Oct. 27



GERMANY:

German economist apologizes for disputed comment on Nazi-era persecution
of Jews



In Berlin, a leading German economist apologized Monday for drawing a
much-criticized parallel between corporate managers today and the Nazi-era
persecution of Jews that followed the 1929 financial crisis.

Hans-Werner Sinn, the head of the Munich-based Ifo institute, was quoted
as telling the daily Tagesspiegel in an interview about the global
economic meltdown that "in every crisis, people look for culprits, for
someone to blame."

"No one wanted to believe in an anonymous systemic error in the world
economic crisis of 1929 either," he added, according to the report. "Back
then it hit the Jews in Germany; today, it's the managers."

Recent weeks have seen widespread condemnation of perceived failings by
financial experts prior to today's financial crisis.

In contrast, the 1929 crisis was followed by the rise to power in 1933 of
the Nazis, who set in motion a systematic persecution of Jews that
culminated with the death of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

Sinn drew strong criticism from the government and the opposition, from
Germany's Central Council of Jews and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He
issued an apology a few hours after the interview hit newsstands.

"I regret very much that the Jewish community feels hurt by my comments,"
Sinn wrote in a letter to the Jewish council's president, Charlotte
Knobloch. "I did not want in any way to compare the fate of the Jews after
1933 with the situation of managers today such a comparison would be
absurd."

"I apologize to the Jewish community and take back the comparison," he
said.

Sinn said he had been trying to make the point that "the search for
putative scapegoats is always misleading" in trying to explain the causes
of economic crises.

The controversy comes ahead of the Nov. 9 anniversary of the 1938
anti-Jewish pogrom the Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass when
synagogues, Jewish homes and businesses across Germany were attacked.

"Sinn's comparison is invidious and, at best, insensitive in its timing,"
the Simon Wiesenthal Center's director for international relations, Shimon
Samuels, wrote in a letter to Sinn.

"We should note the contemporary hatemongers who, once more, libel 'Jewish
finance' for the contemporary financial crisis," Samuels wrote.

(source: Los Angeles Times)





***************


RETRACING THE NAZI BOOK THEFT----German Libraries Hold Thousands of Looted
Volumes


Hundreds of thousands of book stolen by the Nazis are still in German
libraries. A few librarians are acting like detectives, searching for the
books and hoping to return them to the former owners or their families.
However, many libraries have shown little interest in the troubling legacy
tucked away on their shelves.

Book, books, nothing but books. Detlef Bockenkamm is walking along a long
shelf in the storage room at Berlin's Central and Regional Library.
Suddenly he stops and says: "This is where we have the Accession J
collection." The letter J refers to Jews.

The curator has collected more than 1,000 books here, enough to stretch
almost 40 meters (130 feet) if they were lined up next to each other.
Bockenkamm and a colleague combed through old documents, checked files and
studied records documenting the receipt of books. They eventually
discovered that these volumes were stored at the City Pawn Office in
Berlin in the spring of 1943.

The records indicate that the city library purchased "more than 40,000
volumes from the private libraries of evacuated Jews" through this office.
And, this being Germany, the librarians maintained meticulous record books
to keep track of their purchases -- even though parts of the German
capital were already in ruins. As always, preserving order was paramount.
The librarians signed each volume and gave it an accession number,
beginning with the letter J.

Bockenkamm even found children's books marked with the letter J. One was
titled "For Our Youth: A Book of Entertainment for Israelite Boys and
Girls." The book contained the handwritten dedication: "For my dear
Wolfgang Lachmann, in friendship, Chanuka 5698, December 1937." Bockenkamm
has been unable to find out what happened to the boy.

But he did manage to trace the former owner of a book titled "The Rose of
Sharon -- Stories and Poems for Older Jewish Youth." A rabbi gave the
book, bound in green linen, to a young girl from Berlin, in recognition of
her "diligence and good conduct" in religious school. The girl's name was
Adele Hoffnung, and she was deported to Minsk on Nov. 14, 1941. Adele did
not survive the Holocaust.

For Bockenkamm, the bureaucratic, administratively correct implementation
of the great Nazi book theft was "disgustingly sleazy." But he also
derives satisfaction from the fact that he is now able to prepare an
exhibition on the Nazi looted books for the Berlin Central and Regional
Library.

