Efforts to create an erroneous perception in historiography: The case of Stefan Ihrig

Abstract

Although history is a science based on concrete documents and information in the study of the past, it has started to be used as a tool of political powers, power centers, and groups who want to gain benefits by creating perceptions. As a result of the falsification of concrete facts, popularized history has started to replace real history and manipulate social perceptions. Dozens of popular historiographies create erroneous perceptions about the Turkish nation. These include the Blue Book, which portrays the 1915 events as the Armenian genocide, George Horton's "The Scourge of Asia", which claims that the Great Smyrna Fire was started by the Turks, and Margaret Housepian Dobkin's "Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City". One of these is Stefan Ihrig's "Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination". Immediately after the publication of the book by Harvard University Press, newspapers close to the Nazi Party and speeches of politicians within the party began to emphasize the admiration of the Nazis and Hitler for Atatürk, and it was discussed that Hitler took Atatürk as a role model. In particular, the book, which attempted to draw similarities between the Armenian deportation and the Holocaust, was also adopted and supported by some publications supporting the Armenian claims in order to strengthen the "so-called Armenian Genocide" allegations. This study aims to demonstrate the use of popular historiography as a method to create erroneous perceptions of societies by taking the book "Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination" by Stefan Ihrig as an example.