Nazi Hunter (29 page)

That was how Raoul Wallenberg became an American agent. Lauer approached Raoul when the Swede returned from weekend duty as an officer in the Home Guard. Raoul’s response was immediate:
‘I will do it gladly if I can be of help to people in need.’ On 9 June 1944, Olsen met with Raoul, who had just turned thirty-two, and was impressed by his vitality and resourcefulness.
With the help of US Ambassador Herschel V. Johnson, the Swedish Foreign Ministry was persuaded to name him Second Secretary of its embassy in Budapest and to give him access to funds – raised
by Hungarian Jews for a rescue operation – that had already been turned over to the Swedish government. Since the WRB’s total operating budget worldwide was a modest one million
dollars, its spending power had been augmented by an American Jewish philanthropy, the Joint Distribution Committee, which had raised $100,000 for deposit to Raoul’s account at his
family’s Enskilda Bank for the Budapest rescue operation. A two-week delay came from Stockholm’s chief rabbi, Marcus Ehrenpreis, who hesitated over Raoul’s youth and
naïveté as well as the blunt cynicism with which he spoke of needing plenty of cash for bribing German and Hungarian officials.

Raoul Wallenberg had no scruples about bargaining with the devil. It was what he was being sent to Budapest to do. Besides, it was his belief that, in unlawful times such as Hitler’s, any
he, any trick that defends decency or delays indecency, is not only acceptable, but urgent. As one of his assistants in Budapest would put it a short time later: ‘Whatever is illegal becomes
legal. The main thing is to help.’

Eventually, Rabbi Ehrenpreis was won over by Raoul’s salesmanly charm and the commanding German he spoke so fluently. The rabbi bade him farewell with a Talmudic saying: ‘Those who
set off on a mission of humanity can be assured of God’s special protection.’

On 6 July 1944, Raoul Wallenberg flew to Berlin and spent the night sitting up talking with his half-sister, Nina, and her husband, Gunnar Lagergren, a diplomat in the Swedish Embassy there. An
air-raid alarm interrupted their marathon conversation, but they continued it in the bomb shelter.

Though the Swedish ambassador had reserved a night sleeper to Budapest for his guest on 9 July, Raoul knew how fast Eichmann
was working and insisted on taking the first
train out. Without a reservation, he perched in a corridor and leaned on his only luggage, two knapsacks, as he listened to German soldiers discussing their conquests (by that stage of the war,
only romantic ones) and to air-raid sirens that made the train pull over to sidings several times during the delayed overnight journey. As Wallenberg’s passenger train rolled south towards
Budapest, cattle cars were carrying the Jews of Hungary north to death.

In one of his knapsacks was a cheap second-hand revolver. ‘I don’t want to waste money I could use to bribe Nazis,’ he told a friend who wondered why he didn’t buy a
better weapon. ‘Besides, the gun is only to give me courage. I don’t plan to use it.’

As befits an architect, Raoul Wallenberg was a student of dents and precedents: dents in the armour of Eichmann’s death machine and precedents for going around it.

Before his arrival, the Swedish Embassy had been giving out a limited number (some 700 in all) of provisional passports to Hungarians with established Swedish connections or reasonably official
travel plans. Whether the Hungarian authorities accepted these documents was another matter – particularly where Jews were concerned – and then there was the question of crossing Nazi
Germany with such a flimsy credential. Nevertheless, one Jewish merchant, Hugo Wohl, had hired a lawyer who argued that Wohl’s provisional passport made him a Swedish citizen not subject to
wearing the yellow star on his clothes and door. Wohl had won his case. Another Budapest businessman, Wilhelm Forgacs, working in a Jewish forced labour unit, had been rounded up for deportation.
In desperation, he had brandished his hitherto futile Swedish provisional passport one last time. A Hungarian officer had hesitated and put
him instead into an internment
camp, from which the Swedes were able to rescue him.

‘Wallenberg considered these two stories carefully. They offered amazing insight into the psychology of bureaucracy. People ready to send their fellow human beings off to untold suffering
and death without a qualm could be stopped dead by the sight of an official-looking document. This was something to build on!’ writes Elenore Lester in
Wallenberg: the Man in the Iron
Web
(1982).

‘I think I have an idea for a new and perhaps more effective document,’ Wallenberg informed the Swedish ambassador at their first meeting in Budapest. What Wallenberg invented was
the
Schutzpass
, a protective passport which said the bearer was emigrating to Sweden and was therefore not only under Swedish protection, but, in effect, a Swedish citizen. Wallenberg
relied upon his draughtsman’s training to design a document that was particularly impressive visually. Bearing a photograph of the recipient, engraved with Sweden’s three-crown emblem
in full blue and yellow, it looked so official that even an Eichmann might flinch at violating it.

Authorized to issue 4500
Schutzpässe
, Wallenberg printed many times that number and extended their protection to the families of bearers. He was absolutely reckless, which shook
some of his staid diplomatic associates. When he proclaimed to them, ‘I came to save a nation’, the unspoken question arose: ‘
Which nation? Hungary? Or Sweden’s
soul?
’

He carried his disarming arrogance to new heights in his first meeting with the Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy, to present his credentials. At seventy-six, the towering Horthy was astonished
to be lectured on humanitarianism by a very junior Swedish diplomat who warned him that he would be held accountable after the war for the fate of Hungary’s Jews. Though Horthy stood a good
half-foot taller than the medium-sized Wallenberg, the latter wrote home to his mother that ‘I felt taller than he was.’

