Henry Morgenthau Sr.

Near East Relief began with a cable Henry Morgenthau sent from Constantinople (Istanbul) on September 3, 1915. He was born in Mannheim in 1856 and came to New York in 1866. He made a fortune in Manhattan real estate, raised money for Woodrow Wilson's 1912 campaign, and took up the Constantinople embassy in 1913. From the spring of 1915 he gathered consular and missionary accounts of the Armenian Genocide. He put the deportations to Talaat and Enver, who told him American missionaries had invented the stories. On July 16, he cabled the State Department that a campaign of race extermination was in progress.

The September cable asked Washington to have Cleveland H. Dodge, Charles R. Crane, John R. Mott, and Stephen S. Wise form a relief committee. They met on September 16 and wired him $100,000 in October. Morgenthau chaired the American committee in Constantinople that moved the money to the interior. He left Turkey on February 1, 1916, and told the committee three weeks later that a million Armenians had survived, destitute, and that $5,000,000 was needed. In 1919 he and Alexander Hemphill negotiated the agreement that brought Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration into the Caucasus alongside Near East Relief. The Congressional charter that August named him an incorporator and trustee, and he sat on the executive committee until 1930. From 1923 to 1924 he chaired the Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens, which resettled Greeks driven out of Anatolia. He died in New York on November 25, 1946.