Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Hearing of Raoul’s efforts, Eichmann sped up deportations. When there weren’t enough trains, thousands were penned in makeshift camps near the railway yards. In the middle of the night, a young man tiptoed into the shed where Agnes Adachi and a hundred others waited for the end and, lowering his voice, apologized for stepping over them, ‘but I am here to help you, so don’t worry.’ While they wondered to each other who this angel was who still talked to them as though they were human, Wallenberg stepped outside and started screaming at an SS officer in German: ‘What are you doing with our protected people? I am taking them all with me right now!’ And he did.

  When Wallenberg paid his first visit to the Jewish Council of Budapest, these beleaguered bargainers mistook him for a senior Gestapo officer because he strode in and spoke German so aggressively, so intimidatingly, that any bureaucrat – Aryan or not – would quake in his boots. When he talked to their oppressors – German or Hungarian – he threatened trials and hinted that he had the power to grant immunity. ‘He acted,’ says one observer, ‘as if the war was over and he was the victors’ first emissary to Hungary.’

  As soon as he’d organized a new Section C for humanitarian affairs at the Swedish Embassy on the Buda side of the Danube, he moved its operations across the river to Pest, where most of Budapest’s Jews lived; he was anticipating that the Red Army, already advancing upon the capital, would enter from the Pest side sometime that autumn. Though his largely unpaid Section C staff grew to 400 Jews – for all of whom he won an exemption from wearing yellow stars and the freedom to move around the city – the first two he hired were Forgacs and Wohl, the two businessmen who had fought to win the protection of their Swedish provisional passports before he’d invented the Schutzpass. They had the kind of initiative Wallenberg wanted.

  Edith Wohl, who went to work in Section C with the rest of her family, has recalled Raoul’s impact upon his staff:

  ‘He gave us courage. He was so courageous that he made the rest of us ashamed to be afraid. Because of him we all became more optimistic.

  ‘He also shocked us by his behaviour. Here he was, an Aryan who didn’t believe that Jews were something vile and despicable. He even socialized with us as if we were normal people. This was amazing.

  ‘After a while, it became impossible for us to consider him a normal human being. We didn’t ask ourselves the normal objective questions about his background. In fact, we didn’t even know that he was a member of the Wallenberg family. Instead we came to see him as superhuman; someone who had come to Budapest to save us, a Messiah.’

  With the Red Army within artillery range and the Germans poised to burn their bridges behind them, real estate was cheap in Budapest, so Wallenberg was able to buy thirty buildings in Pest which he made into ‘safe houses’ flying the Swedish flag and offering shelter and refuge to thousands of Jews. Some of the younger inhabitants vowed to protect Raoul’s property and he even, on occasion, dressed some of his more Aryan-looking Jews in SS uniforms to stand guard outside his safe houses.

  Eichmann and Wallenberg – two losers in civilian life who, in wartime, built their names in different directions – first met in late July or early August of 1944 in the Arizona night club in Budapest: at Wallenberg’s instigation but Eichmann’s invitation. There they discussed the possibility of Sweden buying real estate from the Nazis. Wallenberg offered 200,000 dollars for forty houses. Eichmann, who knew the Swede wanted them for sanctuaries, brushed him off lightly with: ‘Surely, Mister Secretary, you can’t be serious. Why, the Americans once offered us two million dollars for the Jews of Slovakia!30 Why should the Hungarian Jews be worth less?’

  Eichmann dismissed his visitor as ‘soft . . . another decadent diplomat’ and, says Wiesenthal, ‘in his memoirs, Eichmann has just four lines about Wallenberg.’ But, by the time the first deportation of Budapest’s Jews was announced for 25 August 1944, Wallenberg had rallied the handful of other neutral nations represented there. A Jewish glass and ceramics manufacturer turned a building over to the Swiss legation and this ‘Glass House’ became another centre of sanctuary and occasional salvation for Budapest’s desperate Jews. Despite friendly relations with Hitler, the Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships set up small programmes to shelter Sephardic Jews in Budapest. And the Manfred Weiss family, owners of Hungary’s largest steel and munitions work, went around Eichmann to bargain with SS Major Kurt Becher, who was, literally, Heinrich Himmler’s horse-trader. A long-time Himmler confidant who was sent to Hungary by the SS personnel department to buy 20,000 horses for its troops, Becher wound up acquiring the Weiss combine and becoming the head of it in exchange for the emigration to Portugal of forty-eight Weiss family members, who were flown there in two German planes. Eichmann was furious and called Becher’s coup a ‘Schweinerei’ (dirty trick), even though it had Himmler’s tacit approval.

