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Individuals and groups assisting Jews during the Holocaust

This is a partial list of rescuers who helped Jewish people and others to escape from the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. The list is not exhaustive, concentrating on famous cases, or people who saved the lives of many potential victims. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, has recognized over 20,000 Righteous among the Nations since 1963. The commission, called The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, organized by Yad Vashem and headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, has been charged with the duty of awarding people who rescued Jews, the honorary title of the Righteous among the Nations. As of January 2007, 21,758 people have received such an honor.

Most prominent examples

Holocaust rescuers came from many different countries in the world.

In Poland

Until the end of Communist domination much of Poland's Holocaust history was hidden behind the veil of the Iron Curtain. Poland was the only country where helping a Jew was a crime punishable by death. Yet 6,066 men and women (more than from any other country in the world) have been recognized as rescuers by Yad Vashem in Israel. Their real life stories of courage are just beginning to be told. Many of the rescuers were women and children; and teenagers. Poland during the Holocaust of World War II was under total enemy control – a fact that is often forgotten. Half of Poland was occupied by the Germans including General Government and Reichskomissariat; the other half by the Soviets, along with the territories of today's Belarus and Ukraine. The list of Polish citizens officially recognised as Righteous include 700 names of those who lost their lives while trying to help their Jewish neighbors. There were also groups, such as the Polish Żegota organization, that took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue victims. Witold Pilecki, a member of Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, organized a resistance movement in Auschwitz from 1940, and Jan Karski tried to spread word of the Holocaust. In the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Henryk Iwański leading one of the most daring actions of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) in support of the Jewish fighters.

In France

The French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered several thousand Jews, and similar acts were repeated throughout Europe, as illustrated by the famous case of Anne Frank, often at great risk to the rescuers. Brazilian diplomat Luis Martins de Souza Dantas illegally issued Brazilian diplomatic visas to hundreds of Jews in France during the Vichy Government, saving them from certain death.

In Belgium

In April 1943, members of the Belgian resistance held up the twentieth convoy train to Auschwitz, and freed 231 people. Several local governments did all they could to slow down or block the registration processes for Jews they were obliged to perform by the Nazis. Many people saved children by hiding them away in private houses and boarding schools. Of the approximately 50,000 Jews in Belgium in 1940, only about 25,000 were deported though only about 1,250 of the deported did survive.

In Denmark

The Jewish community in Denmark remained relatively unaffected by Germany's occupation of Denmark on April 9, 1940. The Germans allowed the Danish government to remain in office and this cabinet rejected the notion that any "Jewish question" should exist in Denmark. No legislation was passed against Jews and the yellow badge was not introduced in Denmark. In August 1943, this situation was about to collapse as the Danish government refused to introduce the death penalty as demanded by the Germans following a series of strikes and popular protests. During these events, German diplomat Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz tipped off Danish politician Hans Hedtoft that the Danish Jews would be deported to Germany following the collapse of the Danish government. Hedtoft alerted the Danish resistance and Jewish leaders C.B. Henriques and Marcus Melchior who urged the community to go into hiding in a service on August 29, 1943. During the following two months, more than 6,000 of Denmark's 7,500 strong Jewish community was ferried to neutral Sweden hidden in fishing boats. A small number of Jews were captured by the Germans and shipped to Theresienstadt. Danish officials were able to ensure that these prisoners weren't shipped to extermination camps, and Danish Red Cross inspections and food packages ensured focus on the Danish Jews. Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte ensured their release and transport to Denmark in the final days of the war. Denmark rescued around 6,000 Jews en masse in August - October 1943.

In Bulgaria

The Nazi-allied government of Bulgaria, led by Bogdan Filov, did fully and actively assist in the Holocaust in the areas of Yugoslav Macedonia and Greece which it occupied. On Passover 1943 Bulgaria rounded up the great majority of Jews in its zones of Greece and Yugoslavia, transported them through Bulgaria, and handed them off to German transport to be taken to Treblinka, where almost all were killed. It did not deport its own 50,000 Jewish citizens, after yielding to pressure from the parliament deputy speaker Dimitar Peshev and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The Nazi-allied government of Bulgaria, led by Dobri Bozhilov, deported a higher percentage of Jews (from the areas of Greece and F.Y.R.O. Macedonia that it occupied) to holding camps in Bulgaria and then onto death camps in the north, than did German occupiers in the region. In Bulgarian occupied Greece, the Bulgarian authorities arrested the majority of the Jewish population on Passover 1943. The active participation of Bulgaria in the Holocaust however did not extend to its pre-war territory and after various protests by Archbishop Sefan of Sofia and the interference of Dimitar Peshev the planned deportation of the Bulgarian Jews (about 50 000) was stopped.

