Names like Raoul Wallenberg, Oscar Schindler, Corrie Ten Boom, Maximilian Kolbe, Irena Opdyke and so many more come to mind, but one man and his wife with whom I was not familiar was the subject of an article in The Federalist written by Amy Lutz.
The couple was Carl and Trudi Lutz (no relation to Amy), and they're credited by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. with having saved over 62,000 people during the war. Carl was a Swiss-American who worked for the Swiss diplomatic corps prior to WWII.
I encourage you to read the full article at the link to learn his background, but he was posted to Palestine before the war and then during the war to Budapest, Hungary. Here's the account of what he did once he found himself in Budapest:
[An] incident occurred during Lutz’s time in Palestine that would forever alter his perception. One day while standing on the roof of their apartment, Lutz and his wife Trudi saw four Jewish men lynched in the street. The next day, Lutz wrote a letter to his brother in which he said the following, “As I swore to the victims, as they suffered hits and stabs, that one day I would speak up for them.”
That opportunity would come soon enough. In 1942, Lutz transferred to Budapest, where he resided when the Nazis arrived in Hungary in March 1944. Lutz recalled the protective papers he used to assist German Jews in Palestine and determined they could be used to protect Hungarian Jews from being sent to Auschwitz. While it was unlikely anyone could find a way from Budapest to Palestine in the chaos and terror of 1944-1945, those holding the protective papers were considered to be under Swiss protection and exempt from deportation.
Lutz procured 8,000 protective “units” but realized his efforts would be for naught if he did not ensure that the Nazi forces ruling Hungary would honor them. He scheduled a meeting with a high-ranking Nazi official who had just arrived in Budapest, Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann, one of the Third Reich’s leading facilitators of the Holocaust, was a bit taken aback by the request from the well-dressed, albeit soft-spoken diplomat. He even used their initial meeting as an opportunity to mock Lutz, comparing him to Moses attempting to rescue his people. However, Eichmann did pass along the request. Soon after, Lutz received word that Germany would authorize the 8,000 protective papers, in part because of Lutz’s previous work in Palestine [on behalf of German civilians trapped there when hostilities broke out].
Lutz immediately launched a plan to rescue far more than 8,000 people. While Eichmann assumed the 8,000 “units” Lutz requested meant 8,000 individuals, Lutz instead determined that “units” meant “families,” thereby increasing the number of people he could protect. He immediately began to disseminate the papers throughout Budapest.
Forged Swiss protective documents also began to appear in the city, but Lutz looked the other way. He also placed 76 buildings under Swiss diplomatic protection, where he was able to house thousands of Hungarian Jews who had lost their homes and property. Lutz frequently stepped in to rescue individual Hungarian Jews, once jumping in the Danube river to rescue a Jewish woman shot by fascist militia.
Eichmann eventually discovered Lutz’s deception in late 1944. Instead of refusing to authorize any neutral protective papers, the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators hatched a devious plan. They brought Carl and Trudi Lutz to a brickyard, where Hungarian Jews were kept prisoner before deportation to Auschwitz. The authorities forced the Lutzes to identify forged Swiss protective papers, and they complied to preserve the authority of the legitimate papers.
While the couple attempted to falsely validate the more convincing forgeries, they could not do so for all the papers. Hungarian Jews with documents that could not be validated were no longer protected from deportation and were sent to their death. The experience haunted Carl and Trudi Lutz for the rest of their lives.
In a 1949 report, Lutz summarized his motivations behind his rescue efforts, writing that he did not consider himself a “Christian in name only” and therefore found it a “matter of conscience” to rescue the Hungarian Jews “condemned to die.”
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| Carl Lutz in 1944 |