Selahattin Ülkümen

Selahattin Ülkümen (14 January 1914 – 7 June 2003) was a Turkish diplomat who was recognized by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1989, with his name being listed at Yad Vashem in the city of Jerusalem. During World War II, he was serving as a consul-general of Turkey on the island of Rhodes, Greece, which had been invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. Ülkümen assisted the island's Jews by personally intervening to prevent as many of them as possible from being deported by the Germans amidst the Holocaust. In total, he managed to save around 50 Jews—13 on the basis of their Turkish citizenship, and the remainder through his own initiatives.

Jews in Axis-occupied Greece were deported from Corfu and sent to Nazi death camps, namely Auschwitz. Rhodes, where Ülkümen was posted, had a Jewish population of some 2,000 at the time of the German invasion, which had followed the signing of an armistice between Italy and the Allies amidst the fall of the Fascist regime.

Background Rhodes, inhabited by a Greek majority and a substantial Turkish minority, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for 390 years, until 1912 when Italy imposed its rule on Rhodes and the other Dodecanese islands. The Germans took over in September 1943 after Italy withdrew from the war. By the 1940s, the ethnic Jewish community numbered about 2,000, made up of people from Turkey, Greece, Italy and other Mediterranean countries, as well as those native to the island.

Intervention on behalf of boatmen Before his intervention on behalf of Jews during the July 1944 deportations, Ülkümen had already come into conflict with the German occupation authorities on Rhodes. After Italy's surrender in September 1943, some Italian soldiers attempted to escape from Rhodes to the nearby Turkish coast. Local Turkish and Greek boatmen, including fishermen and boat owners, were accused by the Germans of helping them.

In his memoirs, Ülkümen wrote that boatmen in Rhodes were arrested for transporting Italian soldiers to Anatolia and were to be executed by firing squad. He recalled that the wives, children and relatives of the detained men came to the Turkish consulate asking him to save them, after which he went to see the German military governor of the Dodecanese.

Bombing of the Turkish consulate On 18 February 1944, the Turkish consulate in Rhodes was bombed. Two consular employees, Hasan and Hüseyin, were killed. Ülkümen was wounded, and his wife, Mihrinisa Ülkümen, was gravely injured.

Responsibility for the bombing has been described differently in later accounts. British aircraft frequently carried out raids against German-held Rhodes, and some accounts have attributed the damage to an Allied air raid. Ülkümen, however, maintained in his memoirs that the consulate was deliberately bombed by German aircraft while Rhodes was under German occupation.

The bombing took place several months before the July 1944 deportation of the Jews of Rhodes. It followed a period of mounting tension between Ülkümen and the German authorities, including his earlier intervention on behalf of Turkish and Greek boatmen accused of helping Italian soldiers escape to the Turkish mainland.

Ülkümen’s intervention went beyond the normal protection of Turkish nationals. Of the roughly 42 or 43 people for whom he sought protection, only a minority were Turkish citizens. Nathan Shachar writes that Ülkümen included people whose Turkish papers had expired and others who were only married to Turkish citizens. When German officials objected that many of those listed were not Turkish citizens, Ülkümen insisted that Turkish law regarded the spouses of Turkish citizens as Turkish. Shachar notes that this claim was not legally accurate, but that the Germans ultimately accepted most of Ülkümen’s definitions.

Legacy and honors Maurice Soriano, the head of the 35-person Jewish community who remained in Rhodes after the war, stated, "I am indebted to the Turkish consul who made extraordinary efforts to save my life and those of my fellow countrymen." In 1998 Israel issued a postage stamp in Ülkümen's honor. On 5 June 2012, the Selahattin Ülkümen school was inaugurated in the city of Van, built jointly by the Jewish Community of Turkey and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.