(bell chiming)
- I'm a conflict resolution
professor at heart,
so I'm going almost on the
outer limits of the field
with this project and I just
wanna say a couple of things
of what got me interested in this.
First of all, I am Romanian
and I come from a town
that hosted, in 1881,
the first Romanian Zionist Congress,
in which, in 1881, these Romanian Jews
came up with the idea to move to Israel.
This is about 16 years
prior to Herzl's goals
of moving to Israel.
It's a little known fact
about this small town in Romania.
Second, I was reading about El Salvador
and how some Salvadorans helped
the Jews in the Holocaust.
I was like, huh, that's interesting.
I never knew about this connection.
So I see this name, George Mantello.
And I'm like, okay, sounds
Salvadoran enough to me
and then I click on
the name and it's like,
oh, this guy was born
in Romania, like what?
So then I get even more
interested in this whole story.
Third, as a conflict resolution professor,
I teach a lot about death.
Some of my colleagues in the
Political Science Department
at the Illinois Urbana-Champaign
were saying like,
you guys, IR people, all you
do is death, battle deaths.
It was like a lot of negative stuff.
So I wanted to do something positive,
like good people who try and save others
in times of conflict still.
So in talking to my
international studies students,
(mumbles) they have to read as sophomores,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
by Hannah Arendt,
and we're talking like, well, would you do
if you are faced with
circumstances like this?
Which hopefully we won't be faced,
but the situation around the world
is kind of dire right now.
So that got me thinking like
maybe I need to write something
about this little known guy
who saved so many people.
We're looking at,
this is a story of these
three guys and others
that saved on the upper level,
about 140,000 Jews and non-Jews
during the Holocaust, right?
So this is kind of like Schindler's List,
Raoul Wallenberg,
they're much more famous.
He's not that famous.
Hi, you got class in 10 minutes.
- Yeah.
- What are you doing here?
(audience laughing)
- [Student] Just wanted to say hi.
- Hi, thanks for coming.
Alright, so I'm just gonna
say a couple of words
about Jews in Romania
in the 1930s and 1940s,
and it's gonna be focused
on Romania and Hungary,
but mostly focused on
these ingenious schemes
of saving people,
and to a large extent,
that's what attracted me
because I was feeling like this
guy thinks like a Romanian.
If there is someone who
can beat the system,
it's someone who grows
up in Eastern Europe
and trying to figure out
how can I beat the system.
So, a couple of words about Romania.
In the 1930s, Romania had
the third largest population
of Jews in Europe,
after Poland with three million,
and after the Soviet
Union with 2.5 million.
There were approximately
765,000 Jews in Romania.
You can see much more than Germany,
much more than Hungary at the time.
Most of the Jews, I'm
breaking down here the numbers
for the whole country,
but then for the regions of Romania too.
Most of them were congregated in,
I guess that doesn't work, in Bukovina.
That's the Northern part of Romania that,
no, no, it was--
- [Woman] Try that one, use that one.
- Oh, this, okay.
(electronic chiming)
(woman speaking faintly)
No, it's fine.
It's fine, I'll just point.
Which is now split between
Romania and Ukraine.
You have large concentrations
of Jews in the cities
like Czernowitz, which is
nowadays part of Ukraine, 37%,
Chisinau, part of Republic of Moldova,
now the capital of
Republic of Moldova, 35%.
Iasi, which is still part of Romania,
former capital of Romania, 34% and so on.
So you have large numbers of Jews.
You see here the percentage
for the country is 4.2%.
Now,
I'm gonna show a couple
more demographics here,
because in 1940,
well, Germany awards parts of Romania
to other allies that were
more important than Romania.
Romania was allied with Germany
in World War II until 1944.
It had a fascist or
pro-fascist government.
Hungary was the same,
and Soviet Union was allied
with Germany until 1941, right?
So there are parts of Romania
that will be given to other countries.
So we'll talk about, well, World War II,
the Holocaust, six million
Jews killed in the Holocaust.
There are some territorial changes,
and then we'll talk about the
Jewish population of Budapest
that these three people
helped save to a large extent.
Here are some maps.
This is the map of Romania as of 1940.
It includes territory
that was given to Bulgaria
in the South,
territory that was given to Soviet Union
which is nowadays Republic of Moldova,
territory that was given
to Soviet Union right here
and nowadays is part of Ukraine,
and territory that was given to Hungary.
This part of Northern
Transylvania right here,
and here is a better map to show you,
after the Diktat of Vienna,
this territory is given to Hungary.
Why is this important?
Because it changes the number of Jews
that are living in Romania
and increases the number of
Jews that live in Hungary
and the number of Jews that
live in the Soviet Union.
I just wanna make clear
this is not a talk to say,
well, Romania was great.
