Turkey

The Republic of Turkey (also known as the Republic of Türkiye) was recognised internationally in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. During the Second World War, Turkey remained neutral until 23 February 1945, when it declared war on Nazi Germany.

According to the 1935 census, there were 78,730 Jews in Turkey. In 1934 after the passing of the Resettlement Law, which permitted the relocation and dispersal of ethnic and religious minorities, a pogrom erupted in Thrace. Over 15,000 Jewish citizens of Turkey fled the region. About 600 persons persecuted in Greater Germany for being Jewish (many of them academics or specialists) were officially given work visas in Turkey between 1933 and 1939, with many passing on elsewhere. An additional 300-400 non-prominent Germans were refugees under precarious circumstances, among them many Jews. Turkey aimed to expel 300-400 emigrant Jews in 1937 and – after consultation with Germany – issued a decree in 1938 to prevent any Jewish emigration from Germany, Romania and Hungary except by individual decision by the Council of Ministers, which was usually only open to specialists and their families. Nevertheless, especially after the relaxation of the decree regarding transit in 1941, between 1940 and 1944, around 13,000 Jews passed through Turkey on temporary visas from Europe to Mandatory Palestine. Turkey imposed limits on these visas, issuing them only to be valid for ten days, which meant they were unusable whenever wartime conditions led to delays. During the war, Turkey denaturalized 3,000 to 5,000 Jews living abroad: between 2,200 and 2,500 Turkish Jews were deported to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor and several hundred confined in Nazi concentration camps. When Nazi Germany pushed for neutral countries to repatriate their Jewish diaspora in late 1942 or have them face treatment equal to local Jews (“Heimschaffungsaktion”) [“Repatriation Ultimatum”], Turkish diplomats received instructions to avoid doing so even if Jews could prove their Turkish nationality; only few Turkish diplomats instead aided Jews. In 1942, 781 Jewish refugees from Romania attempting to reach Mandatory Palestine as well as ten crewmembers were killed after their ship, the Struma, sank in Turkish territorial waters after British officials had forbidden their entry to Mandatory Palestine and Turkish authorities had ordered the unseaworthy ship towed back out to the Black Sea (the ship was subsequently torpedoed by a Soviet submarine). During the war, Turkey was the only neutral state to enact anti-Jewish legislation: Between May 1941 and July 1942, non-Muslim males, including the elderly and mentally ill, were conscripted in forced labour battalions. A 1942 Wealth Tax aimed at the expropriation of businesses and property owned by religious minorities including Jews resulted in vast material losses. Non-Muslims were given a 15-day window to pay their dues in cash. 5,000 people unable to pay were sent to labour camps where twenty-one of them died. Many Turkish Jews subsequently emigrated, many of them to Mandatory Palestine and after 1948 to Israel.

For this country there are no sufficient findings on the history of Roma during the Second World War. EHRI would be pleased to receive any information.

With predecessor organisations since 1922, the Directorate of State Archives [Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı] was established in 1984. Since 2018, it is affiliated with the Presidential Office. It controls the Republic Archives, the Ottoman Archives and Departmental Documentations. Their contents as well as the relevance of other archives in Turkey to EHRI remain to be investigated.