GERMAN SCHOLAR EXPOSES TURKISH PROPAGANDA ABOUT JEWS
By Harut Sassounian
AZG Armenian Daily
05/06/2009
Armenian Genocide, Holocaust
For many years, the Turkish government and its hired propagandists have
claimed that Jews have been well treated in Turkey throughout history.
In recent years, as Turkey came under intense international pressure
to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, Turkish officials decided to
present a more positive image of their country by forcing local Jewish
leaders to issue public statements claiming that their community has
lived in peace and prosperity for hundreds of years.
Turkey’s Jewish leaders obediently carried out the dictates of the
Turkish government in order to assure the safety of their community
and to safeguard their own business interests.
Very little research has been done, however, on the true conditions
of the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic
of Turkey. German scholar Corry Guttstadt recently filled that
gap by publishing a comprehensive study of 520 pages on Turkey’s
reprehensible actions during the Holocaust. The book’s title in German
is: "Die Turkei, die Juden und der Holocaust" (Turkey, the Jews and the
Holocaust). Based on archival materials located in several European
countries, she was able to document the tragic fate of Turkish Jewry
during the Holocaust.
In an interview conducted by Sonja Galler and posted on ,
Guttstadt explains why the Jewish community in Turkey dwindled from
150,000 strong during World War I to only 20,000 at the present time.
"To portray the Ottoman Empire as a ‘multicultural paradise’ is
absurd and ahistorical," Guttstadt says. "As non-Muslims, the Jews
were subject to countless constraints. Like the Christians, they had
to pay a poll tax and were obliged to behave in a submissive manner
towards Muslims."
Having witnessed the genocide of the Armenian people, Jews were
terrified that they might suffer the same fate. To ensure their safety
and survival, Jews did everything possible, including conversion to
Islam, to prove that they were loyal Turkish subjects.
"Most Jews initially regarded themselves as allies of the Kemalist
movement and looked to the new Republic with largely positive
expectations," Guttstadt explains. "These hopes were quickly dashed
because despite their attempt to adapt and their declarations of
loyalty, the Jews quickly became a target for the rigid nationalism
of the young Republic. One of the defining policies of the young
Republic was the ‘Turkification’ of state, economy, and society,"
Guttstadt says. As a result, Jews were "successively driven out of a
number of professions and economic sectors. This prompted many Jews
to emigrate" from Turkey.
In the period between the two world wars, there was increasing
intolerance in Turkey against Jews and other minorities. According to
Guttstadt, "Anti-Semitic tracts like the ‘Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion’ reached Turkey and were translated into Turkish in
the 1930’s. Following a visit to Germany, Cevat Rifat Atilhan, who
could be described as the father of Islamic anti-Semitism in Turkey,
started publishing the anti-Semitic newspaper ‘Milli Inkilap’ (National
Revolution) in Istanbul, which contained anti-Semitic caricatures that
had been lifted directly out of the Nazi newspaper, ‘Der Sturmer.’ Both
the ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ and ‘Mein Kampf’ have
gone through umpteen new editions to this day. Nationalist measures
that affected not only Jews, but also Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks,
included forced settlement, the so-called ‘wealth tax’ — which led
to the confiscation of assets of those who were not in a position to
pay the arbitrarily fixed and frequently astronomical sums they were
required to pay — and forced labor in camps in eastern Anatolia."
Prior to World War II, close to 30,000 Turkish Jews fled to Europe
to escape unfair and sometimes brutal treatment at home. Little did
they know that an even more tragic fate awaited them. In 1942, Nazi
Germany asked Ankara to remove its Jewish citizens from territories
occupied by the German Reich, so they would not be rounded up along
with the rest of European Jewry. Ankara, however, refused to allow
their return by revoking their Turkish citizenship. As a result,
several thousand Turkish Jews perished after being dispatched to
German concentration camps.
Guttstadt also exposes the oft-repeated lie that Turkey provided a
safe haven to many European Jews during the Holocaust. She states
that some Turkish consuls in European countries, who intervened to
obtain the release of incarcerated Turkish Jews, did not always do so
"for purely humanitarian reasons," but "to line their pockets."
Corry Guttstadt’s revealing book should be translated and published
in several major languages in order to expose the Turkish government’s
racist and criminally negligent policies vis-a-vis its Jewish citizens
during the Holocaust.