In Portugal

Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued 30,000 visas to Jews and other persecuted minorities, though it cost him his career in 1941, when Portuguese dictator Salazar forced him out of his job. He died in poverty in 1954.

In Lithuania

Chiune Sempo Sugihara, Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, 1939–1940, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Poland in defiance of explicit orders from the Japanese foreign ministry. The last foreign diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train. After the war, Sugihara was fired from the Japanese foreign service, ostensibly due to downsizing. In 1985, Sugihara’s wife and son received the Righteous Among the Nations honor in Jerusalem, on behalf of the ailing Sugihara, who died in 1986. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, Chinese consul-general to Austria Ho Feng Shan, and others also saved tens of thousands of Jews with fake diplomatic passes.

In Albania

Albania is reputed to have hid and saved not only all Albanian Jews, but also several hundred Jewish refugees from other countries, including Serbia, Greece, and Austria, although there are those who disagree with this. In 1997, Albanian Muslim Shyqyri Myrto was honored for rescuing Jews, with the Anti-Defamation League's Courage to Care Award presented to his son, Arian Myrto. In 2006, a plaque honoring the compassion and courage of Albania during the Holocaust was dedicated in Holocaust Memorial Park in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York, with the Albanian ambassador to the United Nations in attendance.

In 1943, the Nazis asked Albanian authorities for a list of the country's Jews. They refused to comply. "Jews were then taken from the cities and hidden in the countryside," Goldfarb explained. "Non-Jewish Albanians would steal identity cards from police stations [for Jews to use]. The underground resistance even warned that anyone who turned in a Jew would be executed." ... "There were actually more Jews in the country after the war than before — thanks to the Albanian traditions of religious tolerance and hospitality."

In Finland

The government of Finland refused repeated requests from Germany to deport Finnish Jews to Germany; once with the curt diplomatic note "Finland has no Jewish Problem".

In Italy

In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and prisoners of war avoided deportation, many of them hidden in safe houses or evacuated from Italy by a resistance group organized by an Irish priest, Hugh O'Flaherty. Once a Vatican ambassador to Egypt, O'Flaherty used his political connections to help secure sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.

In Norway

German demands for the deportation of Jewish refugees from Norway were largely refused.

In China

Between 1933 and 1941, the Chinese city of Shanghai accepted unconditionally over 30,000 Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust in Europe, a number greater than those taken in by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India combined during World War II. After 1941, the occupying Nazi-aligned Japanese ghettoised the Jewish refugees in Shanghai into an area known as the Shanghai ghetto. Some of the Jewish refugees there aided the Chinese resistance against the Japanese. Many of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai migrated to the United States and Israel after 1948 due to the Chinese Civil War (1946–1950).

