The year is 1944.
The second World War is in full swing and around the territories occupied by Nazi Germany,
Jews and others considered undesirables by the Nazi regime are rounded up and sent to
concentration camps, awaiting certain death.
Raoul Gustav Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, voluntarily travelled to Hungary in order
to save Hungarian Jews from the Nazis.
He saved the lives of thousands of Jews while in Hungary, providing them with temporary
Swedish passports and preventing the massacre of the largest Jewish ghetto in Budapest.
As the war was coming to an end and the Russians entered Budapest, he was arrested.
He disappeared shortly thereafter and it is nearly certain he died in a Soviet prison,
though there never has been a definitive conclusion regarding his case.
So, who was this man, a hero that dared take a stand in the face of one of the biggest
evils mankind has ever seen, only to disappear thereafter?
-intro-
Ancestry and Sweden
Wallenberg was born on the fourth of August nineteen-twelve in the nature reserve Kappsta,
near Stockholm, in the summer villa of his family.
He was the son of naval officer Raoul Oscar Wallenberg and the grandson of banker Gustav
Wallenberg.
The Wallenberg family was a prominent Swedish family consisting of politicians, diplomats,
industrialists and bankers.
His father died of cancer, three months before his birth, after which he grew up with his
grandparents.
His mother remarried in 1918 with a man named Fredrik von Dardel.
Wallenberg graduated high school and after his compulsory military service, he first
left for Paris for a year, only to enter the United States to study architecture at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.While studying in the United States he worked odd
jobs and traveled during his holidays, reminiscing to his grandfather that ‘hitchhiking gives
you training in diplomacy and tact’ due to the conditions you’re travelling in.
It took Wallenberg less than four years to obtain his bachelor's degree and returned
to Sweden.
However, there was no work for him as an architect and his grandfather Gustav arranged a job
for him in South Africa and later at a Dutch bank in Haifa.
In 1936 he returned to Sweden again, got a job at the trading company of Kálmán Lauer,
a Hungarian Jew, and became his partner within eight months.
When the Second World War broke out, he was free to travel abroad as a neutral Swede.
One of his destinations he travelled to on a regular basis for his work, was Hungary.
Hungary in World War II
The reason Wallenberg was eventually stationed in Budapest had to do with the business opportunities
he pursued before the Second World War.
His partner in business, Kalman Lauer, travelled often to Hungary in order to conduct business.
However, from 1938 onwards, Hungary commenced passing a series of anti-Jewish legislation.
Among other things, these laws limited the number of Jews in certain professions and
government jobs.
The situation in Hungary, and Europe as a whole, started requiring greater and greater
effort by Kalman Lauer in order to travel and enter the country.
As a result, Wallenberg started travelling to Hungary in order to conduct Lauer’s business.
In 1940 Hungary joined the Axis Powers and in June 1941 they aided Nazi-Germany’s Operation
Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, which would fail catastrophically, with especially
the Battle of Stalingrad nearly wiping the Hungarian battalions of the face of the earth.
In the Spring of 1944, the Allied Powers started to realize what Hitler meant with the “final
solution to the Jewish problem”.
An estimated seven-hundred-thousand Jews, who had up until now not been a primary target
of the Nazis, still lived in Hungary.
After the defeat of the Axis Powers at Stalingrad in 1943, Milkos Horthy, Hungary’s regent,
was negotiating a peace with the United Kingdom and the United States, behind the back of
Germany.
When Hitler caught wind of these plans, he decided Hungary was to be invaded and occupied
by the Nazis themselves.
March 1944, and the Nazis entered Hungary.
The Arrow-Cross party, staunch Nazi supporters, under Ferenc Salaszi, became the puppet government
of the country.
The deportation of Jews nearly immediately took off.
The majority would be sent straight to Auschwitz-Birkenau, an almost certain death.
These deportations would ship 12,000 people towards concentration camps in Nazi-occupied
territories…
every day.
The Nazis and Arrow-Cross militia started with deporting Jews from the countryside.
