“I am Bismarck,” top Ottoman official Talaat Pasha declared to Armen Garo two days after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Garo, an Armenian and former colleague and friend of Talaat, recorded his shock in hearing this embrace of German imperium in a private meeting at the Ottoman Interior Ministry.1 He had come to Constantinople to protest the forced resettlement of Muslim refugees on Armenian lands but quickly realized that the vision of empire embraced by leaders like Talaat had no room for Christian minorities like himself.2 The murder of the Archduke in the Balkans sparked a global war that had roots in two recent regional conflicts. The Balkan Wars had raged between 1912 and 1913 and cost the Ottoman Empire most of its territory in Europe while creating a massive refugee crisis.3