During World War II, he attempted to use his status as a former government minister to issue citizenship papers to Jews in detainment camps in France, but was arrested and imprisoned.
Brutzkus was born in 1870 in Palanga, Courland Governorate, Russian Empire (in present-day Lithuania).
[3] In 1878, the family relocated to Moscow where his father and uncle opened a factory of leather goods.
[3] Together with Leon Bramson, Brutzkus took part in the Russian Jewish bibliographical work, Systematic Index of Literature Concerning Jews (Систематический Указатель Литературы о Евреях).
[3] In 1917, he was elected to the Russian Constituent Assembly on the Jewish list representing the Minsk Governorate.
[2] In October 1922, Brutzkus was elected to the First Seimas as a candidate of the Zionist Group for the Nation and Autonomy.
[4] In 1924, Brutzkus moved to Berlin, and in 1934 to Paris due to the growing threat of Nazism in Germany.
As a former minister in the Lithuania government, he convinced the Consul of Lithuania in Marseille to issue citizenship papers to Jews detained in Camp de Rivesaltes and Camp de Gurs in France.
[9] Brutzkus utilized his status to access the camps and distributed hundreds of documents, also to non-Lithuanian nationals, before he was arrested in 1940 and sentenced to six months in prison by the Vichy regime in France.
[11] In 2022, B'nai B'rith awarded Julius Brutzkus with a Certificate of the Jewish Savior of the Holocaust (posthumously).
[1] Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Brutzkus authored various articles and books in Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, English, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and French on the history of the Jews in Russia; he was particularly intrigued with the history of the Khazars and the early Rus' Khaganate.