T

Taylor, Telford

An American lawyer best known for his role as the counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials, Telford Taylor was born in Schenectady, New York, on February 24, 1908. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1932, he held a series of legal jobs with the federal government. One of these would have a profound impact on his career. From 1939 to 1940 Taylor was a special assistant to U.S. attorney general Robert Jackson. During World War II he joined the U.S. Army as a major in 1942, rising to the rank of colonel by 1944. He worked in intelligence analyzing information obtained from the Ultra code. Near the end of the war, Justice Robert Jackson, now U.S. prosecutor for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, had remembered Taylor’s earlier work and personally requested him for his staff. Taylor acknowledged that he had no experience with international law in general or war crimes in particular, and he also believed that, despite the high-profile nature of the appointment, it would be detrimental to his legal career because he had planned to enter private practice after the war. Nevertheless, the excitement of the work involved convinced him to take the job. Although motivated largely by his own admittedly selfish reasons, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to bringing fair and impartial justice to those who had committed war crimes.

As the Allies gathered more information related to Nazi atrocities, it became clear that there was a need for more trials than those convened by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which tried only the top-ranking Nazis. Taylor thus became the chief U.S. prosecutor for the 12 subsequent trials conducted under Control Council Law Number 10. In this regard, he helped prosecute judges, industrialists, doctors, and others, all in the same manner, adhering strictly to due process and the rules of evidence. He left Nuremberg still committed to law, but seeing a need for an international legal regime that would be applied fairly to all belligerents, not just those on the losing side of war.

Once discharged, Taylor briefly worked with the Small Defense Plants Administration. He then became a private attorney, about the same time that Republican senator Joseph McCarthy began his anticommunist witch hunt in 1950. Taylor was one of the few men who stood up to McCarthy from an early date, denouncing his actions in speech after speech and defending many of those McCarthy had accused of “un-American activities.” His past experience trying Nazis was one of the reasons he opposed McCarthy so vehemently. Indeed, he viewed McCarthy’s attempts to subvert the democratic process as the equivalent of the takeover of the German government by the Nazis in the early 1930s.

After taking on McCarthy, who fell from grace in 1954, Taylor turned to writing. In all he wrote nine books, most focusing on World War II and receiving critical acclaim. His 1992 book The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Biography told the story of his experiences as a war crimes prosecutor. Taylor never left the law completely, however, and served as a special observer to the 1961 Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, which he denounced as a violation of the process of due process and fairness. He also worked to help free Jews imprisoned in the Soviet Union. Taylor died on May 23, 1998, in New York City.

ELIZABETH PUGLIESE

See also: Ferencz, Benjamin; Jackson, Robert H.; Judges’ Trial; Manstein Trial; Nuremberg Trials

Further Reading

Taylor, Telford. The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Taylor, Telford. Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy. New York: New York Times Company, 1970.

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Ten Boom, Corrie

Cornelia (Corrie) ten Boom was a Dutch rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, proceeding from a firm Christian belief that demanded she help those in need. It is estimated that overall she and her family saved the lives of upward of 800 Jews.

She was born in Haarlem, near Amsterdam, on April 15, 1892, the youngest in a family of four children. She had two sisters, Betsie and Nollie, and a brother, Willem; their father, Casper, was a jeweler and watchmaker. Cornelia was named after her mother. Their home was always crowded, as Corrie’s three maternal aunts also lived with her family. In 1924 Corrie, having learned at the feet of her father, became the first licensed female watchmaker in the Netherlands. As she became older, she established a youth club for teenage girls, ran a church for people with disabilities, raised foster children in her home, and engaged in other charitable works. After the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, Corrie was forced to close down the girls’ youth club.

The ten Booms were members of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Corrie came from a family tradition that had long championed Jewish causes. Already during the 19th century, Corrie’s grandfather had supported efforts to improve Christian-Jewish relations, and her brother Willem, a Dutch Reformed minister assigned to convert Jews, studied antisemitism and ran a nursing home that, in the late 1930s, became a refuge for Jews fleeing Germany.

Within months of the German takeover, the social, political, and legal climate of the Netherlands had been transformed. It did not take long for the ten Booms to become involved in resistance activities, with various extended family members taking a number of different underground roles. Corrie became directly involved when she, her father, and her sister Betsie decided to hide Jews in the family home. She established contacts with members of the resistance, who assisted her through obtaining extra ration books and building a hiding place in the family home. This tiny secret room, built into Corrie’s bedroom behind a false wall, became a refuge for Jews, students, and political dissidents. It could hold up to six people, standing, and was serviced by a rudimentary ventilation system.

The “hiding place,” also known as “de Bejé”—an abbreviation of their street address on the Barteljorisstraat, a shopping street in Haarlem—thus became a center of short-term rescue. From this start, Corrie became a leader in what became nicknamed the “Beje movement,” in which a series of safe houses was established throughout the Netherlands.

On February 28, 1944, a Dutch informant betrayed the ten Booms and denounced them to the Nazis. That same day the Gestapo raided the house, and Corrie, her father, brother, sisters, together with other family members as well as some resistance fighters, were arrested. In total, the Gestapo arrested more than 30 people in the ten Boom family home. Although German soldiers searched the house thoroughly, they did not find the Jews who were at that moment concealed in the hiding place next to Corrie’s room. They remained there for nearly three days, until the Nazis gave up their surveillance and Dutch resisters, who knew they were there, moved in and rescued them. By the end of the war, all but one survived.

The ten Booms were sent immediately to Scheveningen prison. Nollie and Willem, and Corrie’s nephew, Peter, were released straight away, but Corrie, Betsie, and their 84-year-old father Casper remained incarcerated. Casper died 10 days later after having fallen ill. Corrie and Betsie stayed at Scheveningen until June 1944, when they were transferred to the concentration camp at Vught. In September 1944 they were deported to Ravensbrück, where Betsie died on December 16, 1944.

Corrie was released from Ravensbrück on December 28, 1944, in what was believed to have been a clerical error. She traveled by train to Berlin, where she arrived on January 1, 1945. From there she made her way back to the Netherlands.

After the war, Corrie set up a rehabilitation center for concentration camp survivors. In a Christian spirit of reconciliation, she also took in and sheltered those who had cooperated with the Germans during the occupation but who were now homeless and without the means of making a living. She returned to Germany in 1946 and began a worldwide ministry that led to her appearing in more than 60 countries. As an evangelist and motivational speaker she would refer to her experiences in Ravensbrück, and as a social critic she protested the Vietnam War. Her main message focused on reconciliation as a means for overcoming the psychological scars left by war. She also wrote a great deal, with many inspirational books appearing advocating a Christian message of love, goodwill, and human understanding through the embrace of Christ’s message.

The main written work for which Corrie ten Boom was remembered was the story of her own family in their confrontation with Nazism during World War II. This was titled The Hiding Place; appearing in 1971, it became a best seller. In 1975 it was made into a motion picture with the same name, directed by James F. Collier and starring Jeannette Clift as Corrie and Julie Harris as Betsie.

In recognition of her work during the war, Corrie ten Boom was knighted in 1962 by Queen Juliana, and, on December 12, 1967, for her efforts in hiding Jews from arrest and deportation, she was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations. In 1977 Corrie, by now 85 years of age, moved to the United States, where she settled in California. She died on April 15, 1983, her 91st birthday.

In resisting the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Corrie ten Boom suffered imprisonment, internment in a concentration camp, and the loss of family members. She followed both the letter and the spirit of her Christian beliefs, seeing that what had to be done was a duty that all those purporting to be true Christians should have fulfilled.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Netherlands; Rescuers of Jews; Resistance Movements; Righteous among the Nations

Further Reading

Carlson, Carole C. Corrie ten Boom: Her Life, Her Faith. Ada (MI): Revell, 1983.

Ten Boom, Corrie. The Hiding Place. Ada (MI): Chosen Books, 1971.

Wellman, Sam. Corrie ten Boom. Uhrichsville (OH): Barbour, 1995.

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Teudt, Wilhelm

On February 2, 1934, the Nazis in Germany, in pursuing their ideal of a completely Jew-free society, began unveiling a new, “Aryan” version of the Bible. The first offering in this regard was a rewritten Book of Psalms that eliminated all references to Jews, “reworking” them in order to purge them of their “Jewish taint.”

The new version appeared in a hymnbook written by an eccentric author named Wilhelm Teudt. Born in 1860, Teudt, who studied theology and worked as a pastor from 1885 to 1908, was an amateur archaeologist who spent much of his time searching for an ancient Germanic civilization. In 1921 he joined the German National People’s Party, and in 1933, at the age of 73, he moved on to the National Socialists—the party that, on January 30 that year, had come into office under Adolf Hitler.

Teudt’s new version of the Psalms numbered 75, rather than the original 150. As an example of his efforts, his version of the 87th Psalm read as follows:

The Lord loveth the height of Germany more than all the dwellings abroad.

The Lord loveth the yew tree of the Odenwald and the oak of the Baltic.

I will make mention of the vulgar Euphrates and the Ganges, where our forefathers ruled.