No, 'cause Romania
killed a lot of Jews too.
The Romanian government, right?
This is about these three
people and what they did,
and their ingenious ways
of saving Romanians.
Here is another map with the territory
that was given on August 30th to Hungary
and you see the other territories
given to neighboring countries.
So, what happens is
the demographics change
because Romania loses all this territory.
It goes down from 760,000
Jews approximately
to 315,000, right?
Most of the Jewish population
was in northern part of Romania, Bukovina,
and also in Transylvania,
large numbers of Jews.
So now, they're outside the country.
The other aspect that's
important is Hungary.
Hungary that only had about 450,000 Jews
prior to 1940,
now has 800,000 because
of the territorial gains
from Czechoslovakia, from Yugoslavia,
and from Romania, right?
And then in Budapest,
in 1944, we still have about 200,000 Jews.
Keep that in mind 'cause this
is gonna become important,
like how many Jews this
guy saved in Budapest.
Alright, so I'm gonna present this
kind of like a movie to a certain extent
because some of the actions
are like Hollywood style.
The leading actors, the
Conductor, Gyorgy Mandel.
Gyorgy Mandel sounds Hungarian.
I claim, well, he was Romanian in a way
because he was citizen of Romania.
He was born in this town,
this village, Lechinta in Bistrita.
So let me go back to show you on the map
kind of like where it is.
That's it right here,
where it says Bistrita.
He was born 15 miles away
from that in a small village
where they had about 4% of
the population was Jewish
in that village,
which actually just amounts
to about 100 or so people,
Jews in that small village.
So, he
went to school in Cluj in Romania,
to Budapest.
Then he went into banking in Vienna.
He made money in Romania in Craiova,
working in the family's
grain business, grains.
He was making profits of 50%, 60%.
This guy was a businessman.
In the early 20's, right,
he's only 20's at the time,
he's paying three telephone operators
to connect him to London,
Zurich, and New York City
on a daily basis.
He's making a killing in terms of profit
because he gets the information
much faster than anyone else, right?
Then he moves to Bucharest in Romania,
gets into a clothing business,
and he is again making
lots and lots of money.
He owns multiple factories in Romania.
He's not very religious
even though he came
from a family of rabbis
who moved from Alsace,
France, to Transylvania,
which was part of also
Hungary at the time.
He develops all kinds of
ties in the '20s and 30s
with Swiss banks,
and he was there in Vienna
in 1938 when the Germans take over.
He was in Prague in 1939
when the Germans take over.
He was in Belgrade in 1941
when the Germans take over, right?
So I don't know,
like he was in the wrong
places all the time.
But he saw what was happening, right,
at that time,
and in 1941,
in December 1941,
he's like okay, I've got to
sell my business and move
'cause this is not good.
Now, one parentheses here.
He met
the Salvadoran consul to Switzerland
in the 1930s,
and he was appointed
as an honorific consul
for El Salvador.
Apparently, he helped this
Salvadoran guy, Castellanos,
to get weapons and to get clothes
for the Salvadoran army back home,
which makes sense that
he was in the business
of clothing and factories
in this line of work.
So when he's leaving
Romania in December 1941,
he's leaving Romania as an alien enemy,
enemy alien, because U.S.
declared war on Germany too.
El Salvador declared war on Germany too
because U.S. was putting pressure
on Central American
countries to do the same,
declare war on Germany.
So he's living in a train
with all these Latin American
diplomats from Bucharest,
going to Switzerland.
He is stopped at the Yugoslav-Swiss
border, and he's taken out of the train
because his name, George Mantello,
he was smart enough in the late 30s
to Hispanicize his name,
to make it sound more like a Salvadoran.
It sounds very similar to Georges Mandel,
one of the French resistance fighters
who was sought all around
Western Europe, right?
He's taken out of the train,
he's sent to Zagreb.
In Zagreb, he has to interact
with one of the Germans
who would become his nemesis in Hungary,
Edmund Veesenmayer,
who was in charge of the Germans in Zagreb
at that point.
But here's how crazy
this George Mantello is.
Some of the German soldiers
were kinda like taking
him and pushing him around
and he punches one of them, right?
Like you gotta be nuts to
do something like that.
And he has no problem.
Like nothing happens to him.
Alright, I'll say a few more words
about how he managed to get from Zagreb
to Switzerland shortly.
Here's the other guy, the Connector,
Florian Manoliu.
This guy was a Romanian diplomat.
He was the commercial attache
of Romania in Switzerland.
He's a friend of George
Mantello's brother, a good friend,
business partner too,
who helps take out from Budapest,
the Auschwitz and the Hungary Reports
that actually say what's
happening in Auschwitz
and also say what's happening
in Budapest with the Jews,
also around the country
of Hungary with the Jews.
