Aleksander Ładoś

Aleksander Ładoś around 1927

Aleksander Wacław Ładoś (born December 27, 1891 in Lemberg , † December 29, 1963 in Warsaw ) was a Polish diplomat , consular officer, publicist and politician. As the Polish envoy to Switzerland, from 1940–1945 he led a rescue operation for the Jews and forged several thousand Latin American passports.

Live and act

Aleksander Ładoś was the son of Jan Ładoś, an official in the postal administration in Lviv, and Albina nee Kalous. He graduated from the 4th Classical High School in Lviv with honors and then studied history at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv . In 1913 he began his political activity in the PSL "Piast" party, where he personally met Wincenty Witos and Jan Dąbski . After the outbreak of the First World War he was involved in the organization of the Polish legions. After being arrested by the Austro-Hungarian authorities, he fled to Lausanne, where he resumed his interrupted studies.

After Poland regained independence, Ładoś returned to the country and joined the diplomatic service. Until the beginning of 1920 he was in charge of the planned plebiscite in Spiš and Orava. From April 1920 he worked in the Warsaw headquarters of the Foreign Ministry, where in June 1920 he took over the position of head of the press department. From 1920-21 he was secretary of the delegation that represented Poland in the peace talks with Soviet Russia in Minsk and Riga. He personally took part in Jan Dąbski's conversations with Adolf Joffe . In October 1922 he was appointed Head of Unit for Central Europe in the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry. On December 1, 1923, however, he was appointed envoy in Riga and on March 1, 1927 consul general of the Republic of Poland in Munich. On April 30, 1931, Ładoś was dismissed from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after Józef Beck took over the position of Deputy Foreign Minister.

Until the attack of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union on Poland , Ładoś dealt with political journalism. He was editor-in-chief of Gazeta Handlowa and published under the pseudonym Wacław Nienaski in such newspapers as Odnowa, Polonia, Wieczór Warszawski, ABC, Zwrot, Goniec Warszawski. He criticized Józef Beck's foreign policy and politically approached the Morges front .

On October 3, 1939, he took over the role of Minister without Portfolio in the government-in-exile of Władysław Sikorski as a representative of Stronnictwo Ludowe . He was later replaced by Stanisław Kot . Since November 8, 1939, he was a member of the Committee of Ministers for State Affairs ( Członek Komitetu Ministrów dla Spraw Kraju ) as a representative of Stronnictwo Ludowe . From May 24, 1940 to July 1945, he served in the Polish embassy in Bern in the function of the chargé d'affaires ad interim.

Ładoś Group and "Passport Affair"

During his mission in Switzerland, Ładoś and his colleagues carried out the operation under the cryptonym “Passport Affairs”, during which the Polish Jews were issued Paraguayan and Honduran passports. With the help of these passports, 330 people were rescued from the Holocaust , 387 people were blown up and killed despite their forged passports. The fate of another 430 people could not be determined. The operation began in 1941 with the purchase of a passport from the notary and honorary consul of Paraguay, Rudolf Hügli. It turned into a massive counterfeiting operation in 1942-43. Their goal was to save the Jews in the ghettos in German-occupied Poland from the Holocaust using forged passports from neutral countries. The lists of names with photographs were smuggled out of the ghettos by members of the Jewish organizations. They were then handed over to the Polish embassy in Bern. The Zionist politician and lawyer Abraham Silberschein and Zurich rabbi Chaim Yisroel Eiss , one of the founders of the ultra-orthodox Jewish organization Agudath Israel, played a special role .

A Jewish employee of Ładoś, Polish diplomat Juliusz Kühl , brought the documents as well as the blank passports to the Polish consulate in Bern, where they were filled out by Consul Konstanty Rokicki . The originals of these passports always remained in the Paraguayan consulate in Bern and notarized photocopies were smuggled back into Germany-occupied Poland. "On the basis of this document, the person in question was not taken to an extermination camp, but to an internment camp, where they will probably be able to stay until the end of the war," wrote Heinrich Rothmund, head of the Federal Aliens Police, on September 6, 1943 after the conversation the other member of the Ładoś group , Ładoś 'deputy Stefan Ryniewicz . Ładoś himself attempted to persuade Federal Councilor Marcel Pilet-Golaz to deliberately "overlook" the activities of Polish consuls and diplomats. He also argued that sending the photocopies of the forged passports was not an illegal act.

