Ömer Tokat

Ömer Tokat (* 1917 in Skopje ; † February 24, 1942 in Ankara ) was a Yugoslav-Turkish student. He became known due to the unsuccessful assassination attempt he carried out on the German ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen , in February 1942, in which he himself was killed.

Life

Ömer Tokat was the son of a Yugoslav teacher. As a schoolboy he developed sympathies for communism and joined the communist underground movement in Yugoslavia. In October 1940 he went to study in Turkey, where he enrolled at the Faculty of Law at Istanbul University. At the same time he was naturalized as a Turkish citizen.

According to allegations made by the Turkish authorities in a trial by the Turkish authorities against the alleged perpetrators of the attack carried out by Tokat in February 1942, which have not been proven with absolute certainty, Tokat was recruited as an assassin by employees of the Soviet consulate in Ankara in 1941, together with two other Yugoslav immigrants secretly trained in the use of firearms and explosives.

Assassination attempt in February 1942

On February 24, 1942, Tokat von Papen lay in wait to carry out the assassination attempt: On that day, as he did every morning, von Papen and his wife walked from his private apartment to the building of the German embassy on Ataturk Boulevard. When the von Papen couple turned onto Ataturk Boulevard, Tokat was on their heels. A short time later there was a serious explosion in which Tokat was torn to pieces, while the diplomatic couple walking a few meters in front of him was only torn to the ground by the blast of the explosion. Otherwise, the couple sustained only minor injuries (von Papen suffered a burst eardrum in one ear). Later investigation revealed that Tokat had been killed by his own explosive device while he was preparing it to be thrown at the diplomat.

The question of who was behind the attack

To this day it has not been established with absolute certainty who was behind the attack carried out by Tokat. Joachim Petzold wrote in his von Papen biography, published in 1995, that the Soviet secret service was most likely to be perpetrated, although "direct evidence for the time being [due to the inaccessibility of the relevant archives] is hardly to be expected". After all, Moscow seems to have taken “very seriously” the ambassador's attempts to "help break up the allied alliance" and to bring about an anti-Soviet front. A responsibility of the Soviets was also assumed by Papen himself, by the Turkish authorities and at least parts of the German government (cf. the diaries of Joseph Goebbels). If Papen is to be believed, Hitler himself is said to have spoken of the fact that Papen was "also on the war front" there in August 1944, at the last meeting of the two men, when Hitler awarded Papen the Knight's Cross for War Merit Cross for his achievements in Turkey. admitted that this already proves "the Russian attack on your life". The contemporary German press initially suspected the British Secret Service of responsibility for the attack for a short time , but then went on to accuse the Soviet secret service GPU of the authorship of the attack.

Another theory, which was spread even in the press of the Allied states during the Second World War, took the position that the attack was a bogus assassination attempt by the German side - with or without Papens' knowledge as well as with the variants that Papen should be killed or that a danger to life was only faked, but nothing should actually happen to him - was staged for the purpose of serving as an occasion to put the Turkish government under pressure to take a sharper course against to smash the Soviet Union. For this purpose, the German organizers of the attack deliberately teased it in such a way that they pretended to be the Soviet Union's role-pulling role ( false flag operation ) in order to put it in a bad light in the eyes of the Turks. In this regard, it should be noted that at least the variant that nothing should happen to von Papen in the attack appears unlikely, as a bogus assassin should have been instructed to carry out his attack in such a way that there was a guarantee that the attack would appear authentic, but nothing would happen to the victim himself: Such a sovereign control of the situation during the assassination or sham assassination by Tokat can, however, be ruled out with great certainty given the fact that Tokat blew himself up. Also the variant that Tokat, according to the will of his backers, should inadvertently kill himself during his attack (by misinforming him about the functioning of the explosive mechanism) in order to create an impressive incident, while Papen should not do anything, is mentioned in the literature usually discarded on the grounds that an unconscious suicide bomber Tokat did not carry out his attack (if von Papen actually thought he should actually kill) or a sham attack (if he knew he should not kill him) for his clients was more so precisely controllable that one could be sure that if his bomb were detonated he would only kill himself, but leave his victim unharmed.

The trial of Tokat's supposed backers

As mentioned, the Turkish authorities suspected immediately after the attack that it was the responsibility of the Soviet secret service. As a result of the police investigation, two members of the Soviet consulate in Ankara, who had allegedly been in connection with Tokat in the months before the attack and who were accused of being agents of the Soviet secret service disguised as diplomats, quickly emerged as the main suspects: George Pavlov, officially archivist at the consulate, and Leonid Kornilov, officially head of the transport department at the Soviet commercial agency of the consulate.

In order to seize both men, the Soviet consulate - which as a diplomatic institution as an extraterritorial area of ​​the Soviet state could not be entered by Turkish law enforcement agencies - was surrounded by the police and systematically besieged. This went on for two weeks before Pavlov was extradited. Kornilov was captured near the Turkish-Soviet border while trying to leave the country.

In addition to the two Soviet diplomats, two Yugoslav immigrants, the medical student Abdurrahman Sayman and the hairdresser Suleiman Sagol, were also arrested, who were also charged with involvement in the Papen attack.

In April 1942, all four were tried by the Ankara jury court as the organizers and backers of the attack on February 24th. The trial, which was chaired by Judge Gabri Pasdasch and lasted with interruptions until mid-June, ended with convictions for all of the accused. By judgment of June 17, 1942, the two Soviet diplomats were sentenced to twenty years in prison on the basis of Article 50 paragraph 4 of the Turkish Penal Code for direct involvement in an attack against the life of a third person , the two Yugoslav Turks to ten years in prison each convicted of a proven connection and support for the assassin.

literature

• Barry N. Rubin: Istanbul Intrigues, 2002.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Petzold: Franz von Papen. A German Doom , 1995, p. 260.
2. ↑ Joachim Petzold: Verfassnis, p. 263.