by Alan Levy
In relatively peaceful Haifa in 1936, Raoul Wallenberg roomed for a while in a kosher boarding house with one of the early Displaced Persons, Ariel Kahane, a Berliner with architectural training. They talked late into the night about villas and public buildings. Kahane, who went on to become a notable Israeli town planner, would later recall: ‘He was a princeling and I was at the nadir of my career. I was possibly the poorest architect of the time and he probably the richest, but we talked on completely equal terms.’
If anything, Raoul Wallenberg might have envied Kahane, for the penniless German had every opportunity while the wealthy Swede felt hemmed in by his background and profession. After three months ‘engaged in routine work’ at the foreign exchange desk of the Holland Bank in Haifa, he wrote to 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.
In closing, he reiterated his passion for architecture – if only there were buildings to build in pre-war Sweden!
Upon his return to Stockholm in 1937, he applied for jobs with architectural firms and submitted plans and designs – all to no avail. By early autumn of 1938, when architect Simon Wiesenthal, twenty-nine, was building his last houses in Lwów, Raoul Wallenberg, twenty-six, had yet to receive his first commission.
It was around that time that he met the actress Viveca Lindfors, then sixteen or seventeen, at a family party. Though they danced so far apart that another couple could easily have danced between them, Lindfors recalled in a 1980 interview that afterwards ‘he invited me up to his grandfather’s office – I thought to make love to me. But he spoke to me in an intense voice, very low, almost a whisper, of the terrible things that were being done to the Jews of Germany. I just didn’t understand what he was talking about. I thought he was trying to win my sympathy or something. I was just a dumb girl at the time and I had a cold Swedish soul. I wasn’t ready to appreciate a man like that.’
Other cold Swedish souls were warning against a ‘Jewish invasion’ of German refugees who would take jobs away from Swedes. When Stockholm University invited nine notable Jewish professors banned from teaching in Germany, the medical students demonstrated against them. In this behaviour, Sweden was hardly unique so much as symptomatic of the world’s indifference to the plight of the Jews. The American Medical Association recommended that only US citizens be permitted to practise – which meant a five-year wait. The British Medical Association threatened a strike to keep ‘the country [from being] inundated with émigrés’ after Hitler annexed Austria. Even socialist doctors, at the 1938 conference of their Medical Practitioners union, warned of ‘the dilution of our industry’ with non-members, but they were outdone by Tories typified by this editorial in Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express:
Just now, there is a big influx of foreign Jews into Britain. They are over-running the country. They are trying to enter the medical profession in great numbers. They wish to practise as dentists. Worst of all, many of them are holding themselves out to the public as psychoanalysts. A psychoanalyst needs no medical training, but arrogates to himself the functions of a doctor. And he often obtains an ascendancy over a patient of which he makes base use if he is a bad man.
Among these sinister figures was the father of psychoanalysis, Dr Sigmund Freud himself, who arrived in London that June and died fifteen months later.
As the war widened and Hitler kept winning, Raoul’s range expanded from Berlin and Budapest to all the other places his Hungarian Jewish partner in an import/export firm, Kalman, Lauer, could no longer visit: occupied Paris and Vichy France, Norway and Denmark, Belgium and Holland. Wherever he went, Wallenberg saw shame, fear, and an indifference that seared his sensitive soul. But he also learned, in negotiating sales and licences, that one could do business with Hitler’s henchmen, for not far behind the sinister spout of ideology lay the saving vices of greed and corruption. Plus an awe of authority that could be exploited to intimidate even killers running amok.
18
‘I came to save a nation’
The Moscow Declaration issued by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in the autumn of 1943 was the first joint statement by the Allies to address the issue of postwar retribution for Nazi atrocities:
Germans who take part in the wholesale shooting of Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian, or Norwegian hostages or of Cretan peasants, or who have shared in slaughters inflicted on the people of Poland or in the territories of the Soviet Union which are now being swept clear of the enemy, will know that they will be brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.
