The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II

by Alex Kershaw

  Determined to become a naval officer like his father, Wallenberg must have been bitterly disappointed when he learned that because he was color blind—he had drawn green horses on red grass as a child—he would not be able to follow in his dead father’s footsteps. Eager to spend time abroad, Wallenberg left Sweden in 1931 to study architecture in America at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. When he returned to Sweden, he tried but failed to find a job as an architect even though he had won the only medal to be awarded by the American Institute of Architects to his class in Ann Arbor of more than a thousand students.

  In 1936, Wallenberg worked at a branch office of the Holland Bank in Palestine’s port city of Haifa, where he met and befriended Jews who had escaped persecution in Nazi Germany. “Their stories of suffering had a great influence on him,” biographer Jeno Levai noted. “His sense of justice was outraged by what he heard.”11 Wallenberg’s character traits, added Levai, were by now “well defined. He was generous and enjoyed having lots of people around him. He was a moderate man, drank very little, and was content to chat all evening over one bottle of beer. He loved beautiful women [but] could not find a partner who suited his demanding standards of beauty and intellect. He joked with his favorite aunt that women might only want to marry him for his wealth.”12

  After returning from Haifa, Wallenberg wrote his grandfather: “I am not made to be a banker. There is something about the profession that is too calm, cynical, and cold for me. I think that my talents lie elsewhere. I want to do something more positive than sit behind a desk all day saying no to people.” He wanted to do more with his life than work in banking—“a glorified pawnshop.”13 Yet it was with the help of his wealthy and influential cousin and godfather—the banker Jacob Wallenberg—that Raoul had then found a job at the Central European Trading Company, owned by Lauer. In 1938, Hungary, under the fascist sway of Miklas Horthy, had passed anti-Jewish laws, which meant Lauer had faced serious problems traveling to Hungary. So he had sent Wallenberg in his place, once in 1942 and most recently in autumn 1943.

  To Iver Olsen, Wallenberg seemed an ideal candidate. Crucially, he knew Budapest and how to make deals, perhaps even with the Nazis.

  ON JUNE 9, 1944, the intense young Wallenberg, the demure and tall Olsen, and the stocky Lauer met at the summer resort of Saltsjobaden at the Grand Hotel. It was 7 p.m. as they sat down in its luxurious, oakpaneled dining room. They talked late into the Scandinavian white night, Wallenberg agreeing to go to Budapest for two to three months, and finally left the hotel as the sun rose the next morning at around 5 a.m.14

  Before parting, Olsen told Wallenberg he would arrange for him to meet with the American ambassador in Stockholm, Herschel Johnson. The savvy, highly experienced Johnson was just as impressed as Olsen and cabled Washington: “There is no doubt in my mind as to the sincerity of Wallenberg’s purpose because I’ve talked to him myself. I was told by Wallenberg he wants to be able to help effectively save lives and he was not interested in going to Budapest merely to write reports to be sent to the Foreign Office.”15

  In Washington, War Refugee Board officials arranged for more than $200,000 in financing and other support for Wallenberg’s rescue mission. 16 Meanwhile, Wallenberg visited the Swedish Foreign Office, where he read reports about the deportation of Jews from Hungary’s provinces. Clearly, not a moment more could be wasted, for it meant another life lost. Each day that June, an estimated twelve thousand Hungarian Jews were being killed in Auschwitz, five hundred each hour, an average of thirty a minute, one every two seconds.

  Wallenberg brought forward his planned time of departure.17

  “I can’t stay in Sweden until the end of July [as planned],” he told Lauer. “Every day costs human lives. I’m going to get ready to leave immediately.” 18

  Before leaving Sweden, Wallenberg spent several days in intense negotiations with officials at the Swedish Foreign Ministry. He was afraid his rescue work would become “dragged into the processes of state bureaucracy and into the quagmire of diplomacy.” The long tradition of Swedish neutrality, especially the Foreign Ministry’s aversion to “conflict with the Nazis,” might undermine his mission, and he wanted written guarantees that he could “get a free hand in the field of rescue.”19

  Wallenberg’s demands were extraordinary. Nevertheless, after much wrangling, the Foreign Ministry agreed to them. He would even be able to use bribery to save lives, they agreed, and would act in Budapest in the official capacity of secretary to the Royal Swedish Embassy. Much to the further chagrin of Swedish officials, no doubt, he even insisted on devising his own basic code, to use in telephone conversations with Lauer, so convinced was he that the Gestapo had broken the Swedish diplomatic codes. Iver Olsen would, for example, be referred to as Larsson.20

  On July 5, 1944, on the eve of his departure, Wallenberg met with the leading members of the Jewish community in Stockholm. The Chief Rabbi of Stockholm, Professor Marcus Ehrenpreis, was present. Following a previous meeting, he had had misgivings about Wallenberg, especially about his youth and his eagerness to spend large sums to bribe the Germans, but now he gave the slightly balding young man his full support.

