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Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism

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Turkish Jews and their Diasporas

Part of the book series: Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe ((MOMEIDSEE))

Abstract

This chapter looks at the novel historical claim that Turkey had played a major role rescuing Jews from the Holocaust. This brash claim ignored the fact that Turkish diplomats in Europe had systematically stripped Turkish Jews of their citizenship, or refused to recognize them as citizens. Turkey did not take the opportunity to save tens of thousands of Jewish citizens in Europe from the Nazi reign of terror, instead condemning thousands of them to miserable deaths in the camps. Discounting these inconvenient truths, Jews and Muslims promoted the narrative of Turkish rescue of Jews. The claim was promoted by the Turkish Foreign Ministry working together with Jewish historians outside of Turkey and was explicitly linked to denying recognition of the Armenian genocide. According to this view, genocide is an if/then proposition: if one accepts the fable that Turks and Jews have lived in peace and brotherhood for five hundred years, as opposed to the historical record which narrates a completely different story, then one trusts that Turks could not possibly have perpetrated a genocide against the Armenians.

Baer, Marc David. Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide. pp. 191-211. © 2020 [Copyright Holder]. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Stanford J. Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey’s Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933–1945 (New York: New York University Press, 1993).

  2. 2.

    Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 254–256.

  3. 3.

    Laurent-Olivier Mallet, La Turquie, les Turcs et les Juifs (Istanbul: Éditions Isis, 2008), 249–252.

  4. 4.

    İ. İzzet Bahar, Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews (London: Routledge, 2015), 260.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 11.

  6. 6.

    Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, 244–271.

  7. 7.

    Emphasis added. Ibid., 257–258.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 257.

  9. 9.

    Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust, 60.

  10. 10.

    Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, ix.

  11. 11.

    Néhama argues that during the war there were 60,000 Sephardim in France (of Salonican, Turkish, and Balkan origin) of whom 15,000 became victims of the Nazis in the camps in Poland and Germany, or in France itself. He makes no mention of Turkey making any effort to save or protect any of these Jews, or even of Ülkümen having saved several dozen Jews on Rhodes.

    Communauté Israélite de Thessalonique, In Memoriam: Hommage aux Victimes Juives des Nazis en Grèce, Tome II, ed. Joseph Néhama (Salonique: 1949), 235–236.

  12. 12.

    Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust, ix. On Foundation office holders, see Jak Kamhi, Gördüklerim yaşadıklarım (Istanbul: Remzi, 2013), 395.

  13. 13.

    Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust, ix–x.

  14. 14.

    “Testimony of Retired Ambassador Necdet Kent Regarding His Rescue of Jewish Turks at Marseilles during World War II,” Appendix 4, translated by Stanford Shaw, in Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust, 341–344, here 342.

  15. 15.

    Bahar, Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews, 190.

  16. 16.

    Corry Guttstadt, Die Türkei, die Juden und der Holocaust (Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2009), was translated into Turkish as Corry Guttstadt, Türkiye, Yahudiler ve Holokost (Istanbul: İletişim, 2012), and into English as Corry Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, translated from German by Kathleen M. Dell’Orto, Sabine Bartel, and Michelle Miles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 220.

  17. 17.

    “Testimony of Retired Ambassador Necdet Kent Regarding His Rescue of Jewish Turks at Marseilles during World War II,” 343.

  18. 18.

    Bahar, Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews, 190.

  19. 19.

    “Testimony of Retired Ambassador Necdet Kent Regarding His Rescue of Jewish Turks at Marseilles during World War II,” 343.

  20. 20.

    Ibid.

  21. 21.

    “Testimony of Retired Ambassador Necdet Kent Regarding His Rescue of Jewish Turks at Marseilles during World War II,” 343.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 343–344.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 344.

  24. 24.

    Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 220.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 218, 220–221.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 220–221.

  27. 27.

    Bahar, Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews, 190.

  28. 28.

    Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 221.

  29. 29.

    Rıfat Bali, Model Citizens of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period, translated by Paul Bessemer (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 398.

  30. 30.

    Rıfat Bali, Türkiye’de Holokost tüketimi, 1989–2017 (Istanbul: Libra, 2017), 209–210.

  31. 31.

    Amazon lists it as the #4 best-seller in Middle Eastern literature on its website (accessed June 2016).

  32. 32.

    “Biz, Ermenileri Yahudiler gibi durup dururken kesmeye başlamadık.” CNNTürk, “Aykırı Sorular,” February 3, 2014.

  33. 33.

    Bernard Lewis speaking at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, broadcast on C-Span, March 25, 2002.

  34. 34.

    “Armenian Allegations: Myth and Reality,” testimony delivered by Professor Justin McCarthy before the House Committee on International Relations on May 15, 1996.

  35. 35.

    Ayşe Kulin, The Last Train to Istanbul, translated by John Baker (Istanbul: Everest, 2006).

  36. 36.

    Ayşe Kulin, Nefes Nefese (Istanbul: Remzi, 2002), 110–111.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 171.

  38. 38.

    Bali, Türkiye’de Holokost tüketimi, 213–214. Ayşe Kulin’s latest bestselling novel, Kanadı kırık kuşlar [Birds with Broken Wings] (Istanbul: Everest, 2016), which has already sold over 150,000 copies, concerns German Jewish academics who took refuge in Turkey during World War II.

  39. 39.

    Kulin, Nefes Nefese, vii.

  40. 40.

    Bahar, Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews, 184–185.

  41. 41.

    Kulin, Nefes Nefese, 185–196; Kulin, The Last Train to Istanbul, 190.

  42. 42.

    Kulin, Nefes Nefese, 197; Kulin, The Last Train to Istanbul, 200.

