The Great Crime: A Podcast History of the Armenian Genocide

Turkey was governed by a brutal dictatorship for a generation - an authoritarian regime that built a nation from scratch, but destroyed all traces of the past.

Today, the Ottoman Empire falls. In the closing months of 1922, it was brought to its knees, not by foreign powers as had long been expected, but from within.

Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, a new Nationalist movement rises from the ashes of the CUP – a challenge to the occupation, and the thousands of genocide survivors trying to return home.

In the wake of the catastrophe, an astonishing global humanitarian movement was created to bring relief to a starving population. This is the story of Near East Relief, and their attempt to bring the Armenian people back from the dead.

The extraordinary military tribunals of 1919 brought executioner and victim face to face once again. Could justice be done for the Armenians?

As the Allies began drawing up plans to partition the Ottoman Empire, furious debates raged in parliament about what had happened to the Armenians.

When confronted with the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, some people refused to stand by. They chose to disobey their governments and commanders. They chose to rescue Armenians from destruction, and bore witness to their plight.

What did the Germans know about what their Ottoman allies were doing during the First World War? Did diplomats cover up the killing of Armenians? Were soldiers implicated in mass murder? This episode explores the question of German complicity.

It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. But as Allied troops poured into the Ottoman Empire in November 1918, the CUP were already making plans to defend the state from partition.

In May 1918, under threat of annihilation, the first Republic of Armenia in the history of the world was declared. But what a paltry declaration it was: the “untimely birth of a sick child.”