Tehlirian was a victim of the Armenian Genocide and held Talaat Pasha responsible for the deaths of his entire family in Yerznga in Ottoman Turkey. The memoir depicts Tehlirian's witness to the Armenian Genocide of 1915, how he attempted to track down Talaat Pasha at the end of WWI, and how he was recruited to carry out the assassination by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), the largest Armenian political party at that time. The book includes Telirian's trial and acquittal in Berlin. Talaat Pasha's assassination and Tehlirian's trial had wide-reaching consequences, including a direct impact on Raphael Lempkin, who coined the phrase "genocide" and worked for the adoption of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.