List of individuals and groups assisting Jews during the Holocaust

Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Nazi occupied Poland in accordance with Japanese policy.^[1] The last diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train.

Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes, between June 16 and 23, 1940, frantically issued Portuguese visas, free of charge, to over 30,000 refugees seeking to escape the Nazi terror.

Dimitar Peshev, Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria and Minister of Justice during World War II. He rebelled against the pro-Nazi cabinet and prevented the Deportation of Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews.
Official portrait, Council of Europe Art Collection, Author: Ivan Minekov.

This is a partial list of rescuers who helped Jewish people and others to escape from the Nazi Holocaust during World War II, possibly the most well-known among whom was Oskar Schindler. The list is not exhaustive, concentrating on famous cases, or people who saved the lives of many potential victims. Since 1963, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, has recognized 24,356^[1] people as Righteous among the Nations (as of 1 January 2013). The commission, called The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, organized by Yad Vashem and headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, has been charged with the duty of awarding people who rescued Jews the honorary title of Righteous among the Nations.

Most prominent examples

Holocaust rescuers came from many different countries in the world.

Netherlands

Miep Gies, the woman who tried to save Anne Frank and her family, is one of the most famous because of the wide dissemination of The Diary of Anne Frank, but there were thousands of others, notably Gertruida Wijsmuller-Meier (also known as Truus Wijsmuller and Tante Truus), who saved many Jewish children, and the Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk, who saved 3,000 to 6,000 people. They also included Corrie ten Boom, industrialist Frits Philips, publisher Geert Lubberhuizen, writer Godfried Bomans, and Hetty Voute, Gisela Wieberdink, Rut Matthijsen, Piet Meerberg, Heiltje Kooristra, Ted Leeders, and M.J.Bultena in Uithuizen who was hunted and shot to death by the Nazis after World War II was over for helping so many. See commemorative stone on Bultenastraat Uithuizen. Also, Alcia Holmann helped with Anne Frank.

Books that report on these individuals include the Corrie ten Boom classic The Hiding Place, No Time for Tears, the story of Truus Wijsmuller-Meijer, The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage^[2] by Mark Klempner, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust by Malka Drucker, Saving the Children by Dutch historian Bert Jan Flim, and Miep Gies' own book, Anne Frank Remembered. Of course, The Diary of Anne Frank also provides vivid descriptions of the efforts Miep and her husband made to try to help the Frank family survive and keep their hiding place from being discovered by the Nazis, as well as from those Dutch who were collaborating with the Nazis. These days in Amsterdam, people may visit both the Anne Frank House and the Resistance Museum to learn more about efforts the Dutch made to resist the Nazis and to protect those targeted by the Nazis for destruction.

Poland

Until the end of Communist domination much of German-occupied Poland's Holocaust history was hidden behind the veil of the Iron Curtain. During WW2 under Nazi occupation, Poland was the only country where any help provided to a person of Jewish faith or origin was punishable by death, see Polish Righteous among the Nations. Yet 6,195 men and women (more than from any other country in the world) have been recognized as rescuers by Yad Vashem in Israel.^[3][4] Their real life stories of courage are just beginning to be told.^[5] Many of the rescuers were women and children; and teenagers.^[6] Poland during the Holocaust of World War II was under total enemy control, half of Poland was occupied by the Germans including General Government and Reichskomissariat; the other half by the Soviets, along with the territories of today's Belarus and Ukraine. The list of Polish citizens officially recognised as Righteous include 700 names of those who lost their lives while trying to help their Jewish neighbors.^[7] There were also groups, such as the Polish Żegota organization, that took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue victims. Witold Pilecki, a member of Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, organized a resistance movement in Auschwitz from 1940, and Jan Karski tried to spread word of the Holocaust.

Greece

The Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture writes "One cannot forget the repeated initiatives of the head of the Greek Christian Orthodox Metropolitan See of Thessaloniki, Gennadios, against the deportations, and most of all, the official letter of protest signed in Athens on March 23, 1943, by Archbishop Damaskinos of the Greek Orthodox Church, along with 27 prominent leaders of cultural, academic and professional organizations. The document, written in a very sharp language, refers to unbreakable bonds between Christian Orthodox and Jews, identifying them jointly as Greeks, without differentiation. It is noteworthy that such a document is unique in the whole of occupied Europe, in character, content and purpose".^[8]

The 275 Jews of the island of Zakynthos, however, survived the Holocaust. When the island's mayor, Lucas Κarrer (Λουκάς Καρρέρ), was presented with the German order to hand over a list of Jews, Bishop Chrysostomos returned to the amazed Germans with a list of two names; his and the mayor's. Moreover, the Bishop wrote a letter to Hitler himself stating that the Jews of the island were under his supervision.^[9] In the meantime the island's population hid every member of the Jewish community. When the island was almost levelled by the great earthquake of 1953, the first relief came from the state of Israel, with a message that read "The Jews of Zakynthos have never forgotten their Mayor or their beloved Bishop and what they did for us."^[10]

The Jewish community of Volos, one of the most ancient in Greece, has had fewer losses than any other Jewish community in Greece thanks to the timely and dynamic intervention and mobilization of the massive communist-leftist partizan movement of EAM-ELAS (National Liberation Front (Greece) - Greek People's Liberation Army) and the successful cooperation of the head of the Greek Christian Orthodox Metropolitan See of Demetrias Joachim and the chief rabbi of Volos Moses Pesach for the evacuation of Volos from the Jewish people, after the events in Thessaloniki (displacement of the city's Jews to concentration camps).