Every larger German library still has hundreds of these books in its
inventory, books snatched up by the men of the SS and SA, as well as
ordinary soldiers, both in Germany and in other European countries
occupied by the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, during World War II.
No one knows how many stolen books are still on the shelves in German
libraries today, although experts, like historian Grz Aly, estimate that
there are at least one million.

These silent witnesses of Nazi crimes are not as spectacular as the stolen
paintings that have become the subject of bitter restitution battles waged
in full view of the public. The books, after all, are not Picassos worth
millions in the art market.

Nevertheless, Germany's Federal Commissioner for Culture Bernd Neumann
believes that museum employees and librarians have an obligation "to
devote particular attention to the search for those cultural goods that
were stolen or extorted from the victims of Nazi barbarism." Neumann
points out that, more than just "material value," what is at issue here is
"the invaluable emotional importance that these objects have when it comes
to remembering the fates of individuals and families."

For decades, libraries asked no questions about the origins of the books
that were added to their inventories during the Nazi era. Many librarians
approached the issue "sluggishly and reluctantly," says Salomon Korn, the
vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. To this day,
many libraries have not systematically searched for stolen books in their
inventories.

'A Fundamental Task for Libraries'

The Lower Saxony State and University Library, in the city of Gttingen, is
proud of its state-of-the-art robotic scanner. It is a pioneer nationwide
when it comes to digitization. But despite its seeming progressiveness,
the library seems to have less of an interest in the past.

It was an intern who at the end of last year first peered into the dusty
accession books from the World War II years. What Arno Barnert found were
deliveries from the Wehrmacht's "loot warehouses" in Gttingen. He found
accessions from the Polish cities of Krakow and Poznan, the Polish
consulate in Leipzig and a high school in the Dutch town of Enschede.
Books once owned by the Viennese Goethe expert Friedrich Fischl, who was
deported in 1941 and murdered in the ghetto of Lodz, Poland, were recorded
as a "purchase."

Barnert notified the library management. A few days later, the intern
received a visit from the library director, who advised the young man not
to make the Nazi loot the subject of his thesis. Barnert was told that if
he did decide to do so, he would not be making any friends and would not
exactly be improving his prospects of getting a job. He might even be seen
as a whistleblower, the director said.

But Barnert continued his search. "Documenting the paths and histories of
books that were acquired in the Nazi period is a fundamental task for
libraries, a question of ethics," he says. In February, Barnert began
collaborating with Frank Mbus, a Gttingen specialist in German studies who
was in the process of preparing an exhibit about book burning.

Mbus found documents in the city archives proving that in March 1933,
members of the SA, together with police officers, confiscated 890 books
from a communist bookseller in Gttingen. Some of the books went to the
National Library in Berlin and some to the University Library in Gttingen.

Mbus notified the administration of the University of Gttingen, which
decided to conduct a search for Nazi loot in the library as part of a
research project. Ironically, intern Barnert was forced to listen to his
supervisor loudly accuse him of having ignored the proper channels.

The proper channels have always been dear to German bureaucrats, and they
were observed by German librarians, who documented the stolen books even
amidst the chaos of World War II. The records show, for instance, that the
Prussian State Library passed on stolen books to 31 university libraries.

The book thieves' initial goal was to develop and expand libraries and, as
the war raged on, to replace inventories that had been destroyed.

A number of organizations took part in the hunt for books. They included
the intelligence service of the SS, the Gestapo and the staff of Alfred
Rosenberg, the "Fhrer's Commissioner for the Supervision of the Entire
Intellectual and Ideological Training and Education of the Nazi Party."

Jews were not the only ones to fall victim to the Nazi book thieves.
Berlin curator Bockenkamm found three books stamped "Karl Marx House,
Trier." A call to the western German city of Trier revealed that the books
had been sent to Berlin for an exhibition in the early 1930s and were
never returned.


Libraries Avoid Association with Nazi Looting

Employees at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in the eastern city of Weimar
identified 440 books that were once in workers' libraries founded by
Social Democrats and labor unions. There were about 2,500 of these
libraries, with more than one million books altogether. Most of them went
missing and were probably destroyed.

