Talaat Pasha (Mehmed Talaat) §

Born in Edirne (Ottoman Rumelia) to a minor official family; trained as a postal-telegraph clerk and rose through the CUP's clandestine networks before the 1908 Young Turk revolution. As Interior Minister from 1913 he built the Special Organisation (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa) and centralised demographic policy under the wartime cabinet. The deportation directive of 24 April 1915, the Constantinople round-up of Armenian intellectuals, and the Tehcir Law of 27 May 1915 were issued under his signature, and Kévorkian and Akçam document his hands-on direction of convoy routes and killing sites via cipher telegrams. Convicted in absentia and sentenced to death by the Ottoman court-martial of 1919; fled to Berlin under a German pseudonym. Shot in the Charlottenburg district on 15 March 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, the opening operation of the ARF's Nemesis programme; the German jury acquitted Tehlirian. His remains were repatriated to Istanbul in 1943 and reburied with state honours on the Hill of Liberty.