The Fake Salvadoran Citizenship Papers That Saved Thousands of Jews During the Holocaust
José Arturo Castellanos and George Mantello were not a pair one might have imagined teaming up to outsmart both the genocidal Nazis and an indifferent world. Yet once circumstances brought the two men together for a business deal in 1939, a relationship ensued that over the next five years resulted in their devising and carrying out a plan that saved thousands of Jews otherwise fated to die in Auschwitz.
Born György Mandl in Transylvania (a Hungarian-speaking part of Romania) in 1901, George Mantello grew up in a well-off Orthodox Jewish family. His secular education included attending military school during World War I, before he entered the business world. A true cosmopolitan, he moved with ease from one European capital to another, while working simultaneously in several different commercial fields – finance, textiles, international trade. And though he mixed comfortably with non-Jewish society, he identified strongly with Revisionist Zionism.
José Castellanos was born in San Vicente, El Salvador, in 1893. He too came from a well-off family, and he too attended military academy, beginning in 1910, from which he emerged to begin a long career in his country’s army. By 1936 he was a colonel and member of the army’s General Staff when, according to Castellanos’ daughter, Frieda Castellanos, the country’s military dictator Gen. Maximiliano Hernández Martínez decided to remove this charismatic rival from the scene by sending him overseas.
A posting as El Salvador’s consul general in Liverpool was followed by consular positions in Hamburg and, finally, in 1941, Geneva.
It was in an earlier posting, as an army business agent in Europe, that Castellanos first met Mandl – who now called himself George Mandel, and eventually eliminated any Jewish hint from his name by becoming Mantello – who brokered a deal for the Salvadoran to purchase weapons and supplies for his country from Czechoslovakia in 1939.
more...
