Angel Sanz Briz

Angel Sanz Briz was the Spanish charge d’affaires in Budapest from May 1944 to November 1944. He was thirty four years old, a career Spanish diplomat from Zaragoza, Catholic, conservative, a faithful servant of the Franco regime that had governed Spain since 1939. The Spanish state under Franco had a complicated wartime position: it was officially neutral, it was sympathetic to Germany on the basis of German support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and it was unwilling to break decisively with the Allies in the closing years of the war. The Spanish foreign ministry had given its diplomatic posts in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia general latitude in 1943, 1944 to assist Sephardic Jews of distant Spanish ancestry under the 1924 Spanish nationality law of King Alfonso XIII. Sanz Briz arrived in Budapest in May 1944 with this latitude already in place. He turned it into a major rescue operation.

The Hungarian Jewish community of around eight hundred thousand people had become a target for German extermination after the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944. The deportations of Hungarian Jews from the provinces to Auschwitz between mid May and early July 1944 took around four hundred and forty thousand people in around two months. The Jews of Budapest, around two hundred thousand people, were the surviving remnant. The Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy halted the deportations on 7 July 1944 under international pressure, including a personal protest from King Gustav of Sweden. The pause held until October 1944, when the German-installed Arrow Cross government under Ferenc Szálasi resumed the persecution. Sanz Briz used the pause to set up a Spanish protection programme for Hungarian Jews on the broadest possible interpretation of the 1924 nationality law.

The 1924 law was the legal basis. It allowed Spain to grant nationality to Sephardic Jews descended from those expelled from Spain in 1492. The actual application of the law in 1924, 1939 had been narrow; only a few hundred Sephardic Jews had been formally granted Spanish nationality. Sanz Briz interpreted the law expansively. He issued Spanish protection passes, the carta de protección, to Hungarian Jews on the strength of any plausible Sephardic ancestry, and to many Hungarian Jews who had no Sephardic ancestry at all on the strength of forged or improvised documentation that he chose not to investigate too closely. He had a quota of two hundred protection passes that the Madrid foreign ministry had authorised. He issued around three hundred and fifty in formal terms. By extending each pass to cover the family members of the holder, and by replacing each pass after expiry with a new one without removing the old one from the registers, he turned the two hundred-quota into protection for around five thousand two hundred individuals. He also rented eight buildings in Budapest, declared them Spanish diplomatic property, and housed several thousand of the protected Jews inside them under the Spanish flag.

The work was done with the active cooperation of the Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasca, who was working at the Spanish embassy as a refugee under his own Spanish honorary citizenship from his service in the Spanish Civil War. Perlasca was Sanz Briz’s deputy in the protection operation through the autumn of 1944. The two men together negotiated with the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, with the German embassy, with the Arrow Cross authorities, and with the Hungarian gendarmerie, to keep the Spanish-protected Jews from deportation. The methods were the standard combination of bribery, bluff and the appearance of Spanish diplomatic authority. The arrangement worked. The five thousand two hundred Spanish-protected Jews were almost all alive at the Soviet liberation of Budapest in mid January 1945.

Sanz Briz was recalled to Madrid in late November 1944 on Spanish foreign ministry orders. The Spanish state was preparing to recognise the new Hungarian Arrow Cross government and the Spanish embassy was being reduced to a skeleton staff. He left Budapest on 30 November 1944. The protection operation continued under Perlasca’s improvised authority for the next forty five days until the Soviet army arrived. Sanz Briz returned to Madrid in early December 1944 and continued his diplomatic career through the Franco period and after, serving as Spanish ambassador to Belgium, Peru, the Vatican, the Netherlands and China. He died in Rome in June 1980 at the age of seventy.

Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in 1966. The Spanish state acknowledged his service in the late 1990s and posthumously awarded him the Cross of Isabella the Catholic. The Sanz Briz family donated his diplomatic papers to the Spanish Foreign Ministry archives, where they are now held. The Hungarian state issued a postage stamp in his honour in 2014 and the Spanish embassy in Budapest, in the same building from which he had run the operation, has installed a permanent commemorative display. The case is the principal example of Spanish wartime moral conduct in the German occupation period and is the closest Spain has to a wartime rescuer of the stature of Wallenberg, Lutz or Sousa Mendes.

See also

Sources

  • Diego Carcedo, Un español frente al Holocausto: Así salvó Ángel Sanz Briz a 5,000 judíos, Temas de Hoy, 2000
  • Federico Ysart, España y los judíos en la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Dopesa, 1973
  • Bernd Rother, Spanien und der Holocaust, Niemeyer, 2001
  • Yad Vashem, file on Angel Sanz Briz, Righteous Among the Nations, 1966
  • Spanish Foreign Ministry archives, Madrid, files on the Budapest legation, 1944
  • Hungarian National Archives, Budapest, files on the foreign legations, 1944, 1945