Princess Alice of Battenberg and Greece, who was the wife of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom stayed in occupied Athens during the Second World War, sheltering Jewish refugees, for which she is recognised as "Righteous Among the Nations" at Yad Vashem. Although the Germans and Bulgarians^[11] deported a great number of Greek Jews, others were successfully hidden by their Greek neighbours.

France

The French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered several thousand Jews. The Brazilian diplomat Luis Martins de Souza Dantas illegally issued Brazilian diplomatic visas to hundreds of Jews in France during the Vichy Government, saving them from almost certain death. Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the religious head of the Islamic Center of France helped more than a thousand Jews by providing fake IDs to the Jews of Paris during the German occupation of France. He also managed to hide many Jewish families in the rooms of Paris Mosque as well as in the residencies and women's prayer areas.^{[12][13][14][15]}

Belgium

In April 1943, members of the Belgian resistance held up the twentieth convoy train to Auschwitz, and freed 231 people. Several local governments did all they could to slow down or block the registration processes for Jews they were obliged to perform by the Nazis. Many people saved children by hiding them away in private houses and boarding schools. Of the approximately 50,000 Jews in Belgium in 1940, about 25,000 were deported—though only about 1,250 survived. Marie and Emile Taquet sheltered Jewish boys in a residential school or home. The Reverend Bruno Reynders was a Catholic Belgian Monk who defied the Nazis (as well as the Vatican, ^{please verify}) to work with local orphanages, Nuns and the Jewish and Belgian Underground to forge false identities for Jewish children whose parents willingly gave them up in an attempt to spare their lives faced with deportation to the death camps. Pere Bruno risked his life for his values and to save the lives of an estimated 400 Jewish children and is honored as a Righteous Gentile at Yad Vashem

Denmark

The Jewish community in Denmark remained relatively unaffected by Germany's occupation of Denmark on April 9, 1940. The Germans allowed the Danish government to remain in office and this cabinet rejected the notion that any "Jewish question" should exist in Denmark. No legislation was passed against Jews and the yellow badge was not introduced in Denmark. In August 1943, this situation was about to collapse as the Danish government refused to introduce the death penalty as demanded by the Germans following a series of strikes and popular protests. During these events, German diplomat Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz tipped off Danish politician Hans Hedtoft that the Danish Jews would be deported to Germany following the collapse of the Danish government. Hedtoft alerted the Danish resistance and the Jewish leader C.B. Henriques informed the acting Chief Rabbi Marcus Melchior in the absence of the Chief Rabbi Max Friediger who had already been arrested as a hostage on August 29, 1943, urging the community to go into hiding in a service on September 29, 1943. During the following weeks, more than 7,200 of Denmark's 8,000 strong Jewish community were ferried to neutral Sweden hidden in fishing boats. A small number of Jews, some 450 in all, were captured by the Germans and shipped to Theresienstadt. Danish officials were able to ensure that these prisoners weren't shipped to extermination camps, and Danish Red Cross inspections and food packages ensured focus on the Danish Jews. Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte ensured their release and transport to Denmark in the final days of the war. Denmark rescued around 7,200 Jews en masse in October 1943.

Bulgaria

The Nazi-allied government of Bulgaria, led by Bogdan Filov, fully and actively assisted in the Holocaust in the areas of Yugoslav Macedonia and Greece which it occupied on direct orders from German authorities. On Passover 1943 Bulgaria rounded up the great majority of Jews in its zones of Greece and Yugoslavia, transported them through Bulgaria, and handed them off to German transport to be taken to Treblinka, where almost all were killed. It did not deport its own 50 000 Jewish citizens, after yielding to pressure from the parliament deputy speaker Dimitar Peshev and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The Nazi-allied government of Bulgaria, led by Dobri Bozhilov (Filov had become a regent to the underaged Simeon II after the death of his father Tsar Boris III), deported a higher percentage of Jews (from the areas of Greece and the Republic of Macedonia that it occupied) to holding camps in Bulgaria and then onto death camps in the north, than did German occupiers in the region.^[16][17] In Bulgarian occupied Greece, the Bulgarian authorities arrested the majority of the Jewish population on Passover 1943.^{[18][19][20][21][22]} The active participation of Bulgaria in the Holocaust however did not extend to its pre-war territory and after various protests by Archbishop Stefan of Sofia and the interference of Dimitar Peshev the planned deportation of the Bulgarian Jews (about 50 000) was stopped. It is important to say that the territories of Greece, Macedonia and other nations occupied by Bulgaria during World War II were not considered Bulgarian - they were only administered by Bulgaria, but Bulgaria had no say as to the affairs of these lands. As to the Jews in the sovereign state of Bulgaria - deportation to the concentration camps was denied. Furthermore Bulgaria was officially thanked by the government of Israel despite being an ally of Nazi Germany. This story was kept secret by the Soviet government because the fascist Bulgarian government, the Tsar of Bulgaria and the Church were responsible for the huge public outcry at the time - causing the whole country to defend its Jewish population. The communist government of the Soviet Union could not give credit to fascists, the church or the Tsar as all three were considered enemies of communism, and hence the archives concerning the saving of the Jews were locked up until the end of the cold war in 1989. Only then did the story come to light. The number of 48 000 Jews was known to Hitler and no one was murdered or deported by the Nazis.^[23]