But there was no mention of the Jews. The desk undertakers were burying them even faster than the Nazis were obliterating them.
This omission outraged US Treasury Secretary Henry J. Morgenthau, who happened to be Jewish and suspected it was no accident. He asked three of his Protestant aides – Randolph Paul, John Pehle, and Josiah E. DuBois Jnr – to prepare a secret eighteen-page report which bore the shocking tide ‘On the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews’. It was a devastating wartime weapon of bureaucratic in-fighting: an inter-departmental attack on State Department officials who ‘have not only failed to use the Governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this Governmental machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews.’
On 22 January 1944, six days after reading the Treasury Department report, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board (WRB), a special agency ‘to forestall the plot of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews and other persecuted minorities of Europe.’ Pehle was named director; DuBois, general counsel.
The WRB hit the ground running – by warning the Axis leaders and all Axis satellites that, after the war was won, the Allies would hold them accountable for their treatment of the Jews. While the Nazi chiefs were already far beyond redemption, uneasy puppets twitched on their strings, for the Second World War’s outcome was no longer in doubt by the beginning of 1944.
The WRB’s first field representative – sent to non-aligned Turkey – was Ira A. Hirschmann, a New York department-store executive who had gone straight from the Evian conference in 1938 to Vienna and stood as personal financial guarantor for importing two hundred Austrian refugees to the US. Based in Ankara for the WRB, Hirschmann quickly persuaded the Romanian government, through its Turkish legation, to empty its concentration camps in Transnistria and return the 18,000 surviving Jews to their homes to fend for themselves. Since this wasn’t enough to protect them from Eichmann or home-grown fascists, Hirschmann used funds from Jewish welfare organizations to pay Black Sea captains to activate their antiquated ships and ferry Jews from Constanza in Romania to Istanbul. Between April and August of 1944, some 4000 Jews were evacuated in this way from the Balkans and transported from Turkey to Syria by train and then delivered to Palestine.
The War Refugee Board appealed to Pope Pius XII to exert his influence upon the devout Admiral Horthy, but the passive Pope waited a month before sending his personal plea. The WRB also urged neutral nations to increase their legation staffs in Budapest. Its hope was that the presence of foreign observers might moderate Nazi brutality. This hope proved futile when only one neutral showed sustained interest. That nation was Sweden. Thus was the door pried open to admit Raoul Wallenberg.
In the spring of 1944, as the noose narrowed around the necks of the Jews of Hungary, Raoul Wallenberg had offered to visit Budapest again to see what he could do for his partner Kalman Lauer’s in-laws, still trapped there. Raoul had, however, been refused a visa. In early June, another opportunity presented itself when the War Refugee Board convinced Sweden it should add a special representative for humanitarian affairs to its Budapest legation. In an elevator, the WRB’s Stockholm representativ
e, Iver C. Olsen, met Lauer, who recommended Raoul for the job.
That was how Raoul Wallenberg became an American agent. Lauer approached Raoul when the Swede returned from weekend duty as an officer in the Home Guard. Raoul’s response was immediate: ‘I will do it gladly if I can be of help to people in need.’ On 9 June 1944, Olsen met with Raoul, who had just turned thirty-two, and was impressed by his vitality and resourcefulness. With the help of US Ambassador Herschel V. Johnson, the Swedish Foreign Ministry was persuaded to name him Second Secretary of its embassy in Budapest and to give him access to funds – raised by Hungarian Jews for a rescue operation – that had already been turned over to the Swedish government. Since the WRB’s total operating budget worldwide was a modest one million dollars, its spending power had been augmented by an American Jewish philanthropy, the Joint Distribution Committee, which had raised $100,000 for deposit to Raoul’s account at his family’s Enskilda Bank for the Budapest rescue operation. A two-week delay came from Stockholm’s chief rabbi, Marcus Ehrenpreis, who hesitated over Raoul’s youth and naïveté as well as the blunt cynicism with which he spoke of needing plenty of cash for bribing German and Hungarian officials.
