Soghomon’s Revenge
On the morning of March 15, 1921, at approximately 10:45 a.m., Mehmet Talaat, the former Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, leaves his home with the intention of purchasing gloves. He has been living in Berlin on 4 Hardenbergstrasse for more than two years, a city he has fled to following the defeat of Turkey in the First World War. Germany has granted him asylum as compensation for having been an ally during the World War.
Not long after, Talaat passes a young man, who looks at him calmly, staring at him as though recognizing an image that has been engraved in his memory. The young man turns around and fires a shot. Talaat is killed immediately and his body remains fallen in front of a house on 27 Hardenbergstrasse. The police arrive quickly after hearing the cries of witnesses. The young man tries to walk away, however the crowd that has gathered catches up to him and begins beating him.
The incident causes a great uproar.
Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, 1921.
S. Tehlirian, Memories [Terrorizing Taleat], written down by Vahan Minakhorian, Cairo, 1953. Source
On June 3, 1921, the judge and jury deemed that Tehlirian was in an “unconscious state” during the commission of the crime and committed the act at a “time of mental turmoil.” Tehlirian was acquitted and walked away a free man from the courthouse. According to the experts who testified, Tehlirian’s actions were conditioned by the “manifest remembrance of a traumatic experience.” The psychological problems had surfaced because of the horrors he had witnessed when the members of his entire family were slaughtered before his very eyes, his sisters raped. Soghomon had been saved by being buried under the corpses of slaughtered Armenians. Based on the conclusion of the Medical Council and the decision by the jury, the judge in Tehlirian’s trial had declared him not guilty on the grounds of temporary insanity.
Tehlirian’s actions and the verdict were mythologized. Soghomon became the embodiment of the struggle against injustice and the horrific crime committed against an entire people. Books were written and songs composed about him. It also had a certain healing effect, not only for Soghomon, but for an entire nation. Soghomon recalled that his repeated epileptic seizures stopped after the murder of Talaat on that early morning in March 1921. At the same time, the Armenian people, engulfed by the horror of the Great Tragedy was gifted a glorious narrative, one which was possible to remember and revere. Tehlirian’s actions were considered a redemption – the main criminal behind the Great Tragedy received his worthy punishment. An entire nation that had been slaughtered and victimized was in some measure assuaged by this heroic act.
Closing arguments by Defense Attorney Kurt Niemeyer:
The Armenian nation, from thousands of years ago down to its youngest child, stands behind Tehlirian.
Tehlirian carries with him in his thoughts the flag of justice, the flag of humanity, and the flag of vengeance to uphold the honor of his sisters and relatives. With all these thoughts in mind he confronts the one person who violated his family’s honor, destroyed the well-being and hap-
piness of millions of people, and physically annihilated a whole nation.
The defendant became a psychologically disturbed person. You, gentlemen of the jury, have to decide what went on in his mind at the time of the killing and whether he was in control of his will.
The Case of Shalom Schwarzbard and the Convention
In 1921, Shalom Schwarzbard, a Jewish tailor in Paris, assassinated Ukrainian national leader Symon Petliura, who had organized the pogrom of thousands of Jews in 1918. The case was similar to Soghomon’s. Shalom’s parents had also been victims of the massacre. Petliura’s murder had taken place in a European capital. The murderer stood before the court and disclosed all the horrors that had befallen his people. The court was once again before a dilemma – morality and legality in conflict with one another. The same solution was applied. The young Jew was acquitted on the grounds of temporary insanity.
Lemkin, who was now a student at law school begins to think more seriously about the need for an international law punishing the wholesale annihilation of groups of people, because aside from that deep concern he had for the issue, he was also concerned about the recurring cases of men taking revenge into their own hands. Why should Soghomon Tehlirian and Shalom Schwarzbard take the law into their own hands?
“He had acted as the self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind. But can a man appoint himself to mete out justice? Will not passion sway such a form of justice and make a travesty of it? At that moment, my worries about the murder of the innocent became more meaningful to me. I didn’t know all the answers but I felt that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world,” Raphael Lemkin wrote in his autobiography. After Schwarzbard’s trial in 1927, Lemkin authored an article where he wrote that he “deplored the absence of any law for the unification of moral standards in relation to the destruction of national, racial and religious groups.” He called Schwarzbard’s act a “beautiful crime.”
Lemkin devoted his whole life to the eradication of this injustice. Years would pass with fruitless efforts, different versions of a law that was never adopted, the Jewish Holocaust that wiped out his entire family, the coining a new word – Genocide, the disillusionment with the Nuremberg Trials when the word “Genocide” was not included in the text of the verdict, his relentless and untiring lobby for the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide at the UN. That day, hours after the conclusion of the UN General Assembly that adopted the Convention, journalists would find Raphael Lemkin sitting motionless, tears streaming from his eyes.
And 27 years earlier, on the morning of March 15, 1921 at approximately 10:45 a.m., a young Armenian by the name of Soghomon Tehlirian in front of a house on 27 Hardenbergstrasse would find Talaat, look at his face, pass him by, turn around and fire a shot…
Tehlirian family, first one on the left is 12-year-old Soghomon, Yerznka, 1908. Ara Oskanyan’s family archive. source
In the center: Soghomon Tehlirian’s father and uncle, from left to the right: Oskian, Khachatur, Asatur.
First on the right: Soghomon Tehlirian, in front of him Armenuhi, Misak’s daughter. Ara Oskanyan’s family archive. source
Ticket-certificate of Soghomon Tehlirian’s release from prison, June 3, 1921.
Armenian Revolutionary Federation History Museum. Source
Robert M. W. Kempner when he was a prosecutor at the International War Crimes Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1946. source
