Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust

by Bierman, John

  Four days later, having just had lunch with ‘the First Secretary of the Swedish Legation in Budapest, who is here for a short while,’* Olsen wrote to Pehle again: ‘He is a fine chap and had many interesting comments to make. He said Wallenberg is working very hard and doing everything possible…

  ‘He is very sceptical as to the possibility of bringing to Sweden the two-thousand-odd Jews who up to now have been issued Swedish papers. He stated that both the Hungarians and the Germans had agreed to provide transit visas…but later the Germans said there must be a quid pro quo, which was that the rest of the Hungarian Jews of working age must be delivered to the German labour camps.’ (Olsen’s emphasis.)

  Olsen’s luncheon guest gave a graphic description of what being ‘delivered to the camps’ entailed. ‘He said that even he did not believe some of the atrocities until he himself was an eyewitness. He went over to a brick factory where they had over ten thousand Jews herded together into an area so small that they were forced to stand up closely packed together for five days, old people and young children alike, without any sanitary facilities.

  ‘He saw them himself standing there, and also being loaded into box cars, eighty (he said eighty were counted out very carefully) into each car, after which the doors were nailed shut. He said many died, just standing in the brick factory.’

  The Swedish diplomat was obviously referring to an incident he had seen before Horthy suspended the deportations. He went on to give Olsen a description of more current incidents, such as ‘young girls of fourteen and fifteen being stolen in the streets, taken into other areas where they had “war whore” tattooed on their arms. Some of them – young Jewesses of good family – had been observed as far away as Hamburg.’

  Olsen continued: ‘He lamented very much the total lack of courage among the Hungarian Jews, since they could do so much to help themselves, even when they knew it was only a matter of a short time before they would be killed.’

  Despite such horrors going on in the streets of Budapest, these were none the less days of comparative calm. The deportations were still officially suspended and Horthy was resisting German demands that they be resumed. The real confrontation between Wallenberg and Eichmann and the worst ordeal of Budapest Jewry were yet to come.

  Chapter 5

  One of the first people with whom Wallenberg had made contact on his arrival in Budapest was Dr Samu Stern, the hapless president of the Central Jewish Council, which Eichmann had insisted be set up to make manipulation of the Jews easier. After the liberation, the elderly and ailing Stern was to write down his agonized memories of that time.

  In his accounts the names of Eichmann and Wallenberg occur time and again. He describes Eichmann as ‘a born, inveterate criminal to whom other beings’ pain was lust. In moments of sincerity he called himself a bloodhound.’ In contrast, he saw Wallenberg as ‘unselfish, full of endless élan and the will to work, like all truly great men – his example induced the other neutral legations to emulate him and join in the struggle.’

  Stern begins his account with the arrival of Krumey, Wisliceny, and Hunsche at the Jewish Community Centre in Sip Street the day after Operation Margarethe. They ‘laid stress upon making their visit more emphatic through machine guns, ready to fire.’ Of Krumey’s, and later Eichmann’s, attempts to calm the terrified Jews, Stern wrote, ‘They have always shunned sensation, disliked creating fear and panic, worked noiselessly, coolly, and in deepest secrecy, so that the listless, ignorant victims should be without an inkling of what was ahead of them.’*

  He recalls the repeated and increasingly preposterous material demands made upon the Jews by Eichmann and his officers, who were always accompanied by SS troopers pointing sub-machine guns. ‘One holiday…an officer, screaming at the top of his voice, ordered us to send three hundred mattresses and six hundred blankets to the Hotel Royal within ninety minutes. When we retorted that we were unable to do so he shouted like a madman that as ten minutes sufficed to execute ten thousand Jews, ninety minutes must suffice to comply with his wish…

  ‘The demands came in every day and were of the most differing kinds – from champagne glasses to typewriters, from brooms to dishcloths and pails…On one occasion we were asked to furnish paintings by Watteau and no other artist; an apartment was being arranged for a high-ranking officer.’

