In contrast, it seemed that no one held any pity for the murdered man. First of all, Talat was a Turk, and every well-read person in the West was familiar with “the terrible Turk” and his perverse proclivities. Furthermore, he was an Ottoman leader, and everyone was familiar with what seemed to be an endless string of slaughters of the Armenians by Ottoman authorities. Since the nineteenth century, massacres of Christians had been making headlines in Europe and America almost weekly. Often, details of the atrocities were almost too horrible to recount. Church groups in the United States, Britain, and Germany had gathered and protested against the violence for decades. When Tehlirian detailed the specifics of his family’s demise, his audience knew what he was going to say before he said it. All Tehlirian had to do was personalize it.
The judge, the jury, and the world also knew that about a year earlier, a postwar tribunal in Constantinople had convicted Talat of war crimes and sentenced him to death in absentia. But before the Great Powers had been able to find Talat and arrest him for “crimes against humanity,” the former interior minister of the Ottoman Empire and his cronies had escaped from Constantinople in the dark of night on a German ship. The tribunal had proceeded without them and had delivered its verdict. Talat was a condemned man at the time of his assassination, and the court knew this.
Tehlirian’s sickliness also made him sympathetic. The young man suffered from sudden fainting spells and nightmare-ridden insomnia. Several witnesses had seen him collapse in public. Doctors examining him concurred that these seizures, which arrived with no warning, were linked to the massacre of his family. His experience as a captive of the Turkish criminals was so severe that he had been psychologically damaged for the rest of his life. For the duration of the trial, the judge would treat Tehlirian with kid gloves, fearful of triggering an “epileptic fit.”
Any one of those aspects of the case would have made it complex and difficult to judge. What capped the conundrum was the unimpeachable justification at the core of what appeared to be a premeditated murder. The man had seen his mother beheaded right before his eyes! For this reason the killing seemed to exist outside the bounds of established law, in another legal dimension altogether. And his mother had not been the only victim, nor only his immediate family, but an entire nation! The man had not simply pursued a personal vendetta; he had avenged the murder of his people.
As such an agent for retribution, Tehlirian represented not just himself but all of humanity. The crimes against the civilian Armenian population of Anatolia had been unprecedented in their scope and sadism. Never before in history had so many died in such a brief period of time. Indeed, there seemed to be no legal scale vast enough to measure what the Young Turks had done. Likewise, there was no legal precedent for Tehlirian’s particular form of first-degree murder.
And since Talat had been the one who had given the orders for the destruction of the Armenians, since the lives of hundreds of thousands of people were on his head, wasn’t Talat’s life a small price to pay in exchange for the deaths of thousands upon thousands? The implications of the case before Judge Lehmberg strained the rule of law, went beyond strict legal concepts of guilt and innocence, generating moral, philosophical, even existential questions. Anyone could see that the man on trial had no guilty conscience. Tehlirian was so certain of his right to kill Talat that he could look the judge in the eye and confidently claim the moral high ground. As far as Tehlirian was concerned, he had no free will in the matter; he was compelled by his very soul to kill the man who had killed his family. Who could debate him?
For all these reasons, the trial favored Tehlirian. But there was one catch. If Tehlirian told the “whole truth and nothing but the truth,” he didn’t stand a chance. Premeditation might be overlooked, but acting as the spearhead of an international conspiracy to assassinate a world leader would send the young Armenian straight to the gallows. And even if Tehlirian was prepared to sacrifice himself on the altar of justice, it was nevertheless crucial that he lie. He had to provide cover for those who had financed and planned the killing—the operatives working in Boston, Syracuse, Paris, Berlin, Geneva, and Constantinople. He had to protect them so that they could plan and execute more reprisals.
One more factor, invisible to the court, loomed over the proceedings: the leaders of Operation Nemesis wanted to use this trial to reveal to the world what had happened to the Armenians in 1915 and 1916. This trial would be a means of laying bare the crimes committed by Talat and his Committee of Union and Progress. Tehlirian had been specifically instructed to linger by the body, to allow himself to be arrested so that he would be tried. In the tumult of the moment, he had panicked and run. But he had not run far. And now here he was, on trial, representing a nation’s tragedy.
Tehlirian would be walking a tightrope as he balanced truth and fiction. He had to escape punishment while furthering the cause of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. It was imperative that Operation Nemesis remain hidden from view. Even as Tehlirian was stepping into the defendant’s box, his confederates in other major European cities were laying the groundwork for the next assassination, and the one after that.
To achieve this goal of obfuscation, a well-coached Tehlirian would offer mere fragments of “truth,” snippets of narrative representing the alternative history he needed the court to accept. Because Tehlirian was presenting a version of events that had in fact never actually taken place, it was essential that the details dovetail and that no slipups be made. So he avoided specifics, never giving his interrogators an opportunity to uncover a flaw in his story.
For example, he had to explain his whereabouts between the time when he supposedly “escaped” the Turks (in 1915) and the date he arrived in Berlin (in December 1920). In an era before credit cards and automatic telephone logs, Tehlirian’s defense attorneys knew that the Berlin prosecutors would never be able to track his travels in detail. When the prosecution did make an effort to question his movements, Tehlirian replied with a logic bordering on the absurd. When asked why, prior to arriving in Berlin, he had visited Geneva (where the ARF maintained its headquarters), Tehlirian, a country boy from Anatolia, answered that hadn’t wanted to miss the opportunity to visit the Swiss city. Judge Lehmberg asked no follow-up questions. When queried about how he had passed his time in Berlin (since apparently he was neither a registered student nor employed), rather than explain that he spent all day stalking Turks, he gave vague answers about attending German language classes.
No one seemed to notice that this man who supposedly took German classes every day could hardly speak the language. At the same time, ironically, Tehlirian’s mediocre language skills provided an additional layer of protection when he was testifying. He repeatedly misunderstood questions and requested they be asked again, buying time as he prepared an answer. This stratagem would prove especially invaluable whenever he was cornered in a fabrication. Caught in contradictory statements, he would stick to a hazy storyline, made even more vague by his awkward rhetoric. Often he refused to understand a question or avoided answering it at all. He was rarely challenged.
As the trial began in the early summer of 1921, Tehlirian held center stage in a state of super-consciousness while playing the part of a sweet and slightly incoherent man who had acted solely out of passion. He focused all of his attention on Judge Lehmberg, the most important individual in the room. Unlike trials in the United States, this trial would not be a contest between prosecution and defense. Instead, Lehmberg would lead a free-form investigation more like an inquest, asking questions as he saw fit. In Lehmberg, Tehlirian had an ally. The judge would repeatedly “lead” the defendant while brushing aside queries and objections made by the prosecution.