Dimitar Peshev was the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria and Minister of Justice during World War II. He rebelled against the pro-Nazi cabinet and prevented the deportation of Bulgaria’s 48 000 Jews. When it came to its own Jewish citizens, the government faced strong opposition from Peshev and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Although Peshev had been involved in various anti-Semitic legislation that was passed in Bulgaria during the early years of the War, the government decision to deport Bulgaria’s 48 000 Jews on March 8, 1943 was too much for Peshev. After being informed of the deportation, Peshev tried several times to see Prime Minister Bogdan Filov but the prime minister refused. Next, he went to see Interior Minister Petar Gabrovski insisting that he cancel the deportations. After much persuasion, Gabrovski finally called the governor of Kyustendil and instructed him to stop preparations for the Jewish deportations. By 5:30 p.m. on March 9, the order was cancelled. After the war, Peshev was charged with anti-Semitism and anti-Communism by the Soviet courts, and sentenced to death. However, after outcry from the Jewish community, his sentence was commuted to 15 years imprisonment, though released after just one year. His deeds went unrecognized after the war, as he lived in poverty in Bulgaria. It was not until 1973 when he was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations. He died the same year.^[24]

Portugal

Historians have estimated that up to one million refugees fled from the Nazis through Portugal during World War II. An impressive number considering the size of the country’s population at that time (circa 6 million).^[25] Portugal remained neutral within the overall objectives of the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance; and that astute policy under precarious conditions, made it possible for Portugal to contribute to the rescue of a large number of refugees.^[26] Portuguese Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar allowed all international Jewish organizations.—HIAS, HICEM, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, World Jewish Congress, and Portuguese Jewish relief committees— to establish themselves in Lisbon.^[27] In 1944, in Hungary, risking their lives, the diplomats Carlos de Sampayo Garrido and Alberto Teixeira Branquinho, coordinated with Salazar, also helped many Jews escape Nazis and their Hungarian allies.^[28] In June 1940, when Germany invaded France, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued visas, indiscriminately, to a population in panic,^[29] without asking previous authorizations to Lisbon, as he was supposed to. On June 20 the British Embassy in Lisbon accused the Consul in Bordeaux of improperly charging money for issuing visas and Sousa Mendes was called to Lisbon. The number of visas issued by Sousa Mendes cannot be determined, a 1999 study by the Yad Vashem historian Dr. Avraham Milgram published by the Shoah Resource Center, International School for Holocaust Studies,^[30] asserts that there is a great difference between reality and the myth created by the generally cited numbers. Sousa Mendes never lost his title as he kept on being listed in the Portuguese Diplomatic Yearbook until 1954 and kept on receiving his full Consul salary, $1,593 Portuguese Escudos,^[31][32] until the day he died.^[33] Other Portuguese who deserve further credit for saving Jews during the war are Professor Francisco Paula Leite Pinto and Moisés Bensabat Amzalak. A devoted Jew, and a Salazar supporter, Amzalak headed the Lisbon Jewish community for more than fifty years (from 1926 until 1978). Leite Pinto, General Manager of the Portuguese railways, together with Amzalak, organized several trains, coming from Berlin and other cities, loaded with refugees.^[34][35][36]

Spain

In Franco's Spain, several diplomats contributed very actively to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. The two most prominent ones were Ángel Sanz Briz (the Angel of Budapest), who saved around five thousand Hungarian Jews by providing them Spanish passports, and Eduardo Propper de Callejón, who helped thousands of Jews to escape from France to Spain. Other diplomats with a relevant role were Bernardo Rolland de Miota (consul of Spain at Paris), José Rojas Moreno (Ambassador at Bucharest), Miguel Ángel de Muguiro (diplomat at the Embassy in Budapest), Sebastián Romero Radigales (Consul at Athens), Julio Palencia Tubau, (diplomat at the Embassy in Sofía), Juan Schwartz Díaz-Flores (Consul at Vienna) and José Ruiz Santaella (diplomat at the Embassy in Berlin).

Lithuania

Chiune Sempo Sugihara, Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, 1939–1940, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing German-occupied Poland in defiance of explicit orders from the Japanese foreign ministry. The last foreign diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train. After the war, Sugihara was fired from the Japanese foreign service, ostensibly due to downsizing. In 1985, Sugihara's wife and son received the Righteous Among the Nations honor in Jerusalem, on behalf of the ailing Sugihara, who died in 1986. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, Chinese consul-general to Austria Ho Feng Shan, and others also saved tens of thousands of Jews with fake diplomatic passes.