  “Those who set off on a mission of humanity can be assured of God’s special protection,” Ehrenpreis told Wallenberg.21

  It was clear to the men at the meeting that Wallenberg was moved by the rabbi’s words. Wallenberg then stood and thanked them for their support.

  “It’s late and I have yet to pack my clothes,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I must leave now. Thank you, my friends . . .”

  Ehrenpreis accompanied Wallenberg to the door.

  “You are in the hands of God” were Ehrenpreis’s words of parting.22

  BY EARLY JULY 1944, only the Jews of Budapest had been spared the roundup in Hungary. “Technical details will only take a few more days in Budapest,” Eichmann reported to Berlin.23

  If all went according to plan, Eichmann might win promotion and what he apparently craved most: Hitler’s appreciation. But then Eichmann ran out of luck. On July 7, as Wallenberg was preparing to leave Sweden, the Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy, finally bowed to intense international pressure—notably from the King of Sweden—and ordered the suspension of “the transfer of Jews to Germany.”24

  Horthy’s decision incensed Eichmann: “In all my long experience, such a thing has never happened to me. It cannot be tolerated.”25 He complained bitterly to Berlin but was informed that until the political situation in Hungary changed, Horthy’s decision would have to be respected. “Eichmann was terribly angry,” recalled Wilhelm Hottl, a Gestapo colleague. “He called Horthy an old depp, an Austrian word for nitwit. ‘Horthy’s got no say in this. We decide what happens in Hungary. ’”26

  The Jews of Budapest had gained a temporary reprieve.

  RAOUL WALLENBERG LEFT STOCKHOLM at 1:50 p.m. on July 7, 1944, traveling to Budapest via Berlin, where he met his twenty-five-year-old half-sister, Nina, at Tempelhof Airport, on the afternoon of July 8, 1944. Tall and slim, with high cheekbones and intense blue eyes, Nina was married to a Swedish diplomat, Gunnar Lagergren, head of the Foreign Interests Section of the Swedish legation in Berlin. She was delighted to see her brother, whom she idolized. Today, more than sixty years later, she remembers him as a quick-witted, dynamic, gifted actor and a brilliant impersonator, able to bring jollity to even the most somber situations. 27 She stresses that she and Raoul had grown up together in a “loving, close family” after Raoul’s mother had remarried.

  Brother and sister made their way to a waiting car. Nina’s husband sat behind the wheel. Luftwaffe fighters soared above as Gunnar pulled away from the airport, past antiaircraft guns and giant webs of camouflage netting concealing gray planes and bombers. Wallenberg was carrying his belongings in two knapsacks and was dressed in a long leather coat and a black felt hat. “He had sent a message to the Swedish Embassy, in Berlin, saying that he was coming, and that he would like to stay overnight with [me],” recalls Nina. �
�Then the ambassador thought it would be nice for me to have him two nights, so he ordered train tickets for a day later to Budapest. We spoke in the car from the airport to my home, and he talked about his mission for the first time. Then he asked if they had booked tickets for him. I said: ‘Yes, but you are going to stay for two nights.’ He got very upset. He said he was in a great hurry to get to Budapest.”28 There was no time to waste. He would leave the next day, on the first available train.

