List of Individuals and Groups Assisting Jews During The Holocaust - Leaders and Diplomats

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.
• 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.
• 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. 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. 5000 dollars in gold from Jewish International in New York were paid for each person taken by the Trujillo. Other refugees settled in the capital Santo Domingo.
• 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.
• 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.
• Prince Constantin Karadja - Romanian diplomat, who saved over 51,000 Jews from deportation and extermination, as credited by Yad Vashem in 2005.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Paul V. McNutt - United States High Commissioner of the Philippines, 1937–1939, who facilitated the entry of Jewish refugees into the Philippines.
• 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.
• 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)
• 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.
• Florencio Rivas - Consul General of Uruguay in Germany, who allegedly hid one hundred and fifty Jews during Kristallnacht and later provided them with passports.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Seishirō Itagaki - Japanese Army Minister who proposed and adopted a Japanese national policy to receive Jew refugees.
• Hideki Tōjō - General and Prime Minister of Japan who received Jewish refugees in Manchuria and rejected German protest.