Diplomat Florin Manoliu's Life and His Almost Impossible Mission.

In May 1944, at the request of Georges Mantello-Mandel, Florin E. Manoliu, the economic counsellor of the romanian legation in bern, Switzerland, agreed to take a thousand San Salvadorian citizenship certificates to northern transylvania for Mantello's relatives and friends. at the railway station in Vienna, he was detained by the German authorities, taken to berlin, investigated, and threatened not to interrupt his journey to bucharest in Hungary. the romanian diplomat finally arrived in bucharest, wherefrom he travelled to northern transylvania. but there were no Jews left in any of the towns in that province, belonging to Hungary then. He took the certificates to budapest, where he gave them to Mose (Miklós) Krausz, the representative of the Palestine agency, hiding in the Swiss legation building in budapest. From Krausz, who had been contacted with the help of the Swiss vice-consul Carl lutz, Manoliu obtained an extremely important document compiled from several auschwitz Protocols written by escapees, that he then handed over to Mantello in Geneva, at dawn, on 21 June 1944. this was to be the source of the information disseminated throughout the allied press in the following years about what had happened at auschwitz. Manoliu was prosecuted for corruption after the war, once acquitted, fled illegally from romania to Switzerland in 1947. He later settled in argentina, where he was a professor at the University of bahía blanca. this study aims at shedding light on some of the details of his mission, as well as his life and fate, in the specific context of the war and post-war years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]