Behold the lands of the Goths, the Longobards, and Andalusians: it shall be said our brothers were born and died there;

But on Osning the Lord shall count those sprung from blood of the sons of Mannus: Ingo, Istu, and Ermin.

Osning is part of the Teutoberger Forest: Ingo, Istu, and Ermin were ancient Germanic gods.

This can be compared with the original, which states:

His foundation is in the holy mountains.

The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.

Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. Selah.

I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them that know me: behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; this man was born there.

And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her: and the highest himself shall establish her.

The Lord shall count, when he writeth up the people, that this man was born there. Selah.

As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there: all my springs are in thee.

Teudt maintained in the foreword to his book that Jesus was of pure Aryan blood and that “His whole spirituality” was “foreign to Jews.” He could not delete the whole of the Old Testament from Christian scripture, but he stated, instead, that many features of it were obnoxious and had to be pruned.

American readers knew of Teudt’s removal of all references to Jews as he worked through the Old Testament. They read about it in the pages of their newspapers and discussed the issue in their churches. Of course, as with most things the Nazis began, Teudt’s initiative did not stop there. Hitler’s ultimate intention was gradually to “Nazify” the church, beginning with the scriptural underpinnings upon which it rested. In 1939 he authorized the creation of what we would today call a think-tank in order to rewrite the Bible completely; its charge was to remove all references to Jews and Judeo-Christian notions of compassion. Those appointed to work on this thoroughly Nazi version of the Bible had the brief of “cleansing” church texts “of all non-Aryan influences.”

In addition to his work redrafting the Psalms, Teudt’s beliefs in German völkisch culture led him to develop theories that, even among his peer group, were considered outlandish. Believing in an ancient, highly developed Germanic civilization, Teudt’s interest in what he called “Germanic archaeology,” through an investigation of Germanic pagan sacred sites, developed in the 1920s. He held that he possessed a paranormal ability to picking up the vibrations of his Germanic ancestors, which provided him with the capacity to visualize ancient sites as he was excavating them.

Studying ancient Saxon shrines, his work attracted the interest of senior Nazis, who were obsessed with locating the spiritual elements of Aryanism. Developing an ever deeper fascination with Saxon culture as the seedbed of all that Germanic culture would become, he viewed the conversion of the Germanic tribes to Christianity before the turn of the first millennium as the greatest catastrophe ever faced by Aryan civilization.

After Teudt joined the Nazi Party, he was rewarded by Adolf Hitler through appointment to a professorial position. He founded or became a member of a number of esoteric research organizations, and his work was valued by the Nazis through the awarding of prizes and various honors. Wilhelm Teudt died on January 5, 1942, in the city of Detmold, Lippe.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Aryanization; Protestant Churches, German

Further Reading

Black, Monica, and Eric Kurlander (Eds.). Revisiting the “Nazi Occult”: Histories, Realities, Legacies. Rochester (NY): Camden House, 2015.

Hite, Kenneth. The Nazi Occult. Oxford: Osprey, 2013.

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Theological Responses to the Holocaust

There was nothing small about the Holocaust. It impacted, directly or indirectly, fundamental tenets of civilization with such shattering force as to call into question society’s basic understanding of humanity. Among the many questions it raised are those that examine Jewish and Christian theology in a post-Holocaust world. Of all of those theological questions, none is more basic for Christians and Jews than “where was God?” Also, for Jews it was “how could it happen to us?” and for Christians “how could we have done it?”

Although theologians wrestled with these questions even while the Holocaust was still in progress, it was not until the 1960s that they were examined and debated in a public and robust way. In August 1966 Richard L. Rubenstein, a conservative rabbi born in 1924 in New York, wrote in his book After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (since retitled: After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism) that it was impossible to believe in the traditional Jewish concept of God after Auschwitz. That concept includes God’s omnipotence, omniscience, mercy, engagement in history, and covenantal relationship with the Jewish people.

In making the argument that he did, Rubenstein was rejecting the position of Orthodox Judaism that Jewish suffering during the Holocaust was part of God’s plan, just as Jewish suffering has been throughout history. This generally meant that the Jewish people were being punished for a sin—perhaps straying from the laws of Torah, or establishing the land of Israel without waiting for the coming of the Messiah. No matter the explanation, Rubenstein found the possibility that Hitler was an instrument of God to be “obscene.” Rubenstein’s position proved to be deeply unsettling to Jewish and Christian theologians alike, and it opened the door to examining the meaning of the Holocaust from a religious perspective.

If Rubenstein’s position represents one end of the spectrum in response to the Holocaust, then Emil L. Fackenheim’s response represents the other end. Fackenheim was born in Germany in 1916 and was a rabbinical student at the time he was sent to a concentration camp, from which he was released after several months. He ultimately relocated to Ontario, Canada, and then to Israel.

Fackenheim sought a middle ground between the unquestioning acceptance of the traditional Jewish position regarding suffering and Rubenstein’s conclusion that God—as conceived in traditional Judaism—cannot exist in light of the Holocaust. He did so by declaring a 614th commandment (in addition to the Torah’s 613), namely, that it is commanded that “authentic” Jews in a post-Holocaust world must survive and must do so as Jews, lest Hitler be able to declare a posthumous victory over the Jewish people. The source of this commandment is what Fackenheim calls “a commanding Voice” that “speaks from Auschwitz.”

For many, Fackenheim went too far. He accused death camp prisoners who during the Holocaust were unable to believe in God of being Nazi accomplices and stated that whoever argued with his assertion that there was a “commanding Voice” at Auschwitz was willfully abandoning God.

It is clear that Rubenstein and Fackenheim both viewed the Holocaust as a unique and theologically significant event in Jewish history. Rubenstein saw the horror of the Holocaust as proof that the God defined by traditional Judaism does not exist; Fackenheim saw it as evidence of God’s engagement and commanding voice. Further, Rubenstein, having rejected the God of the covenant, also thereby rejected the covenant itself. By contrast, Fackenheim saw the covenant as affirmed by the Holocaust in the sense that it was the means by which a new commandment was given to the Jewish people.

Other Jewish theologians—Eliezer Berkovits, Martin Buber, Arthur A. Cohen, Abraham Joshua Heschel, David Weiss Halivni, and Steven T. Katz, among many others—address the same issues as Rubenstein and Fackenheim but find themselves somewhere between their polar-opposite positions.

For example, Irving Greenberg, an Orthodox rabbi who was born in 1933, writes that the two foundational positions of Judaism—God’s engagement in history and the absolute value of every person—were critically threatened by the Holocaust, thereby necessitating certain basic changes in the Jewish understanding of faith and covenant. Faith must be recognized as coming and going, as sometimes clear and strong, and other times as overwhelmed by the reality of the Jewish children who were thrown alive into the flames of the crematoria. The covenant, too, must be reframed from a “commanded covenant”—one that was entered into by the Jewish people in response to a demanding God—to a “voluntary covenant,” one that is freely entered into, and one that is subject to renewal. Greenberg answers the question of where God was during the Holocaust by saying that God was there with the Jewish people during, and sharing in, their suffering.

The theological issues with which Christians must wrestle are no less daunting than those facing Jews. Germany was a highly cultured country where virtually every non-Jew was a member of a church: two-thirds were Protestant, and one-third were Roman Catholic. Christianity was one of the bulwarks of German society. All of the leading Nazi leaders were associated with a church, including Hitler, who was a Catholic who never renounced his Catholicism and was never excommunicated. So the question it this: how can men educated in the Christian faith lead a program of extermination of innocent men, women, and children? On a broader level, how can millions of Christians, including some clergy, follow these leaders on a crusade to kill every Jew in Europe?

Among the many Christians who have sought to answer these questions—such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who dealt with the incongruity between Christianity and Nazism during the Holocaust, as well as post-Holocaust theologians, including Harry James Cargas, Alice and Roy Eckardt, Eugene J. Fisher, Hubert G. Locke, John T. Pawlikowski, and John K. Roth—several can be cited for their critical role in the evolution of post-Holocaust Christian theology.

Harry James Cargas, who was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1932 and who died in 1998, converted to Catholicism at the age of 19. It was shocking to him when he realized that probably every killer in the Nazi regime had been a baptized Christian. His statement to the effect that no other event, save the crucifixion, was as tragic as the Holocaust in Christian history, reflects the importance he ascribed to the need to somehow reconcile the fact of the Holocaust with the Christian faith that was so central to him.

He was a prolific author, but it is possible to identify what was perhaps his most significant contribution to post-Holocaust Christian theology. What made it so valuable was the fact that he did not focus on theological concepts but set forth 16 concrete proposals for what was necessary for Christianity to redeem itself from its complicity in the Holocaust. Some of those proposals were: Hitler must be excommunicated; there must be full recognition by all Christians of the ways in which Christianity was in error about and harmful to the Jews; the Catholic Church must reevaluate and reconsider its understanding of evil and of history; the Vatican must open up all of its archives for the period of the Holocaust; the terms “Old Testament” and “New Testament” must be changed so as to eliminate any implication of the latter replacing or fulfilling the former; and missionizing the Jews must be curtailed and those efforts be turned toward making Christians better Christians.