So I'm calling him the Connector.
And then the third one, the Legitimizer,
this Colonel Jose Castellanos Contreras,
who basically used his position
as a consul general of El Salvador
to give Salvadoran citizenship papers
to Jews and non-Jews and
basically save their lives.
As I mentioned, Castellanos was
friends with George Mantello
from the mid-30s.
I've been trying to find
the exact connection.
'36, '37, they seem to meet
in Switzerland.
Now a couple things about Castellanos.
He was there in El Salvador in 1932
when there's something
called the Matanza happens.
25,000 indigenous peasants are killed
by the government of El Salvador
because of their identity.
So he's there.
He is not clear if he
actually shot that many.
He must have shot some.
But after that, it clearly
had an impact on him.
He moves to Europe.
He is sent to Italy to training,
buy weapons, buy clothes.
He ends up as a consul general in Hamburg
in Germany in '38,
and then in Geneva from '41 to '45.
When he was in Hamburg in '38,
thew Jews are already being
discriminated against, right,
in Germany.
He's issuing without
approval from San Salvador
citizenship papers to all
kinds of Jews to save them.
San Salvador, the people back home,
caught on this, told him to stop.
They move him to a new position in Geneva
where they're hoping he's
gonna behave, but he didn't.
He kept doing the same,
working with George Mandel.
So what happens next?
George Mantello, I was telling
you he sold his business,
got stuck in Zagreb at this point.
He's got a couple of
Romanian business partners
to whom he sold his
share of the businesses.
He left Romania in December of '41
with the equivalent of
7.7 million U.S. dollars
in 2015 currency.
I did the conversion.
And so he's wealthy.
He's got money, right?
I mean, that's a lot of money at the time.
And I mean, even now. (chuckles)
And these business partners of him,
they're in the military,
in the Romanian military.
They come up with a plan.
There's a Romanian flight
from Milano to Bucharest
with a stopover in Zagreb.
They're going to just send
the pilot and not the copilot
with that flight,
and they're going to have the
outfit of the copilot ready
for Mantello, who at this point,
has been spending four months in Zagreb,
to board the plane as a
copilot and go to Romania.
It works.
They manage to do this.
He gets to Bucharest now,
but then again, he has to
go to Switzerland, right?
So it's like he's losing time.
So they come up with a second plan
where he takes the identity
of one of these two Romanians,
Romanians that I'll mention in a second.
And in the train,
he travels in the first
class in the train.
These guys traveled in the second class,
kinda like his bodyguards
to a certain extent,
and they eventually make
it, in the summer of 1942,
he makes it to Switzerland
with the help of these guys.
So this is a photo of George Mantello,
this is Castellanos,
and this is the best photo I could find
of Manoliu from a
newspaper in Bahia Blanca.
I mean you can see he's wealthy,
they all look good and so on.
There's another photo of Castellanos here
with Mantello and they're
clearly enjoying themselves.
This is in Switzerland.
Now the secondary actors,
and I'll mention the Josef Mandl,
George Mantello's brother.
It's funny enough that his brother
never changed his name, right?
It's like he totally stayed Mandl.
These are the two Romanians
who save him in Zagreb
and also get him to
Switzerland eventually.
The one book that's
written about this guy,
about George Mantello
only, or most of the focus,
was actually published by
Syracuse University Press.
- [Audience Member] Oh!
- Yeah, David Kranzler?
He was a library science
professor at CUNY.
He published it here.
It's called The Man Who Stopped
the Trains to Auschwitz,
the book.
So this author claims that Draganescu
was the head of the
Romanian secret police.
I didn't find evidence for that.
I don't think that's really true.
I found evidence that he was the director
of the Romanian Military
Geographical Institute,
which might be a really cool cover
if you're the head of
the secret police, right?
But I doubt that's the truth.
Vasilescu, Draganescu, and Mantello
served to get in the military, right?
So that's where the connection comes from.
There are a couple of other people
that help all these plans.
A Swiss pastor, Vogt,
who helped promote the Auschwitz
and the Hungary Reports,
and I'll talk about this.
Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat in Budapest
who also saved somewhere
around 60,000 Jews in Budapest.
Moshe Krausz, who was the head
of the Palestinian Certificate
Office in Budapest.
If you were a Jew and you had
a Palestinian certificate,
it allowed you to move
from Central and Eastern
Europe to Palestine.
The problem is that it also allowed you
to be moved to Auschwitz
with a certificate.
Why?
Because you're still, in this case,
in Budapest, you're a Hungarian citizen.
Hungarian citizens can be
moved outside the country.
If you have Salvadoran citizenship,
you cannot be moved outside the country,
which is good and bad.
