Henry Morgenthau

(1856 - 1946)

Henry Morgenthau was born to Jewish parents in Mannheim. After the collapse of the family’s cigar business, they settled in New York City in 1866. There Morgenthau attended City College and Columbia Law School and made his fortune in real estate. Woodrow Wilson appointed him the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1913. Three years later he resigned, citing his “failure to stop the destruction of the Armenians.” In 1918 he published a memoir of his time in diplomatic service, documenting the genocide he was unable to deter through official means. “I acquired this knowledge as the servant of the American people,” he wrote in the introduction, “and it is their property as much as it is mine.”