Albania

About 2,000 Jews sought refuge in Albania during the war,^[37] during which five Jews were killed in the country.^[38] Far more were killed in the Albanian occupied-territories of Kosovo and Macedonia, where an estimated 600 Jews were captured and killed throughout the war.^[39] In 1997, Albanian Muslim Shyqyri Myrto was honored for rescuing Jews, with the Anti-Defamation League's Courage to Care Award presented to his son, Arian Myrto.^[40] In 2006, a plaque honoring the compassion and courage of Albania during the Holocaust was dedicated in Holocaust Memorial Park in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York, with the Albanian ambassador to the United Nations in attendance:

In 1943, the Nazis asked Albanian authorities for a list of the country's Jews. They refused to comply. "Jews were then taken from the cities and hidden in the countryside", Goldfarb explained. "Non-Jewish Albanians would steal identity cards from police stations [for Jews to use]. The underground resistance even warned that anyone who turned in a Jew would be executed." ... "There were actually more Jews in the country after the war than before—thanks to the Albanian traditions of religious tolerance and hospitality."^[41]

Finland

The government of Finland generally refused to deport Finnish Jews to Germany. It has been said that Finnish government officials told German envoys that "Finland has no Jewish Problem". However, the Secret Police ValPo secretly slated more than 50 Jews, mostly refugees from Germany and Austria for deportation. After public protests the deportations were officially cancelled but 8 Jews were nevertheless deported in 1942. Moreover, it seems highly likely that Finland deported Soviet POWs, among them a number of Jews. The majority of Finnish Jews however, were protected by the government's co-belligerence with Germany. Their men joined the Finnish army and fought on the front.

Italy

The situation in Italy was somewhat peculiar in that, notwithstanding Mussolini's proclamation against Jews, most Italians had no personal hatred against them. Liliana Picciotto, the historian of the archive of Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (Foundation Center for the Contemporary Jewish Documentation) writes that of the 32.300 Jews living in Italy under German occupation, only 8,000 were arrested, whereas 23,500 escaped unharmed. She speculates that the overall percentage of Jews who survived in Italy owed this to the solidarity the persecuted found among the local population.

Across Italy, and not just in his episcopal charge Rome, Pope Pius XII stood out for many Jews as the surest source of help until the late 1960s , by which time Marxist-driven programmes of defamation had largely overturned this attitude (Soviet defamation).

"The mass media have filled us with the sickening count of the lives sacrificed by the Nazis to their theory of racial purity; what we do not know is how many lives were saved by the humane work of such men as Pius XII. Official figures, cold as they are, may give us an inkling. In 1939 there were some 50,000 Jews in Italy; in 1946, there 46,000, of whom 30,000 were Italians and 16,000 refugees from Germany, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, France, and other countries. Approximately 8000 Jews in all were taken by the Gestapo (Robert Leiber, SJ, Pio XII e gli ebreidi Roma, 1943-1944)—a horrifying cipher, like all such, but far smaller than those that follow the names of most Nazi- occupied or -controlled countries in the roll call of genocidal slaughter." Dr Joseph L Lichten, A Question of Judgment: Pius XII & the Jews, 1963CE.

In Fiume (northern Italy, today Croatian Rijeka), Giovanni Palatucci, after the promulgation of racial laws against Jews in 1938 and at the beginning of war in 1940, as chief of the Foreigners' Office, forged documents and visas to Jews threatened by deportation. He managed to destroy all documented records of the some 5,000 Jewish refugees living in Fiume, issuing them false papers and providing them with funds. Palatucci then sent the refugees to a large internment camp in southern Italy protected by his uncle, Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, the Catholic Bishop of Campagna. Following the 1943 capitulation of Italy, Fiume was occupied by Nazis. Palatucci remained as head of the police administration without real powers. He continued to clandestinely help Jews and maintain contact with the Resistance, until his activities were discovered by the Gestapo. The Swiss Consul to Trieste, a close friend of his, offered him a safe pass to Switzerland, but Giovanni Palatucci sent his young Jewish fiancée instead. Palatucci was arrested on September 13, 1944. He was condemned to death, but the sentence was later commuted to deportation to Dachau, where he died.

Two other Italians distinguished themselves for aiding Jews, though outside of Italy: Giorgio Perlasca, who under the guises of Spanish ambassador in Budapest, was able to put under his protection thousands of Jews and non-Jews destined to concentration camps; and Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, future Pope John XXIII, assisted many Jews and non-Jews to escape by issuing "transit visas" from the Apostolic Delegation in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1944.

In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and prisoners of war avoided deportation, many of them hidden in safe houses or evacuated from Italy by a resistance group organized by an Irish priest, Hugh O'Flaherty. Once a Vatican ambassador to Egypt, Haiti, Santo Domingo and Czechoslovakia, Fr. O'Flaherty used his political connections to help secure sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.^[42] Delia Murphy, wife of the Irish ambassador, assisted him. While Vatican was on decent terms with Mussolini and the Pope disliked leftists Pope Pius XII allowed church efforts to use churches and resources to smuggle Jews out. Many priests, including a future Cardinal and future Archbishops, participated. The Vatican also reportedly had an ambassador persuade Franco to allow Jews to flee across the French border with Spain.

On 19 July 1944 the Gestapo rounded up the nearly 2000 Jewish inhabitants of the island of Rhodes, which had been governed by Italy since 1912. Of the approximately 2,000 Rhodesli Jews who were deported to Auschwitz and elsewhere, only 104 survived.

China

Between 1933 and 1941, the Chinese city of Shanghai accepted unconditionally over 18,000 Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust in Europe, a number greater than those taken in by Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and British India combined during World War II. Japanese government ensured Jewish safety in China, Japan and Manchuria.^[43] Japanese Army received Jewish refugees, General Hideki Tōjō received Jewish refugees in accordance with Japanese national policy and rejected German protest.^[44] After 1941, the occupying Nazi-aligned Japanese ghettoised the Jewish refugees in Shanghai into an area known as the Shanghai ghetto. Many of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai migrated to the United States and Israel after 1948 due to the Chinese Civil War (1946–1950).

