Armenian Genocide
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50 free Armenian Genocide trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Armenian genocide of 1915 is remembered through words as much as through monuments. Diplomats, survivors, perpetrators and later statesmen left remarks that are still cited in classrooms, courtrooms and parliaments, and many people come looking for exactly who spoke them and when. This quiz works through the best-known quotations about the Armenian genocide and the history around them: the warnings sent home by foreign witnesses, the remarks of the men who ordered the deportations, the writers and artists who kept the memory alive, and the long argument over recognition and denial. It is written for students, teachers and anyone preparing for a remembrance event or a history round. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can check who really spoke a line before you repeat it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which dictator is reported to have asked his generals in 1939 who still spoke of the annihilation of the Armenians?
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler reportedly closed his Obersalzberg speech with that question, a week before invading Poland. Notes of the speech reached the West through an American reporter based in Berlin.
Q 02Which lawyer, who coined the word genocide, told his professor that the Armenians are not chickens?
Raphael Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin was answering a professor who likened a state killing its own people to a farmer killing his flock. The United Nations later built its 1948 convention on his proposals.
Q 03Which American ambassador called the Ottoman deportation orders a death warrant to a whole race?
Henry Morgenthau
Henry Morgenthau received almost daily reports from American consuls across the empire. He published his account in 1918 and raised funds for the survivors once he was home.
Q 04Which legal phrase did Britain, France and Russia use in May 1915 to condemn the Armenian massacres?
Crimes against humanity
Crimes against humanity appeared in the three allies' joint declaration of 24 May 1915, which also threatened to hold the perpetrators personally accountable.
Q 05Which pope called the Armenian massacres the first genocide of the 20th century at a centenary Mass?
Francis
Pope Francis used the phrase in St. Peter's Basilica in April 2015, with Armenia's president and the heads of the Armenian church in the congregation.
Q 06Which reality TV star visited Armenia's genocide memorial in April 2015, drawing global media attention?
Kim Kardashian
Kim Kardashian made the trip with her sister Khloé, and her then husband Kanye West came to Armenia as well.
Q 07Which US president kept a campaign pledge by formally recognizing the Armenian genocide?
Joe Biden
Joe Biden issued the statement on 24 April 2021, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Both houses of Congress had passed their own resolutions in 2019.
Q 08Which California metal band played a free concert in Armenia to mark the Armenian genocide centenary?
System of a Down
System of a Down, whose four members are all of Armenian descent, named the tour Wake Up the Souls. It was the band's first show in the country.
Q 09Which Turkish novelist faced trial after saying that a million Armenians had been killed in Turkey?
Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk made the remark to a Swiss magazine in 2005. The charges were dropped the next January, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature later that year.
Q 10Which small flower became the symbol of the Armenian genocide's hundredth anniversary in 2015?
Forget-me-not
Forget-me-not petals carry the message: the emblem's five purple petals stand for the five continents where survivors settled, and its black centre for the suffering of the past.
Q 11Which Austrian novelist wrote The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a 1933 epic the Nazis banned within a year?
Franz Werfel
Franz Werfel based the novel on Armenian villagers who held a mountain against Ottoman troops in 1915. Copies are reported to have passed from hand to hand among Jewish ghetto defenders.
Q 12Which newspaper editor's 2007 murder brought mourners out chanting that they were all Armenians?
Hrant Dink
Hrant Dink, who had been prosecuted three times for his writing, was shot by a 17-year-old nationalist. More than 100,000 people marched at his funeral.
Q 13Which Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate called denial of the Armenian genocide a double killing?
Elie Wiesel
Q 21Which US president promised as a candidate to recognize the Armenian genocide but never did so in office?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama made the pledge during his 2008 campaign, then avoided the word through both of his terms while his administration reassured Turkey.
Q 22Which US president's State Department drew the borders of an Armenian state promised by the Treaty of Sèvres?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson gave his name to the plan, Wilsonian Armenia, but the 1920 treaty was never ratified and the enlarged state never came into being.
