Giorgio Perlasca was an Italian businessman who, between December 1944 and January 1945, posed as the Spanish charge d’affaires in Budapest and used the position to save the lives of around five thousand Hungarian Jews. He had no diplomatic credentials. He had been living at the Spanish embassy as a refugee under a Spanish protection certificate that he had obtained in 1942 in recognition of his service in the Spanish Civil War on the Nationalist side. The actual Spanish charge d’affaires Angel Sanz Briz had been recalled to Madrid in early December 1944. The embassy’s Jewish protection programme, which Sanz Briz had been running on the same lines as Wallenberg’s Swedish operation, was about to collapse. Perlasca, faced with the imminent abandonment of around five thousand people in the Spanish-protected houses, decided to claim the post as Sanz Briz’s successor. He had no authority to do so. He printed his own identification papers, presented himself to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry as the new charge d’affaires, and ran the embassy’s Jewish protection programme for the next forty five days until the Soviet army reached the city.
Perlasca was forty four. He had volunteered for the Italian forces in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 on the Nationalist side, had been promoted to lieutenant, and had received a Spanish honorary citizenship in recognition of his service that included the right to claim Spanish protection in any country where he might find himself. He had become disillusioned with Mussolini’s regime in the late 1930s and had moved to neutral Hungary in 1942 to work as a meat purchasing agent for the Italian army. After the Italian armistice with the Allies in September 1943, when Hungary was still aligned with the Axis, Perlasca was at risk of arrest. He invoked his Spanish honorary citizenship and was admitted to the Spanish embassy in Budapest as a protected refugee in October 1944.
The Spanish embassy under Sanz Briz had been issuing Spanish protection passes, the carta de protección, to Hungarian Jews on the basis of an interpretation of the 1924 Spanish nationality law that allowed Spain to claim protection over Sephardic Jews of distant Spanish ancestry. The interpretation was broad. The passes had been issued at the rate of several hundred per week throughout October and November 1944, and the Spanish embassy had also taken over a number of Budapest buildings as Spanish protected houses, in which around five thousand Jewish protected persons were sheltering by early December. The Hungarian Foreign Ministry had agreed to recognise the protection on a case by case basis. The German embassy had agreed not to interfere directly. The arrangement was holding together by the same combination of bluff, bribery and German indifference that the Swedish operation under Wallenberg was using.
Sanz Briz’s recall to Madrid in early December 1944 was on Spanish foreign ministry orders. Spain was preparing to recognise the new Hungarian Arrow Cross government, and the Spanish embassy in Budapest was being reduced to a skeleton staff. Sanz Briz left on 30 November 1944. The protection of the five thousand people in the Spanish houses was about to lapse. Perlasca, who had been working as Sanz Briz’s deputy in the protection operation, decided that he could not let it collapse. He printed himself a new identification document on the embassy stationery, identified himself to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry as the new Spanish charge d’affaires, and continued issuing protection passes and running the protected houses as if Sanz Briz had not left.
The Hungarian authorities accepted the new charge d’affaires without serious challenge. The German embassy raised the issue with Madrid in mid December 1944 but the Spanish foreign ministry was distracted by other concerns and did not press the case. The Soviet army reached Budapest on 17 January 1945. The five thousand Spanish-protected Jews in Perlasca’s care were almost all alive. Perlasca remained at the embassy through the Soviet siege, was briefly held for questioning by Soviet officers, and made his way back to Italy in spring 1945.
He went back to his pre-war meat trading business in Padua and said almost nothing about his Budapest experience for the next forty years. The case emerged only in the late 1980s after a small group of Hungarian Jewish women in their sixties, who had been protected children in the Spanish houses in 1944, traced him through the Hungarian Jewish community in Israel and called on him in Padua. The Hungarian state journalist Eniko Lonkay’s interviews with Perlasca and the protected children were broadcast on Hungarian television in 1989. The Italian press picked up the story. The Italian state awarded him the Cross of Merit of the Republic in 1989. Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in 1989. He died in Padua in 1992 at the age of eighty two.
The case is unusual in two respects. The Spanish foreign ministry, although it was Perlasca’s nominal employer in 1944, has never officially acknowledged his service, on the technical ground that he was never a Spanish diplomat and was acting in deliberate impersonation of one. The Spanish state position is that Sanz Briz, the actual charge d’affaires, was the rescuer and that Perlasca was a private individual whose actions were unauthorised. The other unusual feature is the form of the rescue itself. Perlasca was not a credentialed diplomat protected by sovereign immunity in any meaningful sense. He was a private individual playing the part of a diplomat in a city under armed occupation, with the constant risk that the impersonation would be exposed and that he would be shot as an enemy agent. The forty five days he held the position are among the most audacious bluffs in the rescue literature.
See also
Sources
- Enrico Deaglio, The Banality of Goodness: The Story of Giorgio Perlasca, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998
- Giorgio Perlasca, L’impostore, Il Mulino, 1997
- Yad Vashem, file on Giorgio Perlasca, Righteous Among the Nations, 1989
- Hungarian National Archives, Budapest, files on the foreign legations, 1944, 1945
- Spanish Foreign Ministry archives, Madrid, files on the Budapest legation, 1944
- Fondazione Giorgio Perlasca, Padua, archives