NER Leadership

In September 1915, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau cabled Washington from Constantinople to report what was happening in the Ottoman interior and urged private American citizens to do what their government would not. The committee that answered him became Near East Relief, and over the next fifteen years its officers and trustees built something American philanthropy had never attempted at this scale.

They raised money from millions of Americans, reported each year to Congress, and made decisions with life-or-death stakes: which children to evacuate before a border closed, what terms to accept from an occupying power, which staff to keep in the field as conditions worsened. They held the work together through war, occupation, famine, and the collapse of the political order they had begun in.

The documents here come from that effort — some written under immediate pressure, others looking back on what had been done and learned.

Each item links to its full archival record.