I can briefly explain Turkey: Turkey for the most part stayed out of the war, as it had allies on all sides and Atatürk had officially adopted a policy of "peace at home, peace in the world" in the 1930's, which his successors carried on. Turkey's treatment of the Jews in WW2 is perhaps the most interesting part of Turkey's WW2 policy. On the one hand, they were one of the few countries that actively offered refugee status to Jewish intellectuals and their families, for a total of a few hundred people. More importantly, they offered unparalleled protection for Turkish Jews and former Turkish Jews in territories under Nazi occupation. For historic reasons, many Middle Eastern Jews ended up in France. Turkish citizenship at the time required people to register every ten years or so while living abroad, and many of these emigrants had allowed their Turkish citizenship to lapse. To regain citizenship, you had to prove that you had family in Turkey. In a remarkably coordinated effort, the cosmopolitan Turkish diplomatic staff of France worked to save these Turkish and former Turkish Jews.

In the interest of time, let me just quote from an old post:

Four Turkish diplomats, Selahattin Ülkümen, Behiç Erkin, Namık Kemal Yolga, and Necdet Kent all worked together to save "Turkish Jews" from death. I use quotation marks because Turkish Jews had to check in the consulates to maintain their Turkish citizenship. Many failed to do so, and so legally their Turkish citizenship lapsed. The consulates in France (where the largest Turkish emigre community was) under ambassador Behiç Erkin chose to ignore that. To regain Turkish citizenship, one had to prove one had relatives still in Turkey (I believe). It's widely alleged that the Turkish consulates accepted the statement “I am Turkish, my relatives live in Turkey” in Turkish (no matter how poorly pronounced) as "proof" of Turkish citizenship and provided the necessary papers. But that's not all. On Rhodes, where there was a large Jewish community, when the Germans started to depart the Jews, Turkish Consul Selahattin Ülkümen demanded that the Turkish Jews (and any of their non-Turkish spouses and children) be saved. When the commander refused on the basis that they were due for transportation under Nazi law, Ülkümen said "under Turkish law all citizens were equal. We didn’t differentiate between citizens who were Jewish, Christian or Muslim," and explained that if the commander continued with the deportation of Turkish citizens, he would turn this into an international incident. The Nazi commander relented, though the Turkish consulted ended up being bombed killing Ülkümen's pregnant wife and two consular employees. However, the Turkish Jewish survived on Rhodes. Their neighbors with Greek passports on Rhodes were almost entirely destroyed in the Shoah, with fewer than 1 in 10 surviving the War.

When Necdet Kent found out the gestapo were rounding people up based on circumcision, Kent explained to the Nazis that this did not prove Jewishness. "When I saw the emptiness in the commander's eyes, I realize that he did not understand what I am saying. And I said that I will accept to be examined by their doctors." He told the Germans that Muslim men, including himself, were also circumcised. More impressively, Kent found out that 80 Turkish Jews had been rounded up and set to be deported to Germany. They were already loaded in to cattle cars. Kent later recalled, "To this day, I remember the inscription on the wagon: 'This wagon may be loaded with 20 heads of cattle and 500 kilograms of grass'." As was typical for Turkish diplomats (who seem to have the most coordinated policy for protecting their Jewish countrymen), Kent demanded that the Turkish citizens be released. The Gestapo commander said they were Jews and refused to release them. Kent then himself got on the train and refused to leave without the Turkish citizens. The train left with him still on board and, at the next station, the German officials had a car waiting for him, apologizing for the mistake and offering to take him back. Again he refused to leave without his co-nationals. Eventually, the German officials relented. Again, he makes the moral choice seem wonderfully simple, "As a representative of a government that rejected such treatment for religious beliefs, I could not consider leaving them there." Namık Kemal Yolga describes the success the Turkish consular staff had in saving all the Turkish Jews they could find:

Every time we learnt that a Turkish Jew was captured and sent to Drancy, the Turkish Embassy sent an ultimatum to the German Embassy in Paris and demanded his/her release, specifically pointing out that the Turkish Constitution does not discriminate its people for their race or religion, therefore Turkish Jews are Turkish nationals and Germans have no right to arrest them as Turkey was a neutral country during the war. Then I used to go to Drancy to pick him/her up with my car and put them in a safe house. As far as I know, only one Turkish Jew from Bordeaux was sent to a camp in Germany as the Turkish Embassy was not aware of his arrest at the time.

However, while Jews from abroad were well treated, Jews domestically were not always treated well. I am referring to the famous "Wealth Tax" of 1942 that was specifically targeted towards Jews, Armenians, and Greeks and, besides providing immediate money for the government, was also meant to help kick start a Muslim entrepreneurial middle class (which really hadn't existed in the Ottoman Empire--traders and businessmen were disproportionately minorities; see also "middle man minorities"). The Wealth Tax, and the subsequent pogrom of 1955, are generally pointed to as the two reasons why the Istanbul's large minority population of the 1930's was greatly diminished through emigration (particularly by Jews Israel and Greeks to Greece; Armenians had less ideal options) by the 1970's.

There were various smaller political intrigues in the Turkish political scene, but for the most part, the biggest event of the era was the Wealth Tax. Turkey was mainly focused on internal development (through things like Village Institutes and People's Houses), import-substitution industrialization (focused on "the three whites": sugar, flour, and cloth), and political opposition was relatively weak in this period (after the crushing of the last major revolt in 1938). The transition to democracy was 1945-1950, which opened up Turkey politically somewhat, as did it's NATO membership, but during this period it was going through a particularly strong isolationist period.