Ángel Sanz Briz was a Spanish diplomat who served under Francoist Spain during World War II. He saved the lives of some five thousand Hungarian Jews from deportation to Auschwitz. Sanz Briz is sometimes referred to as "the angel of Budapest".
After completing his studies in Madrid, his first diplomatic posting was to Cairo. He was sent to Budapest in 1942 where he was the first secretary of the Spanish legation. Between June and December 1944, he and his assistants issued fake Spanish papers to 5,200 Jews, saving them from deportation to concentration camps. he initially received authorization to provide papers to 200 Jews, and continued to enlarge this amount until he reached 5,200. In some cases, he acquired houses in Budapest at his own cost in order to provide shelter for the refugees, which made the difference between life and death for those Jews. He convinced the Hungarian authorities that Spain, under the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera had given Spanish citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Primo de Rivera had issued such a decree on December 20, 1924 but it had been canceled in 1930, a fact the Hungarian authorities were not aware of. Sanz Briz dutifully informed the Spanish Foreign Ministry of his actions, which were neither forbidden nor encouraged by Madrid. In 1944, as the Red Army approached Budapest, he followed government orders to leave for Switzerland. He was replaced by the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, who pretended to be a Spanish consul and continued to issue Spanish visas and to patrol the safehouse system for Jews set up by Sanz Briz. After these events, Sanz Briz continued his diplomatic career: he was posted to San Francisco and Washington, D.C., Ambassador to Lima, Bern, Bayonne, Guatemala, The Hague, Brussels and China. In 1976 he was sent to Rome as Ambassador of Spain to the Holy See, where he died on June 11, 1980. Sanz Briz himself tells how he was able to save the lives of so many Jews, in Federico Ysart's book Los judíos en España. He is also the subject of the 2011 Spanish television series El ángel de Budapest, based on Diego Carcedo’s book Un español frente al Holocausto.
Personal life
In 1942 he married Adela Quijano y Secades, with whom he had four children: Adela, Paloma, Ángeles, and Juan Carlos.
