Carl Lutz
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Carl Lutz (b. Walzenhausen, 30 March 1895; d. Berne,12 February 1975) was the Swiss Vice-Consul in Budapest, Hungary from 1942 until the end of World War II. He helped save the lives of tens of thousands of Jews from deportation to Nazi Extermination camps during the Holocaust. He was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1965.
Lutz emigrated at the age of 18 to the United States, where he was to remain for more than 20 years. After working in Illinois and then studying at Central Wesleyan College in Warrenton, Missouri, Lutz went to work in 1920 at the Swiss Legation in Washington. He continued his education at George Washington University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1924. During his time in Washington, DC, Lutz lived in Dupont Circle. After serving as chancellor at the Swiss Consulates in Philadelphia and St. Louis from 1926 to 1934, Lutz’s more than 20-year sojourn in the United States ended with his assignment as vice-consul to the Swiss Consulate General in Jaffa, in what was then Palestine.
Appointed in 1942 as Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, Hungary, Lutz soon began cooperating with the Jewish Agency for Palestine, issuing Swiss safe-conduct documents enabling Jewish children to emigrate.
Once the Nazis took over Budapest in 1944 and began deporting Jews to the death camps, Lutz negotiated a special deal with the Hungarian government and the Nazis: he had permission to issue protective letters to 8,000 Hungarian Jews for emigration to Palestine.
Lutz then deliberately misinterpreted his permission for 8,000 as applying to families rather than individuals, and proceeded to issue tens of thousands of additional protective letters, all of them bearing a number between one and 8,000. He also set up some 76 safe houses around Budapest, declaring them annexes of the Swiss legation.
Together with other diplomats of neutral countries, such as Raoul Wallenberg, appointed at the Swedish embassy, Angelo Rotta, the Apostolic nuncio, Angel Sanz Briz, the Spanish Minister, later followed by Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian businessman working at the Spanish embassy, and Friedrich Born, the Swiss delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Lutz worked relentlessly for many months to prevent the planned death of innocent people, dodging the action of their German and Hungarian counterparts. Thanks to his diplomatic skills he succeeded in persuading Hungarian and Nazi-German officials, among them Adolf Eichmann, to tolerate, at least in part, his formal protection of Hungarian Jews. The Swiss Minister, Maximilian Jaeger, supported him thoroughly until he was ordered to leave the Country by the Swiss government, as the Soviets approached. In the last weeks before the Red Army took the city, Lutz was greatly helped by Harald Feller, who took over responsibility of the Swiss legation after Jaeger's departure. Of note, Lutz's wife Trudi played a central supporting role during the whole period of her husband's activity in Budapest.
His engagement allowed the lives of tens of thousands of people to be saved. However, similarly to Paul Grüninger, his achievements were not recognized until 1958, when he was "rehabilitated" in Switzerland, after having been accused of having exceeded his authority. In 1963 a street was named after Lutz in Haifa, Israel, and since 1991 a memorial wall at the entrance to the old Budapest ghetto remembers him.
In 1964, Lutz became the first Swiss national named “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, the Jewish people’s memorial to the Holocaust.
Lutz died in Bern, Switzerland, in 1975.
