The forgotten hero who killed the Armenian genocide’s mastermind | The Fresno Bee

The forgotten hero who killed the Armenian genocide’s mastermind | The Fresno Bee

"...And yet for Armenians around the world, Soghomon Tehlirian’s name inspires pride and awe in equal measure. 

On a March morning in 1921, in broad daylight and on a main street in Berlin, he shot and killed Mehmed Talat Pasha, one of the three rulers of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the architect of the Armenian genocide. 

That year he would be tried for murder and the German jury would find him innocent. The New York Times would announce the verdict with the headline, “They had to let him go!”

This Sunday marks the 101st anniversary of the start of the Armenian genocide. 

It was on that night in 1915 that the Armenian intellectuals, professionals, editors and religious leaders in Constantinople were rounded up by the Ottoman authorities, and almost all of them were executed. 

In the years that followed, three out of four Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were systematically annihilated by their own government: 1.5 million people. 

The majority of Armenians alive today are descendants of those few who survived..."

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Armenian genocide was 101 years ago, but it's still personal for Boise daughter of a survivor

The Armenian Genocide is often called “the forgotten genocide,” yet 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1923. Jo-Ann Kachigian remembers her mother and father, who witnessed it all — and survived. She thinks of her grandparents, her aunts and uncles and cousins, 46 of them in all — who didn’t. Jo-Ann vows to tell her mother's story and teach others about the genocide, “with the hope that remembering our tragic past will keep us from repeating it.”

Credit: Katherine Jones/Idaho Statesman