Turkey and the Holocaust

More than half a century of investigation and analysis have yielded a vast literature on the events, participants and motivations surrounding Nazi persecution of Jews. But very little is known about the efforts made by Turkey, a neutral country and traditionally a haven for persecuted Jews, to rescue European Jewry during the Holocaust. Bringing to light for the first time documents buried in the archives of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the National Archives (Washington), and the Turkish embassy and consulate in Paris, as well as materials given him by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, Stanford Shaw here unveils the tragic pleas of those fleeing Nazi persecution and traces the Turkish response. Recreating individual stories through letters from Jewish refugees, SS and Gestapo officials, and Turkish diplomats, this dramatic work carefully examines Turkey's little-heralded participation in sheltering leading scholars, physicians, attorneys and thousands of refugees. Turkey and the Holocaust illustrates how Turkey established Istanbul as the homebase for the Jewish Agency and other organizations set up to assist and rescue Jews throughout Eastern Europe and sought, through diplomatic pressure, to prevent Vichy from deporting all 70,000 of its Turkish Jews to Germany for extermination. Shaw narrates the plight of the refugees in the context of Turkey's overall reaction to the Holocaust, the precise role of Turkish diplomats, the effects of the disastrous Varlik Vergisi -- a wealth tax intended to help solve the financial crisis caused by Turkey's need to maintain a very large army against the possibility of a Nazi invasion from Greece -- and finally the inner workings and heroics of the Jewish Agency. Based on spectacular primary research and documents never before made public, this moving history recounts the horrific tragedies of Jewish persecution under Hitler and will be of interest to anyone interested in Turkish, Jewish, and European history and in the history of World War II.