Jewish Film Club Carl Lutz: The Forgotten Hero

A screening of the film telling the story of the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who saved tens of thousands of persecuted Jews in Budapest during the Second World War.

Lutz negotiated directly and skilfully with Adolf Eichmann, the deviser of the Holocaust. He invoked an alleged British mandate to enable 8,000 Jews to emigrate to Palestine. To everyone’s surprise, the Führer’s headquarters in Berlin granted Lutz this quota, because he had rendered the Germans in Palestine good service during his stay there as a diplomat. On his own initiative, Lutz devised a system of protective letters which put the people seeking help under the diplomatic protection of Switzerland and which was subsequently copied by other countries. Lutz exceeded the quota granted by the Führer several times the number. In addition, Zionist organisations started massively counterfeiting the Swiss letters of protection. It did not take the Nazis long to realize what was going on. Infuriated, they summoned the Swiss Vice-Consul to sort the real Swiss letters of protection from the fake ones in person, an experience that traumatized Lutz for the rest of his life. The last war year changed Lutz’s personal life completely. The upright and rather shy Vice-Consul fell in love with beautiful Magda Grausz, one of his Jewish protégés. After the war, he divorced his wife, married his beloved in Budapest and moved with her and her daughter to Berne. But Switzerland did not recognize his humanitarian action. Instead, Lutz was chided for excess of authority and missing expense receipts and relegated to a subaltern position. He suffered a nervous breakdown and had to go to a sanatorium. Carl Lutz fought bitterly and vainly for his “rehabilitation” until his death.