From a Dönmeh background, Nazım was born and raised in Salonica; his family were longtime residents of the city, successful in running various businesses, and he himself was the director of a hospital. Nazım had joined the Young Turks Movement, and when the Greeks occupied Salonica in October 1912 during the Balkan wars, he was imprisoned for eleven months in an Athens prison as a Turkish nationalist. The guards abused him and told him that his family had been killed, and that Constantinople was already occupied, while Anatolia would soon fall to the Greeks. Sent to Smyrna after a request by the Committee of Union and Progress, he was deeply troubled by his family's fate and the exile from his hometown. In newspaper articles he called attention to Bulgarian atrocities committed against Muslims and "call for vengeance against the remaining Ottoman Christians". The Ottoman defeat and the ethnic cleansing of Muslims was traumatic for many Young Turks and led to a desire for revenge; Nazım's "transformation from a patriotic doctor into a rabid, vindictive nationalist... symbolized the fate of many others".
Nazım was a leading figure in the Turkification of the Ottoman Empire. He was a member of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. Many members of this organization eventually participated in the Turkish national movement and had played special roles in the Armenian Genocide. In a speech delivered on during the closing remarks of a Committee of Union and Progress meeting, Dr. Nazım has said: And continued by saying, "the procedure this time will be one of total annihilation-it is necessary that not even one single Armenian survive this annihilation". During one of the secret meetings of the Young Turks, Dr. Nazım was quoted as saying, "The massacre is necessary. All the non-Turkish elements, whatever nation they belong to, should be exterminated". In February 1915, two months prior to the commencement of the Armenian Genocide, Dr. Nazım declared a new government policy which would "produce total annihilation" in which would be "essential that no Armenian survives". He has been noted to have said that the Ottoman Empire should be "freeing the fatherland of the aspirations of this cursed race" when referring to the Armenians. Nazım subsequently fled from the Ottoman Empire to Germany in October 1918. Due to his role in the Armenian Genocide, Dr. Nazım was sentenced to deathin absentia by the Ottoman Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919–1920, but this was never carried out due to him having fled. He moved to the newly founded Republic of Turkey in 1922 and was never executed for his crimes against the Armenians. However, he was ultimately executed for attempting to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1926.