Leaders and diplomats

Per Anger, Swedish diplomat in Budapest who originated the idea of issuing provisional passports to Hungarian Jews to protect them from arrest and deportation. Anger collaborated with Raoul Wallenberg to save the lives of thousands of Jews.
Władysław Bartoszewski - Polish Żegota activist.
Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg - Swedish diplomat, who negotiated the release of 27,000 people (a significant number of which were Jews) to hospitals in Sweden.
Jacob (Jack) Benardout - British diplomat to Dominican Republic before and during World War Two. Issued numerous Dominican Republic visas to Jews in Germany. Only 16 Jewish families arrived in the Dominican Republic (the other Jews dispersed into countries along the way e.g. Britain, America) and so created the Jewish community of The Dominican Republic
Hiram Bingham IV, American Vice Consul in Marseilles, France 1940-1941.
José Castellanos Contreras - a Salvadoran army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva from 1942-45, and in conjunction with George Mantello, helped save at least 13,000 Central European Jews from Nazi persecution by providing them with false papers of Salvadoran nationality.
Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, German diplomatic attaché in Denmark. Alerted Danish politician Hans Hedtoft about the imminent German plans deport to Denmark's Jewish community, thus enabling the following rescue of the Danish Jews.
Frank Foley - British MI6 agent undercover as a passport officer in Berlin, saved around 10,000 people by issuing forged passports to Britain and the British Mandate of Palestine.
Varian Fry - American journalist who saved 2,000 - 4,000 Jews, including many prominent artists and intellectuals.
Albert Göring - German businessman (and younger brother of leading Nazi Hermann Göring) who helped Jews and dissidents survive in Germany
Paul Grüninger - Swiss commander of police who provided falsely dated papers to over 3,000 refugees so they could escape Austria following the Anschluss.
Kiichiro Higuchi - lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army
Wilm Hosenfeld - German officer who helped pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew, among many others.
Prince Constantin Karadja - Romanian diplomat, who saved over 51,000 Jews from deportation and extermination, as credited by Yad Vashem in 2005.
Jan Karski - Polish emissary of Armia Krajowa to Western Allies and eye-witness of the Holocaust.
Necdet Kent - Turkish Consul General at Marseille, who granted Turkish citizenship to hundreds of Jews. At one point he entered an Auschwitz-bound train at enormous personal risk to save 70 Jews, to whom he had granted Turkish citizenship, from deportation.
Zofia Kossak-Szczucka - Polish founder of Zegota.
Carl Lutz - Swiss consul in Budapest, managed to provide safe-conducts for emigration to Palestine to many thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Luis Martins de Souza Dantas - Brazilian in charge of the Brazilian diplomatic mission in France. He granted Brazilian visas to several Jews and other minorities persecuted by the Nazis. He was proclaimed as Righteous among the Nations in 2003.
George Mantello (b. George Mandl) - El Salvador's honorary consul for Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia - provided fictive Salvadoran citizenship papers for thousands of Jews and spearheaded a publicity campaign that eventually ended the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz.
Paul V. McNutt - United States High Commissioner of the Philippines, 1937-1939, who facilitated the entry of Jewish refugees into the Philippines.
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke - adviser to the Third Reich on international law; active in Kreisau Circle resistance group, sent Jews to safe haven countries.
Delia Murphy - wife of Dr. Thomas J. Kiernan, Irish minister in Rome 1941-1946, who worked with Hugh O'Flaherty and was part of the network that saved the lives POWs and Jews from the hands of the Gestapo.
Giovanni Palatucci - Italian police official who saved several thousand.
Giorgio Perlasca - Italian. When Ángel Sanz Briz was ordered to leave Hungary, he falsely claimed to be his substitute and continued saving some thousands more Jews.
Dimitar Peshev - Deputy Speaker of the Bulgarian Parliament.
Frits Philips - Dutch industrialist who saved 382 Jews by insisting to the Nazis that they were indispensable employees of Philips.
Witold Pilecki - the only person who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, organised a resistance inside the camp and as a member of Armia Krajowa sent the first reports on the camp atrocities to the Polish Government in Exile, from where they were passed to the rest of the Western Allies.
Karl Plagge - a Major in the Wehrmacht who issued work permits in order to save almost 1,000 Jews (see The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, by Michael Good)
Eduardo Propper de Callejón - First secretary in the Spanish embassy in Paris who stamped and signed passports almost non-stop for four days in 1940 to let Jewish refugees escape to Spain and Portugal.
Traian Popovici - Romanian mayor of Cernăuţi (Chernivtsi): saved 20,000 Jews of Bukovina.
Manuel L. Quezon - President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, 1935-1941, assisted in resettling Jewish refugees on the island of Mindanao.
Florencio Rivas - Consul General of Uruguay in Germany, who allegedly hid during Kristallnacht and later provided passports to one houndred and fifty Jews.
Ángel Sanz Briz - Spanish consul in Hungary. Saved, together with Giorgio Perlasca, more than 5,000 Jews in Budapest by issuing Spanish passports to them.
Abdol-Hossein Sardari - Head of Consular affairs at the Iranian Embassy in Paris. He saved many Iranian Jews and gave 500 blank Iranian passports to an acquaintance of his to be used by non-Iranian Jews in France.
Oskar Schindler - German businessman whose efforts to save his 1,200 Jewish workers were recounted in the book Schindler's Ark and the film Schindler's List.
Eduard Schulte - German industrialist, the first to inform Allies about the mass extermination of Jews.
Irena Sendler - Polish head of Zegota children's department: saved 2,500 Jewish children.
Ho Feng Shan - Chinese Consul in Vienna, who freely issued visas to Jews.
Henryk Slawik - Polish diplomat, saved 5,000-10,000 people in Budapest, Hungary.
Aristides de Sousa Mendes - Portuguese diplomat in Bordeaux, who signed about 30,000 visas to help Jews and persecuted minorities to escape the Nazis and The Holocaust.
Chiune Sugihara - Japanese consul to Lithuania, 2,140 (mostly Polish) Jews and an unknown number of additional family members were saved by passports, many unauthorized, provided by him in 1940.
Selâhattin Ülkümen - Turkish diplomat who saved the lives of some 42 Jewish Turkish families, more than 200 persons, among a Jewish community of some 2000 after the Germans occupied the island of Rhodes in 1944.
Raoul Wallenberg - Swedish diplomat, saved up to 100,000 Jews. Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews condemned to certain death by the Nazis during World War II. He disappeared in January 1945 after being captured by the Soviet troops who took control of Budapest.
Sir Nicholas Winton - British stockbroker who organized the Czech Kindertransport which sent 669 children (most of them Jewish) to foster parents ln England and Sweden from Czechoslovakia and Austria after Kristallnacht. Sir Nicholas has been nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.
Namik Kemal Yolga - Vice-Consul at the Turkish Embassy in Paris who saved numerous Turkish Jews from deportation.
Gilberto Bosques Saldívar - General Consul of Mexico on Marsella, France. He issued Mexican visas to around 40,000 Jews and political refugees, allowing them to escape to Mexico and other countries. He was later imprisoned by the Nazis.

