Aram Andonian's landmark work, The Great Crime—the first systematic documentation of the Armenian Genocide, originally written in Armenian in 1921—is now finally available in English.

This publication marks a major milestone in Armenian Genocide studies. The book is of profound historical importance for two primary reasons. First, it presents a foundational account of the extermination of the Armenians through the memoir of an Ottoman bureaucrat, Naim Efendi, which includes handwritten copies of approximately fifty-two Ottoman documents—among them direct orders for the killing of Armenians. As such, it offers crucial and compelling evidence of the genocide based on original Ottoman sources.

Second, The Great Crime is not merely a compilation of documents. It also conveys the firsthand observations of both Andonian and Naim Efendi regarding the fate of the Armenians. The work therefore stands as a powerful testimonial—a voice that carries the lived reality of destruction.

In 1983, the Turkish government sought to discredit Andonian’s work, arguing on three principal grounds that the materials were fraudulent: that the Ottoman official in question never existed; that no such memoir could therefore exist (and that, if it did, its original handwritten version should be produced); and that the telegrams themselves were inauthentic due to alleged inconsistencies. As a result, Andonian’s work—and the documents it contained—were dismissed for decades and largely excluded from scholarly use.

This position was fundamentally challenged in 2018 with the publication of Dr. Taner Akçam’s Killing Orders, which directly confronted and decisively refuted these claims, restoring the Andonian–Naim materials as credible and indispensable sources for the study of the Armenian Genocide.

Now, at long last, Andonian’s work itself is accessible to English-language readers.

This new edition of The Great Crime includes a substantial introduction by Dr. Akçam, which synthesizes the core findings of Killing Orders while incorporating new evidence and insights, along with a specially prepared appendix.

That a work of such significance remained unavailable in English for more than a century is, in many ways, a historical puzzle. Its publication today represents a critical step forward in expanding access to foundational sources and deepening our understanding of the Armenian Genocide.

Learn more about the book and purchase it here.