Between January 1942 and the spring of 1945 Gertrud Lutz lived with her husband in Budapest. While they had been apart, the Swiss Foreign Minister Giuseppe Motta, in recognition of his remarkable contribution and that of his wife during their time in Palestine, had promoted Carl Lutz to the rank of vice-consul. During 1941 he had been representing the interests of Yugoslavia in Berlin. In January 1942 he was appointed to head up the foreign interests section at the Swiss embassy in Budapest. It was a prestigious posting but also an inherently complicated one. At various stages he represented the interests of up to fourteen foreign states which found themselves at war with Hungary. These included the USA and Great Britain, along with its dominions round the world (including Palestine). At the time of their posting to Budapest, Hungary was allied to Germany. Lutz seems to have been viewed in some quarters as a somewhat "restless and anti-bureaucratic" vice-consul, but the circumstances under which he was operating were also far from normal. He ran his department of 18 consular staff from an office in the former United States embassy building. By the time the Germans had lost trust in the Hungarian government sufficiently to invade the country, early in 1944, Lutz had used his vice-consular office in Budapest to issue approximately 5,000 exit visas to Jewish refugees desperate to emigrate to Palestine. According to other sources, by the time of the German invasion he had "aided by his wife and helpers ... helped some 10,000 [Jews] to emigrate to Palestine".