The book thieves were able to expand their range of operations
considerably after the war began. German occupiers in Eastern Europe
raided 375 archives, 957 libraries, 402 museums and 531 research and
educational institutions. They were also active in France, as the odyssey
of sheet music once owned by the pianist Arthur Rubinstein shows. The
history of the copies and prints of these works of various composers, some
with personal dedications, mirrors the catastrophes of the 20th century.

Rubinstein, who was born in the Polish city of Lodz and immigrated to
Paris, fled to the United States in the fall of 1939. When the Wehrmacht
occupied the French capital in June 1940, members of the "Reich Director
Rosenberg Task Force" confiscated his sheet music and had it sent to the
German Reich's intelligence headquarters in Berlin.

In 1945, members of the Red Army confiscated the music and took it to the
Soviet Union. When the music was sent to East Germany in the 1950s as part
of a program to return German cultural assets, it ended up in the music
department of the National Library in East Berlin, where no one recognized
its value and it eventually gathered dust. It was only in 2003, 21 years
after Rubinstein's death, that librarians conducting research in Moscow's
Glinka Museum discovered who the former owner of the music was.
Two-and-a-half years ago, representatives of the Prussian Cultural
Heritage Foundation handed over the music to Rubinstein's children in New
York.

Such finds and returns are the exception. Indeed, most stolen books are
still undiscovered. Because libraries are constantly passing on duplicate
copies to other libraries and exchanging books, the books stolen by the
Nazis are now spread throughout Germany. "This explains why even the new
technical colleges in eastern Germany may have such books," says Annette
Gerlach of the Central and State Library in Berlin.

In 1991, Klaus von Mnchhausen, a political scientist in the city state of
Bremen, was one of the first to suggest searching for stolen books. He
criticized the city's state library for having many books on its shelves
that had once been stolen from Jews. The Bremen Senate hired a retired
senior official from the state Education Ministry to conduct the search,
and she found 1,555 books recorded in the accession book for 1942. Some
entries included the notation "Gift from the Nazi Party," while others
were marked "J.A." -- Jew Auction. Most of the books had been confiscated
from Jewish emigrants who were boarding ships to go abroad. It was
possible to identify the former owners of about 300 of the books.

In early December 1998, a representative of the German government,
together with representatives of 43 other nations, signed a document
outlining 11 basic principles. The signatories to the "Washington
Conference," vowed to search for works of art "that were seized by the
Nazis and never returned," as well as the heirs of such stolen goods.

But little has happened in libraries since then. When stolen goods experts
at the Lower Saxony State Library in Hannover sent a questionnaire to
roughly 600 libraries via the German Library Association, only about 10
percent replied.

To date, only 14 libraries have officially registered their stolen goods.
Even large university libraries, such as those in Frankfurt, Kassel and
Heidelberg, have not yet begun to systematically search for stolen goods
in their inventories.

In most cases, the institutions blame a lack sufficient funding and
personnel to conduct the costly and time-consuming searches. Accession
books must be examined, and then all books taken in after 1933 must be
searched for information identifying libraries, names, ownership stamps
and other clues.

In large libraries, the number of "suspicious books" ranges into the
hundreds of thousands. Even the Berlin State Library, Germany's biggest
library, took its time before beginning a serious search effort three
years ago. "They had to be dragged to the search," says Werner Schroeder,
an expert on Nazi loot in the northwestern city of Oldenburg. "They
apparently wanted to avoid being associated with the Nazi foray throughout
all of Europe."

'Sitting in the Stacks Like Corpses in the Cellar'

Only seven years after the signing of the Washington Conference, a student
discovered, while conducting research for his master's thesis, that the
Berlin State Library owns more than 10,000 stolen books as well as another
9,000 volumes that were more than likely confiscated by the Nazis. There
are probably even more, because the current library succeeded the Prussian
State Library, which played a central role in the Nazis' book confiscation
program. All books that were seized anywhere in the country had to be
offered to the library first. The "Reich Exchange Office," which worked
closely with the library, also became a transfer station for stolen books
during the war.

