INTRODUCTION

As a diplomat in Switzerland during World War II, Aleksander Wacław Ładoś headed a secret operation closely cooperating with other Polish diplomats and Jewish organisations. The operation helped save many Jews from the Holocaust by providing them with illegally issued Central and South American passports. These passports were smuggled into German-occupied countries in Europe and gave the bearers the chance of survival, providing protection from the deadly grip of the Nazis.

THE STORY

Aleksander Wacław Ładoś / 1897-1958

Before the Second World War

Aleksander Wacław Ładoś was born on 27 December 1897 in Lviv, the son of a postal clerk. As a teenager he joined the Polish independence movement. In 1910 he started studying history at Lviv university. Before the First World War he was already a member of the Polish Peasant Party “Piast”. Ładoś joined the Polish forces in Galicia who fought against tsarist Russia. In 1914 this led to his arrest in Zakopane by the Austro-Hungarian authorities.

After being released from prison, he escaped to Switzerland using forged documents. He mainly lived in Lausanne, completed his studies in Freiburg and worked for the Polish press agency.

In 1919 he came back to Poland, where the Polish People’s Republic had been established. As a result of all his contacts and networks, he started working for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Shortly after World War I he served as plebiscite delegate in Spiš and Orava, worked as head of the Press Department of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and served as secretary of the Polish delegation to the peace talks between Poland and the Soviet Union in Riga and Minsk. Prior to 1923 when, with the support of Wincenty Witos, he became the Polish ambassador to Riga, he worked for the political department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Despite his criticism of the coup d’état in May 1926, he was appointed Consul General to Munich where he had first-hand experience of the rise of the Nazis. In 1931 Pilsudski supporters in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs made sure he was dismissed. He returned to Warsaw where he worked for the Swiss firm Hydro Nitro in both an editorial and advisory capacity.

Envoy in Bern 1940-1945

After the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, he fled to France. There he joined the Polish government-in-exile that was then still based in Paris, before it relocated to London in 1940. Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski offered Aleksander Waclaw Ładoś the position of Minister without portfolio which he gratefully accepted. During World War II the government-in-exile was recognised by neutral states as the legitimate successor of the inter-war government in Poland. Even the attitude of states allied with Nazi Germany was not clear which meant that even the after the Polish Republic had been destroyed and during the war, there were some Polish embassies in Europe.

In spring 1940 Aleksander Ładoś was to be made chief diplomat in Bern. German authorities increased pressure on Switzerland, thus delaying his appointment as ambassador. It was not until April 1940 that he was appointed chargé d’affaires ad interim.

After his arrival a large number of aid operations were started to help refugees from Poland and existing operations were expanded. His main role was to act as intermediary between occupied Europe and the government-in-exile in London. He fearlessly made good use of his diplomatic status to improve the situation of Polish refugees in Europe through diplomatic intervention and informed the government-in-exile in London of the situation on the continent.

Already under his predecessor, Tytus Komarnicki, a Polish radio station was broadcast from the embassy and this was continued by Ładoś to provide refugees in Switzerland and Europe with information in Polish on the course of the war and the situation in occupied Europe. Ładoś managed to rescue Jewish refugees from Poland, who were in Switzerland illegally, from being sent to the south of France to the Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis. He not only helped Polish refugees in Switzerland but also supported over 10,000 Polish soldiers of the 2nd Legions Infantry Division interned in Switzerland after illegally crossing the border to Switzerland after France had been invaded by the Nazis.

Ładoś was happy to open the embassy’s diplomatic channels to Jewish activists and organisations thus giving them the opportunity to communicate with organisations in the USA, Great Britain and Palestine during World War II. This meant that Jewish aid and rescue operations could be coordinated and also funded. The embassy thus played a major role in both the material and financial support of Jewish refugees in Shanghai. The communication channels meant that important information on the Holocaust could also be sent to the Western Allies.

Of high relevance is his involvement in forging Central and South American travel documents and distributing them in Europe. The so-called Ladoś group under Aleksander Ladoś consisted of Polish diplomats and representatives of Jewish organisations. They worked closely together with branches of resistance networks in Europe. According to Mordecai Paldiel, Director of Yad Vashem’s Department of the Righteous among the Nations from 1984 to 2007, it is probably the only story of such close cooperation between the Polish diplomats and the Jewish activists to save hundreds or even thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. The Polish diplomats Stefan Ryniewicz and Konstanty Rokicki were in contact with the consular offices of Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti and Peru and purchased illegal blank passports which they filled out with the names and passport details of European Jews. The details were supplied by Juliusz Kühl, the Polish-Jewish Attaché at the embassy. He was in contact with Abraham Silberschein form the Jewish World Congress and the orthodox Jew Chaim Eiss from the organisation Agudat Israel. From 1942/1943 these Jewish organisations financed the purchase of the blank passports from corrupt members of staff of the Central and South American embassies. They also obtained the details and passport photos of Jews from the European ghettos. As German authorities no longer recognised passports issued by the Polish Republic, they had to obtain passports from Central and South American countries. The forged documents were distributed to members of Jewish organisations or via friends and relatives. The forged passports from Bern were also sold on the black market where Jews could buy them for about 300 dollars. Being in possession of one of these passports opened up some scope of action for persecuted people and in some cases, Jews were able to leave the ghettos or have their names removed from the transport lists to the extermination camps.

