Eduardo Propper de Callejón
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Eduardo Propper de Callejón (1895-1972) was a Spanish diplomat who is mainly remembered for having facilitated the flight of thousands of Jews from Occupied France between 1940 and 1944.
[edit] Career
Propper de Callejón was First Secretary of the Spanish Embassy in Paris, when France surrendered to Germany on 20 June 1940. In order to prevent the German army from plundering the art collection that his wife's family kept at the Castle of Royaumont, he declared this castle to be his main residence, so it would be treated in the same privileged way as the accommodation of any other diplomat. Among the art works thus saved are a triptych of Van Eyck (one of Adolf Hitler´s favourite painters).
In July 1940, he issued from the Spanish Consulate in Bordeaux, in co-operation with the Portuguese Consul Arístedes de Sousa Menendes, more than thirty thousand transit visas to Jews, so that they could cross Spain to reach Portugal. When Spain's Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Suñer learnt that Propper de Callejón was issuing visas without the previous authorisation of his Ministry, he had him transferred to the Consulate of Larache in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. Afterwards, he would be posted to Rabat, Zurich, Washington, Ottawa and Oslo.
[edit] Miscellaneous
He never gained public recognition for his heroic acts before his death in 1972 in London.
His wife, Hélène Fould-Springer, was Jewish, though she converted to Catholicism upon their marriage; She was a sister of the art patron Liliane de Rothschild (Baroness Elie de Rothschild, 1916—2003). Propper de Callejón was also the maternal grandfather of the British actress Helena Bonham Carter.