  Monsignor Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio in Budapest, went far beyond the realm of Hungary’s Catholic Church, which concerned itself only with winning for Jews who’d been baptized as Catholics the right to wear a cross next to the yellow star. Not only did Rotta warn Admiral Horthy face to face that ‘the whole world now knows what deportation means in practice’, but he also conspired with the apostolic delegate to Turkey, Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, to provide baptismal certificates to thousands of Hungarian Jews, with or without ceremony or obligation. The instigator of this scheme had been Ira Hirschmann of the WRB, who had approached Roncalli at his summer residence on an island near Istanbul on 1 August. Without being asked, Roncalli (later the beloved Pope John XXIII) also managed to wangle some immigration papers to Palestine from the balky British and sent those along, too.

  On 21 August, as the deadline for deportation loomed, Wallenberg organized a meeting of the neutrals in Budapest which resulted in an appeal to the Hungarian government signed by the papal nuncio, the Swedish ambassador, and the Portuguese, Spanish, and Swiss charges d’affaires, deploring and denouncing ‘the deportation of the Jews’, a euphemism of which they said they ‘all know what this means, even though it be described as “labour service”.’

  Their declaration coincided with other bad news for Horthy. On 24 August, Hungary’s southern neighbour, Romania, not only capitulated to the Russians, but left the Axis and declared war on Germany and Hungary. Reading the handwriting on the wall and in his hands, Horthy cancelled all deportations from Hungary.

  When Himmler in Berlin upheld Horthy because Hungary was now vital for supply lines and troop movements to and from the Balkans, Eichmann asked that his SS special unit be recalled to Germany because ‘they have become superfluous.’ His request was granted and he was decorated with the Iron Cross Second Class for his work to date in Hungary. But Eichmann did not retreat far. Some of his key officers sprinkled themselves around the Hungarian countryside and Eichmann himself stayed on in a castle in Velem near the Austrian border as guest of the Hungarian Minister of Jewish Affairs. His host also lost his post at the end of August when Horthy, emboldened by his own move against deportations, installed a more moderate government. While proclaiming publicly that Hungary would fight to the death for the Axis, Horthy privately urged his new cabinet and Prime Minister to work toward regaining Hungarian sovereignty, liquidating the war in an honourable fashion, and ‘putting an end to the inhuman, foolish, cruel persecution of the Jews.’

  Throughout September, the Hungarian government made clandestine efforts to negotiate an armistice with the Allies. Toward the end of the month, Horthy sent special emissaries to Moscow to arrange Hungary’s surrender. With the Red Army just fifty miles south of Budapest, and with virtually every Jew in the city outfitted with some credential or other – Swedish or Swiss, official or counterfeit – Wallenberg gave thought to winding down his Section C. He wrote to his mother:

  I am doing everything in my power to return home quickly, but you understand that one cannot disband a large operation such as this on a moment’s notice. When the invasion comes, the disbanding will take place more
swiftly and I will try to return home in eight days.

  On 29 September, he notified his home office:

  The agreement reached [in August] between the Hungarians and Germans that all Jews were to be evacuated from Budapest to the countryside outside the capital has been completely sabotaged by the Hungarian authorities and has not yet resulted in a single Jew leaving Budapest.

  Nevertheless, he urged caution, for the Germans surely knew about Horthy’s overtures to Moscow and seemed to be concentrating SS units in and around Budapest. Indeed, Berlin had just advised Eichmann and the officers of his seemingly dissolved SS unit to remain in Hungary in October ‘in anticipation of a political change.’

  As late as 12 October 1944, Raoul’s dispatch to Stockholm was cautiously optimistic:

  The Russian advance has increased the hope of the Jews that their unfortunate plight will soon end. Many have voluntarily stopped wearing the Star of David. Fears that the Germans might, at the last moment, carry out a pogrom remain, despite no positive signs of such an occurrence.