Raoul Wallenberg had no scruples about bargaining with the devil. It was what he was being sent to Budapest to do. Besides, it was his belief that, in unlawful times such as Hitler’s, any he, any trick that defends decency or delays indecency, is not only acceptable, but urgent. As one of his assistants in Budapest would put it a short time later: ‘Whatever is illegal becomes legal. The main thing is to help.’
Eventually, Rabbi Ehrenpreis was won over by Raoul’s salesmanly charm and the commanding German he spoke so fluently. The rabbi bade him farewell with a Talmudic saying: ‘Those who set off on a mission of humanity can be assured of God’s special protection.’
On 6 July 1944, Raoul Wallenberg flew to Berlin and spent the night sitting up talking with his half-sister, Nina, and her husband, Gunnar Lagergren, a diplomat in the Swedish Embassy there. An air-raid alarm interrupted their marathon conversation, but they continued it in the bomb shelter.
Though the Swedish ambassador had reserved a night sleeper to Budapest for his guest on 9 July, Raoul knew how fast Eichmann was working and insisted on taking the first train out. Without a reservation, he perched in a corridor and leaned on his only luggage, two knapsacks, as he listened to German soldiers discussing their conquests (by that stage of the war, only romantic ones) and to air-raid sirens that made the train pull over to sidings several times during the delayed overnight journey. As Wallenberg’s passenger train rolled south towards Budapest, cattle cars were carrying the Jews of Hungary north to death.
In one of his knapsacks was a cheap second-hand revolver. ‘I don’t want to waste money I could use to bribe Nazis,’ he told a friend who wondered why he didn’t buy a better weapon. ‘Besides, the gun is only to give me courage. I don’t plan to use it.’
Simon Wiesenthal has reflected on how a Jewish Nazi-hunter and a righteous Gentile saviour of the Jews could both have started out in the same profession as Hitler’s chief engineer of destruction: ‘The first time Albert Speer visited me, his first words were, “We are both architects.” And I say, “Excuse me, we built in different directions.” From then on, we are not more talking about architecture.’ Suppose, I asked Wiesenthal, Wallenberg had come to him and said, ‘We are both architects’? Without hesitation, Wiesenthal replied: ‘Today I would say to him: “We were both engaged not only in building houses, but in building justice.”’
As befits an architect, Raoul Wallenberg was a student of dents and precedents: dents in the armour of Eichmann’s death machine and precedents for going around it.
Before his arrival, the Swedish Embassy had been giving out a limited number (some 700 in all) of provisional passports to Hungarians with established Swedish connections or reasonably official travel plans. Whether the Hungarian authorities accepted these documents was another matter – particularly where Jews were concerned – and then there was the question of crossing Nazi Germany with such a flimsy credential. Nevertheless, one Jewish merchant, Hugo Wohl, had hired a lawyer who argued that Wohl’s provisional passport made him a Swedish citizen not subject to wearing the yellow star on his clothes and door. Wohl had won his case. Another Budapest businessman, Wilhelm Forgacs, working in a Jewish forced labour unit, had been rounded up for deportation. In desperation, he had brandished his hitherto futile Swedish provisional passport one last time. A Hungarian officer had hesitated and put him instead into an internment camp, from which the Swedes were able to rescue him.
‘Wallenberg considered these two stories carefully. They offered amazing insight into the psychology of bureaucracy. People ready to send their fellow human beings off to untold suffering and death without a qualm could be stopped dead by the sight of an official-looking document. This was something to build on!’ writes Elenore Lester in Wallenberg: the Man in the Iron Web (1982).
‘I think I have an idea for a new and perhaps more effective document,’ Wallenberg informed the Swedish ambassador at their first meeting in Budapest. What Wallenberg invented was the Schutzpass, a protective passport which said the bearer was emigrating to Sweden and was therefore not only under Swedish protection, but, in effect, a Swedish citizen. Wallenberg relied upon his draughtsman’s training to design a document that was particularly impressive visually. Bearing a photograph of the recipient, engraved with Sweden’s three-crown emblem in full blue and yellow, it looked so official that even an Eichmann might flinch at violating it.
