Ángel Sanz Briz

Ángel Sanz Briz was born into a prominent family in Zaragoza, Spain. Studying law at the University of Zaragoza, he entered the Spanish diplomatic service in 1933. After postings in Cairo, he was appointed Chargé d'Affaires at the Spanish Legation in Budapest in 1942. When Nazi forces occupied Hungary in March 1944 and Adolf Eichmann began deporting hundreds of thousands of provincial Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, Sanz Briz refused to remain a detached observer.

Researching Spanish legal precedents, Sanz Briz unearthed a 1924 royal decree issued by Prime Minister Primo de Rivera granting Spanish citizenship to Sephardic Jews dispersed across the Mediterranean. Although Budapest's Jewish population was almost entirely Ashkenazi, Sanz Briz persuaded the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to let him grant protection to 200 Sephardic Jews. Sanz Briz then ingeniously multiplied the permits into family units, issuing numbers like '200-A', '200-B', and '200-C', expanding the 200 visas into thousands of individual safe-conduct letters.

Sanz Briz rented eleven apartment buildings across Budapest, affixing the Spanish flag and declaring them extraterritorial Spanish sovereign soil to shelter Jewish families from Arrow Cross raids. Using his personal funds to bribe Hungarian officials, he coordinated with other neutral diplomats like Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz. In late November 1944, ordered by Franco's government to leave Budapest for Switzerland, Sanz Briz ensured his humanitarian apparatus continued by transferring authority to Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasca.