Raoul Wallenberg, a thirty two year old Swedish businessman with a degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and no diplomatic experience, was sent to Budapest in July 1944 by the Swedish Foreign Ministry, the American War Refugee Board and the World Jewish Congress to do what he could to save the surviving Jews of Hungary. The deportations from the Hungarian provinces in May, June and early July had already taken around four hundred and forty thousand Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, where the great majority had been gassed within days of arrival. The Jews of Budapest, around two hundred thousand people in mid July 1944, were the surviving remnant of what had been one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. Wallenberg’s job was to keep them alive until the Soviet army arrived. He did. The Budapest community was the largest single Jewish community to survive the Final Solution.
Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on 9 July 1944 with the rank of legation secretary at the Swedish Embassy, a small staff and a brief from his superiors that he was free to use any methods he considered necessary. The Swedish foreign minister had already authorised the issue of provisional Swedish passports, the Schutzpass, to Hungarian Jews who could establish a connection to Sweden through family, business or educational ties. Wallenberg expanded the scheme far beyond what the rules envisaged. He printed thousands of impressively designed Schutzpass documents in Swedish blue and yellow, with the three crowns of Sweden in the top corner, and issued them to Hungarian Jews on the basis of any plausible connection or, in many cases, no connection at all. He bought up over thirty buildings in Budapest, declared them Swedish diplomatic property, and housed thousands of protected Jews inside them under the Swedish flag. The protective passport, the Schutzpass, was not legally a Swedish passport in any normal sense. The Hungarian Arrow Cross authorities accepted the documents because the German embassy had agreed to accept them as part of a complicated diplomatic arrangement that the Swedes, with the help of the Vatican and the International Red Cross, had been negotiating since spring 1944.
Wallenberg used the documents to bluff. He went down to the Budapest railway stations as the deportation trains were being loaded in October and November 1944, climbed onto the cars, distributed Schutzpass documents to the Jews aboard, and demanded their release on the grounds that they were Swedish protected persons. The Arrow Cross officers and German guards on the platforms sometimes complied; sometimes they shot at him. He went down to the Danube embankment in November, December 1944 and January 1945, where the Arrow Cross was running mass shootings of Jews into the river, and pulled people out of the lines. He set up soup kitchens in the protected houses. He bribed Arrow Cross officials with cigarettes, food and Swedish currency to release individual Jews from arrest. He worked round the clock for six months. The Soviet army entered Budapest on 17 January 1945. The Jewish ghetto, which Wallenberg had repeatedly intervened to keep from being liquidated, was found largely intact.
The Soviet authorities arrested Wallenberg the day after liberation, on 18 January 1945, on suspicion of espionage. He was taken to Moscow and held at the Lubyanka prison and later at Lefortovo. The Soviet authorities denied for the next twelve years that they were holding him. In 1957, after Sweden had pressed the case repeatedly, the Soviet government issued a statement claiming that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack at Lubyanka on 17 July 1947. The statement was not supported by any independent evidence and was contradicted by reports from former Soviet prisoners over the next four decades who claimed to have seen Wallenberg alive at various Soviet prisons in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s. The case has never been settled. The Russian state has continued to assert the 1947 date. The Wallenberg family does not accept it. The Swedish government has continued to ask. The case is the most prominent unresolved disappearance of the postwar period.
Wallenberg was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1963. He was made an honorary citizen of the United States in 1981, of Canada in 1985, of Hungary in 2003 and of Israel in 1986. His name is inscribed on the wall of the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem. The number of Jews he saved during his six months in Budapest is estimated at between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand. The lower figure is the firm count of Schutzpass holders and protected-house residents whose names appear in the surviving Swedish embassy records. The higher figure is the working consensus of the postwar Hungarian Jewish community on the broader effect of his work, including his role in keeping the central ghetto from being liquidated in the last days before liberation.
See also
Sources
- Ingrid Carlberg, Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust, MacLehose Press, 2016
- Per Anger, With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest: Memories of the War Years in Hungary, Holocaust Library, 1981
- Kati Marton, Wallenberg: Missing Hero, Random House, 1982; updated edition Arcade, 1995
- Yad Vashem, file on Raoul Wallenberg, Righteous Among the Nations, 1963
- Swedish Foreign Ministry archives, Stockholm, Wallenberg files
- Susanne Berger and Vadim Birstein, Raoul Wallenberg Research Initiative RWI-70, ongoing publications on the disappearance