Franklin H. Littell, who was born in 1917 in Syracuse, New York, and who died in 2009, was a minister of the United Methodist Church, a renowned educator, and a prolific author. Of greater importance, however, was his courageous declaration that Christian antisemitism and the theological principle of supersessionism had a direct causal relationship with what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust. Supersessionism is the belief that Christianity supersedes Judaism in every important respect, some of which are: the New Testament fulfills the Old Testament; the revelation through Jesus supersedes revelation at Sinai; and Christians replace the Jews as the people of the covenant. This renders Judaism marginalized, if not totally irrelevant except to the extent that conversion of the Jews to Christianity is a prerequisite for the second coming of the Messiah.

Littell was so concerned with the actions of Jesus’s followers during the Holocaust that he questioned whether Jesus was a true prophet, for how could the followers of a true prophet do what was done against the Jews? He also refused to allow Christians to look upon what Hitler and millions of Nazis did as an accident. Instead, he wrote that what they did was reflective of a Christianity that was “formless and heathen at heart.”

Over the decades since the end of the Holocaust there has been an increasing understanding by the Protestant and Catholic churches of the role Christian theology played in what became the Final Solution, and significant efforts to turn away from the Christianity that allowed it. The Catholic Church took a tremendous step in the direction Cargas and Littell would wish it to go when Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, generally known as “Vatican II,” on October 11, 1962. One of its objectives was to address relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews. To that end, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, known commonly as Nostra Aetate (“In our time”), was proclaimed by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965.

Paragraph 4 of Nostra Aetate spoke directly to the church’s theological position relative to the Jews (who are referred to as “Abraham’s stock”). It rejected the accusation against the Jews of deicide that had long been a part of Christian theology, absolving the Jews—both those at the time of Jesus’s crucifixion, and all those since—of that crime. It made clear that the covenant between the Jews and God is still in force, that Christians should not put themselves above the Jews or refer them as “rejected” or “cursed” by God. It made no mention of the millennia-long goal of converting Jews to Christianity, and it referred to the Jews as “beloved by God.”

Nostra Aetate has been followed by the Catholic Church with documents that further confirmed this new relationship: in December 1974 and June 1985, documents on how the principles of Nostra Aetate should be taught; in March 1998, a document titled We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah; in 2002, a document regarding the need for Catholics to understand how Jews approach the Hebrew Bible; and in December 2015, a document that further explores the meaning of Nostra Aetate.

The Protestant churches have also responded to the theological implications of the Holocaust. In one of the earliest post-Holocaust statements—issued on October 19, 1945—the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland) issued the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis), which reads, in part, “With great anguish we state: through us has endless suffering been brought to many peoples and countries…. we accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously … and for not loving more ardently.”

Except for statements from the World Conference of Churches (WCC), which currently represents more than 345 churches around the world, as a general rule each denomination has made its own declaration regarding its relations with Jews in light of the Holocaust. At the founding assembly of the WCC in 1948, churches represented by the organization were asked to denounce antisemitism as being “absolutely irreconcilable with … the Christian faith.” At the third assembly, in 1961, the WCC—much like Vatican II would do later in the 1960s—rejected the charge that the Jews of today were responsible for the death of Jesus. This was echoed by the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (USA) in 1964.

The United Methodist Church issued its statement regarding the need to establish a new relationship with the Jewish community in 1972. In 1987 the General Synod of the United Church of Christ recognized the ongoing covenant between God and the Jewish people. That same year the Presbyterian Church (USA) rejected supersessionism. Seven years later, in 1994, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America denounced the virulent antisemitic statements made by Martin Luther in the 16th century and characterized antisemitism as “an affront to the Gospel.”

These are but a few of the more than 100 declarations by various denominations and organizations from around the world acknowledging the role that religious antisemitism played in the Holocaust and pledging to reject all aspects of antisemitism going forward. Efforts to reconcile the Holocaust within Jewish theology, within Christian theology, and between Christians and Jews continue.

MICHAEL DICKERMAN

See also: Barth, Karl; Bonhoeffer, Dietrich; Cargas, Harry James; Fackenheim, Emil; Rubenstein, Richard

Further Reading

Bartrop, Paul R., and Steven Leonard Jacobs. Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Connelly, John. From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2012.

Katz, Steven T., Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg (Eds.). Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Littell, Franklin H. The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1975.

Rubenstein, Richard L., and John K. Roth. Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.

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Theresienstadt

Located in the town of Terezín, some 35 miles from Prague in northwestern Czechoslovakia, Theresienstadt was a Nazi-established Jewish ghetto as well as a concentration and transit camp. The camp was contained within an old fortress constructed in the 17th century. It became operational on November 24, 1941, and was liberated by Soviet troops on May 8, 1945.

Theresienstadt was designed to fulfill two primary functions. First, it was a transit point for Czech Jews who were being deported to concentration camps, death camps, and forced labor camps located in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Second, it was a labor camp where elderly, disabled, or prominent Jews were housed. The Nazis perpetrated an elaborate hoax by implying that detainees who remained at Theresienstadt were being treated well as “retirees”; they even called the camp a “spa town.”

In 1942 the Nazis began deporting large numbers of Jews at Theresienstadt to the east, where many perished. Nevertheless, the Germans continued to allude to the camp in quite glowing terms in an effort to disguise their activities and keep the outside world from learning about the true scale of the Holocaust. In 1944 the Germans permitted representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit the facility, after receiving negative press about the Nazis’ deportation of Dutch Jews to Theresienstadt. The visit occurred in June 1944. When ICRC officials arrived, they were impressed with what they saw. Gardens had been cultivated, barracks were clean and renovated, and buildings were freshly painted. Camp officials even staged social and cultural events for their visitors, many of which included detainees. When the ICRC personnel left, however, deportations from Theresienstadt were resumed, and they continued until October 1944. Camp authorities had, of course, forced internees to perform renovations and other projects prior to the visit of the Red Cross.

At least 140,000 Jews were either interned or passed through Theresienstadt between 1941 and 1945. Of that number, some 90,000 were ultimately deported to death or concentration camps in the east; the vast majority of them perished. Some 5,000 children were transported to the east via Theresienstadt, and it is estimated that about 90% died in death camps. The death toll within the camp is estimated at 33,000. Many of those individuals died from disease, illness, malnutrition, exposure, or abuse by camp personnel. By mid-1942 the death toll became so high that camp authorities had to build a crematorium just outside the walls that processed as many as 200 bodies per day.

Unlike most concentration camps, Theresienstadt boasted a vibrant cultural scene; in this case, it resembled many Jewish ghettos. Because the camp housed a number of artists, writers, teachers, actors, and musicians from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Austria, prisoners benefited from concerts, plays, lectures, art exhibits, and other cultural happenings. The library at Theresienstadt held an impressive 60,000 volumes, and although they were officially forbidden from instructing children, older prisoners held daily classes for hundreds of students.

On May 2, 1945, with Adolf Hitler dead and Soviet forces pressing in from the east, camp personnel turned over control of Theresienstadt to the ICRC. Soviet troops officially liberated the camp on May 8.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Concentration Camps; Ghettos; Haas, Leo; Herz-Sommer, Alice; International Committee of the Red Cross; Jonas, Regina; Music and the Holocaust; Propaganda in the Holocaust; Slovakia; Weiss, Helga; Westerbork; White Buses

Further Reading

Green, Gerald. The Artists of Terezin. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1959.

Kogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Troller, Norbert. Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

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Thierack, Otto

Otto Thierack was a Nazi jurist and politician. He was the Reich minister of justice under Adolf Hitler between August 20, 1942, and April 30, 1945.

One of his first steps as justice minister after assuming office on August 20, 1942, was to direct the president of the People’s Court that in criminal proceedings against the Jews, the decisive factor must always be their Jewishness rather than their culpability. Thierack not only made penal prosecution of all unpopular persons and groups harsher but he also waived any pretense of legality and simply began handing “antisocial” prisoners (usually Jews, Poles, Russians, and Roma) over to the SS. Thierack came to an understanding with Heinrich Himmler that certain categories of prisoners were to be, to use their words, “annihilated through work.” As Reich minister, Thierack ensured the reduction of clemency proceedings for those sentenced to death.

Otto Georg Thierack was born in Wurzen, Saxony, on April 19, 1889. His father was a merchant. In 1910 he commenced the study of law at the University of Marburg and received his doctorate in 1914 from the University of Leipzig. In World War I he served as a volunteer in the German army, reaching the rank of lieutenant. He suffered a facial injury and was decorated with the Iron Cross, second class.

After the war he resumed his interrupted law studies, graduating in 1920 with his assessor (junior lawyer) examination. He then entered the judicial service of Saxony as a junior lawyer, and in 1921 he was appointed a public prosecutor at the district court in Leipzig. In 1926 he became a prosecutor at the Supreme Court of Dresden.

