Whether this single-minded and relentless pursuit of every last Jew arose from a personal hatred of the Jewish people, from a total acceptance of Nazi ideology, from a pathological obsession with efficiency for its own sake, or from all three is difficult to say. Some years later, while in hiding in Argentina, Eichmann would tell the Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen: ‘Personally, I never had a bad experience with a Jew…The enemy was not persecuted individually. It was a matter of a political solution, and for this I worked one hundred percent.’ But like his boast of having sent 5 million Jews to their deaths, this may merely have been said for effect.
What seems certain, though, is that Eichmann’s dedication was painfully conscientious. What seems likely, therefore, is that he felt at least some sense of failure at the inability of his department to meet its target figures throughout Europe. Whether his superiors judged his efforts as harshly is unknown. It may be significant that Eichmann never did get a promotion beyond the rank of Obersturmbannführer – lieutenant-colonel – which he achieved in October 1941, and was not decorated until towards the end of 1944, when Himmler, with some show of irritation, pinned a medal on him. On the other hand, when the ‘big job’ came up – the destruction of Hungarian Jewry – Eichmann was entrusted with it, so it must be assumed that Himmler still had great confidence in him.
However that might be, Eichmann may well have felt the need to prove himself again, to both himself and his superiors, which would go a long way towards accounting for the maniacal zeal with which he met the challenge posed by the eight hundred thousand Jews of Hungary. His efforts to destroy them all would later be described by Winston Churchill as ‘probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world – done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a great state and one of the leading races of Europe.’*
But even at the zenith of his achievements, Eichmann was ultimately to be frustrated – and largely by the extraordinary efforts of the ‘Righteous Gentile,’ Raoul Wallenberg.
Chapter 2
Raoul Wallenberg’s father died eight months after his marriage to the beautiful and spirited Maj Wising and three months before the birth of their son. The child had been conceived before the first symptoms of cancer appeared. The illness ran its course with lightning speed, and Raoul Gustav Wallenberg died, in great pain, a week after his bride’s twenty-first birthday. He was twenty-three and had been an officer in the Swedish Navy, as were many men of the sprawling Wallenberg clan. Other Wallenbergs had been, and still are, bankers, diplomats, and bishops of the Lutheran Church. Wallenberg was, and still is, a highly regarded name in Sweden.
Maj Wising Wallenberg, daughter of Sweden’s first professor of neurology, Per Wising, was devastated by her bereavement and sustained only by the thought of the child in her womb. A few days after her husband’s death, in May 1912, she wrote to his parents, Ambassador and Mrs Gustav Wallenberg, at the Swedish embassy in Japan: ‘This horrible emptiness and sense of loss grows greater and greater. How is it ever going to end? I should have understood long ago that so great a happiness as I had been given could not last. Now I have to live on the happy memories that he gave me. Oh, Mother, how will it be with our little one? May God grant that my baby is well-formed and healthy…’
On 5 August 1912 Professor Wising wrote to Ambassador Wallenberg: ‘Our dear Maj was delivered yesterday morning of a boy, as she wished, whom she wants to call Raoul Gustav, a dear name. She is very well, although in the final months she was very tired and had moments of the deepest despair.’
Four days later Mrs Wising (Maj’s mother) wrote to the ambassador and his wife: ‘It is a beautiful, warm day, and Maj is lying in her bed at my side on the verandah and little Raoul is at her side, sleeping in his basket. She is very happy with her little son, but sorrow and loss overwhelm her now and then. It is very difficult to console her, but her own admirable self-control and the fear of causing harm to the little one helps her to get over these moments.’
By 28 August Maj was herself writing again to her in-laws: ‘I can’t describe how happy I feel with this child, a living memory of my happy marriage.’ Little more than three months later Maj wrote to Tokyo again – this time to tell the numbing news of her father’s sudden death from pneumonia, a week earlier: ‘I had no strength to write to you before. This blow is too hard, and it was all I could manage to keep myself composed so that my baby should not suffer.’
