René de Weck, Swiss Consul General in Amsterdam, 1942
In spring 1933, de Weck was appointed Plenipotentiary Minister for Switzerland in Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece, stationed in Bucharest. In November 1941, as a result of the Nazi persecutions of Jews in Romania, de Weck contacted the Red Cross and urged them to send a special representative to Bucharest to protect Jews who were being murdered. As a result, the ICRC sent two representatives. Working with ICRC representative Carl Kolb in the summer of 1943, de Weck managed to gather more than 2,000 Jewish orphans in Moldavia to prevent their deportation and from being forced into ghettoes. De Weck also managed to protect Hungarian Jews who had sought refuge in Romania and who would otherwise have been murdered. De Weck worked unceasingly to prevent the Romanian government from harming Jews of Swiss nationality or of those countries whose interests were being represented by Switzerland in Romania.
