Talaat Pasha

Biography

Mehmed Talaat was born in 1874 in Kırcaali, in the Edirne province, and worked for the Ottoman telegraph service. Arrested in 1893 for tampering with the telegraph, he joined the secret Committee of Union and Progress after his release, was jailed again in 1896 for belonging to a CUP cell, and was exiled to Salonica, where he worked in the post office while organizing Young Turk opposition to Abdul Hamid II and co-founding the Ottoman Freedom Committee in 1906.

After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution restored the constitution he entered parliament for Adrianople. During the counter-revolution of 1909 he helped organize the deposition of Abdul Hamid, and that August he became interior minister. In January 1913 he and Enver carried out the coup at the Sublime Porte, and after Mahmud Şevket Pasha's assassination he, Enver and Cemal ruled the empire as the CUP triumvirate.

As interior minister Talaat helped bring the empire into the First World War. On 24 April 1915 he ordered the arrest of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople and then promulgated the deportation law, and he is regarded as the main architect of the Armenian genocide. He became grand vizier in February 1917 and negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Bolsheviks.

After the empire's defeat he resigned in October 1918 and fled to Germany with other CUP leaders. An Ottoman court-martial sentenced him to death in absentia in 1919. In Berlin on 15 March 1921 he was shot dead by Soghomon Tehlirian as part of the Armenian Operation Nemesis.