As Wallenberg’s half-sister, Nina Lagergren, was to put it a lifetime later: ‘All of a sudden, in that once-happy house, there were two widows and this baby boy.’ The two bereaved women focused all their love on the half-orphaned child who, says Nina Lagergren, ‘gave and received so much love that he grew up to be an unusually generous, loving, and compassionate person.’
Six years after her husband’s death, Maj Wallenberg remarried. Her second husband, Fredrik von Dardel, was as retiring as she was outgoing. He was a quiet, bookish young civil servant in the Health Ministry and rose to the post of administrator of Sweden’s largest hospital, the Karolinska. They had two children, Guy (who was to become one of Sweden’s leading nuclear physicists) and Nina. ‘We never thought of Raoul as being of a different father,’ says Nina. ‘He was completely of us and we of him, and my father adored him as much as the two of us.’
Nonetheless, Raoul was a Wallenberg, and his paternal grandfather, Ambassador Gustav Wallenberg, insisted on supervising his upbringing and education. He was determined that the boy should grow up with an enlightened, cosmopolitan outlook. After Raoul had graduated from high school and completed his compulsory nine months’ military service, Gustav sent him to France for a year to perfect his French. He was already proficient in English, German, and Russian.
After that Raoul went to the United States to study architecture. Although his grandfather wanted him eventually to follow one of the strands of family tradition and go into banking, Raoul had always been fascinated by building and architecture. As a small boy in Stockholm he haunted the major building sites and talked eagerly to the architects, builders, and engineers he found there. Grandfather Wallenberg agreed that Raoul could study architecture first, if he would then learn the ways of commerce and banking.
In 1931 Wallenberg went to Ann Arbor to take the University of Michigan’s architecture course. He was an outstanding student, completing the course, which normally took four and a half years, in three and a half and winning a medal that was awarded to one student out of each class of eleven hundred. Thirty-five years later Dr Jean Paul Slusser recalled at Ann Arbor: ‘He was one of the brightest and best students I think I had in my thirty-year experience as a professor of drawing and painting.’ Classmate Sol King remembered him as ‘a very talented yet modest person who showed great insight in finding simple solutions to complex problems. Neither his conduct nor his manner of dress gave anyone who knew him the slightest clue to his high station in life as a member of one of Sweden’s most distinguished families.’
In his English examination papers of the period Wallenberg revealed that although an idealist, he was by no means starry-eyed. Writing on the subject of European union, he observed: ‘Those who base their hope in union on an idealized conception of man are bound to be disappointed.’ Writing on ‘The Open Mind,’ he commented: ‘The open mindedness of humanity, even in our generation, is a myth. Maybe the individual is open-minded on one question, but on this question he generally belongs to the minority. In most other things he generally is extremely reactionary.’
During the summer vacation of 1933 Wallenberg worked in the Swedish pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair, earning three dollars a day. Hitchhiking back to Ann Arbor, he was picked up by ‘a gentleman in a fine car,’ as he told his mother in a letter. ‘We were going along at about 70 miles an hour, when all of a sudden we saw a train crossing the highway about 150 yards ahead.’ The driver braked violently, went into a skid, and badly damaged his car, but he and Wallenberg emerged unh
urt. After his benefactor had left in the tow truck, Wallenberg, laden down by two suitcases, tried to thumb another lift. It was some time before a car with four men in it picked him up.
‘They didn’t look at all nice,’ Wallenberg told his mother, ‘but by this time I was desperate so I got in with them. They began asking me about money and how much would it be worth to take me all the way to Ann Arbor. I told them I didn’t have any.’ After a while the car drove off the highway and along a side road into a wood. ‘I was told to get out of the car. One of them had a revolver, so I obeyed. They asked for money and I gave them what I had.’ The robbers dumped Wallenberg into a ditch, with his suitcases on top of him, he half expecting a bullet as a good-bye. It never came. When he had pulled himself out, Wallenberg made his way to a railway track, where he eventually flagged down a suburban train. ‘I will not give up hitchhiking because of this experience,’ he told his mother. ‘Instead, I will take less money with me and be more cautious.’
