It was an immense organization, and the basis for all of it was the distribution of Swedish Schutzpasses, which Wallenberg had designed. It was a fake passport, but it looked so credible that it was the most credible protective paper in Budapest that autumn and it saved a lot of people.
How many lives in total did Wallenberg save?
It’s really hard to say. He himself mentions in his last letter back to Sweden the number 20,000. That includes 15,000 people saved from forced labor due to his intervention with [the Nazi-supported Hungarian] Arrow Cross and 2,000 people saved by his security police patrol in street-saving actions. And then there were the death marches ordered by Eichmann in November 1944 when 35,000 Jews had to walk from Budapest to Hegyeshalom. Wallenberg and his security police managed to save up to 1,000 people from those marches.
In the end, it was enough just to mention the name Raoul Wallenberg to save people. In January 1945, General Gerhard Schmidthuber gave the order to destroy the central ghetto in Budapest, which had between 70,000 and 100,000 Jews in it. Wallenberg was no longer in town, but he had a companion in the Arrow Cross police force who had switched sides at the end of 1944, Pal Szalai, and Szalai told Schmidthuber that he had been ordered by Wallenberg to remind him that he would face prosecution for war crimes if he destroyed the ghetto. Schmidthuber backed off.
You write that to a certain extent it was Wallenberg’s acting abilities that helped him save Jews.
Yes, he spoke German fluently and he was a very creative and artistic person. So he often played theater with German officers and Arrow Crossers, shouting at them in German and giving orders. And it worked. Many times he gained respect when he acted like that.
During the Holocaust most people either didn’t care about the extermination of European Jewry or didn’t want to endanger themselves by getting involved. How do you explain Wallenberg’s being such an exception?
In December 1942, when knowledge of the Holocaust started to be very clear, Sweden began stretching out its hand to Jews fleeing neighboring countries. In 1943 Sweden’s borders were totally open to all 8,000 Danish Jews threatened with imminent deportation. Earlier Sweden had closed its borders and even asked Germany to stamp Jewish passports with a clear “J.” But Sweden changed – and quite early compared to other countries – so when Wallenberg was sent on this rescue mission he was acting with the Swedish government’s consent.
The second thing to keep in mind is that Wallenberg was not an ordinary Swede. He had lived five years aboard, including three and a half years in the United States and four or five months in Haifa in Palestine. That’s crucial because in Haifa he lived in a colony of German Jews who had fled persecution. So when he came back to Sweden in 1936, he had insight into what was going on in Germany that was different from that of most Swedes.
He also looked upon himself more as a world citizen. His friends at the time described him as a person with a special international flair, and it’s clear that he saw what was happening to the Jews in Germany in a way that the ordinary Swede maybe did not. Most people saw a problem, but it wasn’t their problem. Raoul Wallenberg was inclined to automatically see the “us” in the problem. He identified with European Jews because he had been in Haifa, had a lot of friends there, and had searched his own heritage and found a small microscopic part of his blood that was Jewish. He was 1/16 Jewish, but in the 1930s he told his friends he was 1/4 Jewish or 1/2 Jewish. He was very proud of that.