The operation was discovered by the Gestapo , which confiscated some of the passports after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising . After the Nazi Germans murdered the holders of the Paraguayan passports in the internment camp in Vittel, France, Ładoś initiated the intervention of the Polish government-in-exile , which in February 1944 resulted in Paraguay recognizing the passports and the holders no longer being removed from the internment camp. Some of them survived the war in Bergen-Belsen and others were able to leave the territory occupied by the Third Reich. In 1945 Ładoś, Ryniewicz, Kühl and Rokicki were honored with a letter of thanks from Agudath Israel, which was presented to the Polish government in exile. The letter stated that the number of those rescued can be estimated at several thousand.

After the communists came to power in Poland, the Ładoś group was never recognized or honored for its actions. Their activity was only the subject of isolated written work or book references. In August 2017, the Polish daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and the Canadian Daily Globe and Mail published a series of articles dedicated to the Ładoś group . The journalists were also able to find the descendants of the people who were rescued with the help of the “Paraguayan passports”.

Later life and death

After the war, Ładoś remained in exile. From September 1945 to July 1946 he lived in Lausanne and in autumn 1946 he moved to Clamart near Paris. In 1960 he returned to Poland and lived in Warsaw, where he died in December 1963. He was buried in the Powązki cemetery . Ładoś left three unpublished diaries. The third diary to be devoted to the passport operation was interrupted by his death.

Awards and honors

• Order of Polonia Restituta , Knight
• Three star medal , commander
• Order of the Crown of Romania , Grand Officer

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Z. Parafianowicz, M. Potocki, How rescued a Polish ambassador in Bern hundreds Jews , Swissinfo.com, August 10, 2017
2. ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/poland-obtains-archive-of-polish-effort-to-save-jews-in-wwii/2018/08/06/421d702c-9985-11e8-a8d8 -9b4c13286d6b_story.html ?? noredirect = on
3. ^ R. Grünberger-Elbaz, The moving revelations of the Eiss archive: About a previously unknown Swiss rescue operation for Jews in World War II , Audiatur-Online.ch, August 31, 2017
4. ↑ Ibidem
5. ^ Notice du Chef de la Division de Police du Departement de Justice et Police, H. Rothmund, Bern, September 6, 1943.
6. ^ Copy of the letter from Agudath Israel to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland, January 12, 1945
7. ↑ Zbigniew Parafianowicz, Michał Potocki, Polak na polecenie rządu ratował Żydów od Holokaustu. Świat się o tym nie dowiedział , “Dziennik - Gazeta Prawna”, August 7, 2017
8. ^ Mark MacKinnon, "He should be as well known as Schindler": Documents reveal Canadian citizen Julius Kuhl as Holocaust hero , "Daily Globe and Mail," August 7, 2017

literature

• Agnieszka Haska, “Proszę Pana Ministra o energiczną interwencję”. Aleksander Ładoś (1891–1963) i ratowanie Żydów przez Poselstwo RP w Bernie , “Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały ”. 11, pp. 299-309, 2015. ISSN 1895-247X.
• Aleksander Ładoś [in:] Leksykon historii Polski , red. Michał Czajka, "Wiedza Powszechna", Warszawa 1995
• Iwona Kulikowska, Aleksander Ładoś - Konsul generalny II RP w Monachium [in:] W nieustającej trosce o polską diasporę , Gorzów Wielkopolski 2012, pp. 263-279, ISBN 978-83-933510-1-5
• Kto był kim w Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej (red. Jacek M. Majchrowski), wyd. BGW Warszawa 1994, p. 103, ISBN 83-7066-569-1
• Mark MacKinnon, "He should be as well known as Schindler": Documents reveal Canadian citizen Julius Kuhl as Holocaust hero , "Daily Globe and Mail," August 7, 2017
• Rachel Grünberger-Elbaz, The moving revelations of the Eiss archive: About a previously unknown Swiss rescue operation for Jews in World War II , Audiatur-Online.ch, August 31, 2017
• Stanisław Łoza (red.): Czy wiesz kto to jest? , Wydawnictwo Głównej Księgarni Wojskowej, Warszawa 1938
• Zbigniew Parafianowicz, Michał Potocki, How a Polish envoy saved hundreds of Jews in Bern , Swissinfo.com, August 10, 2017