The following summer Wallenberg and a college friend drove to Mexico in a battered old Ford. He stayed for a few weeks with an aunt and uncle who lived on the outskirts of Mexico City. His cousin Birgitte Wallenberg, then eight years old, recalls his visit: ‘Mother adored him; he was her pet. I adored him, too. He was wonderful with me, playing with me and trying to teach me chess. He was so unlike most grown-ups; he actually took notice of me, a lonely only child. I remember that his specialty was imitating animal sounds. He was a marvellous mimic and could do twenty-five to thirty different animals. He was good at foreign accents, too, and used to keep us all in stitches. It was always fun being with Raoul.’
On his return to Stockholm with his diploma from Ann Arbor, Wallenberg entered a public competition for the design of a swimming-pool and recreation area in the gardens of one of the Swedish capital’s palaces. Scores of established architects submitted entries. Wallenberg came in second. But he had promised his loving but authoritarian grandfather to study commerce and banking, and Gustav kept him to his word.
His next stop was Cape Town, South Africa, where he spent six months working for a Swedish firm owned by two acquaintances of his grandfather’s. He travelled all over the country selling building materials, timber, and chemicals. The partners wrote glowing testimonials when he left. Albert Floren found him ‘a splendid organizer and his ability to carry on negotiations has been made use of to the full. Of seemingly boundless energy and vitality, he has great imaginative powers and…a clear and original mind.’ The other partner, Carl Frykberg, wrote in similar terms and also of Raoul’s ‘tremendous energy and remarkable gift of quickly and thoroughly acquainting himself with whatever he sets his mind to.’
In 1936 Gustav Wallenberg was Swedish ambassador in Istanbul. There, he became friendly with Erwin Freund, a Jewish banker from British-ruled Palestine. Gustav discussed Raoul’s future with Freund, who suggested that the youngster should come and work for his Holland Bank branch in Haifa. So Raoul moved from Cape Town to Palestine, via Istanbul, where he visited his grandfather.
He was nearing twenty-four and beginning to fret at his grandfather’s well-meant attempts to direct his life. In a letter from Haifa, dated 6 June 1936, he tried diplomatically to get this view across. He was tired of working as an unpaid trainee, he said, and now wanted a real job with a proper salary. He thought the period spent in Cape Town had been ‘a complete waste of time,’ despite the glowing references. ‘A reference is worth something only if the man who writes it is willing to pay you,’ he said.
He admitted he had felt his grandfather’s plans for his future were too rigid and was glad to see from the old man’s last letter that he was willing to be flexible. ‘Under the circumstances, I am willing to co-operate and follow your wishes more than I had previously been willing to,’ he wrote. Then, tiptoeing respectfully around his main point, he went on: ‘Possibly, I am not cut out for banking…Architecture is another thing. I showed at university that I have the talent for that profession…A banker should have something of the judge in his makeup and a cold, calm, calculating outlook. Freund and Jakob* are very typical of that type, and I feel I am so unlike them. I think I have the character for positive action, rather than to sit at a desk and say No to people.’
To soften the impact of his dissent, Raoul added: ‘I can never forget the love and care you have lavished on me…If I were a worthy grandson, I suppose I would thank you and follow your instructions without question…But I do not repent of my comments and suggestions, because I do not think any good would come from hiding my real feelings.’
Later that month Gustav replied: ‘Your disappointment at not yet having a real job is not justified; what you have done up to now has been only to give you experience. I think that our plan has not failed, because what you have experienced has surely been of some use.’ Raoul was wrong, he said, to think his references were useless. ‘If your modesty makes you think you do not merit the praise, I ask you nevertheless not to belittle it.’