The result was that those residing in Budapest knew they would soon be deported as well and
so, they sought help from embassies of the neutral countries still seated, and manned,
in Budapest.
Wallenberg goes to Budapest
Wallenberg agreed to be sent to the Swedish embassy in Budapest in June 1944.
His objective was to save the Hungarian Jews residing in Budapest.
He arrived a month later, was appointed as the first secretary of the Swedish embassy
and began providing unofficial, temporary Swedish passports that he had designed himself.
Because Sweden was neutral, the passports offered protection against deportation, even
though they had no status according to international law.
Between the occupation of Hungary by the Nazis and Wallenberg’s arrival, over four hundred
thousand Jews had already been deported.
Wallenberg, together with fellow Swedish diplomat Per Anger started issuing ‘protective passports’.
There were others such as Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat and Sister Sara Salkahazi, who worked
alongside him and other neutral countries began to follow Wallenberg's example.
Among other things, the passes issued by Wallenberg guaranteed the owners did not have to wear
the yellow star and would be treated as if they were Swedish citizens.
Not only did he save Hungarian Jews, among them were Dutch, Belgian, Italian and Romanians.
With money garnered by the War Refugee Board, he rented over 30 buildings in Budapest, in
which he would house Jewish families.
A Swedish flag would hang outside of these houses, prominently displaying their diplomatic
status and ensuring that neither the Nazis nor Arrow-Cross party members would dare to
enter them.
Sources vary, but between 10 and 15 thousand people took refuge in these houses, protecting
them from deportation to concentration camps.
One of Wallenberg’s drivers, Sandor Ardai, told of one occasion when Wallenberg intercepted
a trainload of Jews about to leave for Auschwitz.
Wallenberg swept past the SS officer who ordered him to depart.
Arriving at the transport trains he climbed the wagons, walked over the roofs, releasing
passports along the way.
He then demanded that those who had obtained a passport were released after all.
So as the war continued and it became obvious the Axis Powers were losing, in a last-ditch
attempt to rid the city of Jews, a plan was devised, a plan to blow up the largest Jewish
Ghetto of the city, harboring over 70,000 Jews, Wallenberg was informed of this plan
and negotiated with the commander of German troops in Hungary, General August Schmidthuber
and Adolf Eichmann, in order to not go through with it.
He threatened that if this order was carried out, he would ensure Schmidthuber was charged
with war crimes after the war was over.
He succeeded and in December that year the Russians (and Ukrainians) under Marshal Rodion
Malinovsky, sieged Budapest.
Disappearance
The German commander of Budapest, SS Lieutenant General Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, refused
to surrender which meant that Budapest would be sieged.
There are conflicting accounts about how Wallenberg disappeared.
One of the accounts was that Wallenberg was outside of Budapest at the time of the siege
and called into the headquarters of Marshal Malinovsky.
There were allegations that Wallenberg was engaged in espionage.
According to this article in Time, his last words were “I’m going to Malinovsky’s,
whether as a guest or prisoner, I do not know yet”.
Other sources state that Wallenberg and his driver Vilmos Langfelder were captured by
the Russians and brought to Malinovsky.
There is no certainty about what happened after Wallenberg’s arrest, and that is what
makes this case so fascinating in my opinion.
Wallenberg just… disappeared.
Over the years, many have claimed that they have seen him in prison, as late as 1962.
In 1957, the Russians reported that Wallenberg died of heart failure in the Loebjanka prison
in Moscow on 17 July 1947.
Regularly stories circulated that Wallenberg would still be alive and would be in Russian
captivity or in a psychiatric hospital.
In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet-Russian regime, KGB documents were published showing
that Wallenberg was still being interrogated at the Loebjanka prison on 23 July 1947.
So, this means that until 1947 he would have certainly been alive.
In 1955, Gustav Richter, a Nazi stationed in Romania, testified that he and Wallenberg
shared a cell shortly after they were arrested.
