Turkey and the Holocaust
[4] According to the research of historian Rıfat Bali [de; tr], more Turkish Jews suffered as a result of discriminatory policies during the war than were saved by Turkey.
[7][8] Until 1950, Turkey was a one-party state that operated under a strongly nationalist government that prioritized Turkification of the country and establishing a Turkish-Muslim bourgeoisie at the expense of religious and ethnic minorities.
"Push" factors included a ban on Jewish associations and restrictions and public censure on the use of non-Turkish languages such as Judeo-Spanish as part of the "Citizen, speak Turkish" campaign, as well as dismissal of state employees deemed not to be "Turks" due to a 1926 law.
[5] During the war, Jews living in Turkey faced discriminatory conscription into forced labor battalions and the 1942 wealth tax intended to financially ruin non-Muslim citizens.
[12] There is only one known case of a Turkish consul offering diplomatic protection to non-Turkish Jews, the French national Monsieur Routier.
The Turkish ambassador in France, Behiç Erkin, reprimanded Routier for acting for humanitarian reasons and made him promise not to do it again.
The Turkish consul in Marseilles, Fuat Carım, gave the list of "irregular" Jews helped by Routier to the Nazi authorities.
[5] However, this was not necessarily for humanitarian reasons; often sexual favors or bribes were demanded for documents that Jews had a legal right to obtain.
[16] In 1942, 769 Jewish refugees from Romania attempting to reach Mandatory Palestine were killed in the Struma disaster after their ship sank in Turkish territorial waters.
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.
[17] Since 1992,[18] Turkey has promoted a myth of widespread rescue of Jews during the Holocaust in films such as Desperate Hours (2000) and Turkish Passport (2011) as well as books such as Last Train to Istanbul (2002) and The Ambassador (2007).