  Indian summer, however, was coming to an end for the Jews of Budapest. On Sunday afternoon, 15 October 1944, Horthy took to the air with a prerecorded broadcast proclaiming Hungary’s withdrawal from the war: ‘Hungary was forced into war against the Allies by German pressure . . . Today it is obvious to any sober-minded person that the German Reich has lost the war. We shall not become . . . the Reich’s rear-guard combat zone. We have agreed to abandon further participation in the fight against the Soviet Union.’ Horthy went on to say that ‘under the cover of the German occupation, the Gestapo confronted the Jewish question in a manner incompatible with the dictates of humanity.’ He concluded by ordering the armed forces to stay loyal and follow his instructions.

  Hungary was out of the war for just a few minutes. As the people danced in the streets, as the Jews of Budapest ripped off their remaining yellow stars, as Hungarian soldiers distributed weapons to the Jewish forced labourers they’d been guarding, saying, ‘We’re on the same side now’, the first rebroadcast of Horthy’s proclamation was followed by an ominous silence and then martial music – the Hitlerite Horst Wessel Song – and then an announcer’s voice saying flatly that the war would continue and then more martial music. Budapest was bewildered.

  The explanation was simple and sinister: that morning, the Germans had kidnapped and wounded Horthy’s only surviving son, Miklos Jnr. (An older son, Istvan, a pilot, had been shot down by the Russians in 1942.) Confronted by German tanks planted on the lawn of Buda Castle with their guns pointed at his windows, and told that his son would be shot if the father uttered another word of ‘treason’, Admiral Horthy capitulated to save his son; his nation, he now knew, was beyond rescue. He stepped down and was escorted into exile in a Bavarian castle; his son was held hostage in two concentration camps: first, Mauthausen (Simon Wiesenthal’s final wartime destination), and, later, Dachau.

  Surrounding Budapest with four armoured divisions, the Germans handed the country over to the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s fanatical Catholic fascist movement with its own army of teenage toughs armed by the Nazis. Adolf Eichmann returned to Budapest. The real bloodbath had begun. The ‘blue’ Danube, normally muddy-brown around Budapest, would flow red for months.

  In the first twenty-four hours of the Arrow Cross regime, some 600 Jews were dragged off the streets and out of their homes and other refuges to be murdered and dumped into the Danube. Swedish and Swiss ‘safe houses’ became torture chambers with a ready supply of victims. The executions provided new sport for the Arrow Cross punks. Rather than ‘waste’ bullets on individual Jews, they killed them three at a time by stripping them naked, tying them together, standing them in the waters of the Danube, shooting the middle one, and watching his weight drag the other two into the river. Dozens of other despairing Jews committed suicide.

  On Monday afternoon, Jewish homes were padlocked for ten days ‘to prevent further rioting.’ Some 6000 Jews, including the chief rabbi of Budapest, were rounded up and herded into two synagogues and held for days without food or water. Borrowing a bicycle from a woman, Wallenberg – whose car had been confiscated, and whose chauffeur, a Jewish engineer named Vilmos Langfelder, had been arrested – stormed into Arrow Cross headquarters and retrieved both car and chauffeur as well as custody of the Swedish safe houses. Then he went to the Dohany Street synagogue, the largest in Europe, brushed past the Arrow Cross thugs at the door, strode down the aisle to the Ark, and asked for Jews with Swedish Schutzpässe to identify themselves. To others who claimed that theirs had been lost, confiscated, or torn up by the Arrow Cross, he issued blank replacements, and then formed his Jews into columns, with bearers of the most impressive documents on the flanks, and marched 300 of them past the astonished Arrow Cross men to very temporary sanctuary in the Swedish safe houses.

  Two days later, prodded by Eichmann, the new Hungarian Minister of the Interior decreed that ‘I recognize no letter of safe conduct of any kind nor any foreign passport which a Jew of Hungarian nationality may have received from whatever source or person.’

  This surely meant the end of the Schutzpass, but Wallenberg had another card to play. He had befriended Baroness Elisabeth Kemény, the brand-new bride of Hungary’s new Foreign Minister. She was a young and sheltered Austrian aristocrat who’d had no idea of what the man she’d just married stood for – until her honeymoon ended in Budapest, by which time she was pregnant. Wallenberg preyed on her fears that her child would grow up fatherless if her husband went to trial as a war criminal31 and used her to bait another trap: like most outlaws in power, the Arrow Cross thirsted for the respectability of diplomatic recognition by such certified neutrals as Sweden and Switzerland. While Sweden had no intention of recognizing the new Hungarian regime, Wallenberg hinted that he might intervene to change his Foreign Ministry’s mind.

