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First woman to receive the Air Medal, 1943

Second Lieutenant Elsie S. Ott was a pioneer in air evacuation of military casualties.

The numbers were high enough that getting them out of a battle zone was highly problematic

On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Codenamed Operation Barbarossa, it was the largest military operation in history, involving more than 3 million Axis troops and 3,500 tanks. It was the logical culmination of Hitler’s belief that the German ‘master race’ should seek ‘lebensraum’ (living space) in the east, at the expense of the ‘subhuman’ native Slav people, who were to be exterminated or reduced to serf status.

José Arturo Castellanos Contreras (San Vicente, El Salvador, December 23, 1893 — San Salvador, June 18, 1977) was a Salvadoran army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador’s Consul General for Geneva during WWII, and in conjunction with a Jewish-Hungarian businessman named György Mandl (George Mandel), helped save up to 40,000 Central European Jews from Nazi persecution by providing them with false papers of Salvadoran nationality.

Mandel-Mantello proposed to Castellanos that they issue Salvadoran documents to help save Jews.

In 1942, Castellanos became the Salvadoran General Consul in Geneva and appointed Mandel-Mantello the consulate’s “First Secretary,” a ficticious title that does not exist in the Salvadoran diplomatic hierarchy.