TURKEY AND and the Holocaust

Turkey's Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945

Stanford J. Shaw e StanfordJ. Shaw1993 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1993

All rights reserved.No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. * No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted savewith written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road. W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designsand Patents Act 1988. Published by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke,Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

ISBN 978-1-349-13043-6 ISBN 978-1-349-13041-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-13041-2

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Contents

List ofPlates vii Photographs ofDocuments viii Preface and Acknowledgments ix

1. Turkey and the Jews, 1933-1945 1

Turkey shelters professionals dismissedby the Nazis 4 Suppression of Nazi-inspired anti-Semitic movements in Turkey during the 1930s 14 Turkish Jewry during World War II 33 The Varllk Vergisi disaster 38

2. Turkey's Role in Rescuing Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust 46

Jewish Turks in France at the start of the German Occupation 46 Persecution of Jews in France during the Occupation 48 Issuance of Turkish passports and certificates of Turkish citizenship to Jewish Turks who had lost their citizenship 60 Turkish diplomatic intervention to prevent application of anti-Jewish laws to Jewish Turks in France 67 Turkish intervention to secure the unsealing of the apartments of Jewish Turks 99 Turkish intervention against sequestration of the businesses of Jewish Turks in France 112 Turkish intervention to protect Jews from deportation to the East 123 Repatriation of Jewish Turks to Turkey 135 Turkish Assistance to the Jews of under Nazi Occupation 250

3. Activities in Rescuing European Jews from the Nazis 255

v vi Contents

Conclusion 305 Bibliography 306 Archives,Newspapers and Interviews 328

Appendix 1. Turkish Diplomatic and Consular Personnel in France and Greece during World War II 331 Appendix2. Ambassador liter Tiirkmen reports on research into Paris Embassy archives on Jewish Turks in France during World War II 334 Appendix3. Testimony of Retired Ambassador Namtk Kemal Yolga about helping Jewish Turks in France during World War II 336 Appendix4. Testimony of Retired Ambassador Necdet Kent about his rescue of Jewish Turks at Marseilles during World War II 341 Appendix5. Businesses and Properties belonging to Jewish Turks in Paris administered by Turkish agents under the Direction of the Turkish Consulate-General 345 Appendix6. Sums deposited with Turkish Consulate-General (Paris) by Jewish Turks being repatriated to Turkey up to April 1944 348 Appendix7. Nationality of Deportees from Drancy Camp 351 Appendix8. Short Biographies of leading Refugee Scholars, Professors and Scientists brought to Turkey in 1930s 353 Appendix9. American Diplomatic Report on Nazi Activities and Influence in Turkey before World War II 370 Appendix10. American Reports on the Situation of Jews in Turkey before World War II 374 Appendix11. Chronology, 1931-1945 377 Appendix12. Principal Members of the Turkish Governments, 1923-1945 424 List ofPlates

1. The Staff of the Turkish Consulate-General in Paris at the celebration of Turkish Republic Holiday in 1943. L.-R: Germaine Guicheteau, Local Clerk Refik Ileri, Consul-General Fikret Ozdoganci's daughter Mina (later Mina Tiirkmen); Consul-General Fikret Ozdoganc, his wife Niizhet Hamm, Vice Consul Nannk Kemal Volga, Tcherna Frisch, Local Clerk Nerman Ozdoganci, niece of the Consul-General, Recep Zerman and Janine Bousquet. (Photo courtesy of Namik Kemal Volga) 2. The Staff of the Turkish Consulate-General in Paris on the occasion of the celebration of Turkish Republic Holiday (Cumhuriyer BayrwnI) in 1941. L.-R: Chancellor Namik Kemal Volga, Consul-General Diilger, and local clerks Guicheteau, Frisch, and Zerman. (Photo courtesy of Namik Kemal Volga) 3. Jewish Turks standing in front of the Turkish Consulate-General in Paris in 1943 waiting to get passports and visas to enable them to return to Turkey. (Photo courtesy of Nannk Kemal Volga) 4. Jewish Turks standing in front of the Turkish Consulate-General in Paris in 1944 waiting to get passports and visas to enable them to return to Turkey. (Photo courtesy of Namik Kemal Volga) 5. The Sirkeci Terminal railroad tracks of the Orient Express, where Jewish refugees coming from Europe arrived in Istanbul. (Photo by Stanford J. Shaw) 6. The Sirkeci Terminal building in Istanbul. (Photo by Sebah) 7. The Sirkeci Synagogue. (Photo by Stanford J. Shaw) 8. main gate. (Photo by Stanford J. Shaw) 9. The Haydarpasa railroad station, terminus of the Anatolian and Syrian railway system used by Jews going by land to Palestine. 10. The Haydarpasa synagogue. (Photo by Stanford J. Shaw) 11. Exterior of the Chief Rabbinate in Istanbul. (Photo by Stanford J. Shaw) 12. The Tokatlian Hotel (Istanbul). (Photo by Abdullah Freres) 13. The Pera Palas Hotel (Istanbul), center of Jewish Agency operations to rescue East European Jews during World War II. (Photo by Stanford J. Shaw) 14. Bebek on the Bosporus where many Jewish refugees in Turkey lived during World War II. (Photo by Stanford J. Shaw)

