Turkey’s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk’s Vision

Turkey’s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk’s Vision
Arnold Reisman
New Academia Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 0-9777908-8-6
Non-Fiction, Modern History
Reviewed by Chris Gerrib

“A Jew remains a Jew!” or so said Dr. Julius Ludwig Wilser, Director of Heidelberg University’s Geological-Paleontologic Institute. Writing in 1939, he was rejecting the application of Dr. Max Pfannensteil to rejoin the University. Fortunately for Dr. Pfannensteil, he had a job and safety somewhere else, Turkey.
Arnold Reisman, a survivor of the Holocaust himself, has penned an encyclopedic accounting of a very-little-known fact of the Holocaust, that of how Turkey, desperate to modernize itself, gave sanctuary to thousands of German intellectuals and their families, even occasionally requesting them to be released from concentration camps. This was not entirely altruistic on Turkey’s part, many of the people freed from the Nazi’s clutches were critical in transitioning the backward and rural Turkey into today’s modern state.
Reisman’s book is extensively researched, and includes hundreds of pictures and reproductions of documents from this era. It’s not a casual read, the intention here is to get everything down, and list every name he could. Here are just a few of the important figures mentioned:
Professor Fritz Arndt, tasked to create chemistry textbooks in Turkish, invented dozens of words for chemical terms, and was by the 1950s giving lectures in fluent Turkish.

Margarete Schutte-Lihotzhy, Austria’s first female architect, developed the modern kitchen and is one of the reasons that a third of Turkey’s architects are female. She went back to Austria as a Resistance fighter, and survived the war, living to the age of 100.
Dr. Ernst Praetorius went from being musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic to driving a taxi, then moved to Turkey at the government’s request to run their national symphony.
Ernst Rueter, a combat vet of WWI and not a Jew, escaped from a Nazi concentration camp and fled to Turkey. He was mayor of Berlin during the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49.
Alfred Erich Frank essentially founded the public health system in Turkey, and was given a state funeral in Ankara in 1957.
Serious students of history should buy a copy and read it. If your library doesn’t have a copy, it needs one.