The Man Our Association Is Half Named After

Selahattin Ülkümen was born on January 14, 1914 in Antakya, then still Ottoman territory and today the Turkish province of Hatay. He studied in Ankara and Istanbul, joined the diplomatic service and in 1943 was appointed consul general on Rhodes. The island had belonged to Italy since 1912 but remained culturally and linguistically deep in its Ottoman heritage. After Italy's armistice in September 1943, German troops took control of the Dodecanese. A young representative of a neutral state thus suddenly found himself in territory occupied by the Wehrmacht, with a consulate, a few staff members and a jurisdiction that was narrowly drawn on paper. He was thirty years old and married, and his wife Mihrinissa was expecting a child.

Rhodes in July 1944

The island's Jewish community was one of the oldest in the Mediterranean and, shortly before the occupation, still counted about 1,700 people. On July 18, 1944, an order went out that all Jewish men had to report to the German command post, supposedly for registration. The next day the women and children were added, and after that it was clear that more than paperwork was at stake. Within a few days, the people in the old Jewish quarter were rounded up and put on ships. They went via Kos to Piraeus and from there by rail to Auschwitz-Birkenau. If you look at the timeline on our page about Rhodes 1944, you can see the pace: between the first summons and the arrival at the extermination camp, less than four weeks passed.

Ülkümen learned of it because acquaintances knocked on the consulate door. He sought a conversation with the German island commander, General Ulrich Kleemann, and made an argument that sounded legal and was meant politically. Turkey was neutral, he said, its citizens were not subject to German measures, and Turkish law made no distinction by religion. He therefore demanded the release of everyone he listed as Turkish nationals. The conversation was not friendly, and in the end Ülkümen threatened to send a report to Ankara. It was exactly this threat that worked, because Berlin had no interest in a break with Turkey at that moment.

The Trick With Citizenship Law

What Ülkümen did next was, strictly speaking, forgery of documents. Only about thirteen to fifteen people on his list actually held a valid Turkish passport. Many others had long since lost their Ottoman or Turkish citizenship because they had missed deadlines or had become naturalized in Italy. He included them anyway. In addition, he argued that spouses of Turkish citizens also count as citizens under Turkish law, and he stretched that to children, in-laws and in some cases entire households. The survivor Matilda Turiel later described how he added names that everyone involved knew did not belong on the list. In this way around forty to fifty people went free, including families holding Italian citizenship.

One case went further still. Albert Franko was already on a transport toward Auschwitz when Ülkümen heard that his wife held Turkish papers. He intervened while the train was still on Greek soil, and Franko was taken off. Such interventions were not covered by any instructions from Ankara. In those weeks Ülkümen acted on his own initiative, without any safety net, and he knew it could cost him his career. Anyone who studies rescue stories keeps running into this point: what mattered was rarely the grand plan, but the willingness to stretch one's own discretion to the limit.

The Price

On February 18, 1944, the Turkish consulate on Rhodes was hit in a bombing raid. Mihrinissa Ülkümen was badly injured and died shortly afterward, having given birth to her son Mehmet. Two consulate employees were also killed. In Turkish tradition, and in part of the German one, this attack counts as retaliation by the Wehrmacht for Ülkümen's conduct. More recent research points out that the bombing came before the deportation and probably belonged to a British air raid on the harbor. We consider this contradiction important enough to name rather than omit. The debate changes nothing about the fact that Ülkümen lost his wife and that the Germans afterward removed him from the island.

After the expulsion, he was taken to Piraeus and held there until the end of the war. His son grew up at first with relatives. On August 2, 1944, Turkey broke off diplomatic relations with the German Reich, a few days after the deportation from Rhodes. After the war, Ülkümen continued his career and for decades hardly spoke about the events. Asked what had made him a hero, he is said to have answered that he had merely done his duty as a human being. Sentences like that sound modest, but they are also a form of deflection: after 1945, many rescuers did not want to be reduced to that one act all the time.

Recognition, Late and Clear

On December 12, 1989, Yad Vashem recognized Selahattin Ülkümen as Righteous Among the Nations, and the following year the honor was presented to him in Jerusalem and a tree was planted. He remains the only Turkish citizen with this distinction, which regularly leads to misunderstandings. Other Turkish diplomats, such as Necdet Kent or Namık Kemal Yolga, also helped people but were honored by the Turkish Foreign Ministry and not by Yad Vashem. In 2001, Ülkümen received a state award in Ankara together with them. He died on June 7, 2003 in Istanbul at the age of 89. In the same year a memorial plaque was unveiled in Istanbul, and in 2012 an elementary school in Van took his name.

What interests us in this biography is less the monument than how well it carries over. Ülkümen had no weapons, no organization and no mandate. He had a desk, a seal and the question of how far he wanted to go. When we work with school classes, this is the point where conversations turn, because young people realize that this is not about heroism in the movies but about decisions on the job. We make that transfer deliberately carefully, because historical situations cannot be laid over today's one to one. You can find more about our formats under Dialogue and Education, and if you want to know why our association carries a second name, read on at Yitzhak Sarfati.