In 1932 Thierack joined the Nazi Party and became the leader of the National Socialist jurists organization (the Rechtswahrerbund), which led to his career as a leading Nazi judge. In 1933, after the Nazi assumption of power in Germany, he became the Saxon minister of justice. In 1935 he was appointed vice president of the Reich Court in Leipzig. At the same time he also represented the minister of justice in coordinating the integration of Nazi jurisdiction in the Reich.

On May 1, 1936, Thierack was appointed president of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), where he concentrated on tightening its jurisdiction. This court prosecuted people accused of crimes against the Third Reich, in closed sessions, and without the right of appeal. He held the position of president of the People’s Court, interrupted by two periods in the German army in World War II, until 1942 when he was succeeded as president by Roland Freisler.

On April 23–24, 1941, Thierack was a participant in the meeting of judicial officers about the so-called “destruction of life unworthy of life,” in the context of Aktion T-4 medical murders.

On September 9, 1942, now as justice minister, Thierack gave directions to the president of the People’s Court that “in criminal proceedings against the Jews, the decisive factor is their Jewishness, rather than their culpability.” The following month he introduced monthly legal briefs that presented model rulings—decisions, with names left out, upon which German jurisprudence was to be based. He also introduced in proceedings of public interest the so-called Vorschauen (“previews”) and Nachschauen (“reviews”), which required that the higher state court presidents were to discuss with the public prosecutor’s office and the State Court president—who had to pass this on to the responsible criminal courts—how a case was to be judged before the court’s decision. This was to be done at least once every two weeks.

One year later the Third Reich changed the laws again, this time removing Jews from the jurisdiction of the court altogether and leaving their fate in the hands of the police or the SS. This legalized the sending of “asocials” or certain foreign prisoners or forced laborers—Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and Ukrainians—directly to the SS, by sending them to concentration camps in the East, where they would be “exterminated through work.”

After Hitler’s intervention, Thierack ordered death sentences were to be enforced immediately. In the opinions of the trial court, the prosecutors, the attorney general and other bodies, petitions for mercy were in principle no longer necessary.

At Thierack’s instigation, the execution shed at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin was outfitted with eight iron hooks in December 1942 so that several people could be put to death at once, by hanging (there had already been a guillotine there for some time). When a number of mass executions began on September 7, 1943, it also happened that some prisoners were hanged “by mistake.” Thierack simply covered up these mistakes and demanded that the hangings continue. He was recognized as one who was ruthless in the furthering of his career, power hungry, and ambitious. His support staff described him as hardworking and resilient, but also high-handed and autocratic.

At the end of the war, Thierack was arrested by the Allies and imprisoned at the prisoner of war camp at Eselheide in 1945. He committed suicide in jail on November 22, 1946, before he could be put on trial at Nuremberg.

EVE E. GRIMM

See also: Asocials; Euthanasia Program; Slave Labor; Volksgerichtshof

Further Reading

Braun, Konstanze. Dr. Otto Georg Thierack (1889–1946). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005.

Miller, Richard Lawrence. Nazi Justiz: Law of the Holocaust. Westport (CT): Greenwood Press, 1995.

Stolleis, Michael. The Law under the Swastika: Studies on Legal History in Nazi Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

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Third Reich

The Third Reich (Das Dritte Reich in German), was the name used by the Nazi Party to describe Germany under its rule. In the German language the term Reich translates to the English word “empire”; hence, the Third Reich was Germany’s third empire, following the Holy Roman Empire, which was shattered by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Second Empire, which had been fashioned by Otto von Bismarck and lost through the reckless rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Nazi propagandists also referred to their domain as the “Thousand Year Reich,” but it lasted just 12 years, from 1933 until Germany’s defeat in World War II in 1945. During that span, the Third Reich persecuted and killed millions of people for racial and political reasons; initiated and waged World War II throughout Europe, the Atlantic, and North Africa; and brought unparalleled destruction.

The Third Reich was proclaimed when the Nazis assumed political power in Germany at the end of January 1933. Although much power was concentrated in Adolf Hitler’s hands, the Third Reich functioned more like a chaotic bureaucracy, with constant institutional and personal conflict at lower levels of the government and party. Despite this, it maintained itself through both the acceptance and support of much of the German people and the intimidation and repression of opponents.

The Third Reich received strong initial popular support because it appealed to nationalist feelings and seemed to offer a solution to the economic Depression of the early 1930s. Hitler and the Nazis pulled Germany out of that deep worldwide crisis and solved the problem of widespread unemployment through massive rearmament programs and other public works projects. The Nazis also appealed to the national pride of many Germans offended by defeat in World War I and the harsh peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles. They claimed to unite Germans from all walks of life and political perspectives into a higher unity, a nation with a unified sense of purpose and destiny. Toward the end of the 1930s, however, public support waned and was replaced more and more by acquiescence ensured by the threat of state-sanctioned violence.

The basis for the Nazis’ belief in the higher unity of all Germans was biological. Hitler and the Nazis believed in enduring, unchangeable racial differences between different nationalities. The Third Reich was to be an extensive empire of “racially pure” Germans, in which other races served as slaves or were eliminated altogether. These goals led to the murder of millions of Jews, Roma, and members of other nationalities, as well as Germans with hereditary diseases. The concentration camp system, initially begun in 1933 to imprison political prisoners, evolved into a complicated but ruthlessly efficient system of enslavement and mass murder.

Hitler sought to expand the Third Reich by annexing or invading other countries. He and the Nazis precipitated World War II when Germany divided Poland with the Soviet Union (after annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia during 1938–1939). Following the outbreak of war, the Third Reich subsequently conquered and dominated almost the entire European continent, stretching from the Atlantic coast of France to deep into the Soviet Union. Ultimately, however, the main countries allied against Germany—Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—succeeded in defeating and occupying Germany and destroying the Third Reich in 1945.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Brandt, Karl; Bureaucracy; Final Solution; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust; “Racial Hygiene”; Weimar Republic

Further Reading

Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.

Evans, Richard. The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Evans, Richard. The Third Reich at War, 1939–1945. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.

Peukert, Detlev. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 1989.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.

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Tiso, Jozef

Slovak nationalist leader named president of the Slovak Republic in 1939. Born on October 13, 1887, at Velka Bytca, Slovakia (then Hungary), Tiso was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1910. In 1918 he helped to found the Slovak People’s Party (SPP), representing it in the Czechoslovakian Parliament in 1925—where he also served as minister of health between 1927 and 1928. With the death of SPP leader Andrej Hlinka in August 1938, Tiso took over as head of the party.

On October 6, 1938, he became prime minister of an autonomous Slovakia, which had been created under the terms of the Munich Agreement. In March 1939 the Czechoslovakian government deposed him for promoting Slovak independence, but Tiso received Adolf Hitler’s support during a visit to Berlin on March 13 of that year; the following day he proclaimed Slovak independence. The Germans occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, and the next day Tiso placed the new Slovak state under the protection of Germany, primarily to avoid its annexation by Hungary.

Jozef Tiso was a Slovak Roman Catholic priest who led the first Slovak Republic between 1939 and 1945. A leader of the Slovak People’s Party, Tiso remained an active priest throughout his political career and was supported by the Vatican in his efforts to uphold Catholicism in Slovakia during World War II. As a major collaborator with Hitler’s Germany, he was convicted and hanged for treason, war crimes, and crimes against humanity on April 18, 1947. (AP Photo)

On October 26, 1939, Tiso became president of the newly created Slovak Republic. Although he personally opposed Nazism, he was forced to share power with the fascist paramilitary Hlinka Guards, and his government willingly collaborated with the Germans, allowing some 68,000 Slovakian Jews to be deported to German concentration camps.

Tiso’s government survived an internal uprising in August 1944 but fell to the Red Army and Czech partisans in April 1945. Tiso fled to Austria but was apprehended by U.S. authorities and extradited to Czechoslovakia, where he was tried and convicted of treason and war crimes. He was executed by hanging in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, on April 18, 1947.

CHARLES R. SHRADER

See also: Catholic Church; Czechoslovakia; Hlinka Guards; Slovakia

Further Reading

Felak, James R. “At the Price of the Republic”: Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, 1929–1938. Pittsburgh (PA): University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

Jelinek, Yeshayahu A. The Parish Republic: Hlinka’s Slovak People Party, 1939–1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.

Ward, James Mace. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press, 2013.

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Topography of Terror

The Topography of Terror (Topographie des Terrors) is a museum complex in Berlin, Germany, documenting the history of the various Nazi policing institutions located in the immediate vicinity of the district, and of the crimes originating from there. It is located on the site of buildings that, during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945, were the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS. Between 1933 and 1945 these organizations, together with the Security Service SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) and the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA), were the foci of National Socialist terror.

The street address of the museum is on Niederkirchnerstrasse, formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The buildings were largely destroyed by Allied bombing during early 1945, and after the war the boundary between the American and Soviet zones of occupation ran right across Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The area became the boundary between the two zones, with the Berlin Wall eventually running along the south side of the street. After the end of the Cold War, the wall at this part of Berlin was never demolished and is thus the longest segment still visible today. This remnant of the Berlin Wall now forms part of the museum site.