Because of bombing raids on Berlin, the accession department at the
national library was evacuated to Hirschberg -- now the Polish city of
Jelenia Gra -- in the foothills of the Giant Mountains in the spring of
1944. Many of the intake documents are still in Jelenia Gra today, where a
historian has been reviewing them since the end of last year.

"We spent too much time complaining about our own losses and looking to
Russia," Annette Gerlach of the Central and State Library in Berlin says,
not without self-criticism. But, she adds, it is now time for her and her
colleagues to finally do their homework.

"These books are sitting in the stacks like corpses in a cellar," says
Salomon Korn of the Central Council of Jews. Of course, he adds, more has
to be done, especially in a matter that involves clearing up the "Nazi's
confiscation crimes."

The University of Marburg Library is the only large German library that
has now carefully examined almost all of its books from the period in
question. As a result, the library has been able to return many books to
the heirs of their former owners.

In many cases, heirs can no longer be found. Then the books remain in the
libraries, and their histories are documented in the card catalogue. And
then there are cases like that of Isac Seligmann. A user at the Berlin
State Library found a volume of an encyclopedia titled "Religion in
History and the Present Day," which had a bookplate indicating that it had
belonged to the Jewish theologian. Library staff managed to find his widow
in Israel.

"I appreciate your offer to return this book to me," Marion Seligmann
wrote from Jerusalem, "but I have no use for it now."


*********************

HAUNTED BY NAZI HISTORY----German Politicians Divided over Anti-Semitism


The German parliament wanted to pass a unanimous resolution against
anti-Semitism to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Night of the
Broken Glass. But the effort has become a victim of political bickering.

On Sept. 29, it was Berlin's turn. Just one week after the Jewish cemetery
in the city's central Mitte district was reopened following renovation
work, an information plaque was daubed with anti-Semitic slogans. An
investigation was immediately begun to try and find the perpetrators, but
little progress has been made.

It is the same story across the country. On average, according to
statistics cited by members of the federal parliament, one Jewish cemetery
each week is vandalized in Germany. Last week in Potsdam, a mini-sidewalk
monument to a Jewish family deported during the Holocaust was smeared with
a swastika. Two weeks ago in the eastern German town of Jena, anti-Semitic
chants were sung at a regional league football match. The list ( in
German) goes on.

Potentially more damning, however, is the fact that anti-Semitism in the
country appears to be on the rise. A number of studies in recent years
have reached the conclusion that anti-Semitism is not just a fringe
problem in Germany. A September study released by the Pew Research Center
in Washington, D.C. came to the conclusion that fully 25 percent of
Germans had unfavorable views of Jews. While that is far less than the 46
percent result in Spain or the 36 percent in Poland, it is up from the 20
percent result found in Germany in 2004.

German politicians are listening. Indeed, since the beginning of the year,
a working group made up of all parties in the German parliament, the
Bundestag, have been busy formulating a resolution condemning
anti-Semitism in Germany. The idea was to have it ready for the 70th
anniversary of the Nov. 9, 1938 Nazi pogrom known as the Night of the
Broken Glass. Political infighting, however, has delayed the project --
and now threatens to torpedo it altogether.

'A Political Fiasco'

"I still have high hopes that we will be able to find a common language
for the resolution, but it unfortunately won't be until after the 70th
anniversary," Gert Weisskirchen, a Social Democratic (SPD) parliamentarian
who helped initiate the project, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "This awful
development (of rising anti-Semitism) demands that we approach it with the
appropriate dignity. We can't let it descend into a political fiasco."

For the moment, however, all signs point to exactly that happening. The
initiative got started at the very beginning of this year, and
Weisskirchen said that until recently, the parties involved -- SPD,
Christian Democrats along with their sister party the Christian Social
Union (known collectively as the Union), the Free Democrats, the Greens
and the Left Party -- were all on the same page.

Not long ago, however, the Union submitted text to be included in the
resolution referring to anti-Semitism in pre-reunification East Germany.
The passage reads that "it must be recalled that Israel was never
recognized by East Germany, that Jewish businesspeople were dispossessed
by the East German government and had to flee, and that East Germany broke
international law by delivering weapons to an anti-Israeli Syria in 1973."

