Namık Kemal Yolga

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Namık Kemal Yolga (born December 7, 1914 in Elazığ , Eastern Anatolia ; † December 21, 2001 ) was a Turkish diplomat and statesman . According to his own reports, he was involved in saving almost all Turkish Jews living in Paris from the Holocaust . That is why he was and is referred to in some Turkish and foreign media as a Turkish Schindler , as his compatriots and colleagues Behiç Erkin and Necdet Kent , who were working in France at the same time .

Career

Yolga studied political science in Ankara and then worked in administration. In 1940, Namık Kemal Yolga was appointed Vice Consul of the Turkish Embassy in Paris , his first diplomatic post abroad. From May to mid-July 1942 he was consul general there.

In 1959 he was Legation Councilor in Paris before he returned to Ankara and took over the management of the Groupe de Planification Politique . In 1960 he was elected Secretary General of the Turkish Foreign Ministry under Foreign Minister Selim Rauf Sarper .

Yolga later served as ambassador in Rome (1963), Paris (1965), Caracas (1966), Tehran (1968) and Moscow (1975).

Rescuing Jews

Two months after Yolga's inauguration, 60% of France was occupied by the German Empire . Parisian Jews were captured, arrested and transported to the Drancy assembly camp , which was opened in 1941 , where they waited to be transported to the extermination camps .

As soon as Yolga and his staff became aware of the arrest of a Jewish person with Turkish nationality, the Turkish embassy is said to have sent an ultimatum to the German embassy demanding their release. It should have been pointed out that the constitution of Turkey does not discriminate its citizens according to race or religion and that the German Reich therefore has no right to detain Jews with Turkish citizenship, since Turkey was a neutral country during the war.

Then Yolga is said to have driven his car to Drancy, picked up the person and brought them to a safe place. As far as he knew, only one Jewish person from Bordeaux was brought to a German camp because the Turkish embassy had not found out about his arrest.

reception

Yolga's statements contradict Turkish documents which show that the fate of hundreds of French Jews with Turkish citizenship led to Auschwitz . Several of them are said to have had contact with Yolga. I. Izzet Bahar, who refers to these documents in his doctoral thesis, sums up that Yolga did his work professionally, but that no extraordinary attitude can be proven. During his time as Consul General, reports from him to Ankara are said to have been the cause that the protection of Jewish children born in France and full Turkish citizens was lifted if they had received French citizenship after their birth .

In 2001, Yolga, Erkin, Kent and Selahattin Ülkümen were honored for their rescue of Turkish Jews through Turkey. Ülkümen was previously the only Turk to have been honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations . This was previously not possible with his other Turkish colleagues, as there are no witness reports about their actions.

The actions of Yolga, Erkin and Kent were also discussed in the 2011 Turkish documentary The Turkish Passport . In 2009 a postage stamp with the portrait of Yolga appeared.

The Turkish-Jewish historian and publisher Rıfat Bali sees in the Turkish portrayal of diplomats, such as Yolga, Erkin and Kent, as Jewish helpers, an attempt to present a humanity of the Turkish people that excludes conscious genocide against the Armenians .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Metehan Demir: Bizim Schindler'ler. In: hurriyet.com.tr. May 15, 2001. Retrieved May 16, 2017 .
  2. ↑ 2009. In: sihirlitur.com. Retrieved May 16, 2017 .
  3. ↑ a b Rıfat Bali : The perception of the Holocaust in Turkey in: Günther Jikeli , Kim Robin Stoller, Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun: Controversial History: Views on the Holocaust among Muslims in international comparison , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978- 3-593-39855-6 , pp. 125–126, preview in Google Book Search
  4. ↑ a b c Stanford J. Shaw : Turkey and the Holocaust , Macmillan, London 1993, pp. 63-64
  5. ^ A b I. Izzet Bahar: Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews , Routledge, London 2014, ISBN 978-1-317-62598-8 , p. 295, preview in Google Book Search
  6. ↑ Rudolf Agstner (Ed.): Turkey 1960: political reports from Ambassador Karl Hartl to Foreign Minister Bruno Kreisky , LIT Verlag, Münster 2011, ISBN 978-3-643-50307-7 , p. 128 f, preview in Google Book search
  7. ↑ Yitzchak Kerem: Rescue of Sephardic Jews by Muslims in the Holocaust in: Journal of Sefardic Studies. Issue 2 , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2014, p. 56. ( digitized version )
  8. ^ Stamp: Namik Kemal Yolga (1914-2001) (Turkey). In: colnect.com. Retrieved May 16, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Yolga, Namık Kemal
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Turkish diplomat and statesman
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Elazığ
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 2001