Juliusz Cool

Juliusz Kühl (born June 24, 1913 in Sanok , Poland , † February 19, 1985 in Dade , Florida ) was a Polish consular officer, economist, activist of the Jewish diaspora and a member of the Ładoś group , headed by Aleksander Ładoś of 1941 to 1943 illegally produced a large number of Latin American passports to save Jews from the Holocaust .

Live and act

Kühl was born into a family of Orthodox Jews in Sanok ( Austria-Hungary, now Poland ). After losing his father at an early age, thanks to the efforts of his mother, he moved to live with relatives in Switzerland in 1929 . He started studying at the University of Bern . In 1939 he defended his dissertation on Polish-Swiss trade relations with distinction. The dissertation attracted the attention of the Polish embassy in Bern. Kühl was employed there after the outbreak of World War II .

In 1943 he married Yvonne Weill, with whom he had three daughters. One of them, Evelyn Kühl, was the wife of Israel Singer , who was Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress from 1986 to 2001 .

Rescue operation and "passport affair"

From 1940 to 1945, Kühl was deputy head of the consular department in the Polish legation, although Switzerland did not recognize its diplomatic status. From 1941 to 1943, Kühl, together with the consul Konstanty Rokicki and with the support of the Polish envoy Aleksander Ładoś and his deputy Stefan Ryniewicz, participated in the illegal production of several thousand Paraguayan passports. They were smuggled into Nazi-occupied Poland by Jewish organizations .

According to the Swiss police, it was Kühl's job to buy the blank passports from the bribed honorary consul of Paraguay . Consul Rokicki then filled them out, giving them the appearance of legality. In addition, Kühl kept in constant contact with Jewish organizations that worked with the Polish embassy, in particular with the influential family of Isaak and Recha Sternbuch from Montreux , the Relief Committee for Jewish War Victims (RELICO) of Abraham Silberschein and with the international Orthodox organization Agudat Israel .

The passports were used to prevent the transport of Jews to the extermination camps . The passport holders were instead taken to internment camps, mainly in France , where they were to be exchanged for Germans interned in the Allied states . The largest internment camps were in Vittel and Bergen-Belsen . According to historians and journalists, several hundred people were saved from the Holocaust in this way . In the course of his activities, Kühl was interrogated twice and threatened with deportation. The requests to the Polish embassy to release Kühl were always refused by Aleksander Ładoś.

Next life

In July 1945, Kühl, Ryniewicz and Rokicki left the diplomatic-consular service after the communists took power in Poland. Stayed cool in Switzerland . With Aleksander Ładoś he was involved in the Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe by Stanisław Mikołajczyk .

In 1949, Kühl moved to Canada , where he first sold watches and then became a successful businessman in the construction industry. In 1980 he moved to the USA , where he died.

reception

Kühl left documents about the Passport operation that were given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust after his death . Kühl's activities have been extensively described by Holocaust historians who dealt with Switzerland. Kühl saw himself as a functionary of the Polish state apparatus and claimed that the passport operation was carried out on instructions from Ładoś. That in turn should have carried out general instructions from the Polish government. The documents do not confirm this claim because Ładoś failed to inform the government that he was engaged in forging passports.

Due to the conspiratorial nature of the operation and the good contacts between Kühl and the Jewish community in Switzerland, the view arose that Kühl was the initiator and leader of the Ładoś group. Mark MacKinnon, who presented Kühl as the “Canadian Schindler ”, reinforced this myth . The Polish journalists Zbigniew Parafianowicz and Michał Potocki turned against this representation. According to them, Kühl was one of four Polish diplomats who took part in the operation headed by Aleksander Ładoś. The researcher Agnieszka Haska, however, takes the view that Kühl and Ładoś acted as a tandem. For them, however, the role of Ryniewicz and Rokicki and the process of forging passports are secondary.

Kühl never received an award for his work. However, alongside Ładoś, Ryniewicz and Rokicki, in a letter from Agudat Jisra'el to the Polish government in exile, he was named as one of the people who saved the lives of several hundred Jews.

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

Individual evidence

↑ 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.
↑ Responsibility of individual officials of the Polish legation in the passport forgery area Hügli, August 8, 1942, Federal Archives Bern .
↑ 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.

personal data
SURNAME	Cool, Juliusz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Polish consular officer, economist and activist
DATE OF BIRTH	June 24, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH	Sanok , Poland
DATE OF DEATH	19th February 1985
Place of death	Dade , Florida

[1] 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.

[2] Responsibility of individual officials of the Polish legation in the passport forgery area Hügli, August 8, 1942, Federal Archives Bern .

[3] 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.