If Turkey’s war hero and President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, having defeated ANZAC and Greek-British armies, had not died in 1938, a year before WW2 broke out, would Turkey have entered the war supporting Hitler and would it have changed the outcome of the WW2?
“The current state of the world does not look bright at all. Every country strives to raise its youth with a different ideology. Italy clings to its fascist ideology. Mussolini, the dictator of this country, keeps shouting that he lives on the bayonets of eight million fascist youth. By dressing its youth in blackshirts, Mussolini is trying to instill in these conditioned youth to re-establish the Roman Empire, which has already sunk into history.
The Nazism that Hitler is creating in Germany is another great and dangerous analog of fascism. Hitler is a racist. Please note, I am not saying ‘nationalist’, but ‘racist’. He is a madman who sees the Germans as the supreme race. While trying to drag all German youth after him, he instilled this ideal in them… Let me just add that neither fascism nor Nazism has an end. Maybe I won’t live to see this… But the end of fascism is war, it has to lose at the front. And I see no possibility for either fascism or Nazism to survive at the end of this war.”
(Sabiha Gökçen, Atatürk’ün İzinde Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, 1937 Memories, p.155)
“Unless a nation’s life faces peril, war is murder.”
(Adana Çifçileriyle Konuşma, March 16, 1923)
“Atatürk had come to Istanbul for the treatment of his teeth; he would rest during the treatment at Dolmabahçe Palace and would not accept any visit. However, on the morning of December 3, after lunch, he left the palace and took the way to Taksim to watch the movie All Quiet on the Western Front, prepared for him by Beyoğlu Cinema.
At the end of the movie, the leading soldier is killed by a stray bullet, but the incident is recorded in the daily report as ‘All quiet on the western front’. Just at this moment, my father (Cemal Işıksel) pressed the shutter button when he saw that Atatürk’s eyes brimmed with tears and his face became as if he was reliving the horrors of war.
When the film was over, Atatürk turned to Şükrü Kaya, the Director of Internal Affairs, and stated that the film was the most realistic document about the war and that it can be ‘inconvenient for the Turkish people who had just come out of the bloody war’.”
Atatürk had already predicted that World War II would break out and that fascism would have to lose at the front. He was also conscious enough to even consider the psychology of the people who had been fighting for many years and was determined to spend Anatolia’s resources on reforms and industrialization. Therefore, if he had been alive in World War II, he would have taken political steps against a leader he called a “fascist madman”, but he would probably not have been involved in the war.
His life was spent at the front, witnessing the real brutality of war with his own eyes, not with video games. and that’s why he said:
Original color photographs of the D-Day invasion of Normandy during World War II. From British and American soldiers preparing for the invasion in England to German prisoners being marched through the streets after France’s liberation, these images are some of the only color photographs taken during the war. This set of photographs is primarily from the German Galerie Bilderwelt, part of Getty Image’s exclusive Hulton Archive collection.
Istanbul – As Turkey welcomes Syrians fleeing violence, the anniversary Friday of the deaths of more than 750 Jewish refugees who were denied shelter by Turkey in World War II was a reminder of perennial tension between pragmatic and humanitarian impulses.
The SS Struma, whose passengers fled Romania and docked in Istanbul, was denied entry to Palestinian territory by colonial power Britain. On Feb. 23, 1942, Turkey towed the vessel to the Black Sea and set it adrift. A Soviet torpedo sank it the next morning, and only one person survived.
The episode is a stain on an upbeat narrative of the Jewish experience in the mostly Muslim country, even if Jews are treated with far more tolerance than elsewhere in the region. Turkey dwells on the legacy of Ottoman rulers who welcomed Jews fleeing Christian persecution in Spain in the 15th century.
Tension over the past shadows Turkey as it seeks to lead in the region, advocating democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. Turkey, which had sought closer ties with Syria’s authoritarian regime, now demands that its president stop a bloody crackdown on opponents and quit, and it shelters some 10,000 refugees from Syria.
Signs of Turkish inclusiveness are many. Singer Can Bonomo, of Sephardic Jewish descent, will represent Turkey at the Eurovision song contest in Azerbaijan this year. Last month, Turkey showed a French film about the Nazi genocide, the first time it was aired on public television in a mostly Muslim nation.
Huseyin Avni Mutlu, Istanbul’s governor, attended a ceremony to commemorate Holocaust victims.
“We have strived to serve the world as a center of tolerance,” read his prepared remarks. “Never was any nationality, religion or belief group oppressed in these lands. On the contrary, they were treated as equals, with respect, and their cultural heritages were conserved.”
But the way Turkey — neutral in World War II — handled the Struma undercuts claims of favorable treatment that Jews and other minorities purportedly received in that era. Even today, deficits in equal rights and religious freedoms mar democratic advances in Turkey.
“This is a tragedy which is treated as something that has nothing to do with Turkey,” said author Rifat Bali, who has written about non-Muslim minorities in Turkey. He said blame is assigned to Britain or the Soviet Union, with some justification, but described the refugee deaths as a “black spot” on Turkey’s “rosy rhetoric” about benevolent policies.
