Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  As they drove through Pest, Anger remembers that ‘again and again we had to hit the brakes of the car, for the streets were blocked by dead bodies, horses, toppled trees, and shattered buildings. But Wallenberg never hesitated at the danger.’

  Anger asked him if he ever grew frightened.

  ‘Sure, it gets a little scary sometimes,’ Wallenberg conceded, ‘but for me there’s no choice. I’ve taken on this assignment and I’d never be able to go back to Stockholm without knowing inside myself I’d done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.’

  When Wallenberg confessed to fear, Anger thought to himself: ‘Only a man who can admit that is genuinely courageous.’

  In its reign of terror’s final days, the Arrow Cross – seeking to settle the score with Wallenberg by taking his life for all those he’d saved – raided his safest ‘safe house’, on Jókai Street, in the middle of the night and tore it apart looking for him. Failing to find him, they carted away all 280 Jews living there and, in the custody of the perverted Mrs Salzer and the fanatical Father Kun, 180 of them perished within a week. One who barely survived the raid was Alice Breuer, the Jewish doctor who had been rescued from a transport to Auschwitz by Wallenberg the previous summer. That had been many lives ago – for her entire family had been deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. Now she and a handful of other surviving ‘Swedes’ stood on a bank of the Danube – facing the river with a firing squad behind them so they could fall right into their watery grave. Instead of shots, however, a voice rang out: ‘These are Swedish citizens! Release them immediately and return their belongings to them!’

  For Alice Breuer, it was the Second Coming of the messiah who had already saved her once: ‘For an instant, I thought: “God has come to save us.” Then I recognized Raoul Wallenberg. To our astonishment, the executioners obeyed him. He seemed very tall indeed – and strong. He radiated power and dignity. There was truly a kind of divine aura about him on that night.’

  Today, Dr Breuer lives in Stockholm, where Raoul Wallenberg doesn’t.

  With the fascists still hunting him, Wallenberg and his driver, Langfelder, caught what sleep they could at an International Red Cross house on Benczur street in Pest. There, on Saturday morning, 13 January 1945, Wallenberg met his first Soviet ‘liberators’. He and Langfelder and the other transients had taken refuge in the basement kitchen while the heaviest fighting raged outside. The Russians were advancing not only in the streets, but through ancient cisterns and corridors that connected the cellars of Pest. In the early hours, fifteen Russian soldiers pounded a hole through the kitchen wall and entered in a cloud of plaster and dust.

  Wallenberg immediately produced papers in Russian certifying that he was a Swedish diplomat and asked to see their commanding officer. Within hours, and sporadically throughout the next three days, he was interrogated by both the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) and the Red Army.

  Between sessions with the Russians, Wallenberg moved freely through the liberated areas of Pest, resisting pleas from his friends to take sanctuary while the fighting still raged around him. He was scheming to meet Marshal Rodion Malinovski, the Red Army commander who, while reconnoitring Pest, had spotted so many foreign flags that he’d wondered aloud whether he was liberating a Swiss or Swedish city instead of a Hungarian one.

  What Wallenberg wanted, first and foremost, was to warn Malinovski that the last of the SS still planned to liquidate the central ghetto of Budapest. But he also wanted to discuss a postwar Wallenberg Institute for Support and Reconstruction of all of Hungary, not just its Jewry. Repatriation, restitution, and return of property as well as reunion of families, creation of employment, medical care, and rebuilding of homes and cities were among his most ambitious goals. Having already drafted the blueprint and a first fund-raising appeal, he was impatient to begin. And naïve.

  Anybody who has been ‘liberated’, willingly or unwillingly, by the Red Army will recognize that Wallenberg presented a profile sure to excite Soviet paranoia: wealthy; capitalist; philanthropic; an arrogant neutral ready to take bold risks; not just a friend of the Jews, but more and more willing to admit that he was an agent of both the American government and a Jewish agency. What’s more, Iver Olsen, the American who hired Wallenberg for the War Refugee Board, happened to be affiliated with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wartime forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That this was known to the Russians, if not to Raoul, made it all the more incriminating.