You can't leave Hungary,
but you cannot be moved to a death camp,
to Auschwitz or other camps.
I can talk more about
this specific difference
because it's smart what they did.
They gave citizenship papers.
They didn't give passports to
travel outside the country,
which again, could have
gotten them in trouble
and allowed people to
be moved to Auschwitz.
Rudolf Kastner, he's famous
for the Kastner train,
another idea to save Jews
for money in this case,
but also from Cluj in Romania.
Joel Brand, from the same
county as George Mantello,
who again was a money for
Jewish lives transaction,
but very large scale.
435,000 Jews could have been saved
if his plan would have worked
and he would not have been
arrested by the British.
There was another Salvadoran
who played a role.
This guy, Jose Gustavo Guerrero.
He was the Salvadoran president
of the Permanent Court of Justice
and then of the International
Court of Justice
after World War II.
So pre, before the war and after the war,
he was the president of the
International Court of Justice.
Very interesting diplomat
that really deserves a good biography.
Walter Garrett, he was the director
of the British Telegraph Exchange,
helped spread the news about
Auschwitz and Hungary Report.
A Romanian consul in
Budapest that helped too.
There are many people who,
and everything needs to fall in place
to help with such operations,
and I'll share some of those stories.
And then a cameo appearance
from someone born in Watertown, New York,
(audience member chuckling)
Allen Dulles.
(audience member chuckling)
Allen Dulles, who was,
still is, actually, the
longest serving CIA director.
He served for 8 1/2 years in the '50s,
the first civilian director of the CIA.
He was in Switzerland at the time
as the director of the
precursor of the CIA,
and he became friends with George Mantello
and they figure out, okay, how can we work
to save as many Jews as possible too?
I'll get to that story.
So there are mainly two ways
in which Mantello saves Jews,
but I wanna share one thing that
George Mantello said in
interviews with David Kranzler
for the book published by you guys.
He basically said, "The terrible thing
"that I had experienced
left a mark on my soul.
"Although I felt safe in Switzerland,
"I always saw before me
heart-wrenching scenes
"of the terrible Jewish martyrdom
"in Nazi-occupied Vienna and Prague.
"The moment that, with the help of God,
"I had escaped this fate,
"I promised myself to do everything
"to save my fellow Jews from their fate
"and improve their lives."
He wanted to save Jews.
Was he self-interested?
Of course.
His family was in
Hungary-occupied Romania.
His wife was in Budapest with her parents.
His kid, who was born in 1930,
was in Budapest with his
wife and his in-laws.
So there was a clear
interest there for him too,
but he wanted to save as
many people as possible.
His first idea didn't work out.
His first idea was the following.
If you are a Jewish person
in Nazi-occupied territory,
you go to the Swiss consulate.
You give your possessions,
whatever you have, jewelry, money.
You get a receipt.
They'll guarantee that
you'll get this value
back after the war.
In the meantime, all this
money that's accumulated
is gonna be used to save Jews, right?
So that was if you couldn't leave, right?
So most of the Jews could not leave.
They would be in ghettos and so on.
This didn't work, and he
blames it on the inter-fighting
between the Jewish
organizations in Switzerland.
No one wanted someone else,
especially an outsider.
Who is this guy?
No one knows him, right?
To take the glory
of saving lots and lots of Jews.
So this is in fall of
1942, it doesn't work.
Spring of 1943, he comes up with,
okay, I'll go back to this,
he comes up with the
Salvadoran papers idea.
Like we're gonna give
people citizenship papers.
Now this, he starts
doing throughout Europe.
I'll show you, I got into
the Holocaust Museum Archives
and they actually have the letters
that he was sending,
these citizenship papers.
He was sending them from
everywhere from Netherlands
to concentration camps in
Nazi-occupied territory,
including to Auschwitz, to Germany also,
all the way to Eastern Europe, right?
I was saying, well, you
have the leading actor,
secondary actors, the other team.
Who's playing for the other team?
The bad guys, if you will, in this.
We have Miklos, sorry,
Horthy, the Admiral Horthy,
the leader of Hungary,
who was the regent of Hungary,
but he was really in charge.
And him, Eichmann,
whom you should know,
and then this Colonel
Veesenmayer, Edmund Veesenmayer,
that's the connection from
Zagreb with George Mantello.
This guy becomes the
representative of Nazi Germany
in Hungary in 1944.
Eichmann is sent with 160 SS officers
to implement the Final
Solution in Hungary in 1944.
160, that's it.
It doesn't take many people
to commit a lot of crimes
and march people to their death.
So they're on the other side,
and you will see in the
second plan to save people
how they come into play.
Plan one, Salvadoran
citizenship papers to Jews,
non-Jews in German-occupied Europe.
