Raoul Wallenberg
—Christina
Listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/hwts-271-raoul-wallenberg--63633380
Even at the height of Nazi Germany’s power in Europe, there were those who did everything they could to protect those the regime sought to destroy. One of the lesser-known of these people is Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish architect and diplomat who used his position and sheer force of will to save thousands of Jewish people in Hungary.
He was born in 1912 to Maria Wallenberg, who named him Raoul after his father, who had died just three months previously. On being widowed, Maria moved in with her parents, but her father died just a few months after Raoul was born. And so, he was raised by his mother and grandmother. As he got older, he spent a great deal of time with his paternal grandfather, Gustaf Wallenberg, who was a Swedish diplomat. Gustaf arranged for his grandson to study in Paris, where he spent one year, then transferred to the University of Michigan in 1931. He studied architecture and spent his holidays journeying around the United States. His favorite method of travel was hitchhiking, and through this he saw much of the country during the worst years of the Great Depression and spent a lot of time with people of all walks of life.
He graduated with a degree in 1935 and returned to Sweden, only to find that his degree didn’t qualify him to be an architect in his home country. In 1936, he got a job with the Central European Trading Company, which worked between Stockholm and Central Europe, and was owned by a Hungarian Jew named Kálmán Lauer. By 1938, Wallenberg was working closely with Lauer and acting as his representative in Budapest when Lauer found himself cut off from his home country by its anti-Jewish laws. By 1941, Wallenberg was named joint owner and International Director of the company. In this position, and protected by his citizenship in neutral Sweden, he was able to travel freely through Europe. He became familiar with Nazi bureaucracy and administration through his business dealings, giving him insight he used later to save lives.
He was inspired to use this knowledge by a British anti-Nazi movie, Pimpernel Smith, the story of man who used his position as an American archaeologist to rescue Polish Jews. The American War Refugee Board (WRB) assigned Iver Olsen of the United States Treasury Department and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the predecessor to the CIA) to plan the rescue of Hungarian Jews. He worked with a committee in Sweden which included Kálmán Lauer, who suggested his colleague Raoul Wallenberg as the perfect man for the job. After some negotiations between the United States and Sweden over the latter’s ongoing trade with Germany, Wallenberg was sent to Budapest as a member of the Swedish diplomatic offices. He arrived on 9 July 1944, at which point there were approximately 230,000 Jews in Hungary.
The plan for rescue was straightforward: Jewish people would be given documents stating they were Swedish citizens, making them exempt from deportation. These protective passports, as the documents were called, did not actually provide Swedish citizenship, but appeared official enough to fool Nazi soldiers in the midst of deporting thousands of people. Wallenberg’s next step was to rent buildings in Budapest, which he declared to be Swedish territory, thereby giving them diplomatic immunity. By the end of the war, he had sheltered over ten thousand people in these buildings.
Wallenberg sometimes saved lives through sheer force of will. More than once he removed people who had already been loaded onto trains for deportation by handing passports through doors and then preventing the train from leaving until all of those with passports had been removed. At other times, he used a natural authority to simply demand that individuals be given over into his custody, in a way that allowed no argument from soldiers or guards to whom he was speaking.
According to documents released in the 1990s, he was also working for the OSS, minimally providing information to the United States and working to undermine the Nazi occupation government.
His most impactful action was negotiations with the Nazis overseeing Hungary in the days prior to the Soviets taking the city of Budapest. Via messages that alternated between emphasizing the fact that these men did not want to find themselves in Soviet hands and threatening them with prosecution for war crimes after the war ended, Wallenberg convinced them to leave without destroying the Budapest ghetto or conducting a forced march of the remaining Jews in the city. Through this, he saved approximately 70,000 lives.
Wallenberg was captured by the Soviets when they took control of Hungary early in 1945, after which he essentially disappears. Documents released after the collapse of the USSR showed that he was wanted for espionage, likely due to his work with the OSS. He is generally believed to have died (or been killed) in a Soviet prison in 1947, as per a statement given a decade later. This is disputed by many people who claim to have seen and interacted with him well into the 1980s, but there is no hard evidence that he survived past 1947. American efforts to find out his fate in the late 1970s were spearheaded by Congressman Tom Lantos, whose life had been saved by Wallenberg’s work. In 1981, because the Soviets refused to answer inquiries from the United States about people who were not American citizens, Wallenberg became the second person in history to be granted American citizenship by an Act of Congress. Despite this new status, the USSR did not provide any more information. His possessions were returned to his family in 1989, after being found in a storeroom.
Wallenberg has received many posthumous honors, ranging from two nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize to monuments across the world. He is named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, a title given to Gentiles who sought to protect or save those who were targeted in the Holocaust.