  In a similar post-war memoir, Dr Ernö Petö, another prominent member of the Jewish Council, recalled the vivid impression made by Wallenberg’s arrival on the scene. After their first meeting, Petö wrote: ‘I spoke to my family about the visit of this young-looking Wallenberg. My son then told me that when as a student he had spent a summer in a student hostel at Thonon-les-Bains in France, he had been together with a Swede by the name of Wallenberg, whose grandfather was at that time the minister to Istanbul. He immediately took out a group photograph and I determined that the Wallenberg in the picture was the representative of the Swedish king.’

  When Petö’s son and Wallenberg met in Petö’s office a little later they embraced as old friends. ‘The contact between them became permanent,’ wrote Petö senior. ‘He was often our guest and his relationship with me also became closer…I can remember him only with the greatest admiration and praise.’†

  Petö and Wallenberg often discussed how best the Swedish king’s goodwill could be put to the help of the Hungarian Jews. An opportunity arose during the second half of July 1944, when Wallenberg told Petö that a Swedish legation courier would be leaving for Stockholm the next day and would be able to carry a message for the king from the Jewish Council.

  According to Petö’s account, ‘There was no time to spare, so I called Károly Wilhelm [another member of the Jewish Council] to my apartment the same evening and together we wrote the letter to the King of Sweden in which we thanked him for what he had done so far and described what would be needed to save the about two hundred thousand Jews still alive.

  ‘We asked him to propose to the Germans and to the Hungarian government that the Swedish government was willing to remove the Jews of Budapest and for this reason they should place ships at his disposal at the Rumanian Black Sea, etc. In a separate memorandum prepared by my son…we reviewed the difficult situation in which Jewry was compelled to live, in fear of further deportations…We were ready at dawn.’

  The Jewish leaders, and apparently Wallenberg, too, set great store by these documents – signed by Stern, Petö, and Wilhelm – reaching King Gustav. Consequently, they were alarmed when they learned that the courier had failed to reach Stockholm on schedule, a couple of days after leaving. While he was en route, the 20 July bomb plot against Hitler’s life had occurred. In the massive security operation that followed, all Germany’s borders were sealed. The courier was stuck inside the Reich. ‘We heard nothing of him for days,’ wrote Petö. ‘Wallenberg himself became nervous.’ Stern recalled: ‘It would have been fatal for us if he had been caught and the letter found in his keeping. We only breathed freely again when Wallenberg informed us of the courier’s safe arrival.’

  Just how precarious was the situation of the Budapest Jews, despite Horthy’s order stopping the deportations, is well illustrated by what came to be known as the Kistarcsa affair. On 14 July, defying the ban on further deportations, Eichmann sent an SS detachment to the Kistarcsa internment camp, where fifteen hundred prominent Jews were being held. This detachment overpowered and disarmed the Hungarian guards – who apparently made only a show of resistance – before loading the Jews onto a train which Franz Novak, Eichmann’s transportation specialist, had secretly obtained.

  The train headed immediately for the border and Auschwitz. But word of what had happened quickly reached the Jewish Council. Dr Petö had the secret telephone number of Admiral Horthy’s son, Miklós, through whom he told the regent of what Eichmann had done. Horthy acted immediately, telephoning the Interior Ministry with instructions that the train must be stopped and returned to Kistarcsa ‘even if you have to use force.’ The order was obeyed and th
e deportation train was turned back just before it reached the frontier.

  Eichmann was livid when he heard of Horthy’s ‘audacity,’ as he called it, and enraged at the Jewish Council, whom he felt had no business to interfere with his plans. Council member Fülöp Freudiger recalled later: ‘It is typical of the German mentality that, incredible as it seems, Eichmann made violent reproaches because of this to a member of the Central Council, accusing this person [Freudiger himself] of intervening with the Hungarian government. He quite seriously took the attitude that it was the duty of the Central Council to further the deportations with all their might.’

  Eichmann was determined to avenge the Kistarcsa setback. ‘[He] felt the prestige of the SS was at stake and the defeat made him rave,’ Stern recalled. ‘He ordered every member of the Jewish Council to report to SS headquarters on Schwab Hill on 17 July, at 8 a.m. We did not have the slightest idea why we were there. At first we were kept waiting for hours in a room which we were not allowed to leave. The telephone was disconnected and we could not make contact with anybody.