They gave about 10,000 of them.
They saved about 30,000 lives with this.
Why?
Because one Salvador paper is
good for the family, right?
In the very beginning,
he would ask for photos,
for information about height, weight,
color of eyes and so on.
In 1944, as the killing
of Jews is increasing,
he's actually sending
the Salvadoran papers
without all of this
so that people can append the photos
and fill in the information.
He's saving lives.
I mean, he's giving this to families,
but sometimes, people in
the family die, right?
So there were many new families formed.
Like oh, I have some neighbors
who need to be part of this family now.
We're not related, but they're
gonna fall under this name.
Here are some of these papers.
We see the early ones with the images,
and this is sent to Vichy, France.
This is sent to Ljubljana, right?
He made them look very good.
I mean, Central and Eastern
Europe is Kafkaesque still,
to this day.
If you don't have a stamp on
something, it's not valid.
And trust me, I've
fought this so many times
coming from there.
So what Mantello did, he
turned this Salvadoran papers
into nice, ornate, like this basically,
with all kinds of stamps,
with the symbols of the El
Salvador Republic and so on.
He wanted to move fast.
By moving fast, this would be just signed
by here, George Mantello.
You can see his signature.
That's all they needed,
and the approval of Castellanos.
If they were passports,
they would need the
approval of the ambassador
of El Salvador and Switzerland.
Takes much longer time.
You can't produce as many.
He would have them
translated in French, German,
quite often a local language, if he could,
and Spanish too so that
there are multiple,
whoever reads it can
understand what this is.
Here are a couple more.
This went to Pressburg,
Kolozsvar, that's Cluj in Romania.
Well, it says Hungary there
'cause it was under Hungarian occupation.
Couple of others.
These are simpler ones,
and this is, where is this going?
I can't really tell, but it's in Germany.
Can see this is an example
of one of them in German.
This is in French, going to Holland,
to Netherlands, right?
So they were given to
Jews and non-Jews alike.
They were given, in some cases,
they were used by American Jews
who were trapped in
Germany and couldn't leave.
So they were very much sought after.
Was he the first one
to come with the idea?
No.
Latin American countries
were selling passports,
selling passports for, on
average, 700 Swiss francs.
That's a lot of money.
On the high end, 3,000 Swiss francs.
Paraguay started this
and then Haiti followed,
and who else?
Peru.
And Peru was also selling
these passports in Switzerland.
They were being shipped,
including shipped in the ghettos,
in the Jewish ghettos
in Warsaw, for example.
And that would allow the
Jews to get out of the ghetto
and not have to wear
the yellow star either.
You can imagine that when Mantello starts
giving these citizenship papers for free,
he's annoying a lot of people.
He's annoying the black
market for the passports.
The Swiss were not very happy
with this Latin American passports too.
And the Germans are starting to question,
well, are there that many Paraguayans
and Peruvians and Haitians here?
Why did the Germans agree
to accept this papers,
this documents?
Everyone knew this was a scam.
Everyone knew that there were
not that many Salvadorans
in Central and Eastern Europe, right?
But the Germans agreed,
and this is from communications
within Nazi Germany
that were saved.
They agreed to accept them
because they were fearing retaliation
against the German ethnics
living in Latin America, right?
So they were saying if
we don't respect this,
then our German nationals
will be retaliated against
in Latin America, and that's not something
that they were willing to deal with.
The second aspect was
that the people having...
Were they successful?
I mean, that's the question.
Were they really saving lives or not?
Dependent on the location,
Western Europe and Central
Europe, definitely.
There were places like Slovakia.
They were not very successful in Slovakia.
The Slovak authorities did not care
about these papers, generally speaking.
In some cases, people were not touched.
Nothing happened to them.
They were allowed to be free.
In other cases, they were put
in nicer concentration camps,
kinda like the spa resorts in Belgium
and Netherlands and so on.
So they were treated better.
In those cases, the thinking was, well,
if we need an exchange
of population, right,
we'll use these people for
the exchange of population
to save our German ethnics.
So this was the first major plan
that was used.
Now funny enough, these papers,
towards the end of the war,
the Germans wanted them.
The Germans wanted the
Salvadoran citizenship papers
because to allow them
to escape the Soviets
and it will allow them a
way out of Germany, right?
'Cause they realized, well,
we're losing this war,
and a way to move to
Latin America, actually.
When what was happening in Switzerland
was discovered by Paraguay, Haiti, Peru,
back home in the capitals,
the authorities were very scared
that we're gonna be flooded with refugees.
Some things never change, right?
This fear of refugees invading us.