Q 23Which 1923 treaty replaced Sèvres and ended efforts to prosecute Ottoman officials for the Armenian genocide?
Lausanne
Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, used the phrase repeatedly. In 2007 his foundation gathered 53 Nobel laureates behind a letter condemning the denial.
Q 14Which Ottoman interior minister said Armenians could live in the desert but nowhere else?
Talaat Pasha
Talaat Pasha made the remark to the United States ambassador on 2 August 1915. A postwar Ottoman tribunal sentenced him to death in his absence for organizing the massacres.
Q 15Which Batman actor played an American journalist in The Promise, set during the Armenian genocide?
Christian Bale
Christian Bale played an Associated Press reporter, a composite of several correspondents who witnessed the killings. Oscar Isaac co-starred as an Armenian medical student.
Q 16Which mountain names Atom Egoyan's 2002 film about a crew shooting an Armenian genocide drama?
Ararat
Ararat screened out of competition at Cannes and went on to win five Genie Awards in Canada, including Best Motion Picture.
Q 17Which French singer co-wrote the song Ils sont tombés in memory of the Armenian genocide's victims?
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour, born in Paris to Armenian immigrant parents, wrote it with Georges Garvarentz in 1975. An English version followed under the title They Fell.
Q 18Which Armenian survivor told a Berlin court in 1921 that he had killed a man but was not a murderer?
Soghomon Tehlirian
Soghomon Tehlirian had shot the exiled architect of the deportations in the street. The twelve-man jury acquitted him.
Q 19In which present-day Turkish city were Armenian intellectuals rounded up on 24 April 1915?
Istanbul
Istanbul, then the Ottoman capital, saw 235 to 270 community leaders seized that first night, and most were later killed. The date is now Remembrance Day.
Q 20Which South American country was the first in the world to officially recognize the Armenian genocide?
Uruguay
Uruguay acted in April 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of the killings. Dozens of governments have followed, among them France, Germany and Russia.
The Treaty of Lausanne came with an amnesty for offences committed between 1914 and 1922, and it won international recognition for the new Republic of Turkey.
Q 24Which British statesman used the word holocaust for the Armenian massacres as early as 1929?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was one of several writers who applied the word to the Armenian killings between the wars. The New York Times had used it for Ottoman massacres as early as 1895.
Q 25Which Ottoman sultan gave his name to the 1890s massacres that killed at least 100,000 Armenians?
Abdul Hamid II
Abdul Hamid II was branded the bloody Sultan and the great assassin in the European and American press after the Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1896.
Q 26Which reform movement, whose name became a byword for brash rebels, held power during the Armenian genocide?
Young Turks
Young Turks began as a loose network of exiled opponents of the sultan. Their main organisation, the Committee of Union and Progress, ran the wartime government that ordered the deportations.
Q 27Which American charity, chartered by Congress in 1919, raised over $116 million for Armenian survivors?
Near East Relief
Near East Relief cared for 132,000 orphans in its own orphanages and is credited with saving more than a million refugees between 1915 and 1930.
Q 28Which teenage survivor played herself in Auction of Souls, a 1919 silent film about the Armenian genocide?
Aurora Mardiganian
Aurora Mardiganian reached America in 1917 and co-wrote the book the film was based on. A humanitarian prize awarded since 2016 is named in her honour.
Q 29Which Armenian priest and composer, arrested in April 1915, never recovered from what he had seen?
Komitas
Komitas had collected more than 3,000 Armenian folk songs before his arrest. After a mental breakdown he spent his last years in psychiatric hospitals in Paris.
Q 30Which German army medic smuggled out photographs of the Armenian deportation camps hidden in his belt?
Armin T. Wegner
Armin T. Wegner took hundreds of pictures in the camps before he was arrested and recalled at the Ottoman command's request. The negatives he saved became lasting evidence.