Switzerland and Midwest Connections: Carl Lutz — the Midwestern years
Welcome to the History Blog featuring the connections between Switzerland and the Midwest. I am Joerg Oberschmied, Deputy Consul General in Chicago. My interest in history started at an early age and continues to this day. The views expressed are solely mine and I hope you enjoy these journeys through time.
As part of a large-scale rescue operation, Carl Lutz put all his energy into saving distressed Jews in Hungary during World War II. He provided thousands of protection letters and an estimated 50,000 members of the Jewish people survived thanks to his intrepid help. Very little is known about his nearly twenty years in the United States, and especially of his time in the Midwest, which we will cover in this history blog.
From Appenzell to Missouri
Carl Lutz was born in Walzenhausen (Canton Appenzell Ausserhoden) in 1895, the second youngest of ten children belonging to Johannes and Ursula Lutz-Künzler (1849–1941). At age 14 he lost his father, a stone merchant. His mother held the large family together and she remained until her death the closest person Carl had. A devout Methodist, Ursula Lutz was a Sunday school teacher for more than 40 years and exemplified to her children the importance of caring for others. After basic schooling, Carl entered a commercial apprenticeship with the embroidery export company Heinrich Peter in St. Margrethen (Canton Sankt Gallen). He also took English courses in nearby Rheineck, before emigrating at the end of 1913 to St. Louis (Missouri), where an old family friend lived. There he found employment in the offices of The National Enameling and Stamping Company (NESCO).
St. Louis and entry into the consular service
The company was founded by the brothers Frederick and William Niedringhaus, who arrived in the area in 1855 as part of a large wave of German immigrants. The product that elevated NESCO into a nationally recognized brand was graniteware or “granite ironware,” the name given to metal utensils coated with an enameled surface composed partly of ground granite. With business booming, the company soon expanded to a site across the Mississippi river in Illinois. The new city created for the Niedringhaus works was named Granite City, in honor of the company’s famous product. The company rapidly expanded, but gradually began to lose money in the 1920s and finally ceased to operate in 1956.
In 1918 Carl Lutz attended Central Wesleyan College in Warrenton, near St. Louis. The college was founded by the German Methodist Episcopal church in 1864, to ‘make a liberal Christian education possible to every young man and woman’. Whilst there, he devoted himself to the study of economics, banking, commercial subjects, and English rhetoric. The college faced financial difficulties at the onset of World War II, as enrollment dropped. Anti-German sentiment caused the school to close and the buildings were sold.
In 1920 Carl Lutz was given the opportunity to work at the Swiss Legation (now Embassy) in Washington and he began to attend lectures at George Washington University, from where he graduated in 1924 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1926, Lutz was transferred to Philadelphia as chancery secretary and he briefly returned to St. Louis in 1933–34 to serve as Chancellor. There he got engaged to Gertrud Fankhauser (1911–1995), an employee at the Swiss Consulate. The couple married the following year in Switzerland, but the relationship ended in 1946. Ms Lutz-Fankhauser had a successful post-war career with UNICEF in Poland and in Brazil, before she was appointed UNICEF’s Vice-President and Director for Europe and North Africa.
Post American Life
Following his US postings, Carl Lutz was transferred to Palestine, where after outbreak of the war Switzerland also represented the interests of Germany. In January of 1942 he was posted to Hungary, were Switzerland represented the interests of (12) countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. In 1949 Carl Lutz married Magda Grausz-Csänyi, the mother of Agnes Hirschi-Grausz, his stepdaughter. Later he served in various positions within the Swiss Foreign Office and he retired as Consul General in 1960. The town of Walzenhausen named him honorary citizen in 1963, and in 1964 he became the first Swiss to be included in Yad Vashem’s Alley of the Righteous among the Nations. He passed away in Bern, Switzerland in 1975. In 2014, George Washington University awarded Carl Lutz its President’s Medal posthumously.
For more information visit www.Carl-Lutz.com. For an excellent account of Carl Lutz’s life and work see “Dangerous Diplomacy” by Theo Tschuy. Also György Vamos wrote a smaller account of his work in Hungary — “Carl Lutz, Swiss Diplomat in Budapest 1944”.
