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Joe Manganiello recounted his great-grandmother's harrowing escape from the Armenian Genocide for the PBS series Finding Your Roots, the Daily Mail reported.

Airing on Tuesday February 7 at 8 p.m. ET, the jaw-dropping show – which recently told Edward Norton that his 12th great-grandmother was Pocahontas – also reveals that Manganiello is descended from slaves.

In an exclusive video shared with People, Manganiello detailed the heartbreaking survival story of how his great-grandmother fled from Armenia in 1915 after witnessing the murder of her husband and seven children.

He said: 'The Turks came into her home in 1915 under the guise of World War I and tried to enact the genocide that they had begun.

'They shot her husband dead, shot her. She laid on the ground, pretended that she was dead while seven other gunshots that went off, which were...her seven children.'

Manganiello's great-grandmother played dead on the ground until the Turks left her home.

The True Blood alum explained: 'She laid there unmoving and the Turks left the house and left the eighth child, who was an infant in the crib, to starve to death, which is just the way that they did business.'

Joe went on to detail how his great-grandmother 'strapped the baby onto her back and escaped the town.'

But she narrowly evaded the horrifying fate of a 'death march,' which Manganiello described.

'They would just handcuff, chain the Armenians together and march them out to the desert, and release the Kurds, give them military coats, horses and guns, to then go do what they wanted with their mortal enemies, the Armenians.

'She escaped that,' the actor said. 'Snuck past, got to the Euphrates river with the baby on her back, swam across the river, and when she got to the other side, the baby had drowned.'

Manganiello added that his great-grandmother 'had a bullet in her still' and 'lived in a cave with other refugees until she was picked up by German military.'

Manganiello's great-grandmother eventually became pregnant in the military camp by a German officer and 'gave birth to a very blonde, half-German child.'