The problem, though, is that not everyone is willing to accept such a
passage. Petra Pau, the Bundestag vice president from the far-left Left
Party, suspects that the Union is trying to push the Left Party out of the
resolution. "We have no problem with a formulation that talks about
anti-Semitism in East Germany after the end of World War II," she told
SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But not in the form submitted by the CDU/CSU. It is
especially regrettable that, right at the end, the Bundestag consensus
against anti-Semitism has been broken apart."

Pau's party is a controversial one in the German political landscape. The
Left Party's predecessor, the Party of Democratic Socialism, was the
democratic successor to the East German communist party SED. Pau was an
SED member before becoming a high level functionary in the PDS.

Still, she isn't the only one who finds the newly submitted passage
problematic. Weisskirchen points out that the formulation makes it seem as
though people were dispossessed in East Germany because of their
Jewishness, which, he says, is inaccurate. Many in East Germany lost their
property and it wasn't a phenomenon limited to people of the Jewish faith.
Furthermore, he mentions, East Germany passed a resolution toward the end
of its existence expressing regret for the state's anti-Semitic leanings,
a fact completely ignored by the CDU/CSU passage.

Removing the Obstacles

A CDU/CSU press release on Wednesday makes in clear that the conservatives
are sticking to their guns -- and are are intent on associating the Left
Party with East German anti-Semitism. "It is true that we want a
resolution without the participation of the Left Party," the press
statement reads. "When this party, under the name SED, controlled East
Germany, it denied Israel's right to exist and never recognized the Jewish
state. We think it is hypocritical that the Left Party now acts as though
it were spearheading the fight against anti-Semitism."

The debate over the resolution threatens to overshadow the anniversary of
a significant marker in Germany's Nazi history on the road toward the mass
murders of the Holocaust. The Night of the Broken Glass, which extended
well into Nov. 10, 1938, saw Hitler unleash his Nazi thugs on the
country's Jewish population. Thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed on
that night and hundreds of synagogues were torched. Nazis also killed
hundreds of Jews and thousands more were rounded up and sent to
concentration camps.

Weisskirchen remains hopeful that a resolution can be passed by the end of
the year, and maybe even by the end of November, he said. "In September,
our positions were very close; we have been working on this text since the
beginning of the year. Now, these obstacles have been placed in our path.
I hope we can remove them."

(source: Der Spiegel)






BELGIUM:

Belgian cooking show in hot water over Hitler meal


Belgians will discover Tuesday the culinary secrets behind trout in
butter sauce, as a television cooking show focuses on Adolf Hitler's
"favourite meal," a program already slammed by a Jewish group.

After studying the mysteries of mussels and chips, preferred by Belgian
singer Jacques Brel and the late Queen frontman Freddy Mercury's curried
chicken, Flemish chef Jeroen Meus heads next week to southern Germany.

The 30-year-old cook catches some trout in Bavaria, and then heads to
Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" to whip up the "meal of an atrocious man" as part
of a "succulent feast", Flemish VRT television said on its Internet site.

The chief editor of Antwerp's Joods Actueel Jewish community magazine,
Michael Freilich, denounced the program in advance for "presenting Hitler
as a simple man of the people."

He accused Meus, whose series also looked at surrealist painter Salvador
Dali's favorite "Catalan lobster," of being "naive" and ill-informed about
the Holocaust and the effects on its survivors.

Six million Jews from across Nazi-occupied Europe perished during the
Holocaust.

Belgium's deportees association also expressed concern about the
program.

But in a statement, Jan Stevens, director of Canvas television, part of
the VRT chain broadcasting the program, said it would help people to "have
a better understanding of the dictator".

"It is not in any way trying to humanize Hitler. Jeroen Meus explains it
clearly in the introduction and during the program, by contrasting the
luxury of Eagles Nest and World War II," he said.

Stevens said, however, that VRT did wish to "apologize in advance if
some people feel shocked by the program's contents."

