Behiç Erkin

Behiç Erkin (b. 1876 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, d. 1961 in Istanbul, Turkey) was a Turkish soldier with an army career focused on military dispatches, and the first director ("between 1920-1926") of the Turkish State Railways, nationalized under his auspices. Later, he pursued a career in politics ("Minister of Public Works between 1926-1928 and deputy for three terms") and in diplomatic corps. He was Turkey's ambassador in Budapest between 1928-1939 and in Paris and Vichy between August 1939-August 1943. It was during his tenure as the Turkish ambassador in France, occupied and administratively divided after June 1940 that, as several other Turkish diplomats, such as Necdet Kent in Marseille and Selahattin Ülkümen in Rhodes, had done during the war, that Erkin spent remarkable efforts to save from the Holocaust the Turkish Jews within his mission's reach, in practical terms any Jewish person who could document a Turkish connection, even the slightest. [cite web | url = http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Turkey.html The Jewish Virtual History Tour|title=Turkey|author=Naim Avigdor Güleryüz|publisher=Jewish Virtual Library|language=English] [cite web | url = http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/news/turkish-diplomats-honored-new.2742.htm Article |title=Turkish diplomats honored in New York|author=|publisher=Wallenberg Foundation|date=1 November 2005|language=English] , in a vein similar to the much better known actions taken during the same period by Oskar Schindler.

Erkin was one of the closest friends and earliest collaborators of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, starting in early 1910s when both men were young officers fighting a war without issue and exchanging thoughts and sentiments, including a shared contempt for many among their senior officers, in Cyrenaica [cite book | title = Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey ISBN 158567334X|author=Andrew Mango|publisher=The Overlook Press|year=2002| language=English] . Both Mustafa Kemal and Colonel Behiç Bey played crucial roles, the latter in quality of officer responsible for transports and dispatches, in the final outcome of the battles at the Dardanelles front where both men had taken part during the World War I. The reputation acquired and the German Iron Cross 1st Class military decoration he was decorated with after the battles were to serve well twenty-five years later when he had to impress in order to step out of the Nazi's extermination machine's and their Vichy France accessory's routine channels. He also played a foremost part in the Turkish War of Independence. He became Behiç Erkin after Turkey's 1934 Law on Family Names, and his surname "Erkin" is one of 37 names given personally by Atatürk. Hand-picked for the post of ambassador to France by President İsmet İnönü in 1939, another point that proved to be critical during his mission in saving people from being dispatched to concentration camps in Eastern Europe was his decision to maintain the consulate in Paris at all costs even after the occupation and his refusal to move, despite pressures from all sides, the consular section to the interim capital of Vichy. An old railways hand, in 1942-1943 he also personally organized the transport of thousands back home across Europe.

Mission in France

According to a very detailed census the German occupation forces had had the French authorities carry out in autumn 1940, 3,381 in a total of 113,467 Jews over 15, residing in Paris and holding French nationality were of Turkish origin, this number reaching at least five thousand people counting also those under fifteen and possibly to ten thousand for the whole of France [cite book | title = The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution ISBN 0195043065|author=Jacques Adler|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=1987| language=English] . Turkey's Code allowed for double nationality but her nationals had to update their registry at the consulate once in every five years to preserve a Turkish identity. Many former Turkish nationals in France had neglected doing this, most of them living there since decades with their ties with their parents' country often reduced to anecdotal level. A more or less equal number (roughly ten thousand) of Jews who solely held the Turkish nationality could have resided in France at the time.

Turkey's embassy in Paris, where Erkin had arrived only three weeks before the start of the Second World War, was staffed by a handful of officials who nevertheless represented Turkey's administrative and cultural elite, all of them without exception being graduates of Galatasaray Lisesi. Namık Kemal Yolga was the Vice Consul after April 1940. Two among the staff, Fatin Rüştü Zorlu and Melih Esenbel, were to become foreign ministers later, the former being hanged at the gallows by the junta after the 1960 military coup d'etat in Turkey, as it was to befall also on a third colleague, Beşir Balcıoğlu, assassinated in Madrid in 1978 by the Justice Commandos Against Armenian Genocide. One consulate, located in Marseille and headed by Necdet Kent, depended Paris, and with the occupation also of southern France by the German army, it was moved to Grenoble. The coordination work was carried out by Leon Mandil, a Turkish Jew appointed a decade ago by Atatürk in quality of "spacial attaché", with perfect command of French and of France's ways, and issued from a family prominent since the 19th century until today [ Leon Mandil's grandfather, Jak Mandil Pasha, was sultan Abdülhamid II's personal doctor. His younger sister Tilda Kemal (b. 1923, d. 2003) was novelist Yaşar Kemal's spouse. ] . The picture was completed by Erkin's valet, an Anatolian Greek who had previously served Atatürk and who was entrusted by him to Erkin in 1926, when Erkin was outgoing for a foreign mission, in order to avoid his being included in the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and who was named Prodromos Stamatiades, shortly called Bodo.

