Source: Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in his memoir written for an American audience to expose the atrocities he witnessed and to advocate for U.S. intervention in World War I, 1918.

When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact. ... I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915. The killing of the Armenian men was a comparatively small part of the tragedy. The real horror was in the treatment of the women and children. They were driven from their homes, and they were forced to march for hundreds of miles, over mountains and deserts, without food, without water, and without shelter. They were robbed, they were raped, and they were murdered. They were sold as slaves in the markets of the interior. They were left to die of starvation and disease. It was a campaign of race extermination...

Ambassador Morgenthau's Story