Religious figures

Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Zante, who, when ordered by the Axis occupying forces to submit a list of all Jews on the island, submitted a document bearing just two names: his own and the Mayor's. Consequently all 275 Zante Jews were saved.
Archbishop Damaskinos - Archbishop of Athens during the German occupation. He formally protested the deportation of Jews and quietly ordered churches under his jurisdiction to issue fake Christian baptismal certificates to Jews fleeing the Nazis. Thousands of Greek Jews in and around Athens were thus able to claim that they were Christian and were thus saved.
Archbishop Johannes de Jong, later Cardinal, of Utrecht, Netherlands, who drew up together with Titus Brandsma O.Carm. († Dachau, 1942) a letter in which he called for all Catholics to assist persecuted Jews, and in which he openly condemned the Nazi German "deportation of our Jewish fellow citizens" (From: Herderlijk Schrijven, read from all pulpits on Sunday 26 January, 1942).
Alfred Delp S.J., a Jesuit priest who helped Jews escape to Switzerland while rector of St. Georg Church in suburban Munich; also involved with the Kreisau Circle. Executed February 2, 1945 in Berlin.
Maximilian Kolbe - Polish Conventual Franciscan friar. During the Second World War, in the friary, Kolbe provided shelter to people from Greater Poland, including 2,000 Jews. He was also active as a radio amateur, vilifying Nazi activities through his reports.
Bernhard Lichtenberg - German Catholic priest at Berlin's Cathedral. Sent to Dachau because he prayed for Jews at Evening Prayer.
Hugh O'Flaherty - an Irish Catholic priest who saved about 4,000 Allied soldiers and Jews; known as the "Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican". Retold in the film The Scarlet and the Black.
Pope Pius XII - during the German occupation of Rome he organised that Italian Jews would be concealed in convents and monasteries. Up to 1,000 Jews were even concealed at the Pope's Summer Residence Castel Gandolfo.
Sára Salkaházi - a Hungarian Roman Catholic Sister who sheltered an estimated 100 Jews in Budapest.
Andrey Sheptytsky - Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, harbored hundreds of Jews in his residence and in Greek Catholic monasteries. He also issued the pastoral letter, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," to protest Nazi atrocities.
The Sisters of Social Service, nuns who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews; included Sister Sara Salkahazi, recognized by Yad Vashem as well as beatified.
Archbishop Stefan of Sofia - Bishop of Sofia and Exarch of Bulgaria.
André and Magda Trocmé - A French pastor and his wife who led the Le Chambon-sur-Lignon village movement that saved 3,000-5,000 Jews.
Omelyan Kovch - Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest who was deported to Treblinka camp for helping thousands of Jews. He was canonized by pope John Paul II

Prominent individuals

Khaled Abdul-Wahab administrator of Mahdia, Tunisia, under German occupation; first Arab nominated for "Righteous Among the Nations"

