First part of The Three Pashas series:

Talaat Pasha (1874 –1921)

Talaat Pasha, born Mehmed Talaat, was one of the “Three Pashas”, a triumvirate of senior officials who ruled the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He became deputy for Edirne in 1908, then minister of the interior and minister of finance, and finally grand vizier (equivalent to prime minister) in 1917. One of the most discussed accions carried out by him and the other pashas was the the arrest and deportation of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, while being minister of interior. Talaat Pasha ordered in 1915 a massively extermination of Armenian people, known as the Armenian Genocide. Among the Three Pashas, he is widely considered the main perpetrator of the genocide, and responsible for the death of between 800,000 and 1,800,000 Armenians, the same amount than Serbs, disabled, Freemasons, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and Spanish Republicans murdered together during the Holocaust. On the night of 2–3 November 1918, Talaat and Enver Pasha fled the Ottoman Empire, eventually being assassinated with a single bullet in Berlin in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, as part of Operation Nemesis. After a two-day trial Tehlirian was found not guilty by the German court, and freed. Tehlirian is even nowadays considered a national hero by Armenians.