On the night of April 24, 1915, as Constantinople's Armenian community was deep in slumber following Easter celebrations, Turkish gendarmes, following the orders of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), made their way through the ancient Byzantine capital to the homes of 250 Armenian cultural leaders. As Peter Balakian wrote in The Burning Tigris, Constantinople's Armenian community had been "the center of Armenian cultural and intellectual life" since the nineteenth century. The Armenians were a minority community that excelled in the arts, academia, and the professional classes; successful, intelligent, and very much "the other" in a Turkey whose young rulers were influenced by the racialist ideologies then prominent in Europe. That night, the Armenian leaders of the city were arrested and imprisoned, sensing what one of the few survivors called "the terror of death" in the air. Within days, the events in Constantinople were replicated across Turkey. By early summer, most were executed. The event marked the beginning of a systematic campaign of genocide, which soon took on greater scope. Never before had the tools of the modern nation-state been used to such an end. In a series of centrally planned and coordinated steps, the Turkish government conscripted Armenian men, disarmed the local population, arrested local leadership, and then carried out a plan of eradication so sweeping and successful in its scope that it would be studied two decades later by the Nazis. In the villages of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, the women, children, elderly, and any men who remained were marched south into the deserts of Syria to their deaths. Along the way, many were spared starvation, killed instead by bayonet, noose, or bullet. Many women and girls were raped and left for dead. Once the Armenians homes were vacated, their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors plundered them in search of gold and jewels. American diplomat Leslie Davis wrote from his post in Harput to Ambassador Henry Morgenthau in Constantinople that he was witnessing "the severest measures ever taken by a government and one of the greatest tragedies in all history." A massacre, however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in comparison with it. In a massacre, many escape, but a wholesale deportation of this kind in this country means a longer and perhaps even more dreadful death for nearly everyone. I do not believe it possible for one in a hundred to survive, perhaps not one in a thousand. Religious custom, Davis noted, forbade the Turks from stripping clothes from a corpse. Therefore, Armenians and Assyrians were forced to strip before being murdered. Davis wrote of the "gaping bayonet wounds on most of the bodies" he witnessed. In desperation, Morgenthau cabled Washington in desperation that "the destruction of the Armenian race is progressing rapidly," calling for immediate relief measures to be organized in America to save the "hundreds of thousands of starving and rag-clad survivors." It was a display of diplomatic courage quite apart from the careerism and realpolitik that would characterize successive generations of American diplomats. Some went further. A German officer serving as aide to a German attach