The Varlik Vergisi, a one-off capital tax approved by the Turkish parliament on 11 November 1942, was presented as a wartime defence measure but was assessed through separate lists that taxed non-Muslim citizens, chiefly Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Levantines, at rates several times higher than Muslims, in some cases exceeding a taxpayer's entire wealth. There was no appeal, payment was demanded within fifteen days, and property including that of close relatives was seized and auctioned, in many cases to Muslim buyers at low prices. Those who could not pay were sent to labour camps in eastern Anatolia, principally Askale near Erzurum, where they worked on roads and in quarries with half their wages deducted against the debt; the law's exemption for men over fifty-five was frequently ignored, and twenty-one detainees died. The tax was repealed in March 1944 and outstanding debts cancelled after criticism from Turkey's wartime partners, but the confiscations were not reversed. The episode, together with the 1934 Thrace events and the 1955 Istanbul pogrom already in this atlas, is treated by historians as a major driver of the departure of Turkey's non-Muslim communities; Turkish governments have generally treated it as a fiscal measure of its time rather than as a discriminatory act requiring redress.
The Turkish state levied a discriminatory capital tax on non-Muslim citizens and sent defaulters to labour camps in eastern Anatolia
The Turkish census of 1935 recorded about 78,700 Jews and some 240,000 Christians (mainly Armenians and Greeks), giving a non-Muslim total of roughly 320,000 out of 16.2 million. The tax was assessed on about 87,000 taxpayers, a majority of them non-Muslim, and non-Muslims were assessed at several times the rate applied to Muslims.
Twenty-one deaths among those held in the eastern Anatolian labour camps are recorded in the standard accounts, mostly among elderly men unable to withstand the work and the climate. There was no killing beyond this; the tax's principal effects were dispossession and emigration rather than death.
Compulsory labour for defaulters, the separate classification of citizens by religion for tax purposes and the confiscation and auction of homes and businesses are documented in Turkish finance ministry records and in historical studies of the tax.
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