George Mantello was a Jewish diplomat who, while working for the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, Switzerland from 1942 to 1945, saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by providing them with fictive Salvadoran citizenship papers. He publicized in mid-1944 the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp, which had great impact on rescue and was a major contributing factor to Hungary's Regent Miklós Horthy stopping the transports to Auschwitz. In recognition of his great contributions to rescue Mantello received an honorary doctorate from Yeshiva University. Mantello is buried in the Jerusalem Har Hamenuchot cemetery.
Background
Mantello was born György Mandl to Orthodox Jewish parents – Baruch Yehudah Mandl and Ida Mandl – in Lekence, Kingdom of Hungary, in the Transylvanian region with mainly Romanian, Hungarian and German ethnic inhabitants which changed hands three times between Hungary and Romania during the 20th century. David Kranzler writes that his father owned a mill and the family was regarded as well-to-do. Mantello had three sisters and two brothers, one of whom, Josef, became involved in Mantello's rescue work.
Mantello became a textiles manufacturer in Bucharest, where he met Salvadoran consul Colonel José Arturo Castellanos in the 1930s. After escaping to Switzerland from the Romanian Fascists, he went to work for Castellanos at the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva as First Secretary. He and Colonel Castellanos issued large number of El Salvador papers which were smuggled into Nazi occupied territories and saved many Jews. In 1944 he became involved in the effort to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Mantello sent his friend, a diplomat from Romania, Florian Manoliu, to Hungary, in order to find out what was happening there. Manoliu went to Budapest, obtained reports from Swiss vice-Consul Carl Lutz on 19 June 1944, and immediately returned with the reports to Geneva. One of the reports was probably Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl's abridged 5-page version of the full 33-page Auschwitz Protocols: both the Vrba–Wetzler report and Rosin-Mordowicz report. The reports described in detail the operations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The second report was a 6-page Hungarian release that detailed the ghettoization and deportation, town by town, of the 435,000 Hungarian Jews, updated to 19 June 1944, to Auschwitz. In contrast to many leaders who received these reports and failed to act on them, Mantello publicized the details within a day of receiving them. This triggered a significant grass roots protest in Switzerland, including Sunday masses, street protests, and the Swiss Press Campaign; over 400 headlines in the Swiss press demanded an end to the deportations. The reports publication resulted in Winston Churchill's letter:"There is no doubt that this persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world...." As a result of the press coverage, world leaders issued appeals and warnings to Hungary's Regent, Miklós Horthy, and the mass transports, which had been deporting 12,000 Jews every day since 15 May 1944, ended on 9 July 1944. The lull in deportations made it possible to organize significant rescue activities in Hungary, such as the Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz missions.
Some recorded talks and music
George Mandel-Mantello and his Mission to Rescue Europe's Jews
