Mehmed Talaat was one of the leaders of the Young Turks and ruled the empire during the Armenian Genocide. He is widely considered the main perpetrator of the genocide, and thus is held responsible for the death of between 800,000 and 1,800,000 Armenians. He was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian as part of Operation Nemesis.
About Talaat Pasha in brief
Mehmed Talaat was one of the leaders of the Young Turks and ruled the empire during the Armenian Genocide. He is widely considered the main perpetrator of the genocide, and thus is held responsible for the death of between 800,000 and 1,800,000 Armenians. He was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, as part of Operation Nemesis. He had a powerful build and a dark complexion. His manners were gruff, which caused him to leave the civil preparatory school without a certificate after a conflict with his teacher. Without earning a degree, he joined the staff of the telegraph company as a postal clerk in Adrianople. He married Hayriye Hanım, a young girl from Ioannina on 19 March 1910. Between 1898 and 1908 he served as a postman in the Salonica Post Office. In 1908, he was dismissed from membership in the Committee of Union and Progress. He became deputy for Adrianople in the Ottoman Parliament. In July 1909 he was appointed minister of interior affairs. After the assassination of the prime minister, Mahmud Şevket Pasha, in July 1913, Tala at Pasha again became minister of Interior affairs. He formed a group later known as the Three Pashas. These men formed the triumvirate that ran the Ottoman government until the end of World War I in October 1918. According to various sources,Talaat Pasha had developed plans to eliminate the Armenians as early as 1910.
In November 1910, he stated: “There can be no question of equality, until we have succeeded in our task of ottomanizing the Empire” He was a leading advocate of assimilation of non-Turkish elements within the Ottoman Empire. He said that the Empire should adopt a policy ofNon-Turkish Turkification, which required the assimilation within the empire of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In 1913, he attended a conference where a decision was made by prominent members of the CUP to promote equality among Muslims andnon-Muslims. He also attended the conference, which concluded that the Ottoman empire was not ideologically compatible anymore and that the policy of assimilation should be changed. In 1917, he became grand vizier of the Empire. In 1918, he and Enver Pasha fled the Empire with the aid of Ahmed Izzet Pasha. He died in a plane crash in Turkey in November 1918, aged 75. He left behind a wife and two children. He later became head of the Salonais Post Office, where he worked for 10 years. He worked after hours as a Turkish language teacher in the Alliance Israelite School which served the Jewish community of Adrianople and was later elected to the Grand Council of Turkey. He claimed that the message in question was to his girlfriend, but the Jewish girl came forward to defend him. In 1924 he was sentenced to two years in jail, but was pardoned.
You want to know more about Talaat Pasha?
This page is based on the article Talaat Pasha published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
