But the reality was completely different - during 1941-1944. Turkey actually sided with Hitler, although the Turkish soldiers did not fire a single shot towards the Soviet soldiers. Rather, they did, and more than one, but all of this was classified as a "border incident" that looked like a mere trifle against the background of the bloody battles of the Soviet-German front. In any case, both sides - Soviet and Turkish - did not react to border incidents and did not cause far-reaching consequences.
If anyone showed an example of skillful maneuvering and the finest diplomacy in World War II, it was Turkey. As you know, in 1941, Turkey declared its neutrality and strictly observed it throughout the war, although it experienced colossal pressure from both the Axis countries and the anti-Hitler coalition. In any case, this is what Turkish historians say.
However, this is only the official version, which is strongly at variance with reality.
Although for the period 1942-1944. skirmishes on the border were not so rare and often ended in the death of Soviet border guards. But Stalin preferred not to aggravate relations, since he understood perfectly well that if Turkey entered the war on the side of the Axis countries, then the situation of the USSR could instantly turn from unenviable to hopeless. This was especially true in 1941-1942.
Turkey did not force the events either, remembering well how its participation in the First World War on the side of Germany ended for it. The Turks were in no hurry to rush headlong into the next world massacre, preferring to watch the battle from afar and, of course, derive the maximum benefit for themselves.
Before the war, relations between the USSR and Turkey were fairly even and stable, in 1935 the treaty of friendship and cooperation was extended for another ten-year period, and Turkey signed a non-aggression pact with Germany on June 18, 1941. Two months later, after the start of World War II, the USSR announced that it would continue to comply with the provisions of the Montreux Convention, which regulates the rules of navigation in the Bosporus and Dardanelles. And also has no aggressive plans against Turkey and welcomes its neutrality.
All this allowed Turkey to refuse to participate in the world war on completely legal grounds. But this was impossible for two reasons. Firstly, Turkey owned the Straits Zone, strategically important for the belligerents, and, secondly, the Turkish government was going to adhere to neutrality only up to a certain point. What it, in fact, did not hide, at the end of 1941, it approved a law on the conscription of older conscripts, which is usually done on the eve of a major war.
In the fall of 1941, Turkey transferred 24 divisions to the border with the USSR, which forced Stalin to strengthen the Transcaucasian military district with 25 divisions. Which obviously were not superfluous on the Soviet-German front, given the state of affairs at that time.
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With the beginning of 1942, the intentions of Turkey no longer raised doubts among the Soviet leadership, and in April of the same year a tank corps, six air regiments, two divisions were transferred to the Transcaucasus, and on May 1 the Transcaucasian Front was officially approved.
In fact, the war against Turkey was to begin any day, since on May 5, 1942, the troops received a directive about their readiness to launch a preemptive attack on Turkish territory. However, the matter did not come to hostilities, although Turkey's pullback of significant forces of the Red Army significantly helped the Wehrmacht. After all, if the 45th and 46th armies were not in Transcaucasia, but participated in the battles with the 6th Army of Paulus, then it is still unknown what "successes" the Germans would have achieved in the 1942 summer campaign.
But much more damage to the USSR was caused by Turkey's cooperation with Hitler in the economic sphere, especially the actual opening of the Strait Zone for the ships of the Axis countries. Formally, the Germans and Italians observed decency: naval sailors, when passing the straits, changed into civilian clothes, the weapons from the ships were removed or disguised, and there seemed to be nothing to complain about. Formally, the Montreux Convention was respected, but at the same time, not only German and Italian merchant ships, but also combat ships freely sailed through the straits.
And soon it got to the point that the Turkish military fleet began to convoy transports with cargo for the Axis countries in the Black Sea. In practice, partnership with Germany allowed Turkey to make good money on supplying Hitler not only with food, tobacco, cotton, cast iron, copper, etc., but also with strategic raw materials. For example, chromium. The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles became the most important communication between the Axis countries fighting against the USSR, who felt themselves in the Strait Zone, if not at home, then certainly as visiting close friends.
Inonu, Ismet.
But the rare ships of the Soviet fleet went through the Straits, in fact, as if to be shot. Which, however, was not far from the truth. In November 1941, four Soviet ships - an icebreaker and three tankers - it was decided to transfer from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean due to their uselessness and so that they would not become victims of German dive bombers. All four ships were civilian and unarmed.
The Turks let them through without hindrance, but as soon as the ships left the Dardanelles, the tanker "Varlaam Avanesov" received a torpedo from the German submarine U652, which is a coincidence! - was exactly on the route of the Soviet ships.
