‘Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story’ Named Book of the Month

‘Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story’ by Henry Morgenthau

YEREVAN (Armenpress)—As the centennial of the Armenian Genocide approaches, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan has launched a “Book of the Month” initiative. The Museum says it will carefully select a book about the Armenian Genocide to be featured each month.

The books must be the memoirs of Armenian Genocide survivors or witnesses, research papers, or other publications of great importance. The aim of this project is to introduce readers to rare and still unknown works related to the topic in order to raise awareness of the subject and provide an in-depth knowledge about the Armenian Genocide.

The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (AGMI) selected “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” to be the Book of the Month for February. These memoirs have the significance of being a unique primary source for the history of the Armenian Genocide, particularly for how it documents the unraveling of the Genocide, determined and planned by the Turkish government, and for how it identifies and explores the thoughts of the Turkish criminal regime of that time. The memoir of U.S. Ambassador Morgenthau is a monumental work indeed, where the represented facts and testimonies undeniably prove that the Armenian Genocide was planned and premeditated.

Morgenthau gives deep analysis of the situation reinforcing it by information from official sources. Moreover, he describes the process of decision-making, the intrigues of the Young Turks government, as well as introduces the reader to the German propaganda policy, which made Turkey involved in World War I. The story of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, presented in accuracy of an eyewitness and an analyst, is an important primary source against the policy of denial in Turkish modern historiography.

“When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact. . . I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915,” Morgenthau wrote in his memoirs.