Carl Lutz

Carl Lutz was the Swiss vice-consul in Budapest from 1942 to 1945. He was forty nine years old in 1944 and the head of what was, in formal terms, a small Swiss legation operation in a city that had been at war for five years. He had spent his pre-war career in junior consular positions in Saint Louis, Philadelphia and Tel Aviv, where he had been Swiss vice-consul during the period of British Mandate Palestine and where he had developed both a deep knowledge of the Jewish refugee question and a network of Jewish contacts in the Zionist movement. The Tel Aviv experience, on the present record, was the formative one for what he did in Budapest.

The Swiss legation in Budapest had been responsible since 1942 for the diplomatic protection of British, American and other Allied citizens trapped in Hungary by the war. Switzerland was a neutral country and the protection of enemy civilians was a standard Swiss diplomatic responsibility. Lutz used the protection authority extensively in 1942, 1944 to obtain emigration permits for Jews who could plausibly claim some Allied connection. The Hungarian authorities, who had become increasingly antisemitic but who had not yet begun systematic deportations, accepted the Swiss protection on a case by case basis. By the time of the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944, around eight thousand Jews had emigrated from Hungary on Swiss-issued documentation.

The crisis came in the spring and summer of 1944. The Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz began on 14 May 1944 and proceeded at the rate of around twelve thousand people per day. By early July around four hundred and forty thousand Hungarian Jews had been deported and the Budapest community of around two hundred thousand was next on the schedule. Lutz, working under instructions from the Swiss Foreign Ministry that authorised him to issue Swiss protection documents to Jews with verifiable connections to British Mandate Palestine, expanded the operation far beyond what the rules envisaged. He printed Swiss Schutzbriefe, protection letters, in batches of eight thousand at a time and issued them to Hungarian Jews with the most tenuous Palestine connections, often after accepting verbal assurance that a sister or a cousin had emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s. He registered each Schutzbrief at the Hungarian Foreign Ministry as a Swiss protection document under the existing diplomatic agreement. He set up the Glass House at Vadasz Street 29 in Budapest, a former glass factory, as the Swiss legation’s emigration office, where Jewish refugees gathered by the thousand to apply for the Schutzbriefe. The Glass House housed approximately three thousand Jewish refugees inside its walls during the autumn of 1944.

Lutz also established a network of seventy six Swiss-protected houses across Budapest, the Schutzhauser, in which around twenty five thousand additional Jewish refugees were sheltering by the end of 1944 under nominal Swiss diplomatic protection. He worked closely with Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish charge d’affaires; with Angel Sanz Briz and then Giorgio Perlasca at the Spanish embassy; with the Vatican nuncio Angelo Rotta; and with the International Red Cross representatives Friedrich Born and Marie Schmolka. The five operations together protected around one hundred and twenty thousand Hungarian Jews in Budapest in autumn 1944 and early winter 1944, 1945, mostly through the same combination of nominal foreign protection documents and protected-house arrangements.

The Hungarian Arrow Cross authorities, after October 1944, recognised the Swiss protections in increasingly perfunctory ways. Hungarian gendarmes raided the Glass House on 6 December 1944 and shot a number of refugees in the courtyard. Lutz physically intervened. He stood in the courtyard of the Glass House between the gendarmes and the refugees and refused to let the gendarmes proceed, on the grounds that the building was Swiss diplomatic property under Hungarian and international law and that any further violence would be a Swiss diplomatic matter. The gendarmes withdrew. The episode is documented in the Swiss Foreign Ministry files and in Lutz’s own postwar account.

The Soviet army reached Budapest in mid January 1945. Around fifty four thousand Hungarian Jews had been protected by the Swiss legation in formal documentary terms, and around twenty five thousand more had been sheltered in the Schutzhauser without formal documentation. The total number of Hungarian Jews whose lives Lutz directly saved is estimated at around sixty two thousand, the largest count of any single rescuer in the Holocaust period. The Wallenberg figure may be higher under broader interpretations. The Lutz figure is firm under the strict count.

Lutz returned to Switzerland after the war and was reprimanded by the Swiss Foreign Ministry for having exceeded his authority. He spent the rest of his career in junior diplomatic posts. The Swiss state did not recognise his work until much later. He died in Bern in February 1975 at the age of eighty. Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in 1965. The Swiss government issued a posthumous formal apology in 1995 for its earlier reprimand. The Glass House at Vadasz Street 29 in Budapest is now a museum dedicated to the rescue operation.

See also

Sources

  • Theo Tschuy, Dangerous Diplomacy: The Story of Carl Lutz, Rescuer of 62,000 Hungarian Jews, Eerdmans, 2000
  • Agnes Hirschi (ed.), Die zweite Front: Carl Lutz und die Rettung von 62,000 ungarischen Juden, Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1995
  • Yad Vashem, file on Carl Lutz, Righteous Among the Nations, 1965
  • Swiss Foreign Ministry archives, Bern, files on the Budapest legation, 1942, 1945
  • Carl Lutz Foundation, Budapest, archives at the Glass House Memorial Museum
  • Hungarian National Archives, Budapest, files on the foreign legations, 1944, 1945