Ładoś Group: The WWII Paraguayan Passport Rescue

A Passport That Wasn’t Real, and Saved Hundreds of Lives Anyway

The most valuable passports I’ve studied in twenty years of collecting were never legally issued. Between 1940 and 1943, a small, quietly desperate group of Polish diplomats in Bern bought blank Paraguayan passport forms from a Swiss notary and used them to pull Jewish families back from the edge of deportation. I want to walk you through how this actually worked, because the true story is more remarkable, and more precisely documented, than the shorthand version usually told.

The Bern Connection: Six People, One Secret

The rescue operation wasn’t the work of a lone sympathetic diplomat. It was run by what historians now call the Ładoś Group, or Bernese Group: a name given to a group of Polish diplomats and Jewish activists who, during the Second World War, built in Switzerland a system for illegally producing Latin American passports aimed at saving European Jews from the Holocaust. Six people made up the core: envoy Aleksander Ładoś, his deputy Stefan Ryniewicz, consul Konstanty Rokicki, and attaché Juliusz Kühl at the Polish Legation, alongside Abraham Silberschein of the RELICO relief committee and Zurich merchant Chaim Eiss, who represented Agudat Israel.

Their supplier was a Bernese notary named Rudolf Hügli, who happened to hold the honorary consulship of Paraguay. The legation identified Hügli as an honorary consul of Paraguay who was ready to sell blank passports, and initially bought about thirty of them. It started, as these things often do, almost casually: the first documents in late 1939 were meant to help wealthy Jews escape Soviet-occupied territory through Japan, with no direct connection yet to the machinery of the Holocaust. Wikipedia, SRF

That changed fast. Once mass deportations began in 1942, the same paperwork became something else entirely.

How the Passport Factory Actually Ran

Rokicki did most of the physical work. He filled out the blank Paraguayan forms by hand, using names and photographs smuggled to Bern by Silberschein and Eiss from inside occupied Poland, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Hungary. Hügli then signed and notarized them for a fee, one that ranged between 500 and 2,000 Swiss francs per passport, money that flowed to Hügli through the Polish diplomats and amounted to considerably more than Ładoś’s own monthly salary of 1,800 francs. None of the Polish diplomats or Jewish activists profited personally, a detail that matters if you’re trying to understand their motives.

The scale surprised even the researchers who eventually reconstructed it. Serial numbers recovered from Silberschein’s archive at Yad Vashem suggest at least three production series totaling roughly 1,056 documents, and since many passports covered entire families, that translates to at least 2,100 people who directly benefited. Wikipedia’s broader estimate for the operation’s reach, citing Silberschein’s own 1944 report, runs as high as 10,000 people spared deportation to extermination camps.

Crucially, a Paraguayan passport didn’t grant safe passage anywhere. What it did was reclassify the bearer. Instead of being sent east to Auschwitz or Treblinka as a stateless Jew, a passport holder was typically interned as a foreign national, in camps like Vittel in France or Tittmoning and Bergen-Belsen in Germany. That distinction, foreign internee rather than deportee, was often the difference between surviving the war and not.

Why It Took Fifty Years to Come Out

None of the six ever wrote a full account of what they’d done. Ładoś began a memoir but died before finishing it. The Swiss police had actually caught up with the scheme by 1943, interrogating Eiss and others, but the war’s end and the group’s own secrecy buried the story for decades. It was only through the research of Jeffrey Cymbler, a New York genealogist who had been piecing the story together since the 1980s, and a Polish embassy research team assembled under Ambassador Jakub Kumoch, that the full mechanics of the operation came to light. jta

Recognition came slowly and unevenly. In 2019, Yad Vashem named Konstanty Rokicki Righteous Among the Nations, with “appreciation” extended to Ładoś and Ryniewicz, a decision that some surviving family members felt understated the other diplomats’ roles. For collectors and researchers, that recognition matters less than the paper trail itself: in December 2019 the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw published a list of 3,262 identified passport holders, drawn from research across the Arolsen Archives, Yad Vashem, and Poland’s Archives of New Proceedings, though several thousand more names likely remain unrecovered.

What This Means for Collectors

If you ever come across one of these Paraguayan documents, or a Latin American passport tied to Bern in this period, treat it as a historical artifact first and a collectible second. Provenance is everything here: a genuine Ładoś Group passport should trace back to a named recipient on the Pilecki Institute’s list or to an archived Silberschein or Eiss correspondence file at Yad Vashem. I’d steer you away from any dealer who can’t show that chain, given how emotionally and historically loaded these items are.

For the parallel story of how Swiss authorities and profiteers complicated this same rescue network, I’ve written more in my earlier piece, Passports, Profiteers, Police, a Swiss War Secret, which digs into the darker, transactional side of wartime document trading in Bern.

The Polish-language documentary on this page (with adjustable subtitles) covers the same Bern operation from the perspective of Polish researchers. It’s a useful visual companion to the archival record above, though I’d treat it as a narrative supplement rather than a primary source in its own right.

 Further reading: Passports, Profiteers, Police – A Swiss War Secret

 

Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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