I've been reading the book Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination by Stefan Ihrig, and according to his book, Ataturk is a cult personality to the ranks of Nazis, especially for Hitler himself. The book even claims that Hitler had a bust of Ataturk, and Goebbels kept writing about Ataturk's health status during Turkish leader's last days. Is it correct to conclude that Nazi ideology roots back to Turkish Kemalism? I can't be sure if the book exaggerates the influence or events in Turkey between 1919-1945, because I can't find any other sources that links these two movements directly together.
...because I can't find any other sources that links these two movements directly together.
That is because no serious historian would link these two movements due to the near-absence of Ataturk and the Turkey in the key primary sources about the Nazi ideology like Mein Kampf or Table Talks.
Hitler saw in Ataturk what he wished to see. To be sure, like Mussolini, there was a lot that Hitler found genuinely appealing in Ataturk: his nationalism, his independent and revisionist foreign policy, his authoritarianism, his "saving the nation" after a defeat in the First World War, his secularism(Hitler privately expressed deep jealousy of the fact that he couldn't castrate the Catholic priests like that from the get-go: that was on his to-do list.), and his social reforms, such as those that extended education to all ("of the race", as per Nazi dogma), regardless of class. Like Mussolini, he was "right wing", but drastically departed from "reactionaries" of the old school and was futuristic and in a way, revolutionary. Hitler saw himself as the same, and to a large extent was. The admiration was far from limited to Hitler on the German right: General von Seeckt, the man behind Germany's military deep state in the 20s, noted Ataturk as someone who followed an active policy for his own nation.
However, I wouldn't overestimate Ataturk's influence on Nazi ideology, which at its core was specifically native to Germany and German concerns. Even the influence of Italian Fascism had its limits-Italian Fascism, for example, was not anti-Semitic. For one thing, Ataturk did not fully "cleanse" Turkey of non-Turks, such as the Kurds. For another thing, Ataturk was not interested in starting another war-he got rid of the Greeks in Turkey, but then established an alliance with Greece. Ataturk was far more Von Seeckt than Hitler in terms of the USSR: while he made sure to keep native Communists on a very tight leash and made clear to Moscow that he wasn't interested in "fraternal Marxist brotherhood"(read: under the benevolent leadership of the Kremlin), he was perfectly happy to have pragmatic, cordial relations with the USSR, particularly as that was seen as another "defeated" state who sought changes to the international system. (Von Seeckt, other generals like Von Schleicher, and some of the Northern "socialist" Nazis, such as the Strasser brothers and the pre-Bamberg Josef Goebbels, saw the USSR rather than the UK and Italy as Germany's natural ally against Versailles. This was a sentiment completely unacceptable to Hitler by the time he wrote Mein Kampf.) Ataturk even toyed with the idea of placing the Communist Party under state control and letting it publicly take a part in politics to woo the USSR. Hard to see Mussolini, let alone Hitler doing that.
EDIT:
I remember reading Timur Vermes' book when Hitler wakes up in 21st Century Berlin. He concludes that the Turks saved Germany and were in some sort of military alliance with the new Germany. Hitler commented that while he was deeply impressed with Ataturk's reforms, he would have never thought "the Turk" as capable of such an achievement.