  Wallenberg told his sister that he had a list of prominent Jews and others in one of his knapsacks. “I had no idea at the time that his mission would be as dangerous as it turned out to be,” she later recalled. “I assumed he would carry it out according to the usual diplomatic methods, although knowing him as I did I should have known better. But I was seven months’ pregnant with my first child at the time, so I suppose I wasn’t concentrating much on anything else.”29

  It was dusk on July 8 as Nina and Wallenberg arrived at her home, the gatehouse of a large house in Wannsee beside the lake, not far from where Eichmann and others had planned the Final Solution. Wallenberg and Nina talked late into the night but were forced to a nearby bomb shelter when RAF bombers paid yet another visit to the city. The raids were now a nightly occurrence over central Berlin and outlying industrial areas, but they were rare in Wannsee itself.30 “We saw these Christmas trees, as we called them, lighted [squares] they would send down before a raid to illuminate the area before they were going to bomb. It looked like it was going to be a big raid, so we decided to take shelter.”31

  It was Wallenberg’s first experience of war. Perhaps only now did he begin to consider the enormity of what he had taken on: trying to rescue enemies of the Reich from under the noses of some of the most ruthless and amoral men in Europe.

  The following day, Wallenberg kissed his sister goodbye. He was about to be driven across rubble-strewn Berlin to the railway station. “We’ll get together soon and catch up on old times,” he reportedly told Nina. “The war can’t last much longer. It’ll soon be over and we’ll all be together again at home with mother.” He paused. “I’m going to be an uncle!” Wallenberg then cried. “Great news! Let me know as soon as the baby is born.”32

  ALMOST SEVENTY YEARS AFTER their parting, eighty-nine-year-old Nina Lagergren says her brother was, on reflection, ideally suited to the task ahead of him. “It was his nature to act swiftly and be very inventive. In the Swedish Home Guard, he had excelled as a leader under pressure. He was quick to make decisions. He could perform.”

  Wallenberg’s idols had been altruistic, intrepid Swedes. According to Nina, he had two main heroes as a young man: Elsa Brandstrom and Fridtjof Nansen, whose acts of courage during World War I had left a lasting impression. Brandstrom had been a courageous, self-taught nurse who had helped save thousands of lives in Siberia in 1915. Nansen was a polar explorer, but he also worked for the League of Nations, returning half a million refugees from Germany and Austria-Hungary to their countries after the conflict.

  Wallenberg had recently found another inspiration, this time cinematic, in the 1941 film Pimpernel Smith, which Nina had seen with him the last time they had been together in Sweden, in December 1942. The film’s main character, Horatio Smith, played by actor Leslie Howard (the son of a Hungarian Jew), saves persecuted Germans from the Nazis. “We were not allowed to see it in cinemas in Sweden because of [our] proximity to Germany,” recalls Nina. “So we were invited by the British embassy to see it in a closed session. When it ended, and we were leaving the cinema, Raoul said to me: ‘This is something I would like to do.’ It was quite amazing. He immediately felt it.”

  Like Horatio Smith, Raoul Wallenberg could not “just stand by.”33

  WALLENBERG ARRIVED THE NEXT AFTERNOON at the Anhalter rail station to take the 17:21 train to Budapest. The station was as usual crammed with anxious German troops leaving for the Eastern Front and for France, where the Allies had landed months earlier on June 6 and were now battling ferociously to break out of Normandy. Wallenberg had not reserved a seat and was forced to sit in the crowded corridor on one of his knapsacks, a pistol hidden in his pocket; he’d bought it secondhand, telling Lauer he didn’t want to waste funds on a new one.34

  Through the train’s windows that evening, Wallenberg could soon see shattered Germany slip past as the train headed south. He reportedly spent most of the journey trying to memorize the names on his list of key resistance figures, socialist politicians, and Jewish businessmen. It was important to remember their names, just in case he had to destroy the list in a hurry.

  Wallenberg’s train finally pulled into a station on the Austro-Hungarian border at Hegyeshalom. Border officials boarded the train and began to check people’s identities. Wallenberg handed over his passport. Its personal description stated that he was “aged 33, born 4.8.1912 in Stockholm, Protestant, 170 cm tall, brown hair, brown eyes.”35

  As his papers and passport were being examined, a transport comprised of twenty-nine boxcars was heading that day—Sunday, July 9, 1944—from Hungary, through Hegyeshalom, toward Poland. As Wallenberg sat on his knapsack and perhaps tried to snatch some sleep, his train could in fact have passed this transport of two thousand Hungarian Jews bound for the ovens in Auschwitz. They had been seized from the Budapest suburbs of Ujpest, Kispest, and Pesterzsebet, and on the evening of July 8, Eichmann had given orders for them to be deported as soon as possible. Admiral Horthy had suspended deportations, but Eichmann had just beaten the deadline.36 The transport marked the end of the liquidation of Hungary’s provincial Jews, what Eichmann called a “deportation surpassing every previous deportation in magnitude.”37

