Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and humanitarian. He saved thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings which he declared as Swedish territory.
On 17 January 1945, during the Siege of Budapest by the Red Army, agents of SMERSH detained Wallenberg on suspicion of espionage, and he subsequently disappeared. In 1957, 12 years after his disappearance, he was reported by Soviet authorities to have died of a suspected myocardial infarction on 17 July 1947 while imprisoned in the Lubyanka, the prison at the headquarters of the NKVD secret police in Moscow. A document released in 2023 as part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection indicates that Vyacheslav Nikonov, then an assistant to the head of the KGB, determined as part of a 1991 inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his disappearance that Wallenberg had likely been executed by Soviet authorities in late 1947 as a result of claims that he may have been associated with people helping not only Jews but also Nazi war criminals escape prosecution. However, there is no conclusive proof of this theory of Wallenberg's death, and his cause and date of death have been disputed ever since, with some people claiming to have encountered men matching Wallenberg's description until the 1980s in Soviet prisons and psychiatric hospitals. The motives behind Wallenberg's arrest and imprisonment by the Soviet government, along with questions surrounding the circumstances of his death and his ties to US intelligence, remain shrouded in mystery and are the subject of continued speculation. In 2016, the Swedish Tax Agency declared him dead in absentia, with the pro forma date of death noted as 31 July 1952.
As a result of his successful efforts to rescue Hungarian Jews, Wallenberg has been the subject of numerous humanitarian honours in the decades following his presumed death. In 1981, US Congressman Tom Lantos, one of those saved by Wallenberg, sponsored a bill making Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the United States, the second person ever to receive this honour, after Sir Winston Churchill. Wallenberg also became an honorary citizen of Canada, Hungary, Australia, the United Kingdom and Israel. In 1963, Yad Vashem designated Raoul Wallenberg as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Numerous monuments have been dedicated to him, and streets have been named after him throughout the world. The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States was founded in 1981 to "perpetuate the humanitarian ideals and the nonviolent courage of Raoul Wallenberg." It gives the Raoul Wallenberg Award annually to recognize persons who take action to further these ideals. In 2012, Wallenberg was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress "in recognition of his achievements and heroic actions during the Holocaust." Declassified documents have confirmed that Raoul Wallenberg worked with the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.
Although some have claimed that Wallenberg was responsible for rescuing 100,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust in Hungary, historians regard that figure as an exaggeration; Yad Vashem estimates the number of people granted protective paperwork as about 4,500 individuals.
Early life
Wallenberg was born in 1912 in Lidingö Municipality, near Stockholm, where his maternal grandparents, Per Johan Wising and his wife Sophie Wising, had built a summer house in 1882. His paternal grandfather, Gustaf Wallenberg, was a diplomat and envoy to Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sofia.His parents, who married in 1911, were Raoul Oscar Wallenberg, a Swedish naval officer, and Maria "Maj" Sofia Wising. His father died of cancer three months before he was born, and his maternal grandfather died of pneumonia three months after his birth. His mother and grandmother, now both suddenly widows, raised him together. In 1918, his mother married Fredric von Dardel; they had a son, Guy von Dardel, and a daughter, Nina Lagergren.
After high school and his compulsory eight months in the Swedish military, Wallenberg's paternal grandfather sent him to study in Paris. He spent one year there, and then in 1931 he studied architecture at the University of Michigan in the United States. Although the Wallenberg family was rich, he worked at odd jobs in his free time and joined other young male students as a passenger rickshaw handler at Chicago's Century of Progress. He used his vacations to explore the United States, with hitchhiking being his preferred method of travel. About his experiences, he wrote to his grandfather saying, "When you travel like a hobo, everything's different. You have to be on the alert the whole time. You're in close contact with new people every day. Hitchhiking gives you training in diplomacy and tact."
Wallenberg was aware of his one-sixteenth Jewish ancestry and proud of it. It came from his great-great-grandfather Michael Benedicks, who immigrated to Stockholm in 1780 and converted to Christianity. Ingemar Hedenius recalls a conversation with Wallenberg dating back to 1930 when they were together in an army hospital during military service:
Raoul Wallenberg's Jewish ancestry is supported by Sweden researcher Paul A. Levine, who wrote in his monograph about Wallenberg:
Wallenberg graduated from the University of Michigan in 1935 with a degree in architecture. Upon his return to Sweden, he found that his American degree did not qualify him to practice as an architect. Later that year, his grandfather arranged a job for him in Cape Town, South Africa, in the office of a Swedish company that sold construction material. After six months in South Africa, he took a new job at a branch office of the Holland Bank in Haifa, where he met and befriended Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. He returned to Sweden in 1936, securing a job in Stockholm with the help of his father's cousin and godfather, Jacob Wallenberg, at the Central European Trading Company, an export-import company trading between Stockholm and central Europe, owned by Kálmán Lauer, a Hungarian Jew.
