Eduardo Propper de Callejón (1895-1972) was a Spanish diplomat who is mainly remembered for having facilitated the escape of thousands of Jews from occupied France during the World War II between 1940 and 1944.
He was the father-in-law of Raymond Bonham Carter and the maternal grandfather of British actress Helena Bonham Carter.[1][2]
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Propper de Callejón was First Secretary of the Spanish Embassy in Paris, when France surrendered to Nazi Germany on 20 June 1940. In order to prevent the Wehrmacht from plundering the art collection that his wife's family kept at the Chateau de 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 Aristides de Sousa Mendes, 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 prior authorization, 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.
Propper de Callejón's father, Max Propper, was a Bohemian Jew, and his mother, Juana Callejón, was a Spanish Catholic; they raised Eduardo and his brothers in the Catholic faith. His wife, Hélène Fould-Springer, was a socialite and painter. She was from a notable Jewish Austrian-French banking family. She converted to Catholicism after World War II.[3] She was a sister of prominent Paris art patron and philanthropist Liliane de Rothschild (Baroness Élie de Rothschild, 1916—2003).
He never gained public recognition for his heroic acts before his death in 1972 in London.
In 2008, he was officially recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance authority in Israel.[4]