Either the German intelligence promptly worked, or the "neutral" Turks shared information with their partners, but the fact remains that "Varlaam Avanesov" still lies at the bottom of the Aegean Sea, 14 kilometers from Lesbos. Icebreaker "Anastas Mikoyan" was more fortunate, and he was able to escape from the pursuit of Italian boats near the island of Rhodes. The only thing that saved the icebreaker was that the boats were armed with small-caliber anti-aircraft guns, with which it was quite problematic to sink the icebreaker.
If German and Italian ships rode through the Straits, as if through their own gateway, carrying any cargo, then the ships of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition could not bring into the Black Sea not only weapons or raw materials, but even food. Then the Turks immediately turned into evil Cerberus and, referring to their neutrality, forbade the Allied ships to go to the Black Sea ports of the USSR. So it was necessary to carry goods to the USSR not through the Straits, but through distant Iran.
The pendulum swung in the opposite direction in the spring of 1944, when it became clear that Germany was losing the war. At first, the Turks reluctantly, but nevertheless yielded to British pressure and stopped supplying German industry with chromium, and then began to more closely control the passage of German ships through the Straits.
And then the incredible happened: in June 1944, the Turks suddenly "discovered" that not unarmed German ships were trying to pass through the Bosphorus, but military ones. The search carried out revealed weapons and ammunition hidden in the holds. And a miracle happened - the Turks simply "turned" the Germans back to Varna. It is not known what phrases Hitler let go of the Turkish President Ismet Inonu, but for sure all of them were clearly not parliamentary.
After the Belgrade offensive, when it became clear that the German presence in the Balkans was over, Turkey behaved like a typical scavenger who sensed that yesterday's friend and partner would soon give up. President Inonu broke off all relations with Germany, and on February 23, 1945, the warlike spirit of the sultans Mehmet II and Suleiman the Magnificent clearly descended on him - Inonu suddenly took and declared war on Germany. And along the way - why waste time on trifles, to fight like this! - War was declared on Japan.
Of course, not a single Turkish soldier took part in it until the end of the war, and the declaration of war on Germany and Japan was an empty formality that allowed Hitler's partner, Turkey, to perform a cheating trick and cling to the victorious countries. Having avoided serious problems along the way.
There is no doubt that after Stalin had done away with Germany, he would have had a good reason to ask the Turks a number of serious questions that could end, for example, with the Istanbul offensive operation and the Soviet landing on both banks of the Dardanelles.
Against the background of the victorious Red Army, which has colossal combat experience, the Turkish army did not even look like a whipping boy, but like a harmless boxing bag. Therefore, she would have been finished in a matter of days. But after February 23, Stalin could no longer take and declare war on the "ally" in the anti-Hitler coalition. Although, had he done this a couple of months earlier, neither Britain nor the United States would have strongly protest, especially since Churchill had not objected to the transfer of the Strait Zone to the USSR at the Tehran Conference.
One can only guess how many ships - both commercial and military - of the Axis countries passed through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles in 1941-1944, how much raw materials Turkey supplied Germany and how much this extended the existence of the Third Reich. Also, you will never know what price the Red Army paid for the Turkish-German partnership, but there is no doubt that the Soviet soldiers paid for it with their lives.
For almost the entire war, Turkey was a non-belligerent ally of Hitler, regularly fulfilling all his wishes and supplying everything possible. And if, for example, Sweden can also be blamed for the supply of iron ore to Germany, then Turkey can be blamed not so much for trade cooperation with the Nazis as in providing them with the Strait Zone - the most important world communication. Which in wartime has always acquired and will acquire strategic importance.
The Second World War and Turkish "neutrality" once again proved what was well known since Byzantine times: without the possession of the Strait Zone, no country in the Black Sea-Mediterranean region can claim to be a great country.
This fully applies to Russia, which collapsed in 1917 largely due to the fact that the Russian tsars did not take control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles in the 19th century, and in the First World War it was very bad - if you can call it that - it was planned landing operation in the Bosphorus.
In our time, the problem of the Strait Zone has not become less relevant and it is possible that Russia will face this problem more than once. We can only hope that this will not have such fatal consequences as in 1917.
Intelligence struggle
Few people now guess: in 1941-1945, Turkish cities became the arena of a fierce struggle between the special services of the USSR and the Third Reich. Everything was used - the theft of secret documents, the recruitment of agents at the embassies, the physical elimination of "particularly objectionable" persons. The apotheosis of the confrontation was the explosion of a bomb on February 24, 1942 on Ataturk Boulevard, in the very center of Ankara. A young man (Bulgarian by nationality) tried to kill Hitler's envoy to Turkey, Franz von Papen, but the diplomat and his wife were only knocked down by the blast. True, even now it is not clear whose "order" it was. After the war, von Papen himself, in his memoirs, transparently hinted at a virtuoso operation by the Gestapo: the Germans thus simply "framed" Soviet intelligence in front of Turkey.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Turkish historian Mustafa Kelarim. - The special services behaved the same way as in neighboring Iran, - the police often found undocumented corpses with European appearance at the bottom of the Bosphorus. Once (shortly after Paulus' surrender in Stalingrad), a group of Germans attacked a coffee shop in Istanbul, where the Russians were celebrating the triumph of the Soviet army: an SS officer was killed in a shootout. Germany set a goal - to persuade Turkey to war against the USSR, and Moscow tried to prevent such an option. It is characteristic that most of the archival documents on this topic are still classified.