Leaders and diplomats

• Per Anger - Swedish diplomat in Budapest who originated the idea of issuing provisional passports to Hungarian Jews to protect them from arrest and deportation to camps. Anger collaborated with Raoul Wallenberg to save the lives of thousands of Jews.
• Ion Antonescu- Prime Minister of Romania from 1940-1944, he resisted Hitler's demands to deport them, he allowed them to flee to other countries such as Hungary, neutral Sweden or other free from occupation countries. Antonescu was tried for war crimes and executed in 1946.
• Władysław Bartoszewski - Polish Żegota activist.
• The Most Illustrious duke Roberto de Castro Brandão - Brazilian diplomat and nobleman who issued diplomatic visas and passports to Jews in Marseilles, France. He was later deported, along with his daughter Maria-Theresa marchioness Siciliano di Rende and later Lady Pretyman, née de Castro Brandão, and his son, Brazilian Ambassador, current duke Guy Marie de Castro Brandão, as a diplomatic prisoner in the Rheinhotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg where Hitler used to go regularly. He stayed there until the end of the war and was exchanged with German soldiers imprisoned by the Allies.
• Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg - Swedish diplomat, who negotiated the release of 27,000 people (a significant number of which were Jews) to hospitals in Sweden.
• Jacob (Jack) Benardout - British diplomat to Dominican Republic before and during World War II. Issued numerous Dominican Republic visas to Jews in Germany. Only 16 Jewish families arrived in the Dominican Republic (the other Jews dispersed to countries along the way, e.g. Britain, America) and so created the Jewish community of the Dominican Republic. [this citation is unsupported by evidence from any other source and should be treated as dubious until further evidence is provided]
• Hiram Bingham IV - American Vice Consul in Marseilles, France 1940–1941.
• José Castellanos Contreras - a Salvadoran army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva from 1942–45, and in conjunction with George Mantello, helped save at least 13,000 Central European Jews from Nazi persecution by providing them with false papers of Salvadoran nationality.
• Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz - German diplomatic attaché in Denmark. Alerted Danish politician Hans Hedtoft about the imminent German plans deport to Denmark's Jewish community, thus enabling the following rescue of the Danish Jews.
• Frank Foley - British MI6 agent undercover as a passport officer in Berlin, saved around 10,000 people by issuing forged passports to Britain and the British Mandate of Palestine.
• Rafael Leónidas Trujillo - the Dominican dictator promised to receive 100,000 Jewish refugees into the Dominican Republic in 1938 when Franklin D. Roosevelt organised an international conference in Evian to discuss the persecution of the Jews. Dominican Republic was the only nation accepting Jews immigrants after the conference.^[45] The DORSA (Dominican Republic Settlement Association) was formed to settle Jews on the northern coast. 5,000 visas were issued but only 645 European Jews reached the settlement. The refugees were assigned land and cattle and the town of Sosúa was founded.^[45] 5000 dollars in gold from Jewish International in New York were paid for each person taken by the Trujillo.^[45] Other refugees settled in the capital Santo Domingo.^[46][47]
• Albert Göring - German businessman (and younger brother of leading Nazi Hermann Göring) who helped Jews and dissidents survive in Germany
• Paul Grüninger - Swiss commander of police who provided falsely dated papers to over 3,000 refugees so they could escape Austria following the Anschluss.
• Kiichiro Higuchi - Japanese lieutenant general who saved 20,000 Jewish refugees.^[48]
• Miklos Horthy - Regent of Hungary during World War II. His stalling tactics and refusal to implement Hitler's Final Solution probably saved more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews from being murdered.
• Wilm Hosenfeld - German officer who helped pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew, among many others.
• Lyndon B. Johnson - Future President of the United States who, as a member of the United States House of Representatives in 1938, helped Austrian conductor Erich Leinsdorf gain permanent residency in the United States. Johnson later helped Jews enter the U.S. through Latin America and become workers on National Youth Administration projects in Texas.^[49]
• Prince Constantin Karadja - Romanian diplomat, who saved over 51,000 Jews from deportation and extermination, as credited by Yad Vashem in 2005.^[50]
• Jan Karski - Polish emissary of Armia Krajowa to Western Allies and eye-witness of the Holocaust.
• Necdet Kent - Turkish Consul General at Marseille, who granted Turkish citizenship to hundreds of Jews. At one point, he entered an Auschwitz-bound train at enormous personal risk to save 70 Jews, to whom he had granted Turkish citizenship, from deportation.
• Zofia Kossak-Szczucka - Polish founder of Zegota.
• Geza Lakatos - Hungarian politician that helped Regent Miklos Horthy overthrow the anti-Semitic government of Dome Sztojay and ensure the end of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.
• Carl Lutz - Swiss consul in Budapest, managed to provide safe-conducts for emigration to Palestine to many thousands of Hungarian Jews.
• Luis Martins de Souza Dantas - Brazilian in charge of the Brazilian diplomatic mission in France. He granted Brazilian visas to several Jews and other minorities persecuted by the Nazis. He was proclaimed as Righteous among the Nations in 2003.^[51]
• George Mantello (b. George Mandl) - El Salvador's honorary consul for Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia - provided fictive Salvadoran citizenship papers for thousands of Jews and spearheaded a publicity campaign that eventually ended the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz.^[52][53]