  Simon Wiesenthal, however, says that ‘what happened to Wallenberg had nothing to do with the Jews or the OSS. The Soviets were suspicious of him right away because he spoke Russian to them. In those days, a foreigner who spoke Russian was immediately a spy because the Russians themselves didn’t know other languages. In Russia at that time, the only use for a foreign language was in espionage. The second thing was that Wallenberg had with him various hard currencies – dollars, Swedish crowns, British pounds – just like all spies were supposed to.’

  * * *

  Late on Tuesday, 16 January 1945, which proved to be his last night in Budapest, Wallenberg loaded his car with food packets and, in the fuel tank, he and his chauffeur, Langfelder, and another Jewish aide, György Szöllös, hid what Szöllös said was ‘a great quantity of gold and jewels that Wallenberg was taking with him’ on what he hoped would be an imminent visit to Marshal Malinovski. While it is presumed that this wealth had been entrusted or donated to Wallenberg by Hungarian Jews fleeing for their lives, this aspect has been neglected by most chroniclers of the Wallenberg case – as if it could tarnish Wallenberg’s heroism!

  Taking it into consideration, however, is important in trying to comprehend his incomprehensible fate, for we can only guess what the Russians thought he was up to. It is quite possible that, upon discovering the gold and jewels in his fuel tank, the Russians mistook Wallenberg for a black-marketeer. And it has only recently become significant that the Soviet unit which took Raoul into custody, the 18 th Army, had as its chief political officer a newly promoted Major General, Leonid I. Brezhnev.

  In interviews with Szöllös and others in Budapest right after the war, Hungarian historian Jenö Lévai made no effort to explain why Wallenberg took along this treasure, but in their 1982 book, Lost Hero, Swedish-born Rabbi Frederick E. Werbell and writer Thurston Clarke theorize that he planned to use it to bribe the Russians to liberate the ghetto as swiftly as possible and spare the ravaged Jews the looting and raping by Soviet troops going on elsewhere in the city: ‘He had had great success bribing the Germans and their Hungarian allies; why, he must have reasoned, should the Soviets and their Hungarian allies be any different?’ Other theories range from buying Soviet support for the Wallenberg Institute’s postwar recovery plan to a well-founded fear that anything he left behind in Budapest would be pillaged by Russian soldiers.

  Wiesenthal has a simpler explanation of why Wallenberg went so well heeled: ‘At that time, when the world was coming to an end for the Axis, nobody would accept their paper money – Hungarian pengös, German marks – because everybody knew that, in a few weeks, you might as well eat the money for all the food it would buy.’

  On the morning after he loaded up his car, Raoul Wallenberg visited the Hungarian Jew in charge of the Swiss safe house (formerly the US Embassy) and told him he was leaving for Russian headquarters in Debrecen, 125 miles to the east. Raoul remarked: ‘I seem to have formed a good relationship with the Russian military.’ Then he and his driver, Langfelder, visited the Benczur Street refuge and told the Jewish leader there: ‘I need to pick up all my possessions because I’m leaving today for Debrecen. Please thank everybody for their hospitality and I’ll call on you as soon as I return.’ He estimated that he might be gone as long as eight days.

  When his host pleaded with him to defer his departure, for there were still snipers and house-to-house fighting, Raoul pointed through the window. Outside, near where his own car and driver stood, were two Red Army soldiers astride m
otorcycles. They wore full battle dress and were armed to the teeth. In the sidecar of one motorcycle sat a squat Soviet officer, Major Dimitri Demchinkov, wearing an olive-drab greatcoat.

  ‘They have been ordered especially for me, but I don’t know whether I’m going as their guest or their prisoner,’ Raoul said, almost proudly.

  Flanked by his Soviet military escort, Wallenberg paid his last call in Budapest at the Swedish Hospital. En route, his Studebaker collided with a Soviet troop transport. Furious, the Russian truck-driver was ready to kill Langfelder until Major Demchinkov pulled rank, warned him he had hit a diplomatic vehicle, and ordered him off. Outside the hospital, there was a second accident: Wallenberg slipped and fell on the icy pavement. He seemed hurt, but, as he picked himself up, he deflected his friends’ concern by pointing to three men emerging from the hospital and taking their first timid steps towards freedom. Each still wore a yellow star on his overcoat, but Wallenberg smiled and spoke his last recorded utterance as a free man: ‘I am happy to see that my work has not been completely in vain.’