  43. 43.

    Eyüp Erdoğan, “Turks Saved Jews from Nazi Holocaust,” Turkish Daily News, October 25, 2008.

  44. 44.

    http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/highlights/turks-saved-jews-nazi/. For further examples of the propagation of the myth of Turkish rescue by such Consuls as Kent in Turkey and abroad, see Mallet, La Turquie, les Turcs et les Juifs, 478–484.

  45. 45.

    Burak Arlıel, director, The Turkish Passport (Imaj, Interfilm Istanbul, Turkey, 2011).

  46. 46.

    Bali, Türkiye’de Holokost tüketimi, 225, 231–233.

  47. 47.

    Uğur Ümit Üngör, Review of Burak Arlıel, The Turkish Passport. H-Genocide, H-Net Reviews. March, 2012. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35380.

  48. 48.

    The website is no longer online, but one can still find it on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20120425034845/http://www.theturkishpassport.com/holocaust_story.asp.

  49. 49.

    For examples of Uzer’s explicit denial of the Armenian genocide, see Umut Uzer, “The Fallacies of the Armenian Nationalist Narrative,” The Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2015, idem, “Ermeni meselesine farklı bir bakış,” Şalom, May 27, 2015, and idem, “Hayal ve gerçek arasında Balakian’ın kara köpeği,” Şalom, April 27, 2016, cited in Bali, Türkiye’de Holokost tüketimi, 205. Also see M. Hakan Yavuz ve Umut Uzer, “Ermeni meselesi, devlet ve aydınlar,” Zaman, Yorum, February 23, 2013.

  50. 50.

    Üngör, Review of Burak Arlıel.

  51. 51.

    Roger Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 11.

  52. 52.

    Rıfat Bali, Bir Türkleştirme serüveni (1923–1945): Cumhuriyet yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri (Istanbul: İletişim, 1999), 340–341.

  53. 53.

    Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 309.

  54. 54.

    For a comparison of how the neutral nations Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey responded to Jewish refugees and the needs of their own Jewish citizens in Nazi Europe during the Holocaust see the collection of essays, Bystanders, Rescuers or Perpetrators? The Neutral Countries and the Shoah, ed. Corry Guttstadt, Thomas Lutz, Bernd Rother, and Yessica San Román, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance series, volume 2 (Berlin: Metropol, 2016).

  55. 55.

    Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 112.

  56. 56.

    Bali, Bir Türkleştirme Serüveni (1923–1945), 341, 361; Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 116.

  57. 57.

    Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 157.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., emphasis added.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 162.

  60. 60.

    Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 199. Emphasis added.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 212.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 309.

  63. 63.

    Ibid.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 313.

  65. 65.

    Üngör, Review of Burak Arliel.

  66. 66.

    Heath Lowry, The Story Behind Henry Morgenthau’s Story (Istanbul: Isis, 1990).

  67. 67.

    Smith, Markusen, and Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide.”

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 2.

  69. 69.

    Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 217, cited in Ibid., 13.

  70. 70.

    Üngör cites Ziya Gürel, “Kurtuluş Savaşında Demiryolculuk,” Belleten 44, no. 175 (July 1980): 539–573; Behiç Erkin, Hâtırat 1876–1958 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2011); and Arnold Reisman, An Ambassador and a Mensch: The Story of a Turkish Diplomat in Vichy France (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010).

  71. 71.

    Emir Kıvırcık, The Turkish Ambassador (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011).

  72. 72.

    Emir Kıvırcık, Büyükelçi: Yirmi bin insanı Nazi soykırımından kurtaran, Kurtuluş Savaşı kahramanı bir Türk’ün ve şerefli ulusunun tarihi değiştiren öyküsü! (Istanbul: GOA, 2007). By its third printing in 2010 with a larger press, it had sold 100,000 copies. Bali, Türkiye’de Holokost tüketimi, 217.

  73. 73.

    Kıvırcık, Büyükelçi, 9.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., 10.

  75. 75.

    Kıvırcık, Büyükelçi, 191.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., 193.

  77. 77.

    Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 150, 211–212; Erkin: Hatirât.

  78. 78.

    Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 212.

  79. 79.

    Avigdor Levy, “Introduction,” Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1992), xvii–xxx.

  80. 80.

    Jak Kamhi, “Letter to Abraham H. Foxman,” August 22, 2007 (available on the website of the Turkish Coalition of America, http://www.tc-america.org/issues-information/armenian-issue/letter-to-abraham-386.htm). See also “Turkish Jews Disavow ‘Genocide’ Move,” Today’s Zaman, August 23, 2007.

  81. 81.

    In 2008, Turkey became an observer member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, founded in 1998 “to promote education, remembrance and research about the Holocaust.” https://holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/stockholm-declaration.

  82. 82.

    Cited in Bali, Türkiye’de Holokost Tüketimi, 121.

  83. 83.

    Kamhi, Gördüklerim Yaşadıklarım, 340.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., 352.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., 358.

  86. 86.

    Cited in Bali, Türkiye’de Holokost Tüketimi, 102–103.

  87. 87.

    Conversations with the author, June 2018, Graz, Austria.

  88. 88.

    Mamigonian, Marc, “Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide in American Scholarship: Denialism as Manufactured Controversy,” Genocide Studies International, vol. 9, no. 1 (2015): 61–82.

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  1. London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    Marc David Baer

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  1. Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

    Kerem Öktem

  2. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Ipek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu

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Baer, M.D. (2022). Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism. In: Öktem, K., Yosmaoğlu, I.K. (eds) Turkish Jews and their Diasporas. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87798-9_9

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