For the first time in history, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Academy Award-winning Holocaust documentary has been broadcast to Iran with Farsi subtitles.

“Genocide,” a Holocaust film that won the best documentary feature Oscar in 1982, aired on Iran’s NTV Simay Azadi on Friday, as well as on satellite broadcasts and streaming online.

Also known as “Nasl Keshi” in Farsi, the sobering film, narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles, was aired in an effort to combat the rampant Holocaust denial emanating from the Iranian regime.

The Wiesenthal Center, one of the leading global Jewish human rights organizations, coordinated the showing to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.

“Any opportunity to learn the truth is well-received in a country like Iran where the truth is in short supply,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, who watched the airing into Iran live from his office in Los Angeles, along with the center’s founder and dean Rabbi Marvin Hier.

“It’s a payback for the Iranian regime,” Hier said, according to Fox News. “They want to lock society. They want to deny the Holocaust, and now their whole population can see the truth and there’s nothing the Ayatollahs or Ahmadinejad can do about it.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, claiming that the atrocity, one of the greatest in human history, was contrived, is a mere “myth” and that the extermination of six million Jews at the hands of Nazis simply never occurred.

The film juxtaposes a unique combination of actual accounts told by Holocaust survivors along the backdrop of footage captured by Nazi cameras.

“The mullahs can’t deny the footage. It wasn’t shot by Jews. It was shot by the Nazis themselves,” Hier said, according to Fox.

“This will resonate with the people of Iran when just a few days ago there was a public hanging for two thieves,” added Hier.  “On a human level, people who are suffering and are repressed will relate to others suffering.”