Posted on 06/22/2008 12:29:57 AM PDT by forkinsocket
WASHINGTON — During World War II, more than 25,000 European Jews became citizens of El Salvador, a country most had never visited and few ever would.
The country, roughly the size of Israel, would come to justify its Spanish name as "the savior" thanks to bogus certificates that made thousands of Jews citizens of El Salvador and kept them from being deported to concentration camps.
The signature on nearly all the certificates was that of George Mandel-Mantello, a Romanian Jewish refugee who in the early 1940s sought help from a Salvadoran acquaintance in Switzerland.
The El Salvador consul general in Geneva, Col. Jose Castellanos, appointed Mantello to the made-up position of first secretary, securing him a diplomat's passport.
The name Mantello was added to make his name sound more Latin.
The operation Mantello and Castellanos arranged to have blank nationality certificates with Mantello's signature taken to consulates in various countries of Geneva, where they received additional stamps.
The text stated that the holders were citizens of the Republic of El Salvador, which extended its protection to the holders and their families.
Other diplomats then smuggled the certificates to various locations in Europe — primarily Hungary — where they were filled out with the Jewish people's information.
Most of Mantello's and Castellanos' papers were smuggled to Budapest and issued by Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul there, who was helping Jews obtain papers at his "Glass House," an abandoned glass factory he rented on behalf of the Swiss government, which became a safe haven for thousands of Jews.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
El Salvador sided with the Nazi’s Castellanos did this not the El Salvadoran government.
Ping.
Inspiring post!
Wikipedia shows them on the Allied side from Pearl Harbor.
And you don't need an apostrophe there.
I sea (sic), your (sic) a punctuation Nazi ;)
Indeed, El Salvador’s president General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez admired Hitler and Mussolini and had tried to turn El Salvador into a fascist state in the 1930’s. However, he began cooperating with the US after the war broke out—he really had no choice, since the war cut off the European market for coffee, El Salvador’s main export product.
In 1941, El Salvador declared war on Japan and Germany, and Hernández expelled the German advisers that he had brought in to help run his government and armed forces.
I should of looked it up to see that they did declare war on Germany. But Maximiliano was a Nazi so I should of followed through by looking into that.
The leader of El Salvador had put down a Communist rebellion, which would, of course, earn him the enmity of leftists worldwide.
The Nazis fought the Communists, the problem is they are both left wing.
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