Switzerland Awakens:
George Mantello (Mandel) - The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz
and Switzerland's Finest Hour

Switzerland Awakens
Painting Ccopyright © 2006 by Hanalisa Omer hanalisa@gmail.com

Image Background: Bratislava (in Slovakia)

In late April 1944 a desperate Gisi Fleischmann and Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, leaders of the Slovak Jewish underground "Bratislava Working Group", sent copies of the now famous "Auschwitz Report" to Hungary and major Jewish organizations in the free world. It described in detail with maps and statistics the atrocities in Auschwitz-Birkenau and alerted Jewish leaders in Hungary about the imminent disaster. It was based on testimony of four Jews who escaped from Auschwitz and reached Slovakia. Daily deportations of about 12,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began May 15, 1944.

Image Foreground: George Mantello and Pastor Paul Vogt

Little was meaningful was done with the Auschwitz Report until George Mantello (Hungarian-Romanian Jew Mandl György, right), First Secretary of El Salvador’s Consulate in Switzerland, obtained a copy via Moshe Krausz in Budapest, long after others have already received it from other sources. Mantello immediately publicized a summary. This led to major spontaneous grass roots protests in Switzerland. Swiss newspapers ignored strict censorship rules and there were about 440 articles about the Holocaust in about 120 papers.

Under leadership of Swiss theologians, including Pastor Paul Vogt (left), church sermons called for the end of the barbarism in Europe.
A book "Am I my brother's keeper?" ("Soll ich meines Bruders Hütter sein?") was published and sold out.

The Swiss people, including university students, members of labor unions and women's leagues staged unprecedented street demonstrations in Swiss towns.

Within a few days this critical Swiss public outcry evoked the first major public response to the Holocaust by political and religious leaders of the free world. A severe warning was issued by world leaders, including Roosevelt and Churchill, to Hungary's leader Miklós Horthy.

This was a major reason why he stopped the transports to Auschwitz. Despite Eichmann's renewed attempts to deport the Jews Raoul Wallenberg, Carl Lutz and the other neutral diplomats were able to rescue tens of thousands and possibly many more Jews in Budapest.