(source: Agence France-Presse)





TURKEY:

Turks Saved Jews From Nazi Holocaust

Some took the risk of forcibly getting on Nazi death trains as they were
to set off for death camps, prying Jews on them from the hands of the SS
officers. Others saved many people from concentration camps by taking them
to safety in their private cars. The Israel-based International Raoul
Wallenberg Foundation and the Israel Union of Jews from Turkey in Israel
are collaboratively searching for witnesses and documents to convince the
Israeli state to honor a number of Turkish diplomats who saved many Jews
from death during the Holocaust


The smell of death permeated the streets of Europe during the dark years
of World War II. Nazi Germany, under the regime of Adolf Hitler, was
hunting Jews in the countries it had occupied and their fate anywhere in
the world seemed simply hopeless.

As the macabre dance on the streets continued, some Turkish diplomats
serving in Europe at that time saved thousands of Jews from the cruel
hands of the Third Reich.

Very nearly lost to the foggy corridors of history, these gallant
Turkish diplomats have been remembered as part of a joint initiative by
the Israel-based International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and the Israel
Union of Jews from Turkey in Israel. The two associations have begun
searching for witnesses and documents to enable Turkish diplomats to be
honored officially by the Israeli state. It is Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, that will confer the honorary
titles on the diplomats.

But in order to do so, it asks for corroborating documents and testimony
of at least three people saved by the heroes. The two Israeli
organizations now request that people who have information on the
diplomats come forward.

The biggest advantage that Turkish diplomats enjoyed in Europe in the
1940s was Turkey's neutrality in the war. That enabled them to save
thousands of Jews from the Nazi genocide in Europe and to help Turkey to
serve as a bridge between Eastern Europe and Palestine for Jewish
refugees.

Germany, aware of all these factors, began to put severe pressure on
Turkey. But despite the pressure and dangers awaiting them, Turkish
diplomats continued to help Jewish refugees in different parts of Europe
and saved thousands of them, many of who were originally Turkish Jews.
These diplomats also served as a bridge between the refugees and
institutions that wanted to help them. Moreover, Turkey, the only
remaining route for Jews in Europe to flee to Palestine, refused to close
off its straits to refugees in transit.

Once arrived in Istanbul, Jewish refugees could pass into Palestine if
they had visas. Those who did not have visas were put in small boats in
the resort towns of Marmaris and Bodrum and sent to Palestine illegally.
About 100,000 Jewish refugees fled from Europe to Palestine via Turkey by
the end of the war. About 75,000 of them were saved by Turks.

France was one of the countries where Turkish diplomats worked to save
Jews. About 10,000 of 300,000 Jews living in France at the beginning of
World War II were Jews from Turkey. Turkish diplomats serving in France at
that time dedicated many of their working hours to Jews. They provided
official documents such as citizenship cards and passports to thousands of
Jews and in this way they saved their lives. Below is a story of these
diplomats.


Saves Jews, loses wife

Germany occupied the island of Rhodes in 1943. A total of 1,800 Jews
were living on the island at that time. Nazis decided to gather all of
them and send them to the concentration camps in Auschwitz in 1944. They
told them to gather at the Italian headquarters on the island and allowed
them to take supplies for 10 days. At the headquarters, the Jews were told
they were going to be taken to another island. Selahattin lkmen, Turkish
consul general serving on the island at that time, objected to the
deportation of 50 Turkish citizens among the 1,800 Jews and saved them
from being taken to Auschwitz.

The Germans ultimately sent 1,673 Jews from Rhodes to Auschwitz; only
150 survived. Soon after, Turkey took sides with the allies and declared
war against the German alliance. Germany bombed the Turkish Consulate
General to Rhodes. lkmen's wife, Mihrinnisa, who was pregnant at that
time, and two officials at the consulate died in the bombardment.

Carries Jews to safety in his own car

The Turkish state appointed Namk Kemal Yolga to his first international
post in Paris in 1940. Two months after he took office, Germany occupied
France. Following the occupation, Jews in France were sent to
concentration camps in the suburbs of Paris. Yolga helped many Jews to
acquire Turkish citizenship and therefore saved them from being sent to
the concentration camps. He also saved many Jews who were arrested by
Nazis even though they had been provided Turkish passports by taking them
to safety in his private car.

Yolga, recounting those years in his memoirs, recalled: Throughout its
history, Turkey has never set the scene for anti-Semitism, which was seen
at different levels in many countries. The Turkish state has never
discriminated against its Jewish citizens. One of the tasks of our
consulate general is to protect Turks, Turkish citizens of Jewish descent
and citizens of other faiths.

