Today’s document relates to a subject which becomes a varied and constant effort of the WRB–the idea of protective papers. We don’t hear much about it in the scholarship, but it’s all over the place in the 1944 records. The idea was (and various relief organizations, consulates, and private people had this idea) if you could get papers stating that you were under the protection of an Allied country, theoretically the Germans needed to treat you as an enemy alien and put you in a POW camp rather than a concentration camp. In a POW camp, you could get Red Cross packages, be treated much better, and be eligible for prisoner exchange. It was much better there than in a concentration camp.
This inevitably led to a market in protective papers. Some were sold for exorbitant prices, others were handed out freely to save lives. One of the earliest mass creator of these protective papers was George Mandel-Mantello. He was a Jewish man from Transylvania who spent the war in Switzerland and befriended the consul general of the El Salvador consulate, Castellanos. Castellanos appointed Mantello as “First Secretary” and in that role, Mantello issued thousands of Salvadoran protective papers. He sent them everywhere in Europe.
There was one problem, described in the document below. Although Castellanos approved of the protective papers, the government in El Salvador did not. In order for the papers to be fully effective, El Salvador needed to tell Switzerland that all bearers of Salvadoran papers should be treated as nationals. In this document, Agudas Israel, an Orthodox organization in New York, urged the WRB to approach El Salvador to make sure they communicated this information to Switzerland.
