Licence to kill

One morning in March 1921 a large man in an overcoat left his house in Charlottenburg, Berlin, to take a walk in the Tiergarten. A young man crossed his path, drew a pistol and shot him in the neck. Emitting a groan ‘like a branch falling off a tree’, he fell dead. The assassin ran, but was arrested by the crowd. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘I am Armenian, he is Turkish. What is it to you?’

The victim was Talat Pasha, erstwhile interior minister of the Ottoman empire and convicted war criminal. His nemesis was Soghoman Tehlirian, engineering student and agent of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Talat topped the ARF’s list of targets: revenge for the genocide of some 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1917. Like Israel’s abduction and trial of Adolf Eichmann, the ARF mixed vengeance with the ‘propaganda of the deed’. To serve justice, the victims broke the law. The ensuing trial would enter the historical record; the sentence would be the world’s memory.

Tehlirian was a Dostoevskian martyr: epileptic, chastely passionate about his girlfriend, the beautiful Anahid, haunted by nightmares of his decapitated mother, and devoted to killing. Serving in a Russian-trained Armenian unit, he had witnessed the aftermath of the genocide and learnt that his mother and brothers had been murdered, his sisters raped. After the war, he assassinated an Armenian traitor in Constantinople on his own initiative. In early 1919, the ARF recruited him, and sent him to Watertown, Massachusetts, where Armenian Americans were funding and planning their revenge. They told him not to flee after shooting Talat, and primed him for his trial.

In court, Tehlirian perjured himself, to save his life, protect the conspiracy and publicise the genocide.