Henry Morgenthau Sr.: “Turkey is a Place of Horror” – “The Murder of a Nation”

Henry Morgenthau Sr. was a US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during WWI. Thanks in large part to this Great Man who was born in a Jewish family, the world learned about the Armenian Genocide and tens of thousands of Armenians were saved through his titanic efforts.

Morgenthau met the leaders of the Ottoman Empire to discuss ways to alleviate the situation of Armenians, but the official authorities ignored his protests. However, he warned the country’s Interior Minister Talaat Pasha, saying: “Our people will never forget these massacres.”

Soon, Morgenthau and several other Americans decided to establish the “Committee on Armenian atrocities” (later renamed “Near East Relief”) that would raise more than $100 million for relief (the equivalent of $ 1 billion today).

Thanks to his friendship with Adolph Ochs, publisher of the “New York Times”, Morgenthau increased the amount of information coverage of the massacres of Armenians from 1 article to 145 articles in 1915. Such actions annoyed the Turkish authorities, which led to Morgenthau’s resignation as the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1916.

In his book “The Murder of a Nation”, Morgenthau wrote that he “came to the conclusion that Turkey is a place of horror…” “I had reached the end of my resources. I found intolerable my further daily association with men, however gracious and accommodating… who were still reeking with the blood of nearly a million human beings.”

Morgenthau rejected the “politically correct” hypothesis about the Turkish deportations of Armenians as a military necessity and convincingly proved that the goal of the Young Turks was the extermination of the Armenian people. Morgenthau condemned the indifference of the European powers which had been encouraging the Turkish murderers.