After a half year in Hungary saving lives, Wallenberg in January 1945 approached the Soviets, who promptly arrested him. Why?
I’m not so surprised they arrested him. I’m more surprised they never let him go. There were a lot of suspicions surrounding Raoul Wallenberg’s actions in Budapest. To start with, his mission was a collaboration between Sweden and the United States, and Stalin had started to become very suspicious of the United States. He thought the Western allies had tried to make a separate peace with Germany without the Soviet Union, and the name Wallenberg had been linked to those peace negotiations because Wallenberg’s father’s cousins had been secret messengers between the German opposition and the Western allies. This is, I think, a very important reason for the arrest.
Additionally, Soviet spies in Budapest saw the enormous size of this rescue mission and reported back home that Wallenberg was not a normal diplomat and that there were strange things going on with all those Shcutzpasses. Also, from a diplomatic point of view, Wallenberg overstepped a lot when it came to contacts with the Arrow Crossers and the Nazis. He had three telephone numbers for Adolf Eichmann in his telephone book, for example. Because of his goal to save people, he allowed himself contacts that were looked upon by the Soviets as very suspicious.
According to the Russians’ current version of events, Wallenberg died in prison of a heart attack in 1947. But you demonstrate in the book that they are lying. Interestingly, when you asked the archivist of Russian intelligence services in 2011 if Wallenberg died of a heart attack in 1947, he said, “Yes, at least for now.”
[Laughs] Very Russian.
There’s an interesting internal document from 1956 in which officers at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow are ordered to look through the archives of prison hospitals to find some kind of disease that the Swedes could be told Wallenberg died from. Originally the suggestion was to tell them Wallenberg had pneumonia and died in Lefortovo prison in 1947. Later they came up with another answer – that he died of a heart attack in Lubyanka prison.
But why didn’t the Soviets just let him go? Why did they need to kill him or imprison him for decades as some people believe they did? Was it just too embarrassing to release him at a certain point?
We don’t know for sure, but I think the answer is to be found in the Swedish attitude toward Stalin at the time. The Swedish diplomats were the first to believe the Soviet disinformation campaign, so already in 1945 there was an informal conviction inside the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm that Wallenberg was dead – that he died in Budapest in an accident or something like that. And that influenced the way the Swedish government acted.
You could say the Swedish foreign policy after the war was to keep Stalin in a good mood, and to ask questions about Raoul Wallenberg was of course not to please Stalin. And in the end this lack of action or lack of will was interpreted by the Soviet government as Sweden not wanting Wallenberg back. And if Sweden didn’t want him back, what could they do? He had already seen too much.
To end on a happier note: What do you consider to be the lesson of Raoul Wallenberg’s life?
He was a person of action. When faced with what was happening to the Jews, he was not satisfied with formulating beautiful words on what needed to be done. He went into action and made things happen.