U.S. put a lot of pressure
on these countries to allow the passports
and also the citizenship papers
once the people in San
Salvador started complaining
about what Castellanos is
approving in Switzerland,
guaranteeing that you're
not gonna be flooded
by the refugees.
Like no one in their right mind
is gonna move to Paraguay,
right, at this point.
But it's just a way to keep them alive
and allow them to move
to nicer camps in some cases.
The second plan.
So now we're in 1944.
This works all throughout
'43, '44, it continues,
but then he comes up with a second plan.
He needs to find out what's
happening with this family.
He hasn't heard from them.
He wants to know from his wife.
He sends Florian Manoliu,
who was a Romanian diplomat,
so he had a diplomatic passport,
to Budapest to give Salvadoran papers
to his wife and his in-laws
and to Bistrita to give
the Salvadoran papers
to his in-large family
there, including his parents.
Manoliu travels from Switzerland.
He gets stopped in Vienna.
He has about 100 Salvadoran
citizenship papers
in his diplomatic pouch.
He's smart enough to ask the
Romanian diplomat in Vienna
to come and pick up the pouch
as the train pulled in.
He's taken aside by the
Germans, he's questioned,
he's sent to Berlin.
He's interrogated in Berlin, right?
Days are lost in this.
And in Manoliu's memoirs, he
actually says at one moment,
like I'm ally, like why do
you treat me like this, right?
I'm just giving this example
because Germany was not
very kind to its allies.
Eventually, he's allowed to go to Romania.
He's told do not get off in Budapest
under any circumstances.
A sign that the Germans
did not want the rest,
even the allies to know what
was happening in Budapest
where the Final Solution
was already started
of killing all the Jews in Hungary
by sending them to Auschwitz,
in some cases, just marching to the border
and then putting them on the trains there
and sending them Auschwitz.
So Manoliu is freed.
He goes, he makes it to Bucharest,
and then he travels to,
he actually disrespects the Germans,
he travels to see what happened
to Mantello's family in Bistrita.
There was no one there.
There was no one in the village.
It was a ghost village,
and they were sent to Auschwitz.
They died there.
Then he travels to Budapest.
He manages to meet up
with Mantello's in-laws,
not even with his wife,
and gives them Salvadoran papers.
And then in Budapest,
he gets this Auschwitz
and Hungary Reports.
In the fall of '43,
there are two Slovaks who
managed to escape from Auschwitz,
and there was a 35-page report
that was written about
what was happening there,
how many people were killed.
By May of 1944,
all the major Jewish organizations knew
what was happening in Auschwitz.
May of 1944.
The media doesn't know yet, right?
At this point, there's no
article in the Western media.
The talk is about 1.7 million
Jews killed in Auschwitz,
right, in the gas chambers.
So,
all of this, Manoliu,
is happening in the sphere
of May 22nd, June 21st, 1944.
He gets word of Auschwitz Report,
a five-page summary,
and then he gets the Hungary Report
where the Final Solution is implemented
as of March of that year,
when Germany took over
Hungary, direct rule.
Horthy was just a figurehead
after a conversation with Hitler.
And he's learning that in
the span of a few weeks,
there were over 400,000
Jews sent to the death camps
from Hungary, right?
June 22nd, Manoliu makes
it back to Switzerland.
He shares the information
with the two brothers.
And now it's a question, well,
what do we do with this information?
He also, just a few more things,
he met with these people,
Miklos Krausz, Lutz,
and they all confirmed yes,
the Jews are being killed in Hungary,
they're being sent to their deaths.
And now these brothers realized
they lost their parents.
They're not sure about
George's wife in Budapest
or his in-laws.
His son made it to
Switzerland a few years back.
So it becomes an issue of well,
we need to make this public, right?
We need to share this information
with the rest of the world
to see the scale of the atrocities.
So he starts a Swiss
press and church campaign.
He starts putting pressure
on the Jewish organizations,
but he works with Walter Garrett,
the director of the
British Telegraph Agency.
This guy, when he finds out what happens,
sends telegrams to the Prime
Minister of United Kingdom,
to the Queen of Holland,
to the Archbishop of Canterbury,
to everyone possible that
he could get in touch with.
And then Allen Dulles, he does the same.
He sends a message to
the Secretary of State.
He actually sends a telegram to Roosevelt,
saying look, this is really
happening, this is for real.
After this point,
there are all kinds of bits
and pieces of information,
but nothing really there.
It wasn't the scale, the
whole scale wasn't clear.
Why would Garrett and
Dulles help Mantello?
Well, Mantello, as I said, had money.
And when he moved to Switzerland
in the summer of 1942,
he helped both the British
and the U.S. intelligence services.
He was allowing the
British to have their mail
sent to the El Salvador Consulate
to beat the German spying networks, right?