In August 1936, in a letter to a friend, Gustav wrote of his grandson: ‘First and foremost I wanted to make a man of him, to give him a chance to see the world and, through mixing with foreigners, give him what most Swedes lack – an international outlook.’ Gustav seemed satisfied that he had succeeded. ‘Raoul is a man,’ he said. ‘He has seen much of the world and has come into contact with people of all kinds.’
Among the people with whom Raoul had come into contact – and the experience seems to have made a lasting impression on him – were a number of young Jews who had fled from Hitler’s Germany to Palestine. He had met them at the ‘kosher’ boarding-house in Haifa, where he had taken a room. It was his first experience of the results of Nazi persecution and it affected him deeply – not just because of his humanitarian outlook but also, perhaps, because he was aware that he himself had a dash of Jewish blood.
His great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side, a Jew named Benedicks, had come to Sweden towards the end of the eighteenth century, one of the first Jews to settle there. Benedicks converted to the Lutheran faith, married a Christian girl, prospered rapidly, and within a year was jeweller to the court of King Gustav IV Adolf. He subsequently became financial adviser to a later king, Charles XIV John, Napoleon’s Marshal Bernadotte. Benedick’s son was one of the pioneers of the Swedish steel industry. Other descendants showed great artistic talent, and they became known as a highly cultured family – one member, a singer, studied under Liszt.
Raoul was aware of his one-sixteenth Jewish blood, and proud of it. Professor Ingemar Hedenius recalls * a conversation with Raoul dating back to 1930, when they were together in an army hospital during military service: ‘We had many long and intimate conversations. He was full of ideas and plans for the future. Although I was a good deal older – you could choose when to do your service – I was enormously impressed by him. He was proud of his partial Jewish ancestry and, as I recall, must have exaggerated it somewhat. I remember him saying, “A person like me, who is both a Wallenberg and half-Jewish, can never be defeated.” ’
Professor Hedenius found Wallenberg ‘intensely likeable – both original and prudent. He seemed courageous, intense, and vital, and though he had a high opinion of his own abilities he did not express this in a boastful or unpleasant way.’
Raoul became aware of the Jewish blood in his mother’s side of the family much sooner than his younger siblings. Nina Lagergren says that when they were children they had no idea of their fractional Jewish descent, ‘not, I’m sure, because Mother wished to hide it, but because the Jewish ancestor was so far back and none of his descendants had been brought up in the ways of the Jewish people. So we didn’t become conscious of this until the mid-thirties, when one of my maternal cousins went to Germany to marry a nobleman. I was only a child at the time, but it seems that the Nazis investigated her background and this caused a lot of talk in the family.’*
In the autumn of 1936, not long after Wallenberg’s return from Haifa, his grandfather fell i
ll. It was the end of his plans to interest influential acquaintances in the idea of founding an international bank, in which Raoul would play an important part. In early 1937 Gustav Wallenberg died and Raoul, freed from the loving tyranny of the old man, found himself wondering what to do next. Architecture, his first love, seemed closed to him. His American diploma did not permit him to practise in Sweden; to do so he would have to qualify all over again and at twenty-five he felt too old to go back to college. Also, the worldwide depression had hit Sweden hard and there was little building going on. His cousins Jakob and Marcus Wallenberg, no doubt aware that he did not feel cut out for banking, did not offer him a post in the family bank or any of its associated undertakings. Maj von Dardel began to worry that, for all his promise and good connections, Raoul would not find a suitable career.
After a while, Wallenberg went into business with a German-Jewish refugee who had patented a new kind of zip fastener. The venture did not flourish. Raoul went to see his cousin Jakob, who had a tract of land near Stockholm that he wanted to develop. Jakob suggested that Raoul should draw up the plans for this project. But in 1939 war broke out and, though Sweden was neutral, development came to a virtual halt.
Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust Page 3