As part of the celebration of Berlin’s 750th anniversary year, it was decided to transform the area into a museum. The first exhibition took advantage of an excavation of the cellar of the Gestapo headquarters. Several of the cells where prisoners were held and tortured are clearly visible, and are among the first sights that greet visitors to the museum.

A number of attempts at creating a permanent museum and memorial followed, but it was not until 2010 that the current structure took shape and opened to the public. The Documentation Center followed the design of architect Ursula Wilms and was officially opened on May 6, 2010, by German federal president Horst Köhler. The opening coincided with the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The Topography of Terror maintains three permanent exhibitions that are open to the public, all of which are presented in both German and English. The first of these is the “Topography of Terror” permanent exhibition itself. The focus of the exhibition outlines the central institutions of the SS and police in the Third Reich, highlighting their crimes not only in Germany but across all of occupied Europe, and educating visitors as to their victims. The second of the facility’s permanent exhibitions examines Berlin as the Nazi capital, emphasizing National Socialist rule and its consequences for the city and its population. Finally, the Topography of Terror offers a tour of the ground on which the site is located, providing an overview of the historic location and the site’s use during the Nazi period and the postwar era.

As an educational facility, the Topography of Terror operates a specialist library focusing on the police, SS, and Gestapo, as well as on National Socialism generally. It holds some 25,000 volumes and a large periodical collection. In the same vicinity, a seminar center for events, lectures, and school groups can accommodate up to 200 people.

The Topography of Terror Foundation provides comprehensive advice and coordination tasks in the field of national and international memorial sites, and it is arguably the most important authority for all other memorial sites in Germany. Through this, it also serves the purpose of coordinating and promoting international collaboration. With more than one million visitors a year, the Topography of Terror museum is one of the most frequented memorial sites and institutions of its kind in Berlin.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Gestapo; Museums and Memorials; Reichssicherheitshauptamt; Schutzstaffel; Sicherheitsdienst

Further Reading

Nachama, Andreas. Site Tour “Topography of Terror.” History of the Site. Berlin: Topography of Terror Foundation, 2010.

Nachama, Andreas. Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office on Wilhelm- and Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. A Documentation. Berlin, Topography of Terror Foundation, 2010.

Rürup, Reinhard (Ed.). Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reichssicherheitshauptamt on the “Prinz-Albrecht-Terrain”: A Documentation. Berlin: Willmuth Arenhovel Verlag, 1989.

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Total War and the Holocaust

The term “total war” or “limitless war” refers to the all-encompassing efforts of entire nations to completely destroy their enemies—combatants and noncombatants alike. Total war is built on two related components: the engagement of all aspects of society—not just the military—to support and wage war, and the need to destroy all aspects of the enemy’s society, which also is fully engaged in supporting and waging war.

Total war stands in contrast to a “limited war,” meaning a war carried out by professional armies on clearly defined battlefields and conducted so as to protect civilians, to respond to enemy actions in a way that does not exceed proportionality, and to conduct oneself, individually and as a group, in recognition of the common humanity of both parties to the conflict.

Although aspects of total war can be seen as early as the French Revolution, it is clearly the dominant form of warfare of both the American Civil War and World War I. The destruction inflicted on Atlanta and the South by Union general William T. Sherman and the mobilization of total national resources by all countries involved in World War I, including manpower and entire economies, represent two key characteristics of total war.

It was in World War II that the full meaning of total war was realized, requiring the populations and resources of entire nations to field large armies with weapons of enormous destructive power, and to target the populations and resources of enemy militaries so as to limit or prevent altogether their ability to do the same. This transformed the world into a battlefield where the distinction between the front lines and the home front nearly disappeared.

The concept of total war and the reality of the Holocaust have a disturbing relationship. A total war need not include genocide, but genocide is in itself an act of total war. The Holocaust is an example of total war conducted against a particular victim group that was seen by the perpetrators as “the enemy,” without distinction between those members of the group, if any, who constituted an objective threat to the perpetrators, and those who did not. It did not limit its violence to the front lines; instead, it reached into the homes, the synagogues, and the businesses of the victim group without regard to military necessity.

Total war means that vast numbers of civilians will support the imposition of untold death and destruction on an enemy population, and, further, that large numbers of civilians will be the victims of the combination of indiscriminate or collateral damage and the intentional perpetration of mass murder. In the process, the first and perhaps most important casualty is the concept of the innate value of human life. When millions are dying, the death of any single person loses its ability to shock, is stripped of the moral complexities that normally would be associated with ending a human life, and therefore combatant countries become free of cultural restraints to pursue their efforts to defeat the enemy not only militarily but also in its entirety.

This is seen clearly in the Holocaust. One of the shocking and almost universal observations in survivors’ memoirs relates to descriptions of the ease with which the Nazis and their collaborators chose who lived and who died, and then processed the killing in a way that prompted no more moral anguish than what was associated with the commission of any mundane day-to-day activity. While this attitude may be expected in soldiers killing other soldiers, the application of the same amoral approach to the killing of civilians—and to see doing so as a necessity, an integral part of the war process—is what brings the Holocaust within the ambit of total war.

Total war makes no difference between soldier and civilian, but it also makes no distinction between those civilians who cannot possibly constitute a threat—the ill, the weak, the very young, the very old—and those who could conceivably be capable of bringing harm to the military cause. During the Holocaust there were few killers who showed any hesitation to perform their duty to kill or facilitate killing, even when their victims were the most innocent and vulnerable of society. That does not mean that the killers did not have any psychological concerns about what they were doing. For example, with few exceptions, members of the Einsatzgruppen, who were responsible for the up-close shooting of old men, women, and children, needed alcohol to deaden their innate moral revulsion at these types of killings. This is a reflection of the lingering power of traditional concepts of right and wrong, but ultimately those concepts proved all too susceptible to the pressures and propaganda of a country intent on the extermination of a particular victim group.

Total war, even more than limited war, subsumes the individual to the will of the group regarding both the actions of the perpetrators and their perception of the victims. The power of group identification, along with the fear of being ostracized from the group, was a substantial motivator in the actions of the killers of the Holocaust. Since the widespread and intentional death of civilians is one of the distinguishing characteristics of total war, and since under any other circumstances the perpetration of such actions would be anathema, the need to diffuse individual guilt by sharing it with the group is a critical element of mass murder. This was clearly the case in the Holocaust. Similarly, the actions of the Nazi killers were such that it became necessary for them to view their victims not as individuals but as faceless members of a vilified group.

Just as in the case of total war, so too the Holocaust fails to meet any of the criteria of a limited war: its deaths were not incurred on the battlefield; it made no effort to protect civilians—in fact, just the opposite; it showed no proportionality in its responses to the Jews’ real or perceived threat; and it most certainly and sadly did not recognize the common humanity of the perpetrators and the victims.

MICHAEL DICKERMAN

See also: Genocide; Holocaust; Kommissarbefehl

Further Reading

Slim, Hugo. Killing Civilians: Method, Madness, and Morality in War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Valentino, Benjamin A. Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press, 2004.

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Touvier Case

The Touvier Case, a trial that took place from March 17 to April 20, 1994, almost 50 years after the end of World War II, was historic on two accounts. First, it was the first judgment of “crimes against humanity” brought against a Frenchman; second, it showcased the long-standing involvement of the Catholic Church in protecting war criminals from World War II. The filing of the complaint and the subsequent trial would never have happened by the will of the French government or of the French courts without the constant pressure of human rights activist Serge Klarsfeld and publications from historians like Robert Paxton.

Paul Touvier was born on April 3, 1915, and after failed attempts to settle himself professionally he joined the Milice (a highly politicized militia) of the collaborationist Vichy regime, where he soon rose to the rank of chief of intelligence in the region of Lyon. His counterpart in the German occupation administration was the notorious “Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie. In this position, Touvier was responsible for a number of murders of Jews and of individual persons with real or suspected ties to the Resistance. Upon the collapse of collaborationist rule in France, he went into hiding and was sentenced twice in absentia to the death penalty for collaboration with the enemy and treason by French courts during the Épuration (the mass legal purge of Vichy officials) of the late 1940s. Arrested during a robbery in 1947, he escaped and found shelter within institutions of the French Catholic Church. In 1967 his condemnations to death from the 1940s expired because of a 20-year statute of limitations regarding such judgments under French law. Some minor judicial restraints remained valid, and therefore elements of the French Catholic clergy lobbied President Georges Pompidou to grant a pardon to Touvier. This occurred in 1971 and caused a public outcry when it was publicized by the media a year later. The outrage increased when it was revealed that Touvier was claiming property as his own that had been seized from Jews during the war. Soon thereafter, former Resistance fighters tried to bring legal action against Touvier on counts still punishable under French law. Touvier again went into hiding, aided by the Catholic Church, now with the Archbishop Lefebvre splinter group.