• Boris III of Bulgaria- King of Bulgaria from 1918-1943 Resisted demands from Hitler to deport the Jews resulting resulting in all 50,000 being spared, Boris died in 1943 after meeting with Hitler.
• Paul V. McNutt - United States High Commissioner of the Philippines, 1937–1939, who facilitated the entry of Jewish refugees into the Philippines.^[54]
• Helmuth James Graf von Moltke - adviser to the Third Reich on international law; active in Kreisau Circle resistance group, sent Jews to safe haven countries.
• Delia Murphy - wife of Dr. Thomas J. Kiernan, Irish minister in Rome 1941–1946, who worked with Hugh O'Flaherty and was part of the network that saved the lives of POWs and Jews in the hands of the Gestapo.^[55]
• Giovanni Palatucci - Italian police official who saved several thousand.
• Giorgio Perlasca - Italian. When Ángel Sanz Briz was ordered to leave Hungary, he falsely claimed to be his substitute and saved some thousands more Jews.
• Dimitar Peshev - Deputy Speaker of the Bulgarian Parliament, played a major role in rescuing Bulgaria's 48 000 Jews, the entire Jewish population in Bulgaria at the time.
• Frits Philips - Dutch industrialist who saved 382 Jews by insisting to the Nazis that they were indispensable employees of Philips.
• Witold Pilecki - the only person who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, organised a resistance inside the camp and as a member of Armia Krajowa sent the first reports on the camp atrocities to the Polish Government in Exile, from where they were passed to the rest of the Western Allies.
• Karl Plagge - a major in the Wehrmacht who issued work permits in order to save almost 1,000 Jews (see The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, by Michael Good)
• Enver Hoxha- Led the Resistance against the German and Italians in Albania, Hoxha refused that the Germans or collaborationists deport a single Jew, therefore Albania was the only country in Europe to have an increased Jewish population after the war.
• Mehmet Shehu- a resistance fighter in Albania who allowed Jews to enter Albania, and Refused to hand the Jews over to The Germans, during the occupation
• Eduardo Propper de Callejón - First Secretary in the Spanish embassy in Paris who stamped and signed passports almost non-stop for four days in 1940 to let Jewish refugees escape to Spain and Portugal.
• Traian Popovici - Romanian mayor of Cernăuţi (Chernivtsi) who saved 20,000 Jews of Bukovina.
• Manuel L. Quezon - President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, 1935–1941, assisted in resettling Jewish refugees on the island of Mindanao.^[54]
• Florencio Rivas - Consul General of Uruguay in Germany, who allegedly hid one hundred and fifty Jews during Kristallnacht and later provided them with passports.^[56]
• Gilberto Bosques Saldívar - General Consul of Mexico in Marseilles, France. For two years, he issued Mexican visas to around 40,000 Jews, Spaniards and political refugees, allowing them to escape to Mexico and other countries. He was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1943 and released to Mexico in 1944.^[57]
• Ángel Sanz Briz - Spanish consul in Hungary. Together with Giorgio Perlasca, he saved more than 5,000 Jews in Budapest by issuing Spanish passports to them.
• Abdol-Hossein Sardari - Head of Consular affairs at the Iranian Embassy in Paris. He saved many Iranian Jews and gave 500 blank Iranian passports to an acquaintance of his to be used by non-Iranian Jews in France.^[58]
• Oskar Schindler - German businessman whose efforts to save his 1,200 Jewish workers were recounted in the book Schindler's Ark and the film Schindler's List.
• Eduard Schulte - German industrialist, the first to inform the Allies about the mass extermination of Jews.
• Irena Sendler - Polish head of Zegota children's department who saved 2,500 Jewish children.
• Ho Feng Shan - Chinese Consul in Vienna who freely issued visas to Jews.
• Henryk Slawik - Polish diplomat who saved 5,000-10,000 people in Budapest, Hungary.
• Aristides de Sousa Mendes - Portuguese diplomat in Bordeaux, who signed about 30,000 visas to help Jews and persecuted minorities to escape the Nazis and The Holocaust.
• Chiune Sugihara - Japanese consul to Lithuania, 2,140 (mostly Polish) Jews and an unknown number of additional family members were saved by passports, many unauthorized, provided by him in 1940.
• Selâhattin Ülkümen - Turkish diplomat who saved the lives of some 42 Jewish Turkish families, more than 200 persons, among a Jewish community of some 2000 after the Germans occupied the island of Rhodes in 1944.
• Raoul Wallenberg - Swedish diplomat. Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews condemned to certain death by the Nazis during World War II. He disappeared in January 1945 after being imprisoned by the Soviet troops who took control of Budapest.
• Sir Nicholas Winton - British stockbroker who organized the Czech Kindertransport which sent 669 children (most of them Jewish) to foster parents ln England and Sweden from Czechoslovakia and Austria after Kristallnacht. Sir Nicholas has been nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.^[59][60]
• Namik Kemal Yolga -A Vice-Consul at the Turkish Embassy in Paris who saved numerous Turkish Jews from deportation.
• Guelfo Zamboni - Consul General at Thessaloniki who gave false papers to save the lives of over 300 Jews residing there.
• Fumimaro Konoe - Japanese Prime Minister who adopted a Japanese national policy to receive Jew refugees.^[61]
• Seishirō Itagaki - Japanese Army Minister who proposed and adopted a Japanese national policy to receive Jew refugees.^[61]
• Hideki Tōjō - General and Prime Minister of Japan who received Jewish refugees in Manchuria and rejected German protest.^[44]

