Austria-Hungary was an ally of the Ottoman Empire and ignored numerous requests for help from the Armenian Catholicos in 1915. Reports about the genocide were suppressed by Marktgraf Johann von Pallavicini (Austrian ambassador in Istanbul). Austrian newspapers kept silent about the genocide and adopted anti-Armenian stereotypes in their coverage of the defense of Van. The writer Franz Werfel, in his book The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, published in 1933, describes the beginning of the genocide from the perspective of the Armenians; it was later banned by the Nazis.