Turkey and the Holocaust

The neutrality maintained by Turkey during most of World War II allowed it to rescue thousands of Jews from the Holocaust in the Nazi-occupied or collaborating countries of Europe. In France, the Turkish consels in Paris and Marseilles intervened to protect Turkish Jews from the application of anti-Jewish laws introduced both by the German occupying authorities and the Vichy government, and rescued them from concentration camps, getting them off trains destined for the extermination chambers in the East, and arranging train caravans and other special transportation to take them through Nazi-occupied territory to safety in Turkey.;Despite opposition from both the Nazis and the British, morever, the Turkish government instructed its diplomats in Eastern Europe to provide all possible assistance to Jews being persecuted during the Holocaust, allowed the Jewish Agency and other rescue groups to operate openly from offices in Istanbul, enabling them to send money and supplies to Eastern Europe, and permitted almost 100,000 East European Jews to transit through Turkey on their way to Palestine.This book is based on research in Turkish diplomatic archives in Ankara and Paris as well as i

STANFORD J. SHAW is Professor of Turkish and Judeo-Turkish History at the University of California in Los Angeles. He was previously Assistant and Associate Professor of Turkish Language and History at Harvard University and Director of its Near Eastern Summer Program. Professor Shaw pioneered the use of Ottoman archives in Istanbul while writing numerous books and articles on Ottoman and Turkish History and society including Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III and History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. He has served as President of the Turkish Studies Association of North America, was the founder and first editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and has been an elected Honorary Member of the Turkish Historical Society of Ankara, Turkey since 1981 and a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Turkish Studies, Washington DC since 1983. He received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Ford foundations and two major research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been awarded honorary degrees by Harvard Unievraity and the Bosporus University (Istanbul), and served as Fulbright Hayes Research Professor at the Bosporus University, Istanbul, in 1990-1991.