Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser

Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser (7 March 1911 – 29 June 1995) was a Swiss humanitarian activist. For a quarter of a century she undertook work for the UNICEF, serving in successively more senior capacities between the organisation's foundation and 1966. She then served between 1966 and 1971, as UNICEF vice-president and director for Europe and North Africa.

Her nomination, jointly with her ex-husband, in 1964 as Switzerland's first two "Righteous Among the Nations" related to an earlier stage in her life however: it was a recognition of the couple's role in rescuing an estimated 62,000 Jews from slaughter during her husband's posting as the Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, and following the invasion of Hungary by the forces of Nazi Germany in March 1944.

Life Provenance and early years Gertrud Fankhauser was born in Rechthalten (Fribourg), a little town in the mountains south of Bern. Her father was a cheese maker. It was here that she met Carl Lutz, a junior Swiss diplomat originally from Appenzell. Gertrud Fankhauser and Carl Lutz returned together to Switzerland, and in January 1935 married at the fashionable St. Paul's Church in Bern.

Diplomat's wife in (British) Palestine Following a last minute change of plan on the part of the Swiss authorities their honeymoon was cancelled. Instead, at the end of January 1935 the couple travelled to Jaffa (as it was then commonly known) in Palestine, which since 1922 had been administered, at least for most practical purposes, as a relatively fractious territory of the British Empire. Here Carl Lutz took up an appointment as a Swiss consular official: Gertrud worked alongside him, supplying (unpaid) clerical support. At some point between 1937 and 1939 (sources differ) they were relocated to nearby Tel Aviv from where, as the wife of an increasingly senior Swiss consular official, Gertrud Lutz experienced at close hand the unfolding Palestinian civil war.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, diplomatic relations between belligerent states were wound down or broken off. Switzerland, with a tradition of neutrality stretching back to 1815, suddenly found itself accepting requests to provide diplomatic and consular services around the world on behalf of various governments that no longer wished to pursue diplomatic interactions directly. Diplomatic relations between Britain and Germany were broken off. Alongside an enormous increase in administrative work, and having to work with various National Socialist agencies, representing Germany diplomatically in Palestine also involved coping with a massive level of humanitarian and social work. In handling these responsibilities the formidable organisational abilities of Gertrud Lutz came to the fore. One of the largest tasks for Gertrud involved looking after the women, children and old people among the German citizens - many of them political or racial refugees - who had been interned in camps by the British authorities. Another major responsibility involved creating and sustaining contacts with large numbers of German Jews in the territory who had suddenly found themselves rendered stateless in 1935 as a result of the Nuremberg [race] Laws. Through their diplomatic and consular work together in Palestine Carl and Gertrud Lutz built up experience and established contacts internationally that would prove invaluable through the challenges ahead, notably during their posting in Budapest. Gertrud Lutz stayed on, liaising closely with the British military authorities, and looking after the German women and children whom the British had identified as "enemy aliens" when the war broke out, and who continued to be detained in camps. She left Palestine to re-join her husband only in October 1941. At the time of their posting to Budapest, Hungary was allied to Germany. Lutz seems to have been viewed in some quarters as a somewhat "restless and anti-bureaucratic" vice-consul, but the circumstances under which he was operating were also far from normal.

Starting in the summer of 1944 the numbers involved were scaled up, with the issuance of the so-called "collective" protection documents and passes. As the German military authorities began the grim task of herding the Jewish population of Budapest into ghettos, approximately 30,000 people received protection in their homes from protection documents issued by the Swiss vice-consul, with 76 houses designated as buildings under Swiss diplomatic protection. Limited quotas of protection documents that Lutz had been allocated in the anticipation that they would be used for individuals were instead adapted so that each applied to entire family units, this increasing the number of people protected. Lutz's team engaged in constant legalistic wrangles to ensure that the diplomatic protections were respected under wartime conditions, but with the German forces accustomed to following rules and frightened of the consequences of not doing so, the protective documents issued and administered on behalf of neutral Switzerland were widely respected by soldiers on the ground through most of 1944.

Between December 1944 and February 1945, during the 50-day Soviet blockade of Budapest, Carl and Gertrud Lutz looked after "more than 50" people who were hidden in the basement of the Swiss embassy buildings, which now included not merely the pre-war Swiss embassy building but also the former embassies of states that were now, following the severing of direct diplomatic relations, being represented by the foreign interest section of the much expended Swiss diplomatic estate. The cellar of the burned out former British embassy building was being used to hide, according to one of them interviewed in 2017, roughly thirty people.

New beginnings

In January 1946 Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser joined "Don suisse", She then, in May 1947, moved on to Poland where in the first instance she served as "Don Suisse" representative. Lutz-Fankhauser's time in Turkey was relatively brief. To her initial astonishment, a priority defining much of her work there involved a large and very necessary UNICEF malaria eradication programme. The situation was particularly grim in the remoter regions, notably in the Kurdish provinces to the east. UNICEF supplied vehicles, equipment and insecticide. Insecticide formulations had to be changed several times as the mosquitoes adapted and acquired new immunities. The vehicles were also a problem. They were mostly Willys Jeeps sent over as kits and assembled at a manufactory in Istanbul. It turned out that roughly 100 of the 400 UNICEF Jeeps were "not in running condition". The drivers had received no training in vehicle maintenance. They had merely been given English language "manufacturers' instructions" and left to work them out. Some of the drivers had difficulty reading even Turkish: English was not widely understood beyond the merchant classes in the cities. One of the new mission chief's most pressing tasks was therefore to arrange hands-on vehicle maintenance courses for drivers and mechanics, and to have the manufacturers' documentation translated into Turkish. The drivers and the vehicles were critical elements in the malaria eradication programme, and while funding for the necessary training was released by UNICEF without demur, the launch of the lengthy exercise was significantly delayed by the Jeep problems. The eradication was in full swing, but still far from completed, when Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser was moved on again in 1966, this time back to (western) Europe.

During the Biafra War (1868-1970 Gertrud Lutz temporarily relocated the centre of her operations from Paris to Geneva in order to be closer to the other international welfare and relief agencies engaged in trying to help the civilian population affected by the war. Under her direction UNICEF looked after around a million imperilled children both during the war and during the post-war period in the early 1970s. After retiring, formally in June 1971, Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser retained close links with the UNICEF European and North African headquarters in Paris. and in 1972 Lutz-Fankhauser became Zollikofen's first female town councillor.

Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser suffered a heart attack while travelling by train to Zürich for a "television event" in which she had been scheduled to participate,

Archive The principal archive on her life and works is held by the Gosteli Foundation at Worblaufen, just outsideZollikofen and near Bern.

Many of the papers that make up the literary estate of Gertrud Lutz wwre supplied after her death by Agnes Hirschi (formerly Agnes "Agi" Grausz, the little girl who became step daughter of Carl Lutz (and therefore, by some calculations, of his first wife) as a result of his marriage to Magdalena Grausz, his second wife. By the time Gerd Lutz died in 1995 it is apparent that the two women were in regular contact.