Erkin's 900-page memoirs, completed in 1958 and yet unpublished [cite web | url = http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/5962888.asp?yazarid=5 Column|title=Bir ibret belgesi ("An exemplary document")|author=Emin Çölaşan|publisher=Hürriyet|date=16 February 2007|language=Turkish] , and the condensed and explained account of his days in France, written by his grandson Emir Kıvırcık and published in 2007, are rich in details on the conditions that prevailed in Vichy France, with the author having access and to the summit of the administration and to the the most modest and exposed classes, notably with the question of Turkish Jews occupying an increasingly larger part of his agenda. On 9 June 1940 Sunday, while the French government moved in haste to Vichy, since there was no one left in France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to distribute the communiqué notifying the change of capital to the embassies present in Paris, these could send someone to Quai d'Orsay to pick it up. It took one month to move the embassy with twenty staff members or spouses, while five were left in the consulate in Paris. Once in Vichy, Erkin had frequent contacts with virtually all Vichy personalities, including Maréchal Pétain, Pierre Laval, Paul Baudoin, François Charles-Roux, Charles Rochat. Where the situation of Turkish Jews were concerned, the emphasis put forth by the embassy at a first time was to assure that Turkish Jews would put a notice of their Turkish nationality next to the "Jewish-owned enterprise" sign whose clear display had become obligatory for anyone concerned, as part of gradually tightening measures. On 28 February 1941, the embassy could even obtain a letter from the German embassy, signed Otto Abetz, stating that they would be disposed to evaluate specific cases concerning Turkish nationals as communicated by the consulate. But the appointment a few days later of Xavier Vallat as Head Commissioner for Jewish Affairs gave a new impetus to Vichy France's own anti-Jewish moves [cite book | title = Vichy France and the Jews ISBN 0804724997, section "Vallat: An activist at work" p.96|author=Michael R. Marrus, Robert O. Paxton|publisher=Stanford University Press|year=1987| language=English] .

On a personal level, Emir Kıvırcık's book relates among other examples the account by Robert Lazare Rousso, picked up in a random identity check in Paris on 13 December 1941, dispatched to a camp where he stayed with thousands of others under the number 3233 for two months and released on 6 February 1942 as a result of recourses taken by the consulate. In 2007, Monsieur Rousso is still living in Paris. And of Herman Rothenberg and Isak Bitran, arrested in October 1942 and sent to Drancy, both released on 12 March 1943, after months of correspondance by the consulate in Paris with the SS, and boarded together with their families on the train to Turkey three days later.

All through 1941-1942, measures against Jews in France became increasingly more severe, with the Nazis trying to extirpate in stages their persons out of France, moving from the most recent immigrants to those who had come to France after 1933 and then to French Jews proper, those in France since generations, whereas Vallat's office was concerned primarily with Jewish assets, on which he had had a widescale inventory drawn in June-July 1941. After tentative attempts by Erkin throughout 1942 for assigning nominal trustees to protect enterprises owned by Turkish Jews, all Jewish nationals of neutral countries ended up by being included in a vast scheme of transport to their respective home countries that was started towards the end of the year. On 19 September 1942, Berlin communicated in a letter signed by Martin Luther that Turkish Jews could be evacuated until 31 January 1943, later extended for two months and more. A few days before the communication, Erkin had had a meeting, organized by Germany's Consul General in Vichy Krug von Nidda, held in secretive conditions with Otto Abetz, Heinz Röthke and Rudolf Schleier in a French chateau. The first train, with its cars painted in crescent and star, departed from Paris in November 1942 to arrive in Edirne eleven days later. Tension and difficulties were present in all stages of the dispatches, starting from the consulate gates where gatherings in masses of Jews provided an easy target for a raid. Aged 67 in 1943 and having had his ambassadorial term extended already for three times, Erkin retired in August 1943 to return to İstanbul where he wrote his memoirs. Behiç Erkin died in 1961. Upon his wish, he was buried in a courtyard nearby a railway junction in the very Eskişehir train station where he had started his career three score years ago.

A second book published in 2008, The Road to the Front ("Cepheye Giden Yol"), by Emir Kıvırcık goes back in time and the author covers this time his grandfather's World War I years.

George Clooney is cited as considering to play Erkin's role in a film project on his accomplishments [cite web | url = http://www.clooneystudio.com/news/january07.html News |title=George Clooney considering Turkish role |author=|publisher= [http://www.clooneystudio.com Clooney Studio] |month=January | year=2007|language=English]

Yad Vashem application

An official application for including Erkin among the Righteous Among the Nations in Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial was made in April 2007 by an Israeli association that brings together Jews with origins in Turkey [cite web | url = http://www.israelvalley.com/news/2007/04/02/9608/-israel-turquie-l-ambassadeur-de-turquie-durant-la-guerre-postule-a-titre-posthume-au-titre-de-juste-parmi-les-nations Article |title=L'ambassadeur de Turquie durant la Guerre postule à titre posthume au titre de Juste parmi les Nations |author=|publisher= [http://www.israelvalley.com Israel Valley] Site Officiel de la Chambre de Commerce France Israël|date=4 April 2007|language=French] .

ources

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ee also

* Necdet Kent
* Namık Kemal Yolga
* Selahattin Ülkümen
* Oskar Schindler
* Schindler's Ark (the book)
* Schindler's List (the film based on the book)
* Holocaust

References