vii Photographs of Documents

1. Albert Gattegno asks Turkish Consulate-General (Paris) to get him out of Draney Concentration Camp 71

2. Turkey protests against anti-Jewish measures applied to Turkish Jews 81

3. France insists that foreign citizens in residence accept French laws, including anti-Jewish laws, and that Jewish Turks be treated equally with other Jews 82

4. Turkey protests application of anti-Jewish laws to Jewish Turks since its Constitution makes no distinction among citizens of different religions 88

5. Germany will release Jewish Turks from Concentration Camps in France if they are immediately repatriated to Turkey 100

6. France proposes that Turkish administrators of sequestered properties of Jewish Turks act only as observers of acts of French administrators 118

7. Turkish Certificate of Citizenship 130

8. Turkish Consulate-General (Paris) to send two final caravans of Jewish Turks to Turkey, after which those remaining will be subject to anti-Jewish laws in France 208

viii Preface and Acknowledgments

I rust became aware of Turkey's role in rescuing thousands of Jews from the Holocaust during my research for TheJews ofthe and the Turkish Republic (Macmillan, London, and New York UniversityPress, New York, 1991). Most of the extant documentation on these tragic but moving events became available to me only after the manuscript of that book had gone to press, however. Starting with a visit to the offices of Jak V. Kamhi, head of the Quincentennial Foundation and President of the Promo Corporation of Istanbul, retired ambassadors Tevfik Saracoglu and Behcet Tiiremen, historian Nairn Giileryiiz, and the Foundation's Administrative Director Nedim Yahya, who showed me copies of a number of letters exchanged between Jewish Turks resident in wartime France, the Turkish Consulate in Paris, and German diplomats, officers, and concentration camp commanders as well as French officials involved in the persecution of Jews at that time, I began a search for more comprehensive documentary evidence. I found such evidence in the archives of the Turkish Foreign Ministry in , the Turkish Embassy and Consulate-General in Paris, and the Archives of the United States Department of State in Washington, D.C. and of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as in numerous published and unpublished studies and memoirs by, and personal interviews with, people who were involved. Obviously more study is needed in the German archives as well as in the local and Turkish diplomatic archives surviving from Nazi-occupied countries other than France, such as Belgium and Holland. In addition, the author would appreciate it if readers with personal knowledge of the events described in this book would share their experiences with him so that subsequent editions may be enriched and added to in the light of their contributions. For their assistance in obtaining access to archival collections, I would like to thank H.E. Kurtcebe Alptemocin, Foreign Minister of Turkey at the time I made use of the Ministry's archives in Ankara; Director of its Research Department Cenk Duatepe and his predecessor, now Ambassador to the Philippines, Erhan Yigitbasioglu; Turkish Ambassador to France Tan~u~ Bieda; Turkish Consul-General in Paris Argun Ozpay, now Ambassador to the Republic of Mongolia; retired Ambassador Kamuran Giiriin, Member of the Turkish Historical Society, for manyyears Secretary General of the Turkish Foreign Ministry; Biliil Sim§ir, former Turkish Ambassador to Albania and later to China, also an active member of the ix x Preface and Acknowledgments

