What do they know? The German Turks and their perception of the Holocaust

What do Turkish people living in Germany know about the Holocaust? Does the first generation of Turkish migrants in Germany, the mostly uneducated Gastarbeiter generation, know about the Holocaust at all? If so, do they participate in Germany's public remembrance of the Holocaust? Indeed, the occupation with the Nazi past is one of the pervasive topics in the contemporary political discourse of Germany while nowadays, approximately a little more than three million people living in Germany have their roots in the Republic of Turkey. Since the decision of an arrangement between Germany and Turkey in 1961 to send (mostly low-qualified) labor forces, so called Gastarbeiter, from Turkey to Germany, the immigration of the ‘first generation’ has increased explosively. From 6,500 Turkish workers in the first year of the cross-national arrangement, the number rose to 910,000 in 1973 and to 1,600,000 in 1981. Since the arrangement did not foresee any rule concerning the return of the Turkish workers back to Turkey, most of the Gastarbeiter and their families stayed – unexpectedly – in Germany and witnessed Germany’s post-war era. In North Rhine-Westphalia, focus of the present research, currently live 743,000 people with a Turkish migration background. The survey of the present investigation discovers the knowledge and the willigness to remember the Holocaust of 150 Turkish people living in Germany. The work deals with two major hypotheses: firstly, the first generation of Turkish workers in Germany did not know about the Holocaust before coming to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and probably never really knew about it since their integration efforts and opportunities until today might have been lower than those of the second and third generation who to a great extent grew up in Germany and therefore should possess a closer relation to German speaking sources. Secondly, at a next stage I assumed that the willingness of the Turkish people in Germany to remember the victims of the Holocaust would be remarkably low due to several reasons such as a low integration level and consequently a low sense of identification with the German nation or even with Europe, as well as a certainly problematic relationship to Israel as well as the genocide of the Armenians at the rear which is not officially admitted and confessed by the Turks yet.