Working hours given over to saving Jews

Necdet Kent served as deputy consul general in Marseille and Grenoble in
France between 1941 and 1944. Kent, also a former ambassador, tells about
those years:

When the Nazis occupied northern France, Jews living there fled to the
southern part of the country, to Vichy France, which had not been occupied
at that time. But when it was occupied too, everything went further bad.
The first thing the Nazis did was to fill trains with Jews as many as
they could find and send them to Germany.

Some Jews who were also Turkish citizens asked us to help them. We
provided them with certificates of proof of Turkish citizenship and
protected their businesses. We put signboards on facades of their
workplaces that Turkey protected those places. As time went by, the
Gestapo officers changed and Nazi attacks increased. We used to go to the
Gestapo headquarters three or four times a day to save Turkish Jews that
were detained or arrested.

Kent recounts another episode:

One night in Marseille, Sidi can, who was working as a translator at the
consulate, visited me. He was nervous. He told me the Germans were
rounding up 80 Jews, also Turkish citizens, and putting them in train cars
for animals and sending them to Germany. He was almost crying. We
immediately went to the train station. The scene at the station was
unbelievable. There were humans crying and groaning in the animal cars.
Each car read that it could haul 20 large cattle and half a ton of hay.
And in each of them were crammed 80 people.

I told can that we should also get on the train. I pushed a German
officer trying to block me and got on the train together with can. The
train stopped when we arrived in Arles or Nimes. German officers got on
the train. They came over to me and told me that there was a mistake and
those who caused it would be punished. I told them that 80 Turkish
citizens were arrested and stuffed into animal cars simply because of
their religion and I would not leave my citizens alone. All women, men and
children in the train were shocked and watched the game being played over
their lives. The Germans then let them all free as a result of my resolve.

Kent continues, Every day, Germans used to find new ways to arrest Jews.
They even used to stop a Jewish man on the street, surround him, and force
him to lower his pants to see if he was circumcised or not. But Nazis
mistakenly arrested many Muslim men too, for they were circumcised as
well. I used to go to the Gestapo headquarters and tell the Nazis that
Muslims get circumcised too. When they did not understand what I meant, I
told them that a medical doctor could examine me. In this way, I saved
many innocent people.

Helped former French PM's son

Behi Erkin was the Turkish ambassador to Paris when France was under
Nazi occupation. In order to prevent the Nazis from rounding up Jews, he
gave them documents saying their property, houses and businesses, belonged
to Turks. He saved many lives in this way. He also saved many Jews who
were sent to the Nazi camps.

Former French Prime Minister Leon Blum's son and his friends were among
the Jews that Erkin helped. The original letter of thanks that Blum sent
to Erkin is preserved at the Republican History Museum at the language,
history and geography department of Ankara University. Erkin reportedly
saved about 20,000 Jews by putting them on trains to Turkey.

NOTE: This story is compiled based on the research of Stanford J. Shaw,
professor of Turkish history and Turkish-Jewish history at the University
of California at Los Angeles, and the information provided by the Israel
Union of Jews from Turkey in Israel.


Jewish community in Turkey indifferent to issue

Emir Kvrck, grandson of former Turkish Ambassador Behi Erkin, said he
has met witnesses to incidents of Turkish diplomats saving Jews from Nazi
genocide. Three of them live in Turkey and 15 live in France. He said that
although he has informed the authorities that he has found witnesses,
Turkish diplomats have still not been honored because the decision to
grant the honorary titles needs to be made by Yad Vashem Museum in
Jerusalem under the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority
after listening to the testimonies of the witnesses or written statements
made by them. Kvrck said it would not be a proper if he, as a family
member of one of the heroes, transmitted the written statements of the
witnesses to Yad Vashem. He believes the Jewish community in Turkey should
carry out such a task. But it has not made any attempt so far.


Other Turkish diplomats that helped Jews during the Holocaust

Ali evket Berber, served in Paris between 1943 and 1944.

Numan Kurtulmu, served in Paris between 1944-1956.

Saffet Arkan, served in Berlin between 1942 and 1944.

Nayetullah Cemal zkaya, served in Athens between 1940 and 1945.

