A Quiet Rebel: José Castellanos

Today, I would like to discuss one of the most significant humanitarian efforts to save Jewish people during World War II, undertaken in large part by an obscure El Salvadorian diplomat named José Castellanos Contreras. His efforts, largely ignored by contemporary scholarship, saved over 20,000 Jewish people from the Nazi Regime’s death camps. His quiet defiance against tyranny is something I worry we must learn from for the future.

The classical liberal tradition had a proud lineage of resistance against kings, tyrants, and oppressors. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” Thomas Jefferson’s personal motto, which he likely adapted from Benjamin Franklin, encapsulates the spirit of resistance that animated the 18th-​century American Revolutionaries.

But violence is not always wise or practical. More often than not, violent resistance or revolution is suppressed. Even if successful, the new leaders often end up being worse than the ones they replace. An underrated aspect of the classical liberal tradition is civil disobedience, or non-​compliance to unjust laws to challenge the state. It is unsurprising this is an often-​overlooked part of classical liberalism because its practitioners rarely beat their chest and write biographies of their tribulations. The work of civil disobedience is achieved through obscurity and humility.

José Arturo Castellanos Contreras was born 23 December 1893 San Vicente, El Salvador. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Adelino Castellanos, a general in the Salvadorian army. In 1911, at the age of 18, he entered the Military Polytechnic School, marking the beginning of his 25 years of active service in the Salvadoran military. Castellanos eventually achieved the rank of Second Chief of the General Staff of the Army of the Republic.

Castellanos spent his formative years during a particularly politically turbulent time in El Salvador. In 1931, Mussolini’s admirer and Fascist sympathizer, General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, seized power over the El Salvadorian government through a military coup. In resistance to Martinez in 1932, there was a failed peasant uprising that was crushed by the military, leaving thousands of civilians dead. While Castellanos played no part in the massacre, seeing his countrymen ordered to kill their own doubtlessly left a deep impression on his psyche. Fearing any further resistance, Martínez imposed strict authoritarian rule, persecuting any who opposed his regime.

A year after the massacre, Castellanos was sent for advanced study to the military institute in Turin, Italy. Upon graduating, he reached the rank of colonel in 1935. Returning to Salvador, he was awarded the position as the second ranking officer on the army’s General Staff in 1936. Despite his success and popularity, he was tasked by Martinez to travel to Europe to secure weapons and supplies for the Salvadoran army. While working in Czechoslovakia, he met György Mandl, a Jewish Hungarian businessman.

Castellanos was a dangerous man in a fascist regime; he was a high-​ranking member of the military, popular, and most importantly for Martinez, Castellanos loathed fascism. Observing the rising tide of fascism in Europe, Castellanos voiced his disapproval of Martínez’s military rule. 8:Fearing Castellanos as a rival, Martínez devised a plan: instead of outright murdering Castellanos and creating an uproar, he would assign him to diplomatic posts and let people slowly forget he ever said a word against the regime.

After his stint in England, in 1938, Martinez assigned Castellanos a new post in Hamburg, Germany, where persecution of the Jewish people had accelerated dramatically after Kristallnacht, a Nazi pogrom against Jewish businesses that signaled the German regime’s increasingly violent persecution of Jewish people.

Castellanos was disgusted, likely reminded of the stories of La Matanza; he wrote a letter to the Salvadoran Foreign Minister giving an account of the persecution of Jews in Germany and begged him to issue visas to German Jews. Castellanos received a reply forbidding him to aid. He ignored these orders and began to issue Jewish people visas to escape Germany. The El Salvadorian government ordered him to stop and severely limit his activity. Castellanos ignored these warnings and continued to issue visas to anyone fleeing the regime. To prevent Castellanos from causing a political incident between Germany and El Salvador, in 1942, he was given a new post in neutral Switzerland. Ironically, though this post was meant to keep Castellanos in obscurity, it set the stage for one of World War II’s most remarkable private rescue efforts of Jewish people.

Castellanos was given the position of Consul General in Geneva. Once he arrived, he reconnected with his friend György Mandl, who had recently fled Nazi-​occupied Europe. After hearing Mandl’s account of the Holocaust unfolding throughout Europe, Castellanos resolved to increase the scale of his clandestine operation.

He gave Mandl the more Hispanic-​sounding alias, George Mandel-​Mantello, before appointing him to the mostly fake consular position he created, the “First Secretary of the Consulate.” With this ridiculous ruse of a Romanian businessman trying to pass himself off as an El Salvadorian diplomat without one word of Spanish, Mandl now had official papers and thus immunity from being arrested by the German Gestapo.

Thanks to Castellanos’ knowledge of legal loopholes and Mandl’s business acumen, the duo began manufacturing Salvadoran citizenship certificates by the thousands. Typically, these certificates provided whole families with legal protection to travel through Nazi-​occupied Europe. To print so many certificates, Mandl spent 100,000 Swiss Francs of his own money from liquidating his businesses. Some research states that Mandl spent hundreds of thousands in contemporary dollars printing these certificates. 

These papers identified the bearers as citizens of El Salvador, entitling them to the protection of a neutral country. In practice, this meant thousands of European Jews with no connection to El Salvador suddenly became citizens of the small Central American republic. While it sounds insane to wave a wand and hand someone paper to make them a citizen of a nation they have never stepped foot in, Castellanos’s diplomatic bluff worked. Salvadoran certificates and passports backed by the International Red Cross and the Swiss consulate provided enough legal cover to give Jewish refugees the semblance of foreign citizenship, shielding them from the fate of death camps.

