Turkey and the Holocaust

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Prior to joining the

Sobibor; and several hundred interned in Nazi concentration camps. When Nazi Germany encouraged neutral countries to repatriate their Jewish citizens, Turkish diplomats received instructions to avoid repatriating Jews even if they could prove their Turkish nationality.[2] Turkey was also the only neutral country to implement anti-Jewish laws during the war.[3] Between 1940 and 1944, around 13,000 Jews passed through Turkey from Europe to Mandatory Palestine.[4] According to the research of historian Rıfat Bali [de; tr], more Turkish Jews suffered as a result of discriminatory policies during the war than were saved by Turkey.[5] Since the war, Turkey and parts of the Turkish Jewish community have promoted exaggerated claims of rescuing Jews,[6][1] using this myth to promote Armenian genocide denial.[7][8]

Background

Until 1950, Turkey was a

European Turkey.[9]

History

See also: History of the Jews in Turkey
Turkey shown relative to German-occupied Europe in 1942

In 1939, Prime Minister

1942 wealth tax intended to financially ruin non-Muslim citizens. Turkey was the only neutral country to implement anti-Jewish laws during the war.[3]

During the war, Turkey

extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor; and several hundred interned in Nazi concentration camps. When Nazi Germany encouraged neutral countries to repatriate their Jewish citizens in the so-called repatriation ultimatum (Heimschaffungsaktion) in late 1942, Turkish diplomats received instructions to avoid repatriating Jews even if they could prove their Turkish nationality.[2] While other neutral countries frequently intervened on behalf of their Jewish citizens living in German-occupied Europe, historian Corry Guttstadt found that "scarcely any records of Turkish interventions on behalf of Turkish Jewish citizens can be found".[11] According to French historian Claire Zalc [fr], while it was possible for Turkish authorities to intervene successfully on behalf of Turkish Jews, "such interventions were rare, and they soon stopped altogether".[12]

There is only one known case of a Turkish consul offering diplomatic protection to non-Turkish Jews, the French national Monsieur Routier. The Turkish ambassador in France,

Northern Zone of France. Although the Turkish consulate in Paris recognized that the remainder "had up to now been Turkish citizens", nothing would be done to help them.[11] A few hundred Jews were repatriated to Turkey from France, but they were outnumbered by those deported to death camps.[11]

Some Turkish officials disregarded instructions from Ankara, granting documents to Turkish Jews.[5] However, this was not necessarily for humanitarian reasons; often sexual favors or bribes were demanded for documents that Jews had a legal right to obtain.[5] Turkish Consul-General Ozkaya, disobeying orders, tried to repatriate 72 Turkish Jews in February 1944.[14] On March 24–25, the SS arrested 40 Turkish Jews and took them to the Haidari concentration camp in Greece. Turkish representatives managed to free 32 of these Jews and send them to Turkey.[14] The Turkish consul in Rhodes, Selahattin Ülkümen, saved around 50 Jews including 15–20 whose Turkish citizenship had lapsed.[1][15] He is the only Turk recognized as Righteous Among the Nations as of 2020.[16]

In 1942, 769 Jewish refugees from Romania attempting to reach Mandatory Palestine were killed in the Struma disaster after their ship sank in Turkish territorial waters. Referring to the disaster, Saydam explained that "Turkey will not become the home of people who are not wanted by anyone else".[3] During the 1940s, around 10,000 Jews obtained transit visas enabling them to pass through Turkey on the way to Mandatory Palestine. Turkey imposed limits on these visas, issuing them only to be valid for ten days, which meant they were unusable whenever wartime conditions led to delays. Guttstadt found that "during the decisive years of 1942 and 1943, the flight through Turkey was largely blocked" and the majority of these Jews passed through Turkey in late 1944 after the Allies captured southeastern Europe.[9]

Commemoration

Turkey made threats that the safety of Jews would be put in danger if the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) covered the Armenian genocide[7] or if the 1982 International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in Tel Aviv, which included the Armenian genocide, was not cancelled.[17]

Since 1992,

Holocaust train to rescue eighty Jews inside,[21] that consul Namık Kemal Yolga rescued Jews,[22] and that Armenian genocide perpetrator Behiç Erkin rescued 20,000 Jews.[23]

Turkey became an observer of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2008.[24] Prior to 2011, commemorations of the Holocaust were limited to the Turkish Jewish community with no state involvement.[25] Scholars Yağmur Karakaya and Alejandro Baer state that Turkish officials "us[e] the Holocaust remembrance ceremony as a platform to propagate a faultless Turkish history" and "the consistent comparison by Turkish government officials of an untainted Turkish past with an inherently and persistently flawed European heritage implies a noncritical engagement with the country’s own past".[26] At the 2011 ceremony, Süzet Sidi, president of the Turkish Chief Rabbinate Holocaust Commission, compared the Holocaust to the Armenian genocide, concluding that while the Armenians rebelled and provoked the actions against them, the Holocaust was unique in history because Jews had not rebelled.[27]

Turkish government officials participated in

Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies for the first time in 2014; at this ceremony, foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu claimed, "There is no trace of genocide in our history. Hostility towards the other has no room in our civilization."[28] In 2013, Turkey's European affairs minister Egemen Bağış claimed, "In our history, there does not exist any genocide."[29] The European affairs ministry also released a statement asserting: "Turkish society has always been away from anti-Semitic feelings [sic], has never shown any feelings of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Our people has [sic] always embraced their Jewish brothers."[30] According to genocide scholars Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, Turkey has shown a "determination to deny the Armenian genocide by acknowledging the Holocaust",[8] and historian Marc David Baer describes this as "performative conscience clearing".[28] These ceremonies also ignore the fact that if Turkish Jews' citizenship was recognized, they would probably not have been killed.[31]

See also

Citations

  1. ^
    S2CID 162685190
    .
  2. ^ a b c Baer 2020, pp. 202–203.
  3. ^ a b c d Baer 2020, p. 202.
  4. ISBN 978-0-19-506340-0
    .
  5. ^
    doi:10.1017/S0364009415000252
    .
  6. ^ Baer 2020, p. 4.
  7. ^ a b Baer 2020, pp. 124, 129.
  8. ^ a b Smith et al. 1995, pp. 6, 11.
  9. ^
    doi:10.3917/rhsho.203.0195
    .
  10. ^ Zalc 2021, pp. 226, 237.
  11. ^ a b c Baer 2020, p. 203.
  12. ^ Zalc 2021, p. 226.
  13. ^ Bahar 2012, pp. 140–141.
  14. ^ a b Guttstadt 2008, p. 293.
  15. ^ "Selahattin Ülkümen". Yad Vashem. Retrieved 14 January 2021.
  16. ^ "Names of Righteous by Country". Yad Vashem. Retrieved 14 January 2021.
  17. ^ Baer 2020, pp. 126–127.
  18. ^ Baer 2020, p. 22.
  19. ^ Baer 2020, pp. 191–192.
  20. ^ Baer 2020, p. 132.
  21. ^ Baer 2020, pp. 193–194.
  22. ^ Baer 2020, p. 198.
  23. ^ Baer 2020, pp. 204–205.
  24. ^ Karakaya & Baer 2019, p. 706.
  25. ^ Karakaya & Baer 2019, p. 710.
  26. ^ Karakaya & Baer 2019, p. 712.
  27. ^ Baer 2020, p. 206.
  28. ^ a b Baer 2020, p. 1.
  29. ^ Karakaya & Baer 2019, p. 713.
  30. ^ Karakaya & Baer 2019, p. 716.
  31. ^ Baer 2020, pp. 207–208.

Sources

Further reading
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