  The Reich plenipotentiary in Budapest, SS Brigadefuhrer Edmund Veesenmayer, would soon report to Berlin that in fact 437,402 Jewish men, women, and children had been deported to Auschwitz from Hungary’s provinces on 148 trains in just seven weeks, from May 14 to July 8. There were now around 230,000 Jews left in Hungary, stranded in its capital, Budapest, waiting in trepidation for the day when deportations would be resumed.38

  8

  The Majestic Hotel

  THE BERLIN-BUDAPEST TRAIN arrived in Nyugati Palyaudvar, the main railway station in the west of the city, on July 9, 1944. The art deco-styled station was the same as Wallenberg remembered it from his last visit, the previous fall of 1943. But the city beyond was much different, a more somber, darker place, now full of fear and uncertainty, where the Nazis and Hungarian fascists were clearly in control. Walls were covered with swastikas, daubed with anti-Semitic slogans and scarred with German propaganda posters. Along the elegant Corso, in the numerous world-famous Turkish spas, and in the embankment cafes and restaurants, there was none of the bustle and gaiety that had so charmed prewar visitors.

  Wallenberg’s taxi wound through the narrow streets of Pest and then crossed the Danube, heading for the Hotel Gellert, not far from the Swedish Embassy. To Wallenberg’s right, looming above central Europe’s great artery, stood the Royal Palace, residence of Admiral Horthy. Wallenberg checked into the hotel, and the following morning, Monday, July 10, he went straight to work, making his way up Gellert Hill toward the Swedish Embassy a few hundred yards away, at 8 Gyopar Street.1 Most days that summer, one could find a long line of people, many of them shabbily clothed, some hysterical and in tears, most wearing the yellow Star of David. The desperate, sad line sometimes stretched all the way down the steep Gellert Hill. The Jews in line were trying to obtain Swedish passports, which would exempt them from wearing the yellow star and being deported.

  Wallenberg knew at least one person on the staff at the embassy: thirty-one-year-old Per Anger, a blond-haired career diplomat. Anger had socialized with Wallenberg before the war and they had also met during Wallenberg’s visits to Hungary while working for the Central European Trading Company; Wallenberg had already assigned him the codename Elena. “I was convinced that no one was better qualified for the assignment than Wallenberg,” recalled Anger. “He was a clever negotiator and org
anizer, unconventional, extraordinarily inventive and cool-headed, and something of a go-getter. Besides this, he was very good at languages [fluent in Russian] and well grounded in Hungarian affairs. At heart, he was a great idealist and a warm human being.”

  Anger also remembered that Wallenberg was oddly equipped for a diplomat. He was carrying “two knapsacks, a sleeping bag, a wind-breaker,” and a black revolver, which he had been able to bring into the country because his diplomatic passport meant customs officials were not able to search his belongings.

  “The revolver is just to give me courage,” Wallenberg told Anger. “I hope I’ll never have to use it.”

  Wallenberg was clearly anxious to get to work.

  “I’ve read your reports,” he told Anger. “But could you bring me up to date?”

  Anger briefed Wallenberg on what had happened that summer. The deportations from the provinces to Auschwitz had been suspended only the day before. As many as 230,000 Jews were still alive in Budapest, some of them under protection from neutral legations such as the Swiss and Portuguese. The Swedish ambassador, Danielson, had already begun the Embassy’s rescue operation, having issued six hundred provisional passports to Jews who could prove that they had “personal or commercial ties to Sweden.”2

  “Everything depends on what the Germans have in mind,” explained Anger. “It’s hardly believable that they will go along with sparing the Jews of the capital for good.”

  “What documents have you issued the Jews?” asked Wallenberg.

  Anger pulled out Red Cross protection letters, examples of the temporary Swedish passports that Danielson had issued, and other documents. Wallenberg looked at them and then, according to Anger, said: “I think I’ve got an idea for a new and maybe more effective document.” Wallenberg explained how a newly designed safe-passage document—a Schutzpass—might be printed in the thousands so that more people could come under Swedish protection. “In this way,” recalled Anger, “the idea of the so-called protective passports was born at our first meeting. These were the identification papers in blue and yellow with the three crowns emblem on them that would come to be the saving of tens of thousands of Jews.”3