Although the French justice system took some steps to bring the absent Touvier to court again during the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was not until the trial of Klaus Barbie in 1987 that the Touvier case reentered the public debate. Barbie, who was not a French citizen, was the first person in French legal history to be convicted on counts of the nonprescriptive “crimes against humanity.” Pressure now mounted to bring the same charges against the most important French subordinate of Barbie: Paul Touvier. In 1989 he was finally arrested in his hiding place, but French judges demonstrated an unwillingness to convict him and they suspended proceedings in 1992. After a public outcry, a higher court ordered a trial in 1993.

The trial did not get under way until March 20, 1994. Nevertheless, the charges had to be reduced, as many cases of murder were ineligible for trial under French statutory limitations, as they were “merely” individual war crimes and not “crimes against humanity.” However, the killing of seven people of Jewish origin in 1944 in retaliation for a Resistance killing of a prominent Vichy figure “qualified” in the legal sense for charges on account of “crimes against humanity.” Touvier’s defense argued that the killing of the seven persons had been the lesser evil, as Touvier thereby had avoided the killing of even more people, which had been ordered by Nazi occupation officials. This argument, however, failed to convince the court. Touvier was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment. An appeal was rejected in 1995, and Touvier died in a prison hospital soon after, on July 17, 1996. His funeral service took place in a Parisian Catholic church administered by Lefebvre followers and was attended by prominent figures of the extreme right and by one member of the French Chamber of Deputies.

OLIVER BENJAMIN HEMMERLE

See also: Barbie, Klaus; Catholic Church; Crimes against Humanity; Vichy France

Further Reading

Golsan, Richard J. Memory, the Holocaust, and French Justice: The Bousquet and Touvier Affairs. Hanover (NH): University Press of New England, 1996.

Rousso, Henry. The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

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Trawniki Men

Named for the concentration camp in which they were trained, “Trawniki men” (Trawnikimänner) or “Trawnikis” were auxiliary police guards who played a deadly role in the day-to-day process of mass murder that was the Final Solution.

In order to implement Operation Reinhard—the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews of the Generalgouvernement (the German-controlled section of Poland that was not annexed to Germany)—trained men were needed to guard extermination camps, enforce and escort deportations, liquidate ghettos, and shoot—up close—Jewish men, women, and children into mass graves. Most of the men who trained under this program were Soviet prisoners of war who “volunteered” for this in exchange for release from the horrid, starvation-level conditions in which they were held. As such, they were part of a larger group called Hilfswilliger (volunteers), also called Hiwis.

The facility in which they trained was part of the Trawniki concentration camp, built where once there was a sugar refinery outside the village of Trawniki, some 20 miles southeast of Lublin. The camp was established shortly after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of Russia in July 1941, on the orders of SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik, SS and police leader (SS-und Polizeiführer) of the Lublin District. He placed SS-Hauptsturmführer Hermann Höfle in command of the camp and SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Streibel in command of the training program and facility for the Trawniki men.

The Trawniki camp served several functions over its three years of operation. For its first three months (July through September 1941) it was used to hold Soviet civilians. Beginning in September 1941 and continuing to July 1944, it was the training center for Trawniki men who were to be Guard Forces (Wachmannschaften) as part of Aktion Reinhard. It served as a forced labor camp from July 1942 to September 1943, at which point it functioned as a subcamp for the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, also located in the Generalgouvernement, near Lublin.

From the inception of the training program through late 1944, more than 5,000 men were screened for sufficient levels of anticommunist and antisemitic sentiments, recruited and trained for their role in the murder of the Jews. Not all were Soviet POWs. Others were conscripted Volksdeutsche, that is, men who were “Germans in terms of people or race,” but were not living in, nor citizens of, Germany. Most were from Eastern Europe so that the Trawniki men—the Soviets and the civilian conscripts—could communicate with (in reality, order) prisoners in a language they could understand, such as Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Estonian, Latvian, and so forth.

Trawniki men were trained for and participated in some of the most violent aspects of an already monstrous campaign of mass murder. They served as guards at almost all of the Nazi extermination camps, such as Bełzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka (more specifically, Treblinka II, the killing site within the Treblinka camp). They were brutal participants in the deportations of Jews from ghettos to the assigned extermination camp, and in the liquidation of those ghettos. Thus, in the ghettos of Warsaw, Czestochowa, Lublin, Białystok, and others, they killed all Jews who had not yet been deported.

Perhaps their most notorious task was to kill hundreds or thousands of Jews at a time, shooting them individually in the soft spot immediately below the back of the skull, or forcing them to lie down on their stomachs on the rows of bodies that were killed before them, and then shooting them, even as the next row of victims was brought to the edge of the open pit to await their turn. Some of the members of the German army or the Reserve Police Battalions found this task—killing innocent men, women, and children in a close up and personal way—to be psychologically difficult, so it was not unusual that the Trawniki men—who seemed to have no such qualms—would take over the killing operation.

The Trawniki training camp, which remained operational to the very end, was overrun in July 1944. After the war, Globocnik and Höfel committed suicide. Streibel, along with other leaders of the program, was charged and brought to trial, only to be acquitted in 1976.

MICHAEL DICKERMAN

See also: Aktion Reinhard; Collaboration; Concentration Camps; Death Camps; Ghettos; Globocnik, Odilo; Holocaust by Bullets

Further Reading

Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.

Douglas, Lawrence. The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Stoltzfus, Nathan, and Henry Friedlander (Eds.). Nazi Crimes and the Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

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Treblinka

Consisting of a labor camp and an extermination camp, Treblinka contributed mightily to the death toll of the Holocaust with approximately 870,000 victims—almost all Jews—killed there during its operation. Treblinka was located near the villages of Treblinka and Malkinia, about 50 miles northeast of Warsaw, in the Generalgouvernement. Two conditions made this an ideal location in which to carry out the tasks of the camps: it was in a lightly populated but heavily wooded area; and it was near a rail line, with a station stop at Malkinia, which allowed for a spur to be built to the camp.

Treblinka was one of three extermination camps established as part of Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard), named after SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), who was assassinated in June 1942. Bełzec and Sobibór were the other two Operation Reinhard extermination camps.

Treblinka consisted of two camps. Treblinka I was a forced labor camp (Arbeitslager), opened in November 1941. Its prisoner population was composed of Jews, and non-Jewish Poles for whom the camp was a means of political detention. Though held in two different areas of the camp, both cohorts did hard labor, primarily in a gravel pit. Deportees who appeared capable of work when they arrived at Treblinka were housed here. The commandant of Treblinka I was SS-Sturmbannführer Theodor van Eupen. He served in that capacity from the camp’s inception until its closing in July 1944.

Treblinka II was the extermination camp (Vernichtungslager). It was completed and operational in July 1942. This was where virtually all Jews from each deportation train were sent after being adjudged incapable of performing the tasks required in Treblinka I. It was here that they were gassed within hours of their arrival.

There were three commandants of Treblinka II. They were SS-Untersturmführer Dr. Irmfried Eberl, from July to August 1942; SS-Obersturmführer Franz Stangl (who had served as commandant of Sobibór), from August 1942 to August 1943; and SS-Oberscharführer Kurt Franz, from August to November 1943.

Treblinka was an extermination camp established by Nazi Germany for the purpose of facilitating the Holocaust. Functioning between July 23, 1942, and October 19, 1943, it is estimated that at least 700,000 and possibly up to 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers, rendering it a killing site second only to Auschwitz in the number of Jews murdered there. A Jewish revolt in October 1943 saw the end of the mass murder operations at Treblinka. (Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)

Treblinka II was composed of three areas. The first was the reception area where the Jews who made up the human cargo packed into railroad cattle cars detrained. The second area was divided into two subsections. One included housing for the German and Ukrainian staff, administrative offices, storerooms, a clinic, and workshops. The staff consisted of 20 to 30 SS men in command and administrative posts, all of whom had received their training through their participation in the Aktion T-4 operation under which Germans who, due to physical or mental disabilities, were deemed to be living “lives not worthy of living” were killed by carbon monoxide gas. Ninety to 120 Soviet prisoners of war, as well as Ukrainian and Polish civilians, served as guards, and some participated in tasks associated with the gas chambers. They were schooled at the Trawniki labor camp, which was the training center for Operation Reinhard police and guards.

The second subsection of Treblinka II was composed of the barracks for the Jews who temporarily worked in the camp at the camp’s workshops, while the third area was the extermination center. The entire camp was surrounded by two fences of barbed wire and numerous watch towers.

Sometimes referred to as the “upper camp” (and identified to its incoming victims as a transit camp), the extermination site of Treblinka II was maintained in its own fully fenced area, with a large earthen mound and branches intertwined in the fence to make it difficult for anyone outside of the area to see what was happening. It contained three gas chambers (which would be expanded by another 10 as more trainloads of victims kept coming). The process that led to the gas chambers began in the reception area.