Religious figures

• Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Zakynthos,^[62] who, when ordered by the Axis occupying forces to submit a list of all Jews on the island, submitted a document bearing just two names: his own and the Mayor's. Consequently all 275 Zante Jews were saved.
• Archbishop Damaskinos - Archbishop of Athens during the German occupation. He formally protested the deportation of Jews and quietly ordered churches under his jurisdiction to issue fake Christian baptismal certificates to Jews fleeing the Nazis. Thousands of Greek Jews in and around Athens were thus able to claim that they were Christian and were thus saved.
• Archbishop Johannes de Jong, later Cardinal, of Utrecht, Netherlands, who drew up together with Titus Brandsma O.Carm. († Dachau, 1942) a letter in which he called for all Catholics to assist persecuted Jews, and in which he openly condemned the Nazi German "deportation of our Jewish fellow citizens" (From: Herderlijk Schrijven, read from all pulpits on Sunday 26 January 1942).
• Alfred Delp S.J., a Jesuit priest who helped Jews escape to Switzerland while rector of St. Georg Church in suburban Munich; also involved with the Kreisau Circle. Executed February 2, 1945 in Berlin.
• Rufino Niccacci, a Franciscan friar and priest who sheltered Jewish refugees in Assisi, Italy, from September 1943 through June 1944.
• Maximilian Kolbe - Polish Conventual Franciscan friar. During the Second World War, in the friary, Kolbe provided shelter to people from Greater Poland, including 2,000 Jews. He was also active as a radio amateur, vilifying Nazi activities through his reports.
• Bernhard Lichtenberg - German Catholic priest at Berlin's Cathedral. Sent to Dachau because he prayed for Jews at Evening Prayer.
• Hugh O'Flaherty - an Irish Catholic priest who saved about 4,000 Allied soldiers and Jews; known as the "Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican". Retold in the film The Scarlet and the Black.
• Sára Salkaházi - a Hungarian Roman Catholic nun who sheltered approximately 100 Jews in Budapest.
• Andrey Sheptytsky - Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, harbored hundreds of Jews in his residence and in Greek Catholic monasteries. He also issued the pastoral letter, "Thou Shalt Not Kill", to protest Nazi atrocities.
• The Sisters of Social Service, nuns who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews; included Sister Sara Salkahazi, recognized by Yad Vashem as well as beatified.
• Archbishop Stefan of Sofia - Bishop of Sofia and Exarch of Bulgaria, actively supported Dimitar Peshev's pressure against the Bulgarian government to cancel the deportation of the 48 000 Bulgarian Jews.
• André and Magda Trocmé - A French Reformed pastor and his wife who led the Le Chambon-sur-Lignon village movement that saved 3,000-5,000 Jews.
• Omelyan Kovch - Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest who was deported to Treblinka camp for helping thousands of Jews. He was canonized by pope John Paul II^[63]
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer – a German Lutheran pastor who joined the Abwehr (a German military intelligence organization) which was also the center of the anti-Hitler resistance, was involved in operations to help German Jews escape to Switzerland.

Prominent individuals

• Khaled Abdul-Wahab administrator of Mahdia, Tunisia, under German occupation; first Arab nominated for "Righteous Among the Nations" ^[64]
• Maria Leenderts and Petrus Johannes Jacobus Kleiss, Dutch merchants in her "Selecta Schoenenwinkel" (located at 248 Dierenselaan in Den Haag) with the cooperation of personnel of the "Quick Steps" soccer club (located on the corner of the Hardewijkstraat and the Nijkerklaan in Den Haag) and the pastor of the "Sint Thersia Van Het Kind Jesus Kerk" (located across the street from the Selecta shoe store and on the corner of the Apeldoornselaan and the Dierenselaan) accommodated many Jewish families throughout the war.
• Gustav Schröder - German Captain of the Ocean liner SS St. Louis who, in 1939 attempted to find asylum for over 900 Jewish passengers rather than return them to Germany.
• Albert Battel - a German Wehrmacht officer.
• Albert Bedane - of Jersey, provided shelter to a Jewish woman, as well as others sought by the German occupiers of the Channel Islands.
• Victor Bodson helped Jews escape from Germany through an underground escape route in Luxembourg.
• Corrie ten Boom, rescued many Jews in the Netherlands by sheltering them at her home. - was sent to Ravensbrück
• Stefania Podgorska Burzminski and Helena Podgorska at age 16 and 7 (Helena was her sister), they smuggled out of the ghettos and saved thirteen Jews from the liquidation of the ghettos.
• Sgt.-Major Charles Coward was an English POW who smuggled over 400 Jews out of Monowitz labour camp.
• Johannes Frömming, horse trainer and driver, employed three Jewish horsemen and hid them on his farm outside Berlin.
• Miep Gies, Jan Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Victor Kugler, and Johannes Kleiman hid Anne Frank and seven others in Amsterdam, Netherlands for two years.
• Alexandre Glasberg, Ukrainian-French priest who helped hundreds of French Jews escape deportation.
• Otto Hahn, Chemistry-Professor in Berlin, helped Jewish scientists to escape and prevent them from deportation, assisted by his wife Edith Hahn, who had for years collected food for Jews hiding in Berlin.
• Friedrich Kellner, justice inspector, who helped Julius and Lucie Abt, and their infant son, John Peter, escape from Laubach.
• Stanislaw Kielar – two girls from Reisenbach family
• Janis Lipke from Latvia, protected and hid around 40 Jews from the Nazis in Riga.
• Heralda Luxin, young woman who sheltered Jewish children in her cellar.
• Józef and Stefania Macugowscy, hid six members of the Radza family, and several others, in Nowy Korczyn, Poland.
• Shyqyri Myrto, Albanian rescuer of Jozef Jakoel and his sister Keti.
• Dorothea Neff, Austrian stage actress, who hid her Jewish friend Lilli Schiff.
• Algoth Niska, Finnish gentleman rogue and alcohol smuggler; smuggled Jews via the Baltic.
• Irene Gut Opdyke, Polish, hid twelve Jews in a German Major's basement.
• Jaap Penraat - Dutch architect who forged identity cards for Jews and helped many escape to Spain.
• Irena Sendler, Polish social worker who saved about 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.
• Suzanne Spaak, wealthy socialite who saved Jewish children in France.
• Marie Taquet-Martens and Major Emile Taquet hid some seventy-five Jewish children in a home for disabled children they were running in Jamoigne-sur-Semois, Belgium.
• Ilse (Davidsohn Intrator) Stanley, herself a German Jew living in Germany until 1939, made many trips to German concentration camps and secured the release of 412 people. After Kristallnacht when she could no longer make those trips, she continued helping German Jews leave the country legally, until her own departure in 1939.
• Hetty Voute, part of the Utrechtse Kindercomite in the Netherlands that rescued hundreds of Jews. Her oral history is found in the book The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage by Mark Klempner
• Gabrielle Weidner and Johan Hendrik Weidner, escape network rescued 800 Jews.
• Bertha Marx and Eugen Marx assisted in saving Jews through the Resistance forces.
• JUDr Rudolf Štursa, a lawyer, and Jan Martin Vochoč, an Old Catholic priest, in Prague baptized Jews on demand and issued over 1,500 baptism certificates.^[65]