Burhan In, served in Varna between 1942 and 1946.

Yrfan Sabitaka, served in Prague between 1939 and 1943.

Pertev evki Kantemiz, served in Budapest between 1939 and 1942.

Abdlahat Birden, served in Budapest between 1942 and 1944.

Fuat Aktan, served in Kstence between 1942 and 1945.

Ragp Rauf Arman, served in Kstence between 1942 and 1945.

Kudret Erbey, served in Hamburg between 1938 and 1942.

Galip Evren, served in Hamburg between 1942 and 1944.

Cevdet Dlger, served in Paris between 1939 and 1942.

Fikret efik zdoanc, served in Paris between 1942 and 1945.

Bedii Arbel, served in Marseille between 1940 and 1943.

Mehmet Fuat Carm, served in Marseille between 1943 and 1945.


*******************

Seeking righteous Turks


SAVIORS:Although only Turkish Diplomat Selahattin lkmen is rewarded so
far, there are many Turkish diplomats who had helped the jews during the
Second World War.

Israeli-based International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and Israel Union
of Jews from Turkey in Israel jointly initiated a project to find Turks
who helped save Jews from the Holocaust during the Second World War


A joint project launched by the Wallenberg Foundation and the Israel
Union of Jews from Turkey in Israel will promote to the world Turks who
helped save Jews from the Holocaust.

The two organizations jointly initiated a project to find Turks who
helped save Jews from the Holocaust during World War II. The project aims
to introduce the saviors of Jews to the world and unearth the real stories
of the period. The project members call for people who witnessed that
period to provide the foundation with the related documents and
information in an effort to contact the relatives of Holocaust survivors.

Turkey is very important for us, said Daniel Rainer, researcher at the
Wallenberg Foundation, stressing that Turkish diplomats, especially in
France, exerted great effort to save Jews who would be the possible
victims of the genocide, speaking to the Anatolia news agency.

We want to promote the saviors of the Holocaust to the world and tell
people of the importance of lifesaving to the next generations through
real stories. We also want to include these real life stories to school
curriculums as well.

Named after the Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, who jeopardized his
life saving Jews during the Nazi genocide, the Wallenberg Foundation was
established by U.S. Congress member Hungarian Tom Lantos and Argentinean
businessman Baruch Tenenbaum in 1997. The foundation has lately focused on
research with regard to people in Muslim countries who saved Jews from
Holocaust during World War II.

Rainer said that in 1990 Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes'
Remembrance Authority, only rewarded Turkish diplomat Selahattin lkmen due
to his accomplishments to save Jews from the genocide during his term of
office in Rhodes, but said there were many Turkish diplomats who had
helped the Jews during the war.

He said the foundation had thus tried to collect evidences and documents
about Turks who saved Jews and that Necdet Kent, who officiated as a
deputy consul in Marseilles during the Holocaust, was one of those
saviors.


Turkish diplomat's story

Necdet Kent provided French-origin Turkish Jews with certificatea of
Turkish citizenship during those years and jeopardized his own life by
boarding a train which was to carry Turkish Jews to internment camps in
Germany.

Kent wanted Nazi officers to release 80 Jews claiming that they were
Turkish citizens. When German officers rejected Kent's demand, he and his
interpreter got in the train as well. Germans had to release Jewish group
lest it could cause a diplomatic crises between Turkey and Germany, said
Rainer.

He said the foundation searches the relatives of the 80 Jews who
witnessed the event. The foundation not only conducts wide research on
Kent, but also on all Turkish diplomats who tried to save Jews during the
Vichy government period in France.

Ambassador Behi Erkin, and consular staff Necdet Kent, Namik Kemal
Yolga, Fikret Sefik zdoganci, Bedii Arbel and Fuad Carim remained among
other names on the list of people on whom foundation tries to conduct
research.

Within the project, the foundation calls for those whose family was
saved thanks to Turkish diplomats to provide a feedback to the foundation.
Rainer also noted that people who have some information on the subject may
contact the foundation at irwf@.... Through the collected data,
the foundation and Israel Union of Jews from Turkey in Israel plans to
reward forgotten Turkish diplomats informing their names to Yad Vashem.

(source: Turkish Daily News)