Turkish Historical Society, who as a young Turkish Foreign Service officer cataloguedthe Embassy archives in Paris, London and elsewhere in Europe; Hayim Eliezer Kohen, Director of Protocol at the Chief Rabbinate in Istanbul, who during World War II was involved with those charged by Istanbul's Jewish community with receiving and caring for Jewish refugees arriving from western Europe; Vidar Jacobsen, of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris; the staff of the archives of the Ministere des Affaires Elrangeres, Paris, and Maitre Serge Klarsfeld, the brilliant and energetic 'Nazi hunter' based in Paris, who made available to me a number of documentson Jewish Turks in Nazi-occupied Europe which he and his wife Beate found in the German archives during the course of their pioneeringresearches on the Holocaust. English translations of many of these sources are presented in this work, with copies of the originals deposited in the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Center and UniversityResearch Library, University of California, Los Angeles, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, and the ZiilfarisMuseum of Turkish Jewry in Istanbul. I would like to thank my wife's mother and father, Seoiha and Emin Kural, whose accounts of their relations with Jewish refugees along the border between Greece and Turkey during World War II first opened my eyes to Turkey's role in rescuing European Jewry during the Holocaust; His Eminence Rabbi Haim Nahum Efendi, last Grand Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire (1909-1920) and later Chief Rabbi of Egypt (1923-1960), who rust stimulated me to undertake research into the history of Ottoman Jewry during conversations in Cairo in the winter and spring of 1956; Professor Avram Galante, pioneering historian of Ottoman and Turkish Jewry, with whom I had fruitful conversations on Heybeliada in Istanbul in 1956, particularly regarding the difficult relations between Ottoman Jews and the other minoritycommunities; Mrs. Mina Tiirkmen, daughter of Fikret ~efIk Ozdo~aoct, Turkish Consul-General in Paris during World War II, who as a young woman was resident in the Consulate-General on Boulevard Haussmaoo; Ambassador Melih Esenbel, for many years Turkish Ambassador to the United States, who served as third secretary in the Turkish Embassy at Vichy during World War II; Ambassador Namtk Kemal Yolga, Turkish Vice Consul in Paris during the war and later Secretary General of the Turkish Foreign Service, to whom I am particularly grateful for the permission which he granted for me to include in this study the photographs which he supplied of the Paris Consulate-General and its staff as well as of the Jewish Turks who came to him and his coUeagues for assistance during the war; Ambassador Necdet Kent, wartime Vice Consul Preface and Acknowledgments xi

at the Turkish Consulate-General at Marseilles, which later moved to Grenoble following the German occupation of southern France, all of whom related their experiences in helping Jewish Turks who applied for assistance against persecution by the French as well as the Germans; and to Jak V. Karohi of Promo Holding as well as to Ishak Alaton and Ozeyir Garih, co­ owners of the Alarko Corporation, Istanbul, who told me about the experience of their relatives who were saved from the Holocaust by the Turkish government. My particular thanks go to my wife, Professor Ezel Kural Shaw, of California State University, Northridge, and to my Graduate Research Assistants for this study at the University of California, Los Angeles, both citizens of Israel, Ms. Ruth Barzilay-Lombrosoand Mr. Oded Neuman, and to the U.C.LA. Academic Senate Research Committee and Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, as well as the United States Fulbright Commission, which provided financial support for my research in Turkey during the Academic Year 1990-1991. Turkey's role in helping European Jews during the Holocaust has been largely ignored or deprecated in studies and conferences on the subject, if for no other reason than that the number of individuals involved, both those killed by the Nazis and those who survived, was a very small percentage of the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis and their sympathizers. Searching through the monumental studies of the Holocaust by such eminent scholars as Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, Serge Klarsfeld and others uncovers scant mention of Jewish Turks or of Turkey's role, either in helping Jews in France and other parts of western Europe, or in facilitating the activities of Jewish rescue organizations operating in Eastern Europe from offices in Istanbul. Even in the numerous memoirs written by members of these agencies or by people who were rescued, hardly anything is mentioned about Turkey's role other than that it was there, and that its officials occasionally caused them trouble as a result of bureaucratic problems of one sort or another. Gratitude is conspicuously lacking in these accounts, and disdain for Turks, whether Jewish or Muslim, seems always to be present. No-one seems to realize that during the years in question Turkey itself was in imminent danger of invasion by the Nazi armies that had already overrun Yugoslavia and Greece and were camped on its borders while making substantial demands of all sorts, including not only the ending of Turkey's role as a base to help the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe, but also the shipment of all the Jewish refugees who had reached Turkey to Germany for extermination, demands which the Turkish government ignored or rejected. Ira Hirschmann, executive at New York's Bloomingdale Department Store, who was sent to Turkey by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944as an xii Preface and Acknowledgments agent of the newly-created War Refugee Board to help rescue East European Jews, a task which could not have been carried out without the encouragement and assistance of the Turkish government, thus displayed great prejudice against his hosts by such ignorant remarks as 'The Turks are not mechanically trained, with the result that they fumble with gadgets and machines'j! referring to one Turkish official with whom he was negotiating as 'this sad-eyed little Turk',2 stating that Turkey's capital Ankara 'was really nothing more than a mountain village, and it offered few of the amenities of civilized life', and going on to disparage Turkey's role in providing excellent positions for the refugee scientists and professors who had been brought from Germany to Turkey in the 1930s by stating that these were 'A few men of outstanding caliber, artists and scientists that any nation would have been glad to number among its leaders ... ,'3 implying that Turkey should have been honored to rescue them . When discussing negotiations when Turkish ship owners were asking substantial rental fees in return for sending their ships to pick up refugees from Eastern Europe and carry them to Palestine in Black Sea and Mediterranean waters patrolled by Russian, German and British warships trying to stop them, he concludes that the ships that were being offered were 'old tubs',4 that the fees the owners were asking in return for placing their ships in jeopardy were 'outlandishly exorbitant' or 'piraticaI',5 and that the owners' requests that their boats be replaced if sunk were inappropriate. It is remarkable that he was not expelled, but the Turks at least knew that his mission was too important for that. Even at the famous Second International Historical Conference held in Jerusalem on April 8-11, 1974 on the subject of Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust , the important paper presented by Dalia Ofer on 'Activities of the Jewish Agency Delegation in Istanbul in 1943'6 was entirely ignored in the subsequent discussion of the several papers presented in her panel," while the statement by Chaim Pazner, official in the Geneva office of the Jewish Agency during the war, that the Turkish government had intervened with German and French authorities to rescue thousands of Jewish Turks in Vichy France who had lost their Turkish citizenship because of their acquisition of French citizenship and failure to register with Turkish