  By the time the central ghetto of Budapest was liberated that night, Raoul Gustav Wallenberg had vanished from view: the first victim of the Cold War to come. It took less than a week for the hero who had fought, bluffed, and outsmarted Eichmann, the Third Reich, the Final Solution, and the Arrow Cross, saving tens of thousands of Jewish lives at great risk to his own, to be enmeshed for life (and, perhaps, death) in another criminal bureaucracy: the Iron Curtain with which Stalin had already begun to blanket Eastern Europe.

  Accounts of what happened after he left Budapest for Debrecen come from prisoners and a few other civilians who saw or talked with Wallenberg or his driver, Langfelder, in the Soviet penal system. The two men told their story whenever they could in the hope that these casual contacts, if they ever went free in the West, could send word to a mostly uncaring world.

  At a checkpoint on the outskirts of Budapest, NKVD officers in green uniforms with red shoulder-boards slashed Wallenberg’s tyres, transferred him and Langfelder to an official Soviet car, and dismissed the military escort. Not for another thirty-six years did it become public knowledge that their abduction had been ordered by a Red Army political commissar (politrak), Major General Leonid Brezhnev, who later ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982: a period of stagnation from which he is remembered as a coveter of fast cars and expensive trinkets.

  In 1981, former Red Army officer Yaakov Menaker, who had emigrated to Israel, told a Stockholm newspaper, Aftonbladet, that he had met several of the officers involved at a veterans’ reunion and they had referred to Wallenberg’s arrest as a ‘successful secret operation’ directed by Brezhnev. A few days later, former Swedish Supreme Court Justice Ingrid Gärde-Widemar, head of the Swedish Wallenberg Committee, acknowledged that ‘we have known since last fall that Brezhnev personally ordered the arrest of Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary in 1945 when he was a Soviet Red Army politruk. We are one hundred per cent sure the information is correct, but our big problem was whether we should make this public or not. We decided to keep silent in order not to jeopardize our efforts to seek Wallenberg’s release.’

  Brezhnev died the following year. Two years later, a Ukrainian Catholic activist, Yosyp Terelia, published in an underground journal, Chronicle of the Catholic Church in the Ukraine, a letter claiming that Brezhnev’s main objective had been Raoul’s dented Studebaker. Terelia said he had two witnesses who had participated in the arrest, one of whom later became a Catholic and confessed his role to his priest:

  Over the years, this man had become a devout believer and told his confessor what had happened. Thus we managed to establish that Raoul Wallenberg had been arrested without the knowledge of the supreme command. He had, in fact, been arrested on the direct orders of Brezhnev. The captain of Brezhnev’s guards robbed Wallenberg and confiscated his diplomatic car. Wallenberg demanded his car back, but Brezhnev had made a present of the car to one of his superiors. Knowing that Wallenberg would protest to Marshal Malinovski, Brezhnev ordered the arrest of the Swedish diplomat.

  For this and other efforts, Terelia was sentenced in 1985 to twelve years of hard labour and exile.

  Little knowing that they were under arrest and charged with being ‘German spies’ and ‘not in possession of valid papers’, the diplomat and his chauffeur were driven to their destination, Debrecen, but not to see Marshal Malinovski. Instead, Raoul was told he would have to confer with civilian higher-ups in Moscow Then, with four armed escorts, he and Langfelder were put aboard a train headed towards the Russian border.

  Both men must have recognized that, particularly under communism, it is hardly customary to ship a chauffeur as a passenger along with an invited guest. Indeed, the decisions about Wallenberg’s fate were already being taken in the Kremlin, for, in a message dated 16 January 1945 – the eve of Raoul’s departure for Debrecen – Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Dekanosov had sent a note to Swedish Ambassador Staffan Söderblom in Moscow that ‘First Secretary Raoul Wallenberg of the Swedish Legation in Budapest has gone over to the Russian side. Measures have been taken by the Soviet military authorities to protect Mr Wallenberg and his property.’ Meanwhile, back in ‘liberated’ Budapest, the NKVD began interrogating and sometimes imprisoning those who had ever worked with Wallenberg.

