Today is Soghomon Tehlirian`s birthday.

Soghomon Tehlirian (Armenian: Սողոմոն Թեհլերյան) (April 2, 1897, Nerkin Pakarich near Erzincan, Ottoman Empire – May 23, 1960, San Francisco, California, United States) was a native of Yerznka, an Armenian Evangelical (Protestant) and Armenian Genocide survivor. He assassinated the former Grand Vizir Talaat Pasha in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin, Germany in broad daylight and in the presence of many witnesses on March 15, 1921 as an act of vengeance for Talaat's role in orchestrating the Armenian Genocide. This assassination was a part of the Dashnak Party's Operation Nemesis.

Tehlirian was a murderer and trialed for murder, but was eventually acquitted by the German court. The trial of Tehlirian was a rather sensationalized event at the time, with Tehlirian being defended by three defense attorneys, including Dr. Theodor Niemeyer, professor of Law at Kiel University.
The trial examined not only Tehlirian’s actions but also Tehlirian's conviction that Talaat Pasha was the main author of the Armenian Deportation. The defense attorneys made no attempt to deny the fact that Tehlirian had killed a man, and instead focused on the influence of the Armenian Genocide on Tehlirian's mental state. It took the jury slightly over an hour to render a verdict of "not guilty" on grounds of temporary insanity.

Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, compares Tehlirian to Shalom Schwartzbard, who assassinated Ukrainian statesman Simon Petlyura in Paris in 1925, for what Schwartzbard believed to be Petlyura's culpability in the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine. Arendt suggests that each man "insisted on being tried", in order "to show the world through court procedure what crimes against his people had been committed and gone unpunished."