1. Ira Hirschmann , li/dlne to a Promised Land (New York, Vanguard, 1946), p. 64. 2. Hirschmann , p. 66. 3. Hirschmann, p. 137. 4. Hirschmann. p. 60. 5. Hirschmann, p. 64. 6. Rescue Anempls during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, April 8-11, 1974 (Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, 1977), pp. 435-450. 7. uu.. pp. 451-463 . Prefaceand Acknowledgments xiii

consulates in France'', was actually denied by Joseph Friedman, who after admitting that 'I am not a historian nor am I involvedin research', went on to reply:

I must admit that I know nothing about the 10,000 Turkish nationals. In fact this is the first time I have heard there were 10,000Jews in France who were Turkish nationals. It seems to me that there must have been a mistake and that the number was not more than 1,000. As far as the matter itself is concerned, as I mentioned, I know nothing. 9

The documents which I have consulted for this monograph are tragic and moving. One cannot help but be overwhelmed by the desperate appeals for help against persecution and impending deportation at the hands of the Nazis or of the Vichy government made to the Turkish diplomats by Jewish Turks resident in Nazi-occupied and VichyFrance, particularlyby those who had previously abandoned their Turkish citizenship when they thought it would be more profitable for them to become French Jews, only to discover after the arrival of the Nazis that it was far better to remain, or resume being, Jewish Turks; by the letters of gratitude sent to the Turkish diplomats by those who were rescued; and by the letters from relatives describing the sad fate of those for whom help came too late, particularly due to Nazi determination on many occasions to deport and exterminate Jewish Turks before the Turkish diplomats could act to save them. The actions of the governments of France (Vichy) and Great Britain during the war to prevent the rescue of many Jewish refugees because of the danger which such action might pose to their own interests stimulates particularly negative emotion for someone like myself, who had in the past admired both nations for their liberalism and enlightenment. The disinclination of some Ashkenazi Jews today, along with a number of non­ Jewish groups who, for their own reasons, wish to suppress all mention and recognition of Turkey's important role in assisting Jews during the Holocaust, also is a cause for regret. May this account of Turkey's role in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust stimulate a realization which will encourage a willingness to perceive history in the light of the story it presents rather than through the distortion of encrusted prejudice. Stanford J. Shaw

8. On Turkey's intervention to save these Jews see p. 13 of this work. 9. Ibid .• pp. 649, 653. For the facts as to how Turkey intervened with the Vichy government to prevent it from shipping these Jews 'off to Germany for extermination, see page 127.