There was a radio report stating that Wallenberg and his driver had been murdered, implying
it had been by the Gestapo or Arrow-Cross party.
Because of this Sweden’s government, in the post-war confusion, thought Wallenberg
had died.
Within the Soviet Union, there were voices that said Wallenberg had been executed in
prison, or even assassinated by poison.
There have been numerous investigations in order to shed light on the fate that had befallen
Wallenberg, though none provided conclusive evidence.
Investigations
Commission In 1991 a Russian-Swedish committee was set
up to investigate the death of Wallenberg.
In December 2000, a few weeks before the publication of the investigation, Russia rehabilitated
Wallenberg because he was unjustly arrested.
On January 12, 2001, the Swedish part of the Russian-Swedish committee revealed its findings
on the death of Wallenberg.
The committee could not establish whether Wallenberg had died in 1947 and could not
even exclude that Wallenberg was still alive.
According to the committee, the possible evidence is probably still in Russian archives.
The committee also believed that the diplomacy of the Swedish government failed in the Wallenberg
case in the 1940s.
Gellért Kovács According to the Swedish-Hungarian writer
Gellért Kovács, who conducted research into Wallenberg from 2009 to 2012, Wallenberg was
kidnapped by Soviet troops because he supported the armed resistance.
This would explain why the Swedish government remained 'passive' for a long time after its
disappearance.
Journal of Ivan A. Serov Another potential scenario was revealed in
June 2016, when the diary of the first KGB chief Ivan Aleksandrevich Serov was published.
He claimed to have seen the file by Soviet authorities on Wallenberg.
Serov writes that his predecessor at the Soviet state security service Viktor Abakoemov stated
that Wallenberg was killed on the orders of Stalin.
Abakumoz was executed in 1954 himself.
Serov further indicated that he was instructed by Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev to
find out what had happened to Wallenberg.
He, however, could not find any evidence of Wallenberg’s supposed guilt for espionage.
These are just three possibilities, there have been more people throughout the years
that claimed they had seen Wallenberg in Soviet custody, whether it was in prison or in psychiatric
hospitals.
All that is certain, however, is that after the Second World War, all concrete traces
of Wallenberg disappeared.
In 1996 the CIA released thousands of documents that were declassified, confirming that whilst
Wallenberg was in Hungary, he was an intelligence asset for the United States, more specifically
the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.
He acted as a liaison between the OSS and Hungarian resistance organisations.
It is speculated that being an intelligence asset was the cause for arrest by the Soviet
authorities, and eventually signed his death warrant.
Death declaration
In October 2016, Wallenberg was officially declared dead by the Swedish tax authorities,
his formal date of death was the 31st of July 1952.
This was done at the request of the SEB, the bank that was once established by the Wallenberg
family, which manages the estate of Wallenberg.
The formal death date was determined on the basis of the Swedish legislation that stipulates
that for persons who are missing when they die, the date of death may not be set earlier
than on a date that is at least a full five years after the last sign of life.
According to the Swedish tax authorities, the last sign of life of which there is no
doubt was in July 1947.
Awards
After you have heard the story of Raoul Wallenberg, it must be rather evident that there have
been a number of awards and honours dedicated to him.
As a matter of fact, there are too many to sum up, which I believe is testament to Wallenberg’s
actions during his life.
Most notably, he was nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1986 he was granted honorary citizenship of Israel, furthermore, multiple streets have
been named after him and he was distinguished by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial
to victims of the holocaust.
Besides Israel, Wallenberg was a honorary citizen of Hungary, the United States, Canada
and Australia.
Behind the Great Synagogue of Budapest is the Raoul Wallenberg Holocaust Memorial Park,
which also is a memorial of the so-called Hungarian Jewish Martyrs, dedicated to the
400,000 Hungarian Jews that were murdered by the Nazis.
While we do not know the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, we can both learn from him and remember the
good he has done, the lives he has saved, and the stand he dared to take in the face
of evil and danger.
Thank you very much for watching this video, and I will see you next Friday.