Deportation trains were often 50 or 60 cars long. As each train approached the “station” where the victims would detrain, the train would stop and be broken into segments of 20 cars each. Each 20-car train pulled into the reception area and was handled before the next segment of the deportation train pulled in. There the doors of the train cars were thrown open and the Jews who managed to survive the trip—often lasting for days, with no food, water, sanitation, or light—would be berated and beaten in order to bring them all out into the bizarre scene that awaited them. Once they were out of the cars and on their way to the next step in this process, a special work unit (Sonderkommando) of Jewish prisoners jumped into each car, removing the bodies of those who did not survive, collecting whatever food, clothing, and valuables were left behind, and cleaning the car so it could be put into use for the same purpose again.

Jews who were unable to walk were taken to an “infirmary” (Lazaret) with a Red Cross flag on it. They passed through the building and exited on the other side where they were shot and thrown into huge pits that were already dug for just this purpose. Those who were able to walk were immediately divided by gender (children with the women). A very few of the men and women—the strongest among them—were selected to go to the forced labor camp—Treblinka I—while all the rest would be just minutes away from their deaths. The condemned group entered two barracks—men in one, women and children in the other—where they were ordered to remove all their clothing to prepare for a shower before they would be allowed into the camp. During this time, all valuables—money, jewelry, and so forth—were collected from them, to be stored and sorted in large storerooms until shipped back to Germany. Beginning in the fall of 1942, women and children were shorn of their hair.

Then these people—naked and no doubt terrified—were forced by fists and whips to run down a path—itself fenced in and covered with branches to hide what was happening—from the barracks to the building with gas chambers. This path was called the “tube.” As soon as they left the undressing barracks, another special work unit would gather up all the clothing (which would be examined for valuables and taken to storerooms for sorting) and clean the room so the next group of victims could be brought and the process repeated.

The gas chambers at Treblinka used carbon monoxide as its killing agent. It was generated from a large diesel engine in a shed (although some reports refer to other sources for the carbon monoxide) and then piped through to the “shower heads” in the gas chamber. There unsuspecting victims took up to 30 minutes to die.

Disposal of the bodies began after a second set of doors was opened and the remaining gas dissipated. Not far from the gas chambers’ doors were huge trenches where the bodies were buried. This was the case until Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler issued an order in early 1943 to exhume all the buried bodies and burn them in an effort to destroy all evidence of the killing that took place there. This began the horrible process of opening the graves and moving the bodies to large pits with burning pyres, some built using train track railings. The burning continued for several months.

There was a Jewish resistance group at Treblinka that began its planning for an uprising in April 1943, which took place on August 2, 1943. The first step was to break into the armory in the camp and take weapons. Before this could be completed, however, the Germans became aware of the prisoners’ actions, meaning that the prisoners were unable to arm themselves sufficiently to take control of the camp as they had planned. Instead, the resistance group set fire to buildings (but the gas chambers remained unscathed), and hundreds of prisoners stormed the fence surrounding the camp. Fewer than 100 were able to escape and survive until liberation.

The killing operation continued through August 1943. The camp was dismantled throughout that fall and winter, with the gas chambers destroyed and a farmhouse built in its place. Soviet forces entered the camp on August 16, 1944.

The number of Jews killed at Treblinka—there were other groups killed there, such as 2,000 Roma, but the victims were almost all Jews, and almost all from Poland—is staggering. In the 15 months from July 1942, when killing operations first began, until the fall of 1943, when operations ceased, it is estimated that more than 870,000 Jews were killed, including: 254,000 from Warsaw and another 112,000 from the Warsaw district; some 337,000 Jews from the Radom district; 35,000 from the Lublin district; more than 107,000 from Białystok; and approximately 29,000 Jews from other countries, including Greece, Macedonia, Slovakia, and Salonika.

Two postwar trials were held in Düsseldorf related to the perpetrators of these mass killings. The first—from October 12, 1964, until August 24, 1965—tried and convicted 10 defendants, including Commandant Kurt Franz. At the second trial—from May 13 to December 22, 1970—the only defendant was Commandant Franz Stangl. He was sentenced to life in prison.

MICHAEL DICKERMAN

See also: Aktion Reinhard; Death Camps; Franz, Kurt; Gas Chambers; Greece; Jewish Resistance; Liberation, Concentration Camps; Final Solution; Operation Harvest Festival; Resistance Movements; Roma and Sinti; Shoah; Slave Labor; Sonderkommando; Stangl, Franz; Wirth, Christian; Wolff, Karl

Further Reading

Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Rajchman, Chil. The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory, 1942–1943. New York: Pegasus Books, 2009.

Steiner, Jean-Francois. Treblinka. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

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Triumph of the Spirit

A motion picture produced in 1989, based on the life of a Greek-Jewish boxer named Salamo Arouch, who was a victim of the Nazis incarcerated at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp between 1943 and 1945. Arouch, who came from the city of Salonika, had represented Greece at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and was Balkans middleweight champion prior to World War II. On March 15, 1943, with the Nazi assault on the Salonika ghetto, he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. Upon learning Arouch’s identity, SS guards in the camp arranged bi-weekly boxing matches involving Jewish and Roma inmates: the winner would receive an additional food ration; the loser would be consigned to the gas chamber at Birkenau. Arouch was reputed to have fought in no fewer than 200 such bouts. Triumph of the Spirit, a motion picture directed by Robert M. Young, starred Willem Dafoe in the role of Salomo Arouch. A controversy regarding the movie arose soon after its release when another Greek-Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz boxing matches, Jacko Razon, claimed that the film actually told his story, not that of Arouch. Nothing came of the controversy, however, and the film, which was shot on location in Auschwitz itself, was met with critical and popular acclaim.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Arouch, Salamo; Auschwitz; Olympic Games, 1936

Further Reading

Baron, Lawrence. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema. Lanham (MD): Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Gonshak, Henry. Hollywood and the Holocaust. Lanham (MD): Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

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Trocmé, André and Magda

André Trocmé was a French Huguenot pastor who, with his wife Magda, née Grilli di Cortona, directed a remarkable rescue effort of Jewish and other refugees in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its surrounding areas, a rural mountainous region in south-central France known as the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon.

Born in Saint-Quentin-en-Tourmont in northern France on April 7, 1901, Trocmé was the son of a French father and German mother, and the product of a strict bourgeois Huguenot upbringing. As an eyewitness to the horrors of World War I, he was shattered by its tremendous violence and the decimation of an entire generation, and advocated for the resolution of conflict through nonviolent means. In 1926 he married the equally dedicated Magda Grilli di Cortona, whom he had met while conducting graduate work at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. They would have four children: Nelly, Jean-Pierre, Jacques, and Daniel.

Trocmé became an outspoken proponent of nonviolence, making him a controversial figure in the French Protestant church. Seeking to limit his influence, he was sent to the remote parish of Le Chambon, though once there he did not hesitate to impart his pacifist convictions into his work. In 1938 he and Pastor Edouard Theis, who came to the village to assist him, opened the École Nouvelle Cévenole, a coeducational secondary school based on the principles of tolerance, pacifism, and internationalism.

Trocmé’s preaching was also politically shaded. He spoke out against Nazism in neighboring Germany, pointing out its discriminatory policies toward Jews. With the coming of World War II, his opposition toward the Nazis, and his pacifism, would be tested in a manner he did not anticipate.

In 1940 France capitulated to Germany in a few short weeks. On June 23, 1940, the day after the armistice was signed, Trocmé and Theis emphasized their views in a celebrated sermon directed squarely at their Protestant Huguenot congregation: “The duty of Christians is to resist the violence brought to bear on their consciences with the weapons of the spirit—we will resist whenever our adversaries try to force us to act against the commands of the Gospel. We will do so without fear, but also without pride and without hatred.” When the deportations of Jews began in France in 1942, Trocmé urged his congregation to give shelter to “the people of the Bible,” the more so as the village and its outlying areas were quickly filled with hundreds of fleeing Jews. Trocmé showed the way by enjoining his congregation to take in refugees—particularly children—in need of sanctuary. From this point on the people of Le Chambon would prove over and over again that they were willing to open their doors courageously to Jews and other persecuted refugees seeking shelter.

Magda Trocmé also assisted refugees in their search for safe havens, connecting them with those prepared to take them in. While not part of any formal resistance network, the efforts of the Trocmés to assist Jews overlapped with the work of many others who were supporting rescue efforts in the area.

As a result, large numbers of people found permanent shelter in and around Le Chambon, while others were sheltered temporarily until a way could be found to smuggle them across the border into Switzerland. They were housed with local townspeople and farmers, in public institutions, and in homes for children. There were many ways in which people provided help. It was not only a matter of families being prepared to accommodate the Jewish refugees; when the Jews (nicknamed “Testaments” by the villagers) arrived at the local train station, designated members of the community would meet them before spiriting them away to their new homes. Schools found ways to accommodate increased enrollments, and fabrications of school registers were made so it appeared as though the children—with changed names—had always been there. With very few dissenters, the entire community of Le Chambon, it seemed, banded together as one in order to rescue Jews.