This is true, even now the Russian Embassy in Ankara flatly refused to comment on the events of that time for AiF. Meanwhile, it is not known whether we would now celebrate Victory if in the summer of 1942, in the midst of the German onslaught on Stalingrad, the Turkish army invaded the Caucasus …
“The Germans did a good job,” says Ahmet Burey, Doctor of Historical Sciences from Ankara. - On the one hand, they promised Turkey a "European way" of development, including Azerbaijan in it. On the other hand, a rumor spread in the villages: Hitler was marked by Allah, he was born with a "green belt around his waist" and … secretly converted to Islam, taking the name Heydar.
“Our work in Turkey was not a sinecure,” Ludwig Moisisch, the press attaché of the German embassy, wrote in his memoirs. "On the contrary, she was the most responsible that the diplomatic service of the Third Reich could offer." By the summer of 1942, the Germans had achieved excellent results: after the assassination attempt on von Papen, relations between the Turks and Moscow had become worse than ever. The resident of Soviet intelligence in Ankara, Georgy Mordvinov, was arrested, and 26 selected divisions of the Turkish army were concentrated on the border with the USSR. It seemed that a war with a new enemy could not be avoided …
Hauptsturmführer called for jihad
After the arrest of Mordvinov, the station in Ankara and Istanbul was headed by State Security Captain Mikhail Baturin. In fact, in a couple of months he should have convinced Turkey that the war against the USSR was a disaster. The work unfolded in all directions. Baturin himself later recalled in his memoirs: to meet with agents, he often disguised himself as a beggar, and as a wandering monk - dervish, and as a street vendor of sweets. Our reconnaissance post in Kars deployed its agents to the Kurdish areas under the guise of mullahs - in which case they had to raise an uprising in the rear of the Turks. This method was not new. For example, one of the residents of the Nazi intelligence SS Hauptsturmführer Julius Schulze in Iran also disguised himself as a mullah: having grown a beard, he held prayers every Friday, in excellent Persian calling on the faithful to jihad against the Russians and the British. Now the position of an intelligence officer is boring and technical, but then, in addition to everything else, he had to be an actor.
“The success of Soviet intelligence was in disinformation,” says Stephen Curling, a British historian living in Ankara. - Month after month, fantastic information was thrown into the General Staff of Turkey. For example, that the USSR transferred 50 divisions from the Far East to the Caucasus, and in which case the Russians will be in Ankara in two days. In reality, there was no such transfer. The number of Soviet agents in southeastern Turkey ready to raise the Kurds to an uprising was exaggerated a hundred times (!). There is a version that the Turks were given a fake war plan (allegedly stolen in Moscow from Stalin's own office), including the landing of an amphibious assault in Istanbul, the invasion of the Soviet army from Iran. The Turks understood that the game is not worth the candle.
As a result, Turkish President Ismet Inonu did not dare to start a war with the USSR in the summer and autumn of 1942, despite Hitler's pressure. After the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad, this completely lost its meaning. Two years later, Georgy Mordvinov and other Soviet intelligence officers accused of organizing the assassination attempt on von Papen were released from prison. After the Victory, Mikhail Baturin also left Ankara with the rank of colonel - his goal was achieved. He lived a long life and died in 1978.
… Thanks to the popularity of the film "Tehran-43", everyone in Russia knows about the confrontation between the intelligence services of Germany and the USSR in Iran. Now "AiF" told our readers about Turkey. However, an invisible front also existed in other neutral countries, such as Afghanistan and Egypt. Gathering information bit by bit, we will try to tell about this. Even if the archives are never declassified.
By the way
In the fall of 1943, British and Soviet intelligence in Ankara knocked off their feet, trying to track down the spy: he photographed and then handed over to the Germans secret documents about the meeting of the “big three” (Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt) in Tehran. However, the mole was never found. What a surprise it was when in 1954 he showed up himself, filing a lawsuit … against the government of the Federal Republic of Germany! The agent of the Nazis turned out to be the valet of the British Ambassador, Elias Bazna, who worked under the nickname Cicero. The Germans paid him £ 300,000 for information. The banknotes turned out to be counterfeit, and Bazna demanded to return his "honestly earned money". Cicero sued Germany for another 16 years, until he died, having received nothing.