Maria Leenderts and Petrus Johannes Jacobus Kleiss, Dutch merchants in her "Selecta Schoenenwinkel" (located at 248 Dierenselaan in Den Haag) with the cooperation of personnel of the "Quick Steps" soccer club (located on the corner of the Hardewijkstraat and the Nijkerklaan in Den Haag) and the pastor of the "Sint Thersia Van Het Kind Jesus Kerk" (located across the street from the Selecta shoe store and on the corner of the Apeldoornselaan and the Dierenselaan) accommodated many Jewish families throughout the war.
Albert Battel - a German Wehrmacht officer.
Albert Bedane - of Jersey, provided shelter to a Jewish woman, as well as others sought by the German occupiers of the Channel Islands.
Victor Bodson helped Jews escape from Germany through an underground escape route in Luxembourg.
Corrie ten Boom, rescued many Jews in the Netherlands by sheltering them at her home. - was sent to Ravensbrück
Stefania Podgorska Burzminski and Helena Podgorska at age 16 and 7 (Helena was her sister), they smuggled out of the ghettos and saved thirteen Jews from the liquidation of the ghettos.
Sgt.-Major Charles Coward was an English POW who smuggled over 400 Jews out of Monowitz labour camp.
Miep Gies, Jan Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Victor Kugler, and Johannes Kleiman hid Anne Frank and seven others in Amsterdam, Holland for two years.
Alexandre Glasberg, Ukrainian-French priest who helped hundreds of French Jews escape deportation.
Friedrich Kellner, justice inspector, who helped Julius and Lucie Abt, and their infant son, John Peter, escape from Laubach.
Stanislaw Kielar – two girls from Reisenbach family
Janis Lipke from Latvia, protected and hid around 40 Jews from the Nazis in Riga.
Heralda Luxin, young woman who sheltered Jewish children in her cellar.
Józef and Stefania Macugowscy, hid six members of the Radza family, and several others, in Nowy Korczyn, Poland.
Shyqyri Myrto, Albanian rescuer of Jozef Jakoel and his sister Keti.
Dorothea Neff, Austrian stage actress, who hid her Jewish friend Lilli Schiff.
Algoth Niska Finnish gentleman rogue and alcohol smuggler; smuggled Jews via the Baltic.
Irene Gut Opdyke, Polish hid twelve Jews in a German Major's basement.
Jaap Penraat - Dutch architect who forged identity cards for Jews and helped many escape to Spain.
Tim Pickert rescued dozens of Jews from the ghettoes of Kraków, Poland to hide them in his windmills located on his estate 23 km northwest of the The Hague, Netherlands.
Nicolaus Rossini, helped many Jewish orphans - was executed in Kraków-Płaszów.
Irena Sendler, Polish social worker who saved about 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Suzanne Spaak, wealthy socialite who saved Jewish children in France.
Marie Taquet-Martens and Major Emile Taquet hid some seventy-five Jewish children in a home for disabled children they were running in Jamoigne-sur-Semois, Belgium.
Gabrielle Weidner and Johan Hendrik Weidner, escape network rescued 800 Jews.
Bertha Marx and Eugen Marx assisted in saving Jews through the Resistance forces.
JUDr Rudolf Štursa, a lawyer, and Jan Martin Vochoč, an Old Catholic priest, in Prague baptized Jews on demand and issued over 1,500 baptism certificates.

Villages helping Jews

Yaruga, Ukraine
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Haute-Loire département in France, which saved up to 5,000 Jews.
Markowa, Poland, where 17 Jews survived the war. Many families hid their Jewish neighbours there and some paid the ultimate price.

Wiktoria and Józef Ulm, their 6 children and unborn baby were shot dead by the Germans for hiding the Szall and Goldman families.
Dorota and Antoni Szylar - hid seven members of Weltz family.
Julia and Józef Bar - hid five members of Reisenbach family.
Michal Bar - hid Jakub Lorbenfeld.
Jan and Weronika Przybylak - hid Jakub Einhorn.

Tršice, Czech Republic, many people from this village helped hide a Jewish family, six of them were given the honorific of Righteous among the Nations.
Nieuwlande, The Netherlands - during the war this small village contained 117 inhabitants. They unanimously decided in 1942 and 1943 that every household would give shelter to one Jewish household or individual during the war, thus making it impossible that anyone in the small village would betray their neighbours. Dozens of Jews were thus saved. All inhabitants have been honored by Yad Vashem.
Moissac, France There was a Jewish boarding home and orphanage in this town. When the mayor was told that the Nazis were coming the older students would go camping for several days, the younger students were boarded with families in the area and told to treat as members of their immediate family and the oldest students hid in the house. When it became too dangerous for the students to stay there any longer they made sure that every student had a safe place to go to. If the students again had to move the counsellors from the boarding house arranged for a new place and even escorted them to the new housing.