Arnold Reisman

An Ambassador and a Mensch: the Story of a Turkish Diplomat in Vichy France Arnold Reisman

This book reveals the little known role played by a Turkish diplomat, Behiç Erkin, Ambassador to France, who with his staff saved Turkish Jews living in France from certain death during World War II. Since Stanford Shaw first chronicled this episode in 1993, it has been uniformly assumed that the Turkish government in Ankara was solidly behind Erkin's actions. The totality of recent findings of contemporaneous documents from various US government archives, however, confirms that the intervention in behalf of French Jews with Turkish origins was not the policy of the Government of Turkey at all but the determined undertaking of members of the Turkish diplomatic corps in France. They acted independently against the extant policy of Ankara, risking the wrath and ire of their own government as well as those of Germany and its puppet regime, Vichy France. Their careers and often their lives were at risk and their diplomatic peers representing western countries offered no support.