Eduardo Propper de Callejón

Eduardo Propper de Callejón (9 April 1895, Madrid – 1972, London) was a Spanish diplomat who is mainly remembered for having facilitated the escape of thousands of Jews from occupied France during World War II between 1940 and 1944.

He was the father-in-law of The Honourable Raymond Bonham Carter and the maternal grandfather of British actress Helena Bonham Carter.

Propper de Callejón was First Secretary of the Spanish Embassy in Paris, when France surrendered to Nazi Germany on 20 June 1940. In order to prevent the Wehrmacht from plundering the art collection that his wife's family kept at the Chateau de Royaumont, he declared this castle to be his main residence, so it would be treated in the same privileged way as the accommodation of any other diplomat. Among the art works thus saved are a triptych of Van Eyck (one of Adolf Hitler´s favourite painters).

In July 1940, he issued from the Spanish Consulate in Bordeaux, in co-operation with the Portuguese Consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes, more than 30,000 transit visas to Jews, so that they could cross Spain to reach Portugal. When Spain's Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Suñer learnt that Propper de Callejón was issuing visas without prior authorization, he had him transferred to the Consulate of Larache in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. Afterwards, he would be posted to Rabat, Zurich, Washington D.C., Ottawa and Oslo.

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