Before the group was uncovered by the German secret service in 1944, the Ładoś group had produced documents for some 8,000 to 11,000 Jews and saved many people’s lives. Apart from coordinating activities, Ładoś’s main role was to keep the group’s activities secret by means of diplomatic intervention and to make sure that the forged documents were officially recognised.

Other diplomats were also involved in resistance work in World War II but the extent of the Ładoś group’s work and their close cooperation with Jewish networks and activists are quite unique. Another remarkable fact is that it was not only Polish Jews who were able to acquire these passports but also people who had formerly had German or Dutch citizenship. For as long as it existed, the group had one main goal. At high risk, also to themselves, they tried to save European Jews, irrespective of their nationality. This is confirmed in documents and statements by witnesses. This decision and the responsibility they took for citizens of other countries made them “European Consuls”. However, because of the different conditions in occupied countries, German and Dutch Jews had greater chances of survival than Polish Jews.

After the War

After the end of the war in 1945, Ładoś resigned as an envoy but decided to stay in Switzerland and lived in Lausanne. Up to 1946 he acted as the official representative in Switzerland of the PSL (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, the Polish Peasant Party) and its leader Stanisław Mikołajczyk. After a communist dictatorship was established in Warsaw, Ładoś emigrated to France and lived near Paris. He withdrew increasingly from public life. In 1960 he returned to Warsaw, where he lived with his sister in poverty. His health was deteriorating and he died on 29 December 1963. Ładoś left three volumes of unpublished and unfinished memoirs in which, due to his relatively early death, the passages describing the forging of passports are missing. The other members of the Bernese group shared a similar fate. They all left the diplomatic service and withdrew from public life. Konstanty Rokicki remained in Switzerland where he led a lonely life and spent his final years in a poorhouse. He died on 18 July 1958 and was buried at the cemetery in Lucerne in the section for the poor.

Commemoration

In the so-called Cold War, the forgery operation remained largely unknown apart from a few academic studies. After World War II, a communist dictatorship was established in Poland and it was not until 1989 that Ładoś and the other members of his group were officially acknowledged by the Polish government. It is only in the last few years that efforts have been made to officially commemorate the resistance work carried out by the Bernese Group. They have been the subject of several exhibitions and documentary films in Switzerland and Poland. In 2018 a plaque commemorating the group was ceremoniously unveiled in Bern. In 2019 Yad Vashem honoured a member of the Ładoś Group, Konstanty Rokicki, with the title of

Righteous among the Nations.

Along with the honouring of the restistance of the Ładoś Group, scientific activities surrounding the group also intensified. “The Ładoś List” is one of the largest Holocaust research projects conducted during recent years, carried out under the auspices of the Pilecki Institute. So far it has been possible to identify over 3,000 Jews who were in possession of so-called “Ładoś passports’.

Sources and Literature

Danuta Drywa: Poselstwo RP w Bernie. Przemilczana historia, Warszawa/ Oświęcim 2020.

Nathan Eck: The Rescue of Jews With the Aid of Passports and Citizenship Papers of Latin American States, in: Yad Vashem Studies 1 (1957), S. 125-152.

Agnieszka Haska: „Proszę Pana Ministra o energiczną interwencję”. Aleksander Ładoś (1891–1963) i ratowanie Żydów przez Poselstwo RP w Bernie, in: Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały 11 (2015), S. 299-309.

Jakub Kumoch (editor) with the co-operation of Monika Maniewska, Jędrzej Uszyński, Bartłomiej Zygmunt: The Ładoś List. An index of people to whom the Polish Legation and Jewish organizations in Switzerland issued Latin American passports during the Second World War, Warszawa 2020.

Mordecai Paldiel: Heroic Poles of the time of war, in: Wszystko co najważniejsze, https://wszystkoconajwazniejsze.pl/mordecai-paldiel-heroes-of-a-special-kind/

Pilecki Institut (Hrsg.), Reisepässe des Lebens; ein dreisprachiges (De, Pl, En), a website in Polish, German and English on the activities of the Bernese Group headed by Ładoś with a strong focus on the passport holders and a database with all the passport holders identified up to now, URL: https://passportsforlife.pl/  [last retrieved: 22.04.2025].

Images:  Headerbild / Gravestone: By Mateusz Opasiński – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88738469

Author: Cornelius de Fallois

Translation: Patricia van den Brink

Contact: info@fritz-bauer-forum.de