World War II
Beginning in 1938, the Kingdom of Hungary, under the regency of Miklós Horthy, passed a series of anti-Jewish measures modeled on the so-called Nuremberg Race Laws enacted in Germany by the Nazis in 1935. Like their German counterparts, the Hungarian laws focused heavily on restricting Jews from certain professions, reducing the number of Jews in government and public service jobs, and prohibiting intermarriage. Because of this, Wallenberg's business associate, Kálmán Lauer, found it increasingly difficult to travel to his native Hungary, which was moving still deeper into the German orbit. Hungary became a member of the Axis powers in November 1940 and later joined the Nazi-led invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Out of necessity, Wallenberg became Lauer's personal representative. He traveled to Hungary to conduct business on Lauer's behalf and to look in on members of Lauer's extended family who remained in Budapest. He soon learned to speak Hungarian and, from 1941, made increasingly frequent travels to Budapest. Within a year, Wallenberg was a joint owner and the International Director of the company. In this capacity, Wallenberg also made several business trips to Germany and German-occupied France during the early years of World War II. It was during these trips that Wallenberg was able to closely observe the Nazis' bureaucratic and administrative methods—knowledge which proved valuable to him later.Meanwhile, the situation in Hungary had begun to deteriorate as the tide of the war began to turn decisively against Germany and its allies. Following the catastrophic Axis defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad, the Horthy regime began secretly pursuing peace talks with the United States and the United Kingdom. Upon learning of Horthy's duplicity, Adolf Hitler ordered the occupation of Hungary by German troops in March 1944. The Wehrmacht quickly took control of the country and placed Horthy under house arrest. A pro-German puppet government was installed in Budapest; actual power rested with the German military governor, SS-Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer. With the Nazis now in control, the relative security from the Holocaust enjoyed by the Jews of Hungary came to an end. In April and May 1944, the Nazi regime and its accomplices began the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to extermination camps in German-occupied Poland. Under the personal leadership of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel for his role in the implementation of the Nazis' Final Solution, deportations took place at a rate of 12,000 people per day.
''"Pimpernel" Smith'' screening
Wallenberg was directly inspired by "Pimpernel" Smith, a 1941 British anti-Nazi propaganda thriller. The film had been banned in Sweden, but Wallenberg and his sister, Nina, were invited to a private screening at the British Embassy in Stockholm. Enthralled by Professor Smith, who saved twenty-eight Jews from the Nazis, Nina stated, "We thought the film was amazing. When we got up from our seats, Raoul said, ‘that is the kind of thing I would like to do’".Recruitment by the War Refugee Board
On 21 June 1944, George Mantello received and immediately publicized two important reports given to him by Romanian diplomat Florian Manilou, who had returned from a fact-finding trip to Romania and Budapest at Mantello's request. Manilou received material from Miklos "Moshe" Krausz in Budapest, who worked with Carl Lutz to rescue Jews. One of the reports was probably Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl's abridged version of the 33-page Auschwitz Protocols. The reports described in detail the operations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The second was a six-page Hungarian report that detailed the ghettoization and deportation of 435,000 Hungarian Jews, as updated to 19 June 1944, by towns, to Auschwitz.Mantello publicized the reports' findings immediately upon receipt. This resulted in large-scale grassroots protest in Switzerland against the unprecedented barbarism against Jews and led to Horthy being threatened by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In a letter, Churchill wrote, "There is no doubt that this persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world...."
Following the report's publication, the Roosevelt administration turned to the newly created War Refugee Board in search of a solution to the genocide against Jews. US Treasury Department official Iver C. Olsen was dispatched to Stockholm as a representative of the WRB and tasked with putting together a plan to rescue the Jews of Hungary. In addition to his duties with the WRB, Olsen was also secretly employed as the chief of "Currency Operations" for the Stockholm station of the Office of Strategic Services, the United States' wartime espionage service.
In search of someone willing and able to go to Budapest to organize a rescue program for the nation's Jews, Olsen established contact with a relief committee composed of many prominent Swedish Jews led by the Swedish Chief Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis to locate an appropriate person to travel to Budapest under diplomatic cover and lead the rescue operation. One member of the committee was Wallenberg's business associate Kálmán Lauer.
The committee's first choice to lead the mission was Count Folke Bernadotte, the vice-chairman of the Swedish Red Cross and a member of the Swedish Royal Family. When Bernadotte's proposed appointment was rejected by the Hungarians, Lauer suggested Wallenberg as a potential replacement. Olsen was introduced to Wallenberg by Lauer in June 1944 and came away from the meeting impressed and, shortly thereafter, appointed Wallenberg to lead the mission. Olsen's selection of Wallenberg met with objections from some US officials who doubted his reliability, in light of existing commercial relationships between businesses owned by the Wallenberg family and the German government. These differences were eventually overcome and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs agreed to the American request to assign Wallenberg to its legation in Budapest as part of an arrangement in which Wallenberg's appointment was granted in exchange for a lessening of American diplomatic pressure on neutral Sweden to curtail the nation's free-trade policies toward Germany.