A masterful account of the assassins who hunted down the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. In 1921, a tightly knit band of killers set out to avenge the deaths of almost one million victims of the Armenian Genocide. They were a humble bunch: an accountant, a life insurance salesman, a newspaper editor, an engineering student, and a diplomat. Together they formed one of the most effective assassination squads in history. They named their operation Nemesis, after the Greek goddess of retribution. The assassins were survivors, men defined by the massive tragedy that had devastated their people. With operatives on three continents, the Nemesis team killed six major Turkish leaders in Berlin, Constantinople, Tiflis, and Rome, only to disband and suddenly disappear. The story of this secret operation has never been fully told, until now. Eric Bogosian goes beyond simply telling the story of this cadre of Armenian assassins by setting the killings in the context of Ottoman and Armenian history, as well as showing in vivid color the era's history, rife with political fighting and massacres. Casting fresh light on one of the great crimes of the twentieth century and one of history's most remarkable acts of vengeance, Bogosian draws upon years of research and newly uncovered evidence. Operation Nemesis is the result -- both a riveting read and a profound examination of evil, revenge, and the costs of violence.

"The Case of Misak Torlakian is about the trial of Misak Torlakian, an Armenian Ottoman subject, by the British Military Court, which took place at 10:00 a.m. on August 11, 1921, on the charge of murdering Bihbud Khan Jivanshir, Ex-Minister of interior of Azerbaijan, outside the Pera Palace Hotel in Constantinople (Istanbul) on July 18, 1921. The Case of Misak Torlakian is the twin of The Case of Soghomon 'I'ehlirian. Both trials involved the murder of a tyrant, and both of the perpetrators were found not guilty. During both trials, history, theology, philosophy, physiology, psychology, and politics were invoked by both sides to sway the Military Judge in the case of Torlakian, and the Jury of Peers in the case of Tehlirian. Thus in addition to being landmark legal cases, these two trials reveal the prevailing mindsets and political strategies of Germans, Turks, Armenians and Azeris in the aftermath of WWI."--Back cover.

The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that the Armenians were restless under Ottoman rule, they were a problem for Germany too. From the 1890s onward Germany became accustomed to excusing violence against Armenians, even accepting it as a foreign policy necessity. For many Germans, the Armenians represented an explicitly racial problem and despite the Armenians’ Christianity, Germans portrayed them as the “Jews of the Orient.” As Stefan Ihrig reveals in this first comprehensive study of the subject, many Germans before World War I sympathized with the Ottomans’ longstanding repression of the Armenians and would go on to defend vigorously the Turks’ wartime program of extermination. After the war, in what Ihrig terms the “great genocide debate,” German nationalists first denied and then justified genocide in sweeping terms. The Nazis too came to see genocide as justifiable: in their version of history, the Armenian Genocide had made possible the astonishing rise of the New Turkey. Ihrig is careful to note that this connection does not imply the Armenian Genocide somehow caused the Holocaust, nor does it make Germans any less culpable. But no history of the twentieth century should ignore the deep, direct, and disturbing connections between these two crimes.

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.

The first English-language biography of the de facto ruler of the late Ottoman Empire and architect of the Armenian Genocide, Talaat Pasha (1874-1921) led the triumvirate that ruled the late Ottoman Empire during World War I and is arguably the father of modern Turkey. He was also the architect of the Armenian Genocide, which would result in the systematic extermination of more than a million people, and which set the stage for a century that would witness atrocities on a scale never imagined. Here is the first biography in English of the revolutionary figure who not only prepared the way for Ataturk and the founding of the republic in 1923, but who shaped the modern world as well. In this explosive book, Hans-Lukas Kieser provides a mesmerizing portrait of a man who maintained power through a potent blend of the new Turkish ethno-nationalism, the political Islam of former Sultan Abdulhamid II, and a readiness to employ radical "solutions" and violence. From Talaat's role in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to his exile from Turkey and assassination--a sensation in Weimar Germany--Kieser restores the Ottoman drama to the heart of world events. He shows how Talaat wielded far more power than previously realized, making him the de facto ruler of the empire. He brings wartime Istanbul vividly to life as a thriving diplomatic hub, and reveals how Talaat's cataclysmic actions would reverberate across the twentieth century. In this major work of scholarship, Kieser tells the story of the brilliant and merciless politician who stood at the twilight of empire and the dawn of the age of genocide.

Sacred Justice is a cross-genre book that uses narrative, memoir, unpublished letters, and other primary and secondary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men who organized Operation Nemesis, a covert operation created to assassinate the Turkish architects of the Armenian Genocide. The leaders of Operation Nemesis took it upon themselves to seek justice for their murdered families, friends, and compatriots. Sacred Justice includes a large collection of previously unpublished letters, found in the upstairs study of the author's grandfather, Aaron Sachaklian, one of the leaders of Nemesis, that show the strategies, personalities, plans, and dedication of Soghomon Tehlirian, who killed Talaat Pasha, a genocide leader; Shahan Natalie, the agent on the ground in Europe; Armen Garo, the center of Operation Nemesis; Aaron Sachaklian, the logistics and finance officer; and others involved with Nemesis. Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy tells a story that has been either hidden by the necessity of silence or ignored in spite of victims' narratives—the story of those who attempted to seek justice for the victims of genocide and the effect this effort had on them and on their families. Ultimately, this volume reveals how the narratives of resistance and trauma can play out in the next generation and how this resistance can promote resilience.