Raoul Wallenberg saved the lives tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews – but he couldn’t save his own. In January 1945, the 32-year-old Swedish diplomat approached the Red Army as it liberated Hungary to discuss his post-war humanitarian plans. Instead of helping, though, the Soviets arrested him – and then for a decade denied knowing anything about his whereabouts.
In 1957, after German prisoners of war – freed following 10 years in Soviet prisons – testified to conversing with Wallenberg in jail, the USSR finally admitted to arresting Wallenberg in 1945 but claimed he died of a heart attack in prison two years later, at age 34.
The true story of Wallenberg’s fate may never be known – some believe he lived many more years, others believe the Soviets murdered him in 1947 – but a new biography of Wallenberg by journalist Ingrid Carlberg spends more than a third of its 600 pages on this subject, covering the efforts – or lack thereof – of the Swedish government to bring Wallenberg home.
Carlberg’s book, “Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust” (MacLehose Press), originally appeared in Swedish in 2012 and won Sweden’s prestigious August Prize for non-fiction. The English translation was just released this month.
The Jewish Press: How did Wallenberg wind up in Hungary in 1944 with the mission to save Jews?
Carlberg: After the German invasion of Hungary in May, there was an initiative taken by the American War Refugee Board to finance a rescue mission in Hungary. The United States couldn’t act in Hungary since they were part of the war, so they asked their diplomatic envoy in Stockholm – Herschel Johnson – to persuade the Swedish government to help.
It so happened that the firm where Raoul Wallenberg worked was situated in the same building as the American legation in Stockholm, so even before the American envoy suggested this rescue mission to the Swedish government, there had been a lot of discussions in the building about it. Furthermore, Raoul Wallenberg’s boss was Jewish and his family was in Hungary, so it didn’t take long before all those things came together, and it was Hershel Johnson who actually suggested the name Raoul Wallenberg to the Swedish government.
You write that the War Refugee Board sent requests to several countries to intervene to stop the extermination of Hungarian Jewry. Sweden, though, was the only country to respond positively. Why?
I think the American diplomats in some of those countries felt it was really strange for them to ask their host governments to increase diplomatic work in Hungary at a time when the German army had invaded Hungary. So some American ambassadors didn’t even ask their host countries. And other countries just didn’t want to.
Sweden at this time, though, had a great need to please the Western allies because the neutral policy Sweden took during the war meant a certain German-friendly attitude that the Western allies thought had passed the limit of the acceptable. So now that the war had turned and it was obvious that the Germans were facing defeat, Sweden sought to improve its reputation among the Western allies.
Once in Hungary, how did Wallenberg go about saving Jews?
There’s a myth that Raoul Wallenberg walked around the streets distributing protective papers and thus personally saved tens of thousands of Jews. That’s not the truth. Raoul Wallenberg’s heroic deed was the huge organization he managed to build to help Hungarian Jews. There were nearly 350 people employed in his organization, and they delivered food to tens of thousands of people, ran a hospital, and had their own security police, sent out by Wallenberg to save Jews who were being taken away.