  Baron Gabor Kemény pleaded that he was the youngest and least powerful member of the new cabinet, but his bride said that if he didn’t act, she was ‘going home to Mother’. So persuasive was the Baroness that she accompanied her husband to the radio station on 20 October to make sure he broadcast a proper rendition of the decree Wallenberg had drafted in his name. It restored recognition of foreign passes, exempted Jewish bearers from wearing yellow stars, and granted extra-territorial protection to safe houses owned by neutral legations. When they returned home, the Baroness found a floor-to-ceiling plant waiting with a tiny gift card that read, ‘Thanks, Wallenberg.’ Her husband was furious and jealous. Meanwhile, the Arrow Cross men continued their rampage: sometimes respecting the rules, sometimes not. Every delay, however, helped.

  With Jews unable to leave their homes, let alone buy food or medicine, Wallenberg bought supplies with funds channelled through Sweden by the Joint Distribution Committee. His young Zionist storm troopers and ‘monsignors’ delivered them to the embattled Jews of Pest. He distributed another 5000 Schutzpässe. When all ration cards for Jews were voided and it was decreed that all without ration cards must be deported, Wallenberg and his staff worked through the night printing and issuing ‘Swedish ration cards’. Forty doctors recruited by Wallenberg moved through the ghetto inoculating its inmates against typhoid, paratyphoid, and cholera.

  By early November, when Adolf Eichmann summoned Raoul Wallenberg to Gestapo headquarters in the Hotel Majestic, each was well aware of the other’s work. Eichmann greeted Raoul with an intimidating question that showed he’d been looking into his adversary’s past: ‘Why did you go to Palestine in 1937?’

  ‘Because it interested me,’ Wallenberg answered coolly, and then, casually letting on that he’d done his homework, too, he alluded to Eichmann’s ‘Zionist’ past by adding: ‘I believe the Jews should have a state of their own, don’t you?’

  ‘I know all about you!’ Eichmann screamed. ‘You’re a Jew-lover who receives all his dirty dollars from Roosevelt. We know that the Americans have put you in Budapest and we know that your cousin Jacob is another Jew-lover and an enemy of
the Reich.’ In Berlin, where Jacob Wallenberg headed the Swedish trade mission to Germany, a close German friend of his had been executed after the botched 20 July attempt to blow up Adolf Hitler. The Wallenbergs were warned to stay out of Germany. ‘We have proof enough to arrest you because of your association with Jacob Wallenberg,’ Eichmann bullied Raoul.

  Not many men faced down Adolf Eichmann in wartime and lived very long, but Raoul was one of them. ‘All right,’ he said blandly. ‘I’ll admit that Jacob Wallenberg is an enemy of Nazism. So what? That’s none of my concern.’

  Infuriated by Raoul’s nonchalance, Eichmann ranted: ‘We know about your so-called passports. They’re all frauds! The Jews who’ve escaped to Sweden with them are all enemies of the Reich. We know they’re helping Jews escape from Denmark, too.’ With no home-grown fascist movement, the Danes had been a thorn in Eichmann’s side, for, even under German occupation in 1940, they had refused to persecute their 6400 Jews or even hand over 1300 German Jews who had taken refuge in Denmark before the war. When the Nazis tried to introduce the yellow star, they were told the King would be the first to wear it. Workers in Danish shipyards refused to repair German vessels. The Germans hadn’t cracked down until October 1943, but the Danes hid the Jews so well that barely 500 Jews were apprehended – and even they were sent to the ‘privileged’ ghetto of Theresienstadt, where ninety per cent survived. Another 6000 Jews or endangered relatives (half-Jews; non-Jewish spouses, etc.) were smuggled to Sweden in late 1943, which explains Eichmann’s outburst.

  Wallenberg didn’t even dignify Eichmann’s attack with a cool answer. Instead, he presented Eichmann with a bottle of Scotch and a carton of cigarettes, for, while Raoul’s research had shown that Eichmann was incorruptible and treacherous, he had also recognized that the vocational school dropout and middle-class hardware heir from Linz would be awed by an aristocrat treating him as an equal.