Authorized to issue 4500 Schutzpässe, Wallenberg printed many times that number and extended their protection to the families of bearers. He was absolutely reckless, which shook some of his staid diplomatic associates. When he proclaimed to them, ‘I came to save a nation’, the unspoken question arose: ‘Which nation? Hungary? Or Sweden’s soul?’
He carried his disarming arrogance to new heights in his first meeting with the Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy, to present his credentials. At seventy-six, the towering Horthy was astonished to be lectured on humanitarianism by a very junior Swedish diplomat who warned him that he would be held accountable after the war for the fate of Hungary’s Jews. Though Horthy stood a good half-foot taller than the medium-sized Wallenberg, the latter wrote home to his mother that ‘I felt taller than he was.’
Raoul also wrote to his mother about his business partner’s relatives:
Please be so good as to inform Dr Lauer and his wife that I have unfortunately found out that his parents-in-law and also a small child belonging to his family are already dead. That is to say that they have been transported abroad where they will not live for very long.
In six weeks, Wallenberg had mastered the arithmetic of the Final Solution which had eluded the Allies for six years.
Had the Schutzpass been Wallenberg’s only contribution to history, he might have merited the Nobel Peace Price for which Wiesenthal keeps nominating him on the assumption that he is still alive until proven dead. ‘He developed as a hero from the moment he was sent to save lives,’ says Simon. ‘Soon, helping others became for him more meaningful than his own life. Many times he risked his life. Eichmann tried a few times to kill him, but he could also have been killed whenever a transport of people was going out and he, with his great courage, would follow the transport in his car. When the transport stopped at a station, he would go to the prisoners and pass out as many Swedish protection passports as he had. Then he would race ahead to the next station and, when the transport arrived, make a scandal for the SS about their deporting Swedish citizens. In that way, he saved thousands from odds that were ninety-nine to one . . .’
‘Against them?’ he is asked.
‘Against him,’ Wiesenthal clarifies, for hope was less than even one in a thousand for Hungarian deportees in the Holocaust’s final fury: no more ‘selections’ awaited them at Auschwitz, where they were sent directly to death. And Wiesenthal wonders rhetorically: ‘What
did a second secretary of a little land like Sweden matter to an SS man or a Hungarian Nazi with gallons of blood on his hands already? Wallenberg’s only weapons were that official-looking Schutzpass and his personal courage.’
There are many accounts of Raoul rushing to assembly points for deportations and asking, ‘Who here has Swedish papers?’ Sometimes people without passes would hold up driver’s licences, prescriptions, or other Hungarian documents the Germans couldn’t read. Wallenberg would issue Schutzpässe and then proclaim their rights before the ink was dry.
In the summer of 1944, Dr Alice Breuer was in Kistarca, a collection camp for Jews ticketed for Auschwitz. ‘Suddenly,’ she recalls, ‘a guard came and ordered me to come along. He said I was to be released. I didn’t believe him, but when I arrived at the camp exit, a car with Hungarian police was waiting. I was taken, together with three others, to the Swedish Embassy in Budapest. There I met Raoul Wallenberg for the first time. He offered me chocolate, handed me a large document, and explained that I was now a Swedish citizen with nothing to fear from the Germans and the Hungarian Nazis. “Remember that your connection with Sweden is AB Kanthal Hallstahammar,” he said. “This is important. Don’t forget it. Now hurry home to your husband and his parents. They are waiting for you.”’
Rarely was his intervention so indirect. More than once, he stood on the roof of an outbound freight train passing out Schutzpässe to all within reach while the engineer sounded his whistle impatiently. At least once, German soldiers fired warning shots in the air. One jolt of the engine, one flinch by Raoul, one stray bullet, and he would have perished then and there. Sometimes he stepped in front of German guns, placing his own body between Jews and deportation. More than once, he was manhandled by guards and threatened with worse, but he would not stop. Nobody had ever seen such a man!
