent to which this people insured their lives was merely another indication of their thrifty habits.
“I wish,” Talaat now said, “that you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders. They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course all escheats to the State. The Government is the beneficiary now. Will you do so?”
This was almost too much, and I lost my temper.
“You will get no such list from me,” I said, and I got up and left him.