The incredible story of Carl Lutz, the Swiss diplomat who saved 60,000 people from the Nazi death camps

The Raoul Wallenberg Foundation on Sunday recalled the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, "hero of the Holocaust" in charge of save 60,000 Jews from Nazi persecution in Hungary during the Second World War.

Carl Lutz was one of the most outstanding saviors of the Holocaust victims. His heroic act is worthy of our eternal gratitude and recognition ", says a statement signed by Eduardo Eurnekian, president of the NGO and its founder, Baruj Tenembaum.

Lutz died on February 12, 1975 in Bern, fourteen years after his retirement from diplomacy. With his wife Gertrud, they had received in 1965 the title "Just among the nations" of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, located in Jerusalem.

In addition, in 2012 and thanks to the efforts of the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, his story was immortalized in a commemorative stamp of the Israeli Postal Authority.

Lutz's bond with Israel began in 1935, when he was appointed Vice-Consul of Switzerland in the British Mandate of Palestine at the time.

He lived "six unforgettable years" in Yaffo, recording in his personal photographic archives the old city of Jerusalem, the camel caravan on the Tel Aviv coast and sharing with the German settlers in Sarona, while the NGO was saving.

In Palestine He also witnessed the beginning of Jewish immigration to Palestine, to escape the Nazi persecution in the period before the beginning of the second world war.

In 1942 he was appointed Vice-Consul to the Swiss Diplomatic Delegation in Budapest, Hungary. At that time, he began working to protect tens of thousands of Jews who were likely to be deported to extermination camps by fascist authorities, allied with Nazi Germany.

Cooperate with the Jewish Agency, an organization in Palestine that coordinated Jewish immigration, has enacted safe conduct for more than 10,000 Hungarian Jewish children, and an estimated 60,000 people have escaped the Holocaust through their efforts.

Her tactics were numerous and counted at all times on Gertrud's help. They published, for example, letters of protection (Schutzbriefe) from the Swiss government, neutral during the war, postpone his deportation to the concentration camps. They also attributed 50,000 pbadports allowing the country to leaveand coordinated the shipment ofmedical help and food to these at-risk populations.

Once the diplomat he threw himself into the Danube to save a Jewish woman shot by Hungarian fascists and thrown to death in the watercourse. Lutz appeared with the victim and confronted the police, baderting his authority and the roles he had badumed. Finally, he managed to take the woman to a medical center.

Lutz also met Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, Swedish diplomat who gave his name to the foundation and who also saved more than 62,000 people from the Holocaust before dying prisoner of the Soviets in 1947, quickly teach him rescue methods.

When Hungary was liberated from the Nazis by the Red Army, Lutz stayed there to ensure the well-being of the Jews who had not yet managed to emigrateand in January 1945, shortly before the end of the war, he finally returned to Switzerland.

Lutz and Gertrud divorced a year later, and the vice-consul remained in the foreign service of his country until his retirement in 1961. He died in 1975, but the legacy left by his work remained until today. It has been recalled and invoked as an example in the darkness that Nazism has sown on Europe.