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Turkey was officially neutral during World War II, though it maintained strong diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany during the period of the Holocaust. During the war, Turkey denaturalized 3,000 to 5,000 Jews living abroad; 2,200 and 2,500 Turkish Jews were deported to 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, Turkish diplomats received instructions to avoid repatriating Jews even if they could not prove their Turkish nationality.

There were some 300-500,000 Jews with one or more parent born in the Ottoman Empire living in Europe as of 1939. These Jews could often receive Turkish citizenship papers given an application process, and many were saved through the intervention of Turkish diplomats.

Background

The Ottoman Jewish population was strong and numerous. Their numbers received a substantial boost in 1498 with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Sephardic refugees expelled from Spain and Portugal. Later, Jews escaping Russian persecution sought refugee in the Ottoman Empire too.

History

Commemoration

See also

• International response to the Holocaust
• Francoist Spain and the Holocaust
• MV Mefküre – Turkish ship sunk in August 1944 while transporting Jewish refugees

Citations

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Sources

• Baer, Marc D. (2020). Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-04542-3.
• Bahar, Izzet I. (2012). Turkey and the Rescue of Jews During the Nazi Era: a Reappraisal of Two Cases; German-Jewish Scientists in Turkey & Turkish Jews in Occupied France (PhD thesis). University of Pittsburgh.
• Karakaya, Yağmur; Baer, Alejandro (2019). ""Such Hatred Has Never Flourished on Our Soil": The Politics of Holocaust Memory in Turkey and Spain". Sociological Forum. 34 (3): 705–728. doi:10.1111/socf.12521.
• Smith, Roger W.; Markusen, Eric; Lifton, Robert Jay (1995). "Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 9 (1): 1–22. doi:10.1093/hgs/9.1.1.
• Guttstadt, Corry (2008). Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-76991-4.
• Zalc, Claire (2021). Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-98771-5.

Further reading

• Bali, Rıfat N. (2013). "Perceptions of the Holocaust in Turkey". Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities: Sources, Comparisons and Educational Challenges. Springer Netherlands. pp. 61–69. ISBN 978-94-007-5307-5.
• Dost-Niyego, Pınar; Aytürk, İlker (2016). "Holocaust Education in Turkey: Past, Present, and Future". Contemporary Review of the Middle East. 3 (3): 250–265. doi:10.1177/2347798916654581. hdl:11693/49431. S2CID 157967347.

• The Holocaust by country
• Jewish Turkish history
• Armenian genocide denial
• Antisemitism in Turkey