George Mantello

George Mantello, born George Mandl or Mandel (1901 – 1992) was a Jewish diplomat who, while working for the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, Switzerland, saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by providing fictive Salvadoran citizenship papers and rescued tens of thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands by publicizing in mid-1944 the deportation of Jews from Hungary to the death camps.

Mantello was born in 1901 to Orthodox Jewish parents in Bistriţa, Transylvania, a Hungarian speaking region of Romania. Originally a textiles manufacturer as an adult in Bucharest, he met Salvadoran consul Colonel José Arturo Castellanos in the 1930s. After escaping to Switzerland from the Romanian Fascists he went to work for Castellanos at the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva.

In 1944 he mounted his most ambitious effort -- to halt Adolf Eichmann's secret deportation of Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz. With the aid of a diplomat from Romania, Florian Manoliu, he obtained two documents provided by Mosher Krausz in Budapest. One was Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl's version of the Vrba-Wetzler Report - also known as the Auschwitz Report and as the Auschwitz Protocol, which described in detail the operations of Auschwitz. The other document was a report about deportations of Hungarian Jews. In contrast to many leaders who received these reports well before Mantello and failed to act on it, he publicized details of atrocities within a day after receiving the reports. This triggered a significant grass roots protest in Switzerland, including Sunday masses, street protests and the Swiss Press Campaign: over 400 glaring headlines in the Swiss press (against censorship rules) demanding an end to Europe's brutality toward Jews. Ultimately the large scale and vocal Swiss publicity led to threats issued against Hungary's Regent, Horthy, and to the stopping of the transports, which until then took 12,000 Jews daily to the death camps. The lull in deportations made it possible to organize significant rescue activities in Hungary, such as the Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz missions.

Further reading

• David Kranzler. The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello, El Salvador and Switzerland's Finest Hour.
• Jenö Lévai, Zsidósors Európában, Budapest 1948 (Hungarian)
• Rafael Ángel Alfaro Pineda. "El Salvador and Schindler's list: A valid comparison," Raoul Wallenberg web site.
• Embassy of El Salvador in Israel, "El Salvador and the Holocaust: An almost unknown chapter in the history of El Salvador."
• Jon Kimche. "The war's unpaid debt Of honour: How El Salvador saved tens of thousands Of Jews," Jewish Observer and Middle East Review.
• Ernie Meyer. "The Unknown Hero: One sympathetic foreign diplomat saved thousands of Jews in Europe by providing them with foreign citizenship papers."
• Ernie Meyer. "The greatest rescue of the Holocaust."
• "Where is the Conscience of the World?" (editorial), Orthodox Tribune.

External links

• "El Salvador, a rescuing country" (profile of Mantello), International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation
• Profile at John Lamperti's personal site