Count Kazamery Deak Lajos & Deak Elizabeth .... Hungary / Magyaregregy ...6 people...4 children and they parents, saved, and sent over to New York City after 7 months of hiding in the basement.

Villages helping Jews

• Yaruga, Ukraine^[66]
• Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Haute-Loire département in France, which saved up to 5,000 Jews.
• Markowa, Poland, where 17 Jews survived the war. Many families hid their Jewish neighbours there and some paid the ultimate price.
  • Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, their 6 children and prenatal child were shot dead by the Germans for hiding the Szall and Goldman families.
  • Dorota and Antoni Szylar - hid seven members of Weltz family.
  • Julia and Józef Bar - hid five members of Reisenbach family.
  • Michal Bar - hid Jakub Lorbenfeld.
  • Jan and Weronika Przybylak - hid Jakub Einhorn.

• Tršice, Czech Republic, many people from this village helped hide a Jewish family, six of them were given the honorific of Righteous among the Nations.
• Nieuwlande, The Netherlands - during the war this small village contained 117 inhabitants. They unanimously decided in 1942 and 1943 that every household would give shelter to one Jewish household or individual during the war, thus making it impossible that anyone in the small village would betray their neighbours. Dozens of Jews were thus saved. All inhabitants have been honored by Yad Vashem.
• Moissac, France There was a Jewish boarding home and orphanage in this town. When the mayor was told that the Nazis were coming the older students would go camping for several days, the younger students were boarded with families in the area and told to treat as members of their immediate family and the oldest students hid in the house. When it became too dangerous for the students to stay there any longer they made sure that every student had a safe place to go to. If the students again had to move the counsellors from the boarding house arranged for a new place and even escorted them to the new housing.
• The Portuguese cities of Figueira da Foz, Porto, Coimbra, Curia, Ericeira and Caldas da Rainha were assigned to house refuges, they were pleasant resorts with many available hotels.^[67] The refugees led totally ordinary lives.^[27] They were allowed to circulate freely within town limits, practice their religions, and enroll their children in local schools. “Here we were given freedom of movement; we were allowed to go on outing and live as we wished", said Ben-Zwi Kalischer.^[68] Those times were captured on films that can be found at the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive.^[69]

Others

• The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

See also

• British Hero of the Holocaust
• Righteous among the Nations
• List of Righteous among the Nations by country
• Żegota Council to Aid Jews in occupied Poland
• Shoes on the Danube Promenade
• Lars Ernster member of the Board of the Nobel Foundation
• Aristides de Sousa Mendes
• Chiune Sugihara
• 522nd Field Artillery Battalion
• Dimitar Peshev
• Luis Martins de Souza Dantas
• Raoul Wallenberg
• Rescue of the Danish Jews
• Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust
• Witold Pilecki

References

External links

• The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage
• Stories of Honor and Courage During the Holocaust
• Heroes and Heroines of the Holocaust
• Holocaust Rescuers Bibliography
• Anna Poray, Saving Jews: Polish Righteous
• Holocaust Memorial Budapest, testimony from the family Jakobovics in 1947
• Witness: "Karoly Szabo played a determining role among Wallenberg’s supporters"
• The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous: Stories of Moral Courage

Further reading

Fogelman, Edith (1994). Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. Doubleday. ISBN 0-3854-2027-7. 

Rescue of the Danish Jews