  Simon Wiesenthal says that ‘for years after the war, there would be so many diplomats and other foreigners shuffling back and forth through Russia and its prisons that one Swedish first or second secretary wouldn’t normally have worried Stalin.’ But the war was not yet over in January of 1945, and Wiesenthal thinks that what did worry the Russians was Raoul’s link with the War Refugee Board, which Stalin perceived as a front for US intelligence and for ‘separate peace’ negotiations by the Americans and British with Nazi Germany instead of the ‘unconditional surrender’ demanded by all the Allies. Indeed, the WRB’s field representative in Turkey, Ira Hirschmann, had been bargaining in Ankara and the Middle East with Nazi go-betweens while other intermediaries were in contact with Heinrich Himmler, who was hoping to come to power and negotiate a ‘conditional surrender’ if Hitler faltered. And the ‘condition’ Stalin feared the most was a fantasy occasionally voiced among both Axis and Allies: what if America and Britain (and perhaps the Free French) signed a separate peace with Germany (and perhaps Japan) and victors and vanquished united to wipe out godless Bolshevism once and for all?

  Learning of Hirschmann’s negotiations, the Soviet Foreign Ministry vehemently vetoed all such dealings. W. Averell Harriman, the US Ambassador to Moscow, was obliged to cable Washington that the Soviet Union was not interested in the Jewish problem.

  None of this was known to Raoul Wallenberg and Wilmos Langfelder who, still treated courteously as though in protective custody, bore the discomforts of a 1500-mile rail journey, largely through war-torn Romania, which took two weeks. After a brief stop at Focsani at an internment camp for foreigners, they ate dinner with their escorts at a restaurant called Luther in Iasi, the Romanian town on the Russian frontier. Then they boarded a Soviet train that took them through the Ukraine to Moscow.

  No official car awaited their arrival on Wednesday, 31 January. Instead, their escorts took the Swedish diplomat and his Hungarian chauffeur on a tour of the newly completed Moscow subway: each station a museum of Russian art, some of it revolutionary, some of it Stalin Gothic. To Wallenberg as an architect, these were to be his last images of freedom. Alighting at the Dzerzhinskaya station that evening, he and Langfelder were led into a floodlit former hotel flying a red flag. This was Lubyanka Prison, headquarters of the NKVD and last known address for hundreds of thousands of political prisoners.

  There Wallenberg and Langfelder were separated. There they faded from sight. By March of 1945, the Soviet-controlled Kossuth Radio in Budapest was claiming Wallenberg had been murdered en route to Debrecen by Hungarian fascists or ‘agents of the Gestapo’. This became the official Soviet line for more than a decade.
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  It would be more than two decades before another ‘liberated’ architect, Simon Wiesenthal, would first hear the name of Raoul Wallenberg and drop everything to enter his case. ‘For us Jews,’ says Wiesenthal today, ‘human life is very holy and there is a passage in the Talmud that is maybe 1500 or 2000 years old, but it applies to Wallenberg right now. It says that when you save one human life, you save the whole world.’

  19

  The Wallenberg disappearance

  Throughout the 1950s, as foreign captives trickled back to the West from Soviet prison camps, one could chart Raoul Wallenberg’s movements (and some of his driver, Wilmos Langfelder’s) from 1945 onward, if never upward, through the Gulag Archipelago: ex-citizen Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s designation of his native land’s vast clandestine penal system which ‘begins right next to us, two yards away from us’ and in which, said Solzhenitsyn in 1975, ‘Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat . . . has been imprisoned for thirty years and they will not yield him up.’

  Gustav Richter, former German police attaché in Bucharest, shared cell 123 in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, Wallenberg’s first port of call in the gulag, with him for more than a month in 1945. He said Raoul asked several times: ‘What will my relatives say when they learn I’m in prison?’ Richter replied: ‘Under the circumstances, I think you have no cause for shame.’

  Twice a month, prisoners were allowed to petition any Soviet official, even Stalin. Raoul wrote to the prison director, protesting his arrest and treatment and demanding the right to contact the Swedish Embassy in Moscow. His petition went unanswered. During their time together, Richter said Raoul was taken out for interrogation only once – ‘for an hour or an hour and a half,’ after which he reported that he was accused of espionage and told: ‘Well, we know who you are. You belong to a great capitalist family in Sweden.’