Carl Lutz

Carl Robert Lutz ( born March 30, 1895 in Walzenhausen (AR), † February 12, 1975 in Bern ) was a Swiss diplomat who has carried out the largest rescue of Jews during the Second World War. Along with resistance fighters succeeded Carl Lutz to save a total of 62,000 Hungarian Jews.

Lutz was in 1913 emigrated to the United States and worked since 1920 in the Swiss Legation in Washington, DC and later in the consular offices in Philadelphia and St. Louis. With his wife Gertrud Lutz- Fankhauser, who later became UNICEF's vice president, he went in 1935 to the Consulate in Jaffa in the League of Nations Mandate of Palestine, where he worked as a consular officer until 1940. Together, they have witnessed the dramatic unrest between Palestinians and Jewish immigrants from Europe.

After a short stay in Berlin, he was transferred in 1942 under the envoy Maximilian Jaeger as Vice Consul at the Embassy in Budapest. He became famous for his commitment to Hungarian Jews, which over 60,000 people - about half of the surviving Hungarian Jews - were saved from deportation and the Holocaust. He achieved this in his position as head of the " Foreign Interests " at the Swiss Embassy by he exhibited from May 1944 Jews who wanted to emigrate to Palestine, protective passports and letters of protection. This kept them from being deported to Auschwitz, because the Hungarian gendarmerie and the Eichmann command respected these papers, with Lutz's previous work in Palestine, in the performance of German diplomatic interests against Great Britain in 1940, played a role. The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who came to Budapest in July 1944, was informed about the procedure of the Swiss and worked with him for the rescue of Jews in Budapest. Wallenberg's activities became known world by the fall of his mysterious disappearance, on the other hand remained Lutz as quasi messy official in Switzerland long unappreciated.

After the war, his behavior in an assessment of the message activity was indeed judged to be correct, but the title of the legitimately issued protective papers as " Swiss Passes " was part of the police department of the Federal Political Department deemed " vires ", without leading to a formal complaint. From 1954 to 1961 he was employed as consul in Bregenz. After his divorce married Lutz 1950, the Hungarian Maria Magdalena Grausz. Lutz is on the Bernese Bremgarten cemetery buried.

Yad Vashem honored him and his first wife in 1964 with the title Righteous Among the Nations.