Castellanos and Mandl took advantage of their diplomatic immunity to travel and distribute certificates of Salvadoran citizenship to as many Jews as they could find. With the help of their staff and contacts, they distributed over 13,000 certificates, saving an estimated 40,000 Jewish people from death at the hands of the Nazi regime. Thanks to his work, El Salvador was the only country that offered nationality rights to Hungarian Jews on a massive scale during World War II.

By mid-​1944, El Salvador elected a new president, Castaneda Castro, who now formally authorized Castellano to continue his work. Importantly, Castellanos was no smuggler or profiteer; he refused compensation from everyone he saved, unlike many wartime diplomats who became rich selling falsified documents. But Castellanos was engaged in a purely humanitarian project. In a later interview, Castellanos remarked that he “did what anyone would have done in my place.” I am sorry to say that is simply not true. Castellanos and Mandl had no real legal authority to issue their papers, and they were explicitly violating orders from their government.

But Castellanos’s operation remained largely clandestine until the war’s end. After the war, he resigned from his foreign service and returned to his homeland after a long time away. He lived out his post-​war life modestly, rarely mentioning his extraordinary deeds. His daughter only found out about his heroic acts after a brief interview with him was aired on the radio. He assured her it was not a big deal and that, again, anyone would have done the same in his position.

Though I doubt everyone would risk their life for strangers, a select few in similar circumstances to Castellanos did the same. The Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, stationed in Lithuania, handed out thousands of visas to fleeing Jews. Aristides de Sousa Mendes do Amaral, a Portuguese diplomat serving in the French city of Bordeaux, defied the orders of his native regime, issuing visas and passports to thousands of refugees fleeing Nazi-​occupied France. The British Secret Service Officer Major Francis Edward Foley acting as a passport control officer for the British Embassy in Berlin, liberally “bent the rules” and helped thousands of Jewish families escape from Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht and before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Little of Castellanos’s legacy has survived beyond the papers he issued. Much of what he did remained secret. He received no kudos or praise for his work, only the constant fear of being discovered. The law and every authority in his life demanded he stand by and watch others be slaughtered; his conscience demanded something be done. Castellanos’ dilemma was described perfectly by Frederic Bastiat in his masterwork The Law, where he wrote, “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”

Classical liberals and libertarians often admire events such as the American Revolution, and though they see it as a last resort, they romanticize resistance against tyranny on some level. But this narrative does not fit into most real-​life situations. Most acts of defiance against the state are not epic last stands but quiet acts of civil disobedience by regular people who refuse to lose their moral sense to arbitrary authoritarianism.

In a previous episode of this podcast, I covered Sophie Scholl, a German student who became a symbol of nonviolent resistance against the Nazi regime. After becoming disillusioned with Nazism, she and her brother Hans joined the White Rose—a group dedicated to passive resistance. They distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi atrocities and urging Germans to oppose Hitler’s dictatorship. Their activism was influenced by their Christian faith and commitment to individual liberty. In February 1943, the Scholls were caught distributing leaflets at the University of Munich, arrested by the Gestapo, and swiftly tried and executed by guillotine. Allied planes later dropped copies of their final leaflet over Germany.

In Nazi-​occupied Norway, over ten thousand teachers refused to join the Nazi-​led Teachers Union. Teachers sent letters of resignation en masse to protest the implementation of a fascist curriculum. More than a thousand teachers were arrested and deported to labor camps. But ultimately, the regime was forced to abandon its plans of Nazifying education.

Castellanos, Scholl, and others risked their own necks to resist a tyrannical murderous regime. The sad truth is few followed their example. In the United States, the State Department had confirmed the Nazi party was implementing their plan to exterminate the Jewish population.

Though allied forces condemned the German policy of state-​led mass murder, they offered no plan to rescue the Jewish population. Immigration quotas established in the 1920s through the National Origins Act greatly limited the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, the regions most affected by the Holocaust.

Public Opinion Polls from the 1930s and 1940s show that most Americans opposed admitting large numbers of Jewish refugees. Furthermore, FDR’s administration focused on winning the war over directly aiding Jewish people. The United States did accept 200,000 Jewish refugees from 1933-1945, but far more sought safety on America’s shores and were turned away. In 2000, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s report concluded: “Despite widespread knowledge of the genocide, the United States and other Allied nations failed to take meaningful action to rescue Jews.”

Due to his own humility, for quite some time Castellanos remained an obscure figure. Since his death in 1977, there has been a growing movement acknowledging his sacrifice. In 2010, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust recognized Castellanos as “Righteous Among the Nations” for his efforts. The Anti-​Defamation League posthumously honored Castellanos for his humanitarian actions during the Holocaust. In 2016, Germany’s Foreign Office and the Centrum Judaicum Berlin held an event in Berlin to honor Castellanos’s legacy, including a screening of a movie about his life.

Castellanos did not break the rules to make history. He broke the rules because he believed laws that command indifference to suffering are not worth obeying. He understood that the legitimacy of law is grounded in its moral content, and that no government, no matter how powerful, can override the claims of conscience. Castellanos’ story is a reminder that resistance comes in many forms, and in the case of Castellanos, it came in the form of forged documents.

We live in a time marked by the looming threat of authoritarianism and by bureaucratic cruelty being touted as law and order. Castellanos’s example demands we ask ourselves: when the law and morality diverge, which will we follow? Liberty is not only defended on battlefields or in parliaments, but by the choices of individuals who refuse to let their moral sense be legislated away.