While the people of Le Chambon were effectively hiding the children “in plain sight,” the Vichy authorities learned of Pastor Trocmé’s clandestine work. Accordingly, in January 1943 he and Pastor Theis, together with the local headmaster, Roger Darcissac, were arrested and imprisoned for several weeks in the St. Paul d’Eyjeaux internment camp for political prisoners, near Limoges. When he was arrested and first told to desist from his rescue activities, Pastor Trocmé made a famous statement: “These people came here for help and for shelter. I am their shepherd. A shepherd does not forsake his flock…. I do not know what a Jew is. I know only human beings.”

After a period of imprisonment, they were released through the intervention of several individuals—including André’s cousin Daniel Trocmé, who was also involved in refugee work in Le Chambon, and who was himself later arrested; deported to Majdanek, he died in 1944.

Following his release Pastor Trocmé continued his efforts on behalf of Jews and others in Le Chambon, but he was forced to go into hiding for several months. His absence did not deter the residents of Le Chambon, nor close down the rescue operation he had begun. They continued welcoming persecuted Jews into their homes, providing a sanctuary for them and enabling many to see out the war in relative safety.

No one knows precisely how many Jewish refugees were hidden or saved at Le Chambon during World War II. Some estimates consider about 3,500 Jewish refugees were saved; others range as high as 5,000, taking into account those Jews who at least passed through Le Chambon and vicinity, as well as those who remained for any length of time.

After the war, André and Magda Trocmé continued the cause of nonviolent resolution of problems, with André serving as European secretary for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, a nongovernmental pacifist organization founded in 1914 in response to the horrors of war in Europe. He spent his final years as pastor of a Reformed Church in Geneva.

On January 5, 1971, Yad Vashem recognized Pastor André Trocmé as one of the Righteous among the Nations, with Magda receiving the same recognition on May 14, 1984. In an unprecedented move, in 1998 Yad Vashem presented this honor to the entire village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.

Pastor André Trocmé died on June 5, 1971, in Geneva, followed by his wife Magda on October 10, 1996, in Paris. Both are buried in the family grave in Le Chambon.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon; Rescuers of Jews; Resistance Movements; Righteous among the Nations; Upstander; Vichy France

Further Reading

Hallie, Philip. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon, and How Goodness Happened There. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

Henry, Patrick. We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2007.

Rittner, Carol. The Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. New York: New York University Press, 1986.

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The Truce

An Italian-produced motion picture, filmed in English-language dialogue, recounting the post-Holocaust return of Italian Jew Primo Levi from his liberation at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp to his home in Italy. The movie covers a period of nine months, during which Levi, played by actor John Turturro, is shunted around eastern Europe under the direction of Soviet liberation troops. Given the multinational composition of the prisoner body, Levi shares his experiences with other Italians, Poles, Greeks, Russians, and—always present—German soldiers who had been forced to surrender to the Red Army. The movie was directed by veteran Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi and released in the United States through Miramax Films in 1996. The Truce, based on Levi’s 1963 memoir (La Tregua), is a movie proceeding from an uncommon scenario, namely, a postgenocidal situation. While many (perhaps most) Holocaust and genocide–related movies deal with events surrounding the period of the killing, The Truce is unique in addressing the multitude of issues facing survivors upon their liberation. For this reason, it stands alone within its genre.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Auschwitz; Levi, Primo; Liberation, Concentration Camps

Further Reading

Baron, Lawrence. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema. Lanham (MD): Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Frodon, Jean-Michel (Ed.). Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century. Albany (NY): State University of New York Press, 2010.

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Turkey

Often referred to as the bridge between Europe and the East, Turkey was officially neutral in World War II until months before the end of the conflict, when, on February 23, 1945, it declared war on Germany. The extent of its efforts to save Turkish Jews from the ravages of the Nazis, however, belies that characterization of neutrality.

Once the heart of the mighty and wide-flung Ottoman Empire, Turkey had seen that empire diminish in size and power beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was known as “the Sick Man of Europe.” Its theocratic government held back its development while other countries in Europe were experiencing the new thinking of the Enlightenment and a general growth in prosperity. This led to a revolution in the early 20th century when the religious and political leader of Turkey—Sultan Abdul Hamid II—was overthrown by a Turkish reform group called the Young Turks. Although promising sweeping reforms and modernization, the Young Turks soon turned from that orientation to one of extreme nationalism, pan-Turkism, and expansionist irredentism.

The plans of the Young Turks to restore Turkey and the Ottoman Empire to its former glory were stalled when the western Balkan countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia formed the Balkan League and broke free from the empire in the Balkan War of 1912, greatly diminishing the empire’s presence in Europe. During World War I, when it was allied with Germany and the Central Powers, Turkey again found itself on the losing end of a significant and humiliating military defeat, this against the Russians at the Battle of Sarikamish in January 1915.

Turkey was more than an ally with Germany in World War I. Its army became in some respects an extension of the German military. In an effort to improve the ill-trained and poorly disciplined Turkish army, Germany embedded officers into virtually every Turkish unit. Despite this infusion of leadership and weaponry by the Germans, and notwithstanding its victory at Gallipoli in 1915, Turkey’s overall experience in World War I—its relationship with Germany, the losses it suffered on the battlefield, and the difficult conditions at home—left Turkey reluctant to take sides in World War II. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who became president of Turkey in October 1923, sought to modernize Turkey during the interwar years. To that end, he invited the leading scholars and scientists of Europe—including Jews—to live in Turkey and contribute to its movement forward.

Turkey’s neutrality during World War II provided some level of security to Jews living there and also gave it diplomatic access to Germany and its occupied countries. Thus, for example, the Turkish embassy in Vichy France was able to play a significant role in protecting the approximately 10,000 Turkish Jews living there. These efforts were spearheaded by diplomats on the ground—the ambassador, consuls, and deputy consuls—but were fully supported by the Turkish government, as seen by the direct intervention by the Turkish foreign minister and the president in early 1944 when the Vichy government planned to deport all of its Turkish Jews to “the East,” meaning to the extermination camps of Poland. The plan was cancelled.

Turkey defied the Germans in a number of ways. It refused to close the Bosphorus Strait or the Dardanelles, something requested by Germany because they were waterways by which Jewish refugees attempted to flee Europe. It allowed Jews who reached Turkey to continue to its southern coast and the Mediterranean Sea for travel to Palestine. If turned back by the British, those Jews were given safe harbor in Turkey. It allowed for the presence of various Jewish organizations—for example, the Jewish Agency—on Turkish soil to help bring European Jews to safety and, ultimately, to Palestine.

Turkish diplomats were especially active. The Turkish ambassador to France, as well as consuls in Paris and Marseilles, made certain that Jews’ papers proving Turkish citizenship were up-to-date and issued false citizenship cards if necessary. But their most significant efforts were made to exempt Turkish Jews living in France from the many and onerous anti-Jewish laws and regulations applicable to French Jews. They did this by sending strong official statements to French diplomats, in which they rejected the argument made by those diplomats that by living in France, Turkish Jews were implicitly accepting the rules and regulations of that country.

The basis on which Turkish diplomats made their arguments was a simple and courageous one: that Turkey did not treat its citizens differently because of religion, and therefore would not allow other countries to do so. Although this was not consistent with its treatment of the Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians during World War I, Turkey’s diplomats—especially Selahattin Ülkümen, the Turkish consul general on the island of Rhodes; Namik Kemal Yolga, the Turkish deputy consul general in Paris; Necdet Kent, the deputy consul general in Marseille; and Behiç Erkin, the Turkish ambassador to Paris—argued again and again that Turkish Jews were not to be subject to any rules or restrictions based on their religion.

When Germany and France sent notice that all foreign Jews needed to be repatriated to their homelands no later than May 1944 or else they would become subject to the rules applicable to all Jews, Turkish diplomats arranged for trains to return some 2,000 Jews to the safety of Turkey.

It was not just Turkish Jews that Turkish diplomats helped. Jews in Eastern Europe—in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, among other places—as well as Jews in Greece also benefited from their efforts. And it was not just its diplomats who did the helping. The papal nuncio to France—Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (who would become Pope John XXIII)—helped many Jews to survive the Nazi onslaught.

There was one significant lapse in Turkey’s generally protective attitude toward Jews. In December 1941, a ship—the Struma—filled with more than 780 (some accounts put the number at 769) Romanian Jewish refugees on their way to Palestine was towed into Istanbul (its engine had died). While British and Turkish officials argued over the Struma’s right to continue on to Palestine, its passengers were not allowed to disembark. They were restricted to the ship because of Turkey’s fear that if the British did not let them enter Palestine, Turkey would have to take them in. Finally, on February 23, 1942, the ship was allowed to proceed (it had to be towed from Istanbul; its engine was still not working), but on the next day it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, killing all passengers and crew.

The estimates of the number of Jews saved because of the efforts made by the Turkish government and its diplomats vary widely, from a low of 15,000 to a high of 100,000, with the consensus somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.

MICHAEL DICKERMAN

See also: Rescuers of Jews; Struma Disaster

Further Reading

Bahar, I. Izzet. Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Guttstadt, Corry. Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Levy, Avigdor, ed. Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century. Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press, 2002.