  ‘At last an officer [Hunsche] let us enter. He was acting as a substitute for Eichmann and conferred with us in an absolutely useless manner and without end on how the panicky atmosphere among Jewry could be disposed of. The deliberations went on the entire afternoon and we were dismissed after twelve hours at 8 p.m.’

  While the eight-man council were thus kept incommunicado at the Hotel Majestic, a 150-man SS detachment, led by Eichmann himself, again raided the Kistarcsa camp and again overpowered and disarmed the Hungarian guards. This time they took the extra precaution of cutting the camp’s telephone wires. The 1500 Jews who had previously been rescued by Horthy’s command were put back on the waiting train and again sent, this time at express speed, to the border and Auschwitz. There was no chance of interference. ‘Before we could try they had already crossed the frontier,’ wrote Stern.

  Emboldened by this coup, Eichmann began insisting again that all the Jews of Budapest must be deported. Horthy again said he would not permit this. Eichmann flew to Berlin for fresh instructions and was told to see if a show of force would weaken Horthy’s resolve. When Eichmann returned, the number of SS men in and around the capital began to increase noticeably. Soon they were 9500 strong. ‘Now certain of their preponderance,’ Stern wrote, ‘the SS troops, in full armour, held a great parade through the streets of Budapest.’

  Having staked out his position by these dramatic means, Eichmann began to prepare for a lightning round-up and deportation action in late August. He now felt he had enough forces of his own at his disposal to carry out such an operation without any help from the Hungarians. To make sure there was no further interference by the Jewish Council, Eichmann had Stern, Petö, and Wilhelm arrested.

  On 17 August the seventy-year-old Stern, ill with pneumonia, was dragged out of his sick-bed by the Gestapo and put into an open car for the drive to Schwab Hill. Petö, in the same car, had some incriminating documents on him, including a letter from Wallenberg. ‘I threw my notes from the car,’ he recalled in his post-war memoir. ‘I had a letter of Wallenberg’s which I wanted to tear up before throwing it to the wind. Hearing the crumpling of paper, the detective turned round and took the half-torn letter from my hands.

  ‘During my interrogation I saw the letter, pasted together again, in the hands of the Gestapo…The Gestapo investigator, who seemed a bit drunk, was obviously incensed by the Wallenberg letter and mistreated me severely…’ (Petö’s memoir, unfortunately, does not disclose the letter’s contents.)

  Horthy, however, was informed of Eichmann’s action, and intervened on behalf of the Jewish leaders. Within twenty-four hours the Gestapo released them, though not before giving them a brutal working over.

  Stern and Petö were among Horthy’s favoured Jews, and his relations with them aptly illustrate his – and his son’s – ambivalent attitude towards the Jewish people. For some years, Stern had been a member of Horthy’s Privy Council, while Petö’s son-in-law had been private secretary to the regent’s son. Both Stern and Petö had regular private meetings with either the regent or his son in Buda Castle, entering by a back staircase. As already seen, Petö also had the son’s secret phone number. Petö felt that the younger man was quite sympathetic, although afraid of being denounced by palace spies for his continuing contacts with Jewish leaders. His room was frequently searched for hidden microphones.

  Another prominent Jew, the Zionist activist Ottó Komoly, had secret meetings with the younger Horthy at about this time. In his diary, recovered after his death at the hands of the Hungarian Nazis, he gives a revealing account of the attitude of the regent and his son to their Jewish fellow-countrymen. ‘By birth and upbringing I am an anti-Semite,’ the young Horthy told Komoly. ‘It could not have been different with us in view of the way they spoke about Jews in our parents’ home. For example, it would be inconceivable for me to marry a Jewish woman or for my children to have Jewish blood.

  ‘But then I got involved in economic life.* I saw what happened there…Our civil servants have no feeling for the economic interests of the country. As far as they are concerned, the country could go bankrupt. This is why there is a need for the Jews who, while looking after their own interests, have advanced the interests of the country…As a sportsman, I know that peak results can only be obtained through competition. The Hungarians need the competition the Jews represent. The extent of Jewish emigration must be regulated in accordance with the interests of the nation…’

  Some other prominent Hungarians were displaying great ambivalence about the Jews at this time, most notably Lászlo Ferenczy, liaison officer between the Hungarian Gendarmerie and the SS – ‘an opportunist rotten to the marrow,’ as Stern called him. According to Stern’s post-war account, Ferenczy entered into a plot with the Jewish Council to foil Eichmann’s plan for a deportation raid scheduled for 26 August.

