author
Henry Morgenthau
1856–1946
A German-born American diplomat and businessman, he is best remembered for serving as U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I and for speaking out about the mass violence he witnessed there. His memoirs and public advocacy made him an important early witness to one of the great human tragedies of the era.
3 Audiobooks
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story
by Henry Morgenthau
All in a Life-time
by Henry Morgenthau, French Strother
Secrets of the Bosphorus
by Henry Morgenthau
About the author
Born in Mannheim in 1856, Henry Morgenthau emigrated to the United States as a boy and built a successful career as a lawyer and real-estate investor in New York. His rise in business and Democratic Party politics eventually brought him into national public life.
In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson appointed him ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. During his years in Constantinople, Morgenthau reported on the persecution and mass killing of Armenians and tried to press Ottoman leaders to stop it. He later became one of the best-known American voices warning the world about those events.
After leaving diplomacy, he wrote Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, a memoir that helped shape how many readers understood the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the wartime atrocities carried out under its rule. He remained active in public and humanitarian causes for decades, and died in New York in 1946.