He was paying the salaries
for the British diplomats
in Switzerland because it was
very hard to get the money
to Switzerland from the United Kingdom,
and he was fronting hundreds
of thousands of Swiss francs.
He actually manufactured
some timing machines
that the Royal Air Force needed
in Switzerland on his own money,
having them shipped to Bermuda or New York
or Portugal or Latin America
and then to United Kingdom, right?
So he was very helpful for
the intelligence community
over there, and it was
both for the British
and the Americans that he was doing this.
So he was clearly, I
mean, he was a player.
He liked to network.
I mean, you saw the photo
where he's enjoying himself
at the end of the day in Switzerland,
and knew how to play this game.
They started a press campaign.
They translated in multiple
languages these reports
and then sent them to all
the diplomatic delegations
in Switzerland, Jewish
organizations, and the media.
First article, June 24th.
This is the first time we have an article
about the Auschwitz Report in Switzerland,
and this is the first
time in the world, really,
that it's happening.
And then the number of
articles keep increasing,
and you see 21 articles,
following week, 32,
following week, 200 articles.
The Swiss keep publishing,
this is from research done by Lipstadt,
470 articles in 182 newspapers
in 1944
that were published about the
Auschwitz and Hungary Report.
And the same time, Pastor
Vogt translates the reports,
published the reports,
gives church sermons and so on,
so really publicizes.
Switzerland was trying to be neutral.
They didn't want to fight.
They didn't want to say
anything bad about the Germans,
'cause well, then they could get invaded.
There are public demonstrations
against the deportations and
the killings in Swiss towns.
This is out.
The cat is out of the bag
about what's happening
in this death camps.
When does this finally make
it to the English media?
New York Times, June 20th, 1944.
So this is a little bit before,
but it mentions, it's very tiny,
and it mentions, well,
7,000 German-Slovak Jews,
they were killed in Terezin.
That was it.
This is not the Auschwitz Report,
but this is the first time New York Times
actually writes anything
about these killings.
And then the article,
the Auschwitz Reports start appearing,
and this is from the Auschwitz Report.
This is from July 3rd, 1944.
So about a week and a
half after Switzerland,
they start picking up.
July 3rd, the next one,
and it's not front page.
Next one is July 5th.
Well, in between is July 4th.
How much did United States really care
at this point about it?
It only makes the headlines,
the Auschwitz Report makes
the headline in November
in New York Times, right?
So it took quite a lot to convince people
that such atrocities on this
scale could actually happen.
Right, as I was thinking
more about this talk today,
I was thinking like how
many more worse things
are happening at the southern border
that we don't know about?
That's what I kept thinking, like,
'cause we don't really know
what's happening there, right?
That was my fear.
And then the pressure from
leaders around the world
on Horthy, the leader of Hungary,
theoretical leader of
Hungary at this point,
from the Pope, from President Roosevelt,
who sends a very strongly worded letter
to Horthy on June 26th,
from the Swedish king, who
appoints Raoul Wallenberg,
famous Raoul Wallenberg to go to Budapest
and try and save as many Jews as possible,
from the Federation of Swiss Women's,
appealing to Horthy's wife.
And then there's a huge bombing
of Budapest on July 2nd.
Roosevelt basically threatened Horthy,
saying that if you don't do anything,
you'll be treated like
a war criminal, right?
So that is seen as what makes
Horthy change his approach
because he's powerless at this point.
Horthy's reaction.
He takes control.
So June 26, he takes control.
June 26, President Roosevelt
basically threatens him,
you're gonna be treated
like a war criminal, right?
Which I think has a role in his decision.
I'm gonna retake control of Hungary.
I'm gonna remove the Germans
out of the administration.
I'm the decision maker.
The Germans try to kill him.
There's a German-inspired
coup attempt a week later,
a few days later, actually.
A few days later, July 7th,
halts the deportations,
finally stops them on July 18th.
In the same time, you
have 160 Germans, SS,
and you also have the Arrow Cross,
the fascist organization
that's very hard to control
by Horthy in Hungary,
and they keep deporting people.
They deport about 30,000
people behind their backs
in this time period
from the neighboring towns in Budapest.
You have about 200,000 Jews
in Budapest at this point.
Horthy makes an offer.
We'll send 10,000 Jews, kids and others,
to the West if provided save haven,
if, and that's really interesting,
but they cannot go through Romania.
Why?
Because if they go through Romania,
it's a springboard to go to Palestine.
Romanian government was trying to,
killed a lot of Jews, no doubt,
but was also trying to save
as many Jews as possible
if you had money, right?
So that was allowing a lot of Jews
to go towards Palestine if you had money.
UK refused initially this offer.
Then they said yes, but by
that point, was too late.
Never happened, right?
This offer from Horthy.