A rare commemoration was held at Sarayburnu, a promontory near the Golden Horn inlet in Istanbul. Organizer Cem Murat Sofuoglu said the Turkish establishment was not interested.
“They don’t want to shake the cage,” said Sofuoglu, a lawyer who wants Turkey and Britain to apologize.
Turkey’s Jewish community of just over 20,000 has traditionally kept a low profile to avoid controversy or worse, especially at a time when political ties between Turkey and Israel, a former ally, are frozen. The low point came in 2010 when nine people died during an Israeli raid on a Turkish ship intending to deliver aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
In 2003, two Istanbul synagogues were targeted in deadly bombings by militants tied to al-Qaida, and Turkey cracked down on radical Islamists.
Many Turkish Jews had to speak Turkish and drop Ladino, a language that mixes Hebrew and Spanish and is dying out, in the early years of the modern republic. During World War II, Jews, as well as ethnic Armenians and Greeks, were subject to an arbitrary lump-sum tax, and mobs attacked non-Muslim properties in Istanbul in 1955.
Anti-Semitism has risen in Turkey’s ultraconservative media over the past five years, said Murat Onur, an Istanbul-based commentator who has studied the issue. Activists want the government to incorporate “hate speech” legislation in plans for a new constitution.
Baki Tezcan, an associate professor of history and religious studies at the University of California, Davis, said the only place to buy a menorah in Istanbul is at the offices of Shalom, a Jewish newspaper. In December, he went there to get one because his father-in-law is Jewish, saw no sign outside, and encountered a strict screening procedure.
“This experience made me realize how difficult it must be to live as a Jew in Turkey, feeling so threatened that they have to hide their community newspaper’s offices and apply such high security measures,” he wrote in an email.
After the Ottoman Empire collapsed and foreign powers carved up its spoils, Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, hauled Turkey onto a secular path, though religious belief remained entrenched. Today, the government is run by pious Muslims who describe themselves as conservative democrats.
One constant over the decades is the fact that Turkish identity cards state the religion of their carriers.
The majority Sunni Muslims stand “at the center of the circle” of Turkish citizenship, according to Tezcan.
“This might go back to the original meaning of the word ‘millet,’ which is used to refer to ‘nation’ today,” he wrote. “It actually meant a ‘religious community.’ So we are dealing with the repercussions of late Ottoman history, and the complex dynamics of growing local nationalisms, on the one hand, and European imperialism, on the other.”
Eyal Peretz is the Israel-born chairman of Arkadas, a community of ethnic Turkish Jews in Israel. He said the Ottoman welcome to Jews was something “we cannot forget” and an “exceptional story” in a dire catalogue of persecution over the centuries.
However, he criticized Turkey for downgrading relations with Israel, alleging it seeks to curry favor with Muslims worldwide. Turkey is incensed over the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel, which has refused Turkish demands for an apology and compensation in the 2010 raid.
Some historians speculate the Soviets mistook the Struma for a troop ship from Romania, a Nazi ally, and thought they were firing on an enemy. A book, “Death on the Black Sea,” cites Refik Saydam, Turkey’s prime minister at the time, as saying Turkey was not responsible.
“Turkey cannot serve as a homeland for people not welcomed by others,” Saydam said. “That’s the way we choose. This is the reason we could not keep them in Istanbul. It is unfortunate that they were victims of an accident.”
Deborah Dwork, director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in the United States, said studying the past helped to provide a compass for future conduct. She said Turkey’s wartime refugee policy was similar to that of other nations in that it welcomed only those Jews likely to make financial or cultural contributions. German Jews had a prominent role in archaeological excavations in Turkey in the 1930s.
“They were going to cherrypick precisely those Jews who would enrich Turkey one way or another,” Dwork said. She noted that Turkish authorities waited 24 hours before sending lifeboats to the area where the Struma was struck.
“As far as I’m concerned, that is both compliance and complicity with mass murder,” she said.
WWII-era war “British bomber” found in sea off Turkey
By the help of a fisherman, Turkish scientists discovered the plane as they dived 1.5 miles off Finike town of Antalya.
A World War II war plane, believed to be a British bomber, has been found at the bottom of the sea off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.
By the help of a fisherman, Turkish scientists discovered the plane as they dived 1.5 miles off Finike town of Antalya. The plane was lying off 35 meters below the sea.
Professor Mehmet Gokoglu, one of the scientists working on marine life, said he was told by a fisherman that there was a sunken war plane at the bottom of the sea in Finike Bay.
“The fisherman showed us where exactly the plane was and we found the wreck at our first dive,” Gokoglu said. “The fuselage is almost intact.”
Gokoglu and other divers also found 20mm unexploded anti-aircraft shells near the sunken plane and a part which reads “British Manufacture”.
“It was probably an aircraft of the British Royal Air Force,” Gokoglu said.
A 80-year-old local man said he saw the plane crash when he was a child. Huseyin Taskin said there were German, Italian and British war planes and warships in the bay during the World War II.
“I was 12 or 13 when I saw the tragedy. The plane was burning in the air, it lost altitude and after a while it hit the sea surface. I do not know if anyone survived,” Taskin said.
Turkish officials informed the Coast Guard and Naval Forces about the sunken wreck.