  ‘We played the comedy of being entirely convinced of his good intent and humane feelings,’ Stern wrote. ‘We went as far as to declare to his face that he was the only possible man to rescue Budapest Jewry from certain annihilation…He would acquire glory and never-fading acclaim, for he would wash the stain from the nation’s name.’

  The plan (according to Stern, cooked up by himself and Ferenczy) was to have enough gendarmes brought quietly into Budapest from the country to outnumber the SS, backing up these gendarmes with police and reliable military units. Ostensibly, these forces would be brought in to help with the deportations; actually, their purpose would be to prevent them. Ferenczy insisted that he must get clearance for the plan from Horthy himself and – seemingly unaware of the irony of the request – asked Stern if he could arrange a meeting for him with the regent. On learning the details, Horthy agreed to play his part in the plan by pretending not to object to the impending deportations.

  Then, as Stern later explained it: ‘When the preparations reached the desired point, one or two days before the date set for the deportation, the regent would inform the Germans that all deportations were prohibited and that he was committed to enforce this measure by force of arms if necessary.’ Stern thought that while it might come to an unavoidable clash, it was much more likely that the Germans would back down rather than risk an open and irreparable breach with an ally, however uncertain, at such a crucial point in the war. It certainly was crucial for Germany: their Rumanian allies were at the point of making a separate peace with the advancing Russians; Normandy and Brittany were in Anglo-American hands; Paris was on the point of falling; and the south of France had been invaded.

  The neutral missions in Budapest, having got wind of the impending deportations, were also busy at this point. Wallenberg, as Stern noted, ‘put all of his energies into a siege of the ministerial offices.’ On 22 August, at Wallenberg’s initiative, there was a meeting of neutral representatives chaired by Monsignor Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio, at which a strong note was drafted for delivery to Prime Minister Sztójay. The neutral na
tions, they said, were well aware that a mass deportation was being planned. Ostensibly, this was for labour service in Germany, but ‘we all know what that means,’ the note added in an unusually undiplomatic turn of phrase.

  Acting in response to these pressures, and knowing that he had enough forces on hand to neutralize Eichmann’s SS, Horthy forbade the deportations. To underline this, Ferenczy warned Eichmann that the nineteen thousand Hungarian soldiers, police, and gendarmes now in the capital would, if necessary, use force to stop him.

  ‘Furious with rage,’ recalled Stern, ‘Eichmann realized he had been deceived, yet he dared not order the use of arms and so turned to Berlin for instructions.’ The reply – direct from Himmler himself and received during the night of 24 August – was not to proceed. A couple of days later, Horthy dismissed Sztójay and appointed the moderate General Géza Latakos in his place as premier, giving him secret instructions to draw up a three-point programme: to restore Hungarian sovereignty as far as possible under the partial German occupation; to stop the persecutions against the Jews; and to prepare the ground for an armistice, to be carried out at the appropriate time.

  With the fall of Sztójay and his replacement by Latakos, it seemed that for the Jews of Budapest the worst might be over. But the removal of Sztójay – to be followed by the temporary banishment of Eichmann – was only a respite, the end of one phase in the martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry.

  Three members of the Jewish Council, Fülöp Freudiger, Sándor Diamant, and Gyula Link, who escaped to Rumania in mid-August – thereby laying themselves open to the accusation that they had deserted their fellows – wrote a joint account of that period. They singled out a number of Hungarian Fascists for special condemnation. Among them was Péter Hain, chief of the Hungarian Gestapo, which was ‘dedicated to surpass its model in brutality and baseness.’ Lászlo Endre and Lászlo Baky, who worked closely with Eichmann, were ‘radical anti-Semites, convinced that all the evil in this world is due to the activity of the Jews.’ Of Endre, the joint account says, ‘Even his friends considered him a pathological case, who acknowledged no laws for his own person and gave way to his passions without any considerations whatsoever.’