Author Description

This is the smoking gun linking Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of Interior and later Grand Vizier, to the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The report was prepared for Talaat Pasha and meant for his private use. In all likelihood, it would have been destroyed, were it not for the fact that Talaat was assassinated in Berlin 1921, and his widow kept and then gave the report to a Turkish historian who eventually published it. According to Talaat's figures over 1,150,000 Armenians disappeared in the Ottoman Empire between 1915-1917. This number includes well over 100,000 Armenians who fled from the Ottoman Empire during WWI, but it does not include tens of thousands of Armenian women and children who were forcefully Islamized and absorbed into Muslim families. Talaat Pasha's Report on the Armenian Genocide also includes additional materials from his private papers showing the systematic confiscation of over 40,000 Armenian properties, surely an undercount, as "abandoned" properties confiscated by the Ottoman State cir. 1917. These records add substance to the testimonies of survivors of the Armenian Genocide and onlooker, including foreign missionaries and consular representative in the interior of Ottoman Turkey, most notably United States officials in Trebizond, Harpoot (Elazig), Mersin, Aleppo and Damascus.Much of the statistical information in Talaat's papers have been turned into colour maps for the perusal of readers.