Karadja Constantin

Karadja, Constantin Constantin Karadja was born in 1889 to a Greek father and a Swedish mother in The Hague, during his father’s tenure as the Ottoman Empire’s ambassador to the Netherlands. As a young man, Constantin studied law in London and married his cousin, Marcelle, who was Romanian. The couple decided to settle in Romania, where Constantin joined the Foreign Office and embarked on his diplomatic career. From 1933 until the end of 1941 he served as Romanian consul-general in Berlin and was outraged by the Nazis’ racist policy against the Jews. He defended the Romanian Jews and expressed his repulsion at the Nazis’ actions in his correspondence with the Foreign Office in Bucharest. Immediately after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, he began to take vigorous steps against the expropriation of the property of Romanian Jews in the Third Reich. He drew up lists of the victimized by the “Aryanization” policy, and of their property, which he sent to his superiors so that Bucharest could protest these actions and demand the return of the plundered assets. In messages to the Foreign Office, he declared that its duty was to protect the Jews in the name of international law and the universal principle of human rights. More specifically, he asserted, Romania had the obligation to issue up-to-date passports to the Romanian Jews in Germany so that they could leave. When Constantin Karadja was instructed to add the word, “Jew”, to the passports of Romanian Jews, he insisted that the directive be rescinded, stating, “From a humanitarian aspect, we will worsen even more the situation of these unfortunates by adding unnecessary obstacles to their flight…” Instead, he suggested using only the letter “X” in a manner that could be identified only by the Romanian authorities. At the end of 1941, he was recalled to Bucharest and appointed director of the passport unit in the Foreign Office. There he continued to insist that his superiors protect Romania’sJews, particularly those who found themselves in Nazi-occupied countries and were in danger of being deported to concentration camps. To the Ministry’s director-general and to Foreign Minister Mihai Antonescu he wrote that “they must insist that Germany show the same attitude toward Romanian Jews as it did to citizens from the Axis states of Bulgaria and Hungary”. In November 1941, he wrote to Romanian legations that they “must protect all Romanian citizens abroad, without distinction”. However, his persistence on behalf of the Romanian Jews was of no avail. In 1942, Romania sent a classified circular to its foreign legations declaring that it was no longer responsible for the protection of Romanian Jews, thereby effectively abandoning them to the Nazis. In 1943, Karadja urged the Foreign Minister to give protection to 600 Romanian Jews, who, like other Jewish subjects from neutral and Axis states, Germany was demanding be either returned to their native land or face deportation to “eastern provinces,” meaning annihilation. In February-March 1944, the Romanian Jews living in France made their way home to Rumania. Constantin Karadja displayed great courage by writing letters to his superiors and to the country’s leaders cautioning them not to support the murderous policy against the Jews, because after the war Romania would be held accountable for the crimes committed against them. Karadja died in 1950, after a lifetime defending human rights, in the course of which many Jews were spared certain death. On May 18, 2005, Yad Vashem recognized Constantin Karadja as Righteous Among the Nations.