But what he's offering is important.
He's trying to do
something to save his skin.
He's trying to do something
to show that he's not a war
criminal at the end of the day.
That's why he's making the offer.
So, and then basically, he's
out of power on October 15.
There's a break in the shipments of Jews
from Hungary to the death camps
from beginning of July
to October 15th, alright?
This is important, why?
Because during this time,
the other smaller countries,
the International Red Cross,
they find back their humanitarian voice
and they start doing what
El Salvador was doing.
They give these passes.
Like now, you're protected by the Swiss.
It meant nothing, but
at the end of the day,
the local Hungarians were kind of afraid.
Like well, it could come and bite us
if we do not respect that all these people
who we know they're not Swiss,
now have Swiss citizenship papers.
We have to respect it.
This is a photo of the line in
front of the Swiss Consulate
in Budapest, waiting to
get the Swiss passes.
Carl Lutz, the Swiss consul,
comes up with the idea
of protective ghettos.
60,000 people in a protective ghetto,
you cannot touch them if
you're Germany, right?
Then there were 70,000 Jews
outside the protected ghetto,
like a bunch of streets that were seen as,
well, this is it, this is protected.
70,000 outside the protective ghetto
that the Germans tried to get,
and Raoul Wallenberg at that point
threatens the German commander
who wanted to kill all those people,
that you will be treated
as a war criminal,
and that makes him back off for a few days
and basically saves these people too.
So we have at the end of the war
about 130,000 Jews left in Budapest.
Others died, but the idea is that
once El Salvador started
with the citizenship papers,
Switzerland started doing it,
Sweden started doing it,
and this idea of protective ghettos
is inspired by El Salvador.
And the fact that Horthy takes an action
and stops the shipments of Jews, right,
can be traced back to this press campaign.
I'll finish shortly.
There are other plans
Mantello is working on.
The Kastner train,
giving tractors in the summer,
late summer of '44 to
the Germans for lives.
Why?
'Cause they wanted to get
the crops from the fields
at that point from
whatever they controlled
in Eastern Europe.
There are others, other ideas.
This one did not work,
a ransom fund for 700,000 Jews.
The Germans, towards end
of '44, beginning of '45,
they're willing to give Jews for money.
Himmler himself is willing to,
he said like look,
I'm willing to liberate,
he was talking about 200,000 Jews
in exchange for $5 million and good press,
good press.
Right, he just wanted
like just good press,
something good about us.
Like stop destroying us in the press
the way you guys have been doing
since the summer from Switzerland,
and then it spreads around the world.
So that's basically
Mantello, but you know what?
Those Salvadoran papers saved people
even after the war.
You have about several thousands
of those papers left in Geneva in '45.
Someone found them, another
Jewish person found them.
He was saved by one of these papers,
and he starts sending them back
to Central and Eastern Europe
that's occupied by Soviet Union now.
So now these people can
use the citizenship papers
of Salvador to escape the Soviets,
and they're allowed through these papers
to go to internally
displaced persons camps
in Western Europe through Prague, right?
And thus, make it out of,
well, the Iron Curtain that
was coming down pretty fast.
Here's a photo of Mantello
saving one of the famous rabbis
of Central and Eastern Europe
from the Kastner train.
So one more thing he did,
he saved this guy's life,
the President of the Hungarian Parliament.
He actually fought with an SS officer
who was sent to kill Bela
Varga in the hotel Vienna,
and he had a fist fight with this guy
to save Bela Varga's life.
After the war, Mantello is accused,
like well, you made a lot of money,
this was a black market
operation in Switzerland.
And then lots of people
who were saved by him,
very high ranking officials
in the Jewish communities,
but not only Jewish communities,
also non-Jewish were sending letters,
and he was exonerated.
There was no doubt that he did this
from the goodness of his heart.
He didn't make a buck out of this.
He got the third Israeli visa in history,
but he also helped the Israeli
prime minister, Ben-Gurion,
at a time when no one was
giving money to Israel, loans.
He set up a Swiss Israeli bank.
He managed to use his Swiss connections
to give loans to Israel at 2%
when the going rate was
30% for loans for weapons,
in this case, for Ben-Gurion.
One more note, he moved to Rome.
He started an import-export business.
You can find this name,
Giorgio, Italianized,
Giorgio Mantello on
these conspiracy theories
about who killed JFK.
(audience laughing)
And I'm not kidding.
I was shocked when I found that link.
Why?
Because he was friends
with Allen Dulles, right?
The former CIA director.
And because he did all these shady deals,
and he's a Jew, right?
So why not blame this Jew for JFK's death?
Very colorful person
and with a lot of really cool ideas,
and I'll end on this note,
and I'm sorry I took way too long.
