Atatürk in the Nazi ImaginationStefan Ihrig[1]
HARDCOVER
ISBN 9780674368378
Publication Date: 11/20/2014
Trade 320 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
30 halftones, 1 map
Belknap Press
Prologue: Leaving “Enverland”
1. Turkish Lessons for Germany: The Turkish War of Independence as a Major Weimar Media Event, 1919–1923
2. “Ankara in Munich”: The Hitler Putsch and Turkey
3. Hitler’s “Star in the Darkness”: Nazi Admiration for Atatürk and His New Turkey
4. The “Turkish Führer”: Nazi Hagiography and National Education
5. The New Turkey: Nazi Visions of a Modern Völkisch State
6. The Second World War and Turkey: Another Spain?
Epilogue: First Stone, Then to Dust
Note on Sources and Historiography
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
THERE IS A SMALL CRITICISM to be made of Ihrig’s book. Although he is clear that there was nothing fascistic or Nazi-ike about Atatürk or Kemalism, other than making passing mention of Atatürk’s lack of interest in Nazi gifts and praise, and the Turks’ feeling that some of the Nazi coverage was excessive, Ihrig never reports on any Turkish reaction to the hagiographies written and published by the Nazis and to the cooptation for alien purposes of the Kemalist enterprise. Turkey’s more than ambiguous activities during World War II — when they both declared war on Germany (on February 23, 1945) and provided the Nazis with needed materials — all occurred after Atatürk’s death and cannot be laid at his door. (Parenthetically, the official Nazi paper the Völkischer Beobachter called Turkey’s declaration ‘“treason against itself” and “claimed to be the keeper of the only and true ‘Atatürkism.’”) SOURCE
Mavi Boncuk |
Early in his career, Adolf Hitler took inspiration from Benito Mussolini, his senior colleague in fascism—this fact is widely known. But an equally important role model for Hitler and the Nazis has been almost entirely neglected: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Stefan Ihrig’s compelling presentation of this untold story promises to rewrite our understanding of the roots of Nazi ideology and strategy.
Hitler was deeply interested in Turkish affairs after 1919. He not only admired but also sought to imitate Atatürk’s radical construction of a new nation from the ashes of defeat in World War I. Hitler and the Nazis watched closely as Atatürk defied the Western powers to seize government, and they modeled the Munich Putsch to a large degree on Atatürk’s rebellion in Ankara. Hitler later remarked that in the political aftermath of the Great War, Atatürk was his master, he and Mussolini his students.
This was no fading fascination. As the Nazis struggled through the 1920s, Atatürk remained Hitler’s “star in the darkness,” his inspiration for remaking Germany along nationalist, secular, totalitarian, and ethnically exclusive lines. Nor did it escape Hitler’s notice how ruthlessly Turkish governments had dealt with Armenian and Greek minorities, whom influential Nazis directly compared with German Jews. The New Turkey, or at least those aspects of it that the Nazis chose to see, became a model for Hitler’s plans and dreams in the years leading up to the invasion of Poland.
[1] Stefan Ihrig is Professor of History at the University of Haifa. Professor Stefan Ihrig received his BA degree in Law and Politics at the Queen Mary University in London, his MA degree in History, Turcology and Political Science at the Free University of Berlin and his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. Professor Ihrig spent four years as a project assistant and researcher at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and has also spent four years as a Polonsky Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He has previously lectured at the Free University of Berlin and the Univesity of Regensburg. In 2016 the Weiss-Livnat International MA Program in Holocaust Studies had the pleasure of welcoming him to the faculty. He is also a professor in the Department of General History at the University of Haifa and at the Haifa Center of German and European Studies.
Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler Hardcover – January 4, 2016
- Hardcover: 472 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press
- ISBN-10: 0674504798
- ISBN-13: 978-0674504790
The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that the Armenians were restless under Ottoman rule, they were a problem for Germany too. From the 1890s onward Germany became accustomed to excusing violence against Armenians, even accepting it as a foreign policy necessity. For many Germans, the Armenians represented an explicitly racial problem and despite the Armenians’ Christianity, Germans portrayed them as the “Jews of the Orient.”
As Stefan Ihrig reveals in this first comprehensive study of the subject, many Germans before World War I sympathized with the Ottomans’ longstanding repression of the Armenians and would go on to defend vigorously the Turks’ wartime program of extermination. After the war, in what Ihrig terms the “great genocide debate,” German nationalists first denied and then justified genocide in sweeping terms. The Nazis too came to see genocide as justifiable: in their version of history, the Armenian Genocide had made possible the astonishing rise of the New Turkey.
Ihrig is careful to note that this connection does not imply the Armenian Genocide somehow caused the Holocaust, nor does it make Germans any less culpable. But no history of the twentieth century should ignore the deep, direct, and disturbing connections between these two crimes.
NAASR’s Aronian Book Prizes were established in 2014 by the late Dr. Aronian and Dr. Geoffrey Gibbs, to be awarded annually to an outstanding scholarly works in the English language in the field of Armenian studies and translations from Armenian into English.
The 2017 awards are for books published in the year 2016.
Ihrig was awarded the prize for a monograph for his book Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Harvard University Press)
See also: Measured Terror: The 1926 Turkish CoupStefan Ihrig | Published in History Today Volume 67 Issue 2 February 2017
Turkey has a long history of coups, but a failed attempt on the life of President Kemal Atatürk in 1926 had a lasting impact on the country. One foreign journalist recorded the reprisals that followed with admiration – which soon turned to fear.
