Yozgat

A military internment camp

Turkey defined the status of military refugees in 1941 and assigned those who were to be kept under permanent guard to camps at Ankara, Yozgat, Isparta, Erdek, Niğde, Sivas and Adana. Erdek and Isparta were reserved for French personnel and Niğde for Greeks, while Ankara and Yozgat held mixed nationalities. Guarding and security were military duties, and the camps were administered under the Ministry of National Defence. The town had held prisoners before: during the First World War Yozgat was the site of an Ottoman camp for Entente prisoners of war, which a British White Paper of 1918 described as a group of detached houses on the steep side of a hill. That was a separate institution from the camp opened in 1941.

Soviet airmen and parachutists who came down in eastern Anatolia were among those sent to Yozgat: three parachutists who landed near Ardahan and Borçka were escorted there by train in June 1942. Correspondence was censored and passed to the internees’ national attachés. An escape in February 1942 ended with the man’s recapture the following night at Yerköy.

Who was held there

Returns preserved in the Turkish military archive give a picture of the camp’s early population. In April 1941 it held about a hundred internees, most of them Russian nationals with smaller German and Bulgarian groups. By July 1942 the total had risen to 147, of whom 117 were Russian nationals, including 13 officers. These are all-nationality camp returns and none is a Ukrainian figure.

Refusing to go back

The end of the war did not end the camp. From 21 May 1945 the Turkish authorities were to escort 243 Russian refugees, 241 of them from Yozgat, to the Soviet frontier for repatriation. The internees said that they would be killed if they returned and refused to go, despite repeated visits and persuasion by Soviet embassy officials. Camp officers noted that they could only be moved with their hands cuffed behind their backs, and the return did not take place.

The government decided to close the camp on 1 September 1947, and its remaining internees were formally detached from the Ministry of National Defence on 1 January 1949. The 2009 study records the ending of camp activities in August 1948 and 63 refugees still present at the beginning of 1949. Those who would not or could not go home therefore stayed on in military custody for years after the fighting stopped.

Transfer to Kastamonu

In December 1948 an interministerial refugee commission decided to open a guesthouse at Kastamonu, run by the Red Crescent, so that the 53 people remaining at Yozgat could be kept together as guests rather than internees. The word camp was deliberately dropped. The Red Crescent agreed to meet Yozgat’s food and transfer costs, and parliament voted funds in 1949 for the move.

The Yozgat camp director reported 53 refugees on 21 May 1949, listing their nationalities and occupations: radio and typewriter repairers, electricians, fitters, carpenters, cooks and gardeners. Officers had received four lira a day and other ranks sixteen lira a month, arrangements carried over to Kastamonu. On 2 June 1949 the group, of Russian, Bulgarian, Egyptian, Italian, Greek, Turkish and German nationality, arrived at the Kastamonu guesthouse. A local paper noted that after six or seven years in Turkey the non-Turks among them had learned Turkish, and quoted the refugee it called a Ukrainian Russian on conditions behind the Iron Curtain.

A new guesthouse in Yozgat

After fire destroyed the Kastamonu guesthouse on 14 March 1954, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the remaining refugees back to Yozgat. A Red Crescent inspector rented a building there with the provincial governor and a manager was appointed. This later guesthouse was a separate civilian institution and should not be confused with the wartime military camp.