Raoul also wrote to his mother about his business partner’s relatives:

In six weeks, Wallenberg had mastered the arithmetic of the Final Solution which had eluded the Allies for six years.

Had the
Schutzpass
been Wallenberg’s only contribution to history, he might have merited the Nobel Peace Price for which Wiesenthal keeps nominating him on
the assumption that he is still alive until proven dead. ‘He developed as a hero from the moment he was sent to save lives,’ says Simon. ‘Soon, helping others became for him more
meaningful than his own life. Many times he risked his life. Eichmann tried a few times to kill him, but he could also have been killed whenever a transport of people was going out and he, with his
great courage, would follow the transport in his car. When the transport stopped at a station, he would go to the prisoners and pass out as many Swedish protection passports as he had. Then he
would race ahead to the next station and, when the transport arrived, make a scandal for the SS about their deporting Swedish citizens. In that way, he saved thousands from odds that were
ninety-nine to one . . .’

‘Against them?’ he is asked.

‘Against him,’ Wiesenthal clarifies, for hope was less than even one in a thousand for Hungarian deportees in the Holocaust’s final fury: no more ‘selections’
awaited them at Auschwitz, where they were sent directly to death. And Wiesenthal wonders rhetorically: ‘What did a second secretary of a little land like Sweden matter to an SS man or a
Hungarian Nazi with gallons of blood on his hands already? Wallenberg’s only weapons were that official-looking
Schutzpass
and his personal courage.’

There are many accounts of Raoul rushing to assembly points for deportations and asking, ‘Who here has Swedish papers?’ Sometimes people without passes would hold
up driver’s licences, prescriptions, or other Hungarian documents the Germans couldn’t read. Wallenberg would issue
Schutzpässe
and then proclaim their rights before the
ink was dry.

In the summer of 1944, Dr Alice Breuer was in Kistarca, a collection camp for Jews ticketed for Auschwitz. ‘Suddenly,’ she recalls, ‘a guard came and ordered me to come along.
He said I was to be released. I didn’t believe him, but when I arrived at the camp exit, a car with Hungarian police was waiting. I was taken, together with three others, to the Swedish
Embassy in Budapest. There I met Raoul Wallenberg for the first time. He offered me chocolate, handed me a large document, and explained that I was now a Swedish
citizen with
nothing to fear from the Germans and the Hungarian Nazis. “Remember that your connection with Sweden is AB Kanthal Hallstahammar,” he said. “This is important. Don’t forget
it. Now hurry home to your husband and his parents. They are waiting for you.”’

Rarely was his intervention so indirect. More than once, he stood on the roof of an outbound freight train passing out
Schutzpässe
to all within reach while the engineer sounded
his whistle impatiently. At least once, German soldiers fired warning shots in the air. One jolt of the engine, one flinch by Raoul, one stray bullet, and he would have perished then and there.
Sometimes he stepped in front of German guns, placing his own body between Jews and deportation. More than once, he was manhandled by guards and threatened with worse, but he would not stop. Nobody
had ever seen such a man!

Hearing of Raoul’s efforts, Eichmann sped up deportations. When there weren’t enough trains, thousands were penned in makeshift camps near the railway yards. In the middle of the
night, a young man tiptoed into the shed where Agnes Adachi and a hundred others waited for the end and, lowering his voice, apologized for stepping over them, ‘but I am here to help you, so
don’t worry.’ While they wondered to each other who this angel was who still talked to them as though they were human, Wallenberg stepped outside and started screaming at an SS officer
in German: ‘What are you doing with our protected people? I am taking them all with me right now!’ And he did.

When Wallenberg paid his first visit to the Jewish Council of Budapest, these beleaguered bargainers mistook him for a senior Gestapo officer because he strode in and spoke German so
aggressively, so intimidatingly, that any bureaucrat – Aryan or not – would quake in his boots. When he talked to their oppressors – German or Hungarian – he threatened
trials and hinted that he had the power to grant immunity. ‘He acted,’ says one observer, ‘as if the war was over and he was the victors’ first emissary to
Hungary.’

As soon as he’d organized a new Section C for humanitarian affairs at the Swedish Embassy on the Buda side of the Danube, he moved its operations across the river to Pest, where most of
Budapest’s Jews lived; he was anticipating that the Red Army, already advancing upon the capital, would enter from the Pest side sometime
that autumn. Though his
largely unpaid Section C staff grew to 400 Jews – for all of whom he won an exemption from wearing yellow stars and the freedom to move around the city – the first two he hired were
Forgacs and Wohl, the two businessmen who had fought to win the protection of their Swedish provisional passports before he’d invented the
Schutzpass
. They had the kind of initiative
Wallenberg wanted.

Edith Wohl, who went to work in Section C with the rest of her family, has recalled Raoul’s impact upon his staff:

‘He gave us courage. He was so courageous that he made the rest of us ashamed to be afraid. Because of him we all became more optimistic.

‘He also shocked us by his behaviour. Here he was, an Aryan who didn’t believe that Jews were something vile and despicable. He even socialized with us as if we were normal people.
This was amazing.

‘After a while, it became impossible for us to consider him a normal human being. We didn’t ask ourselves the normal objective questions about his background. In fact, we
didn’t even know that he was a member of the Wallenberg family. Instead we came to see him as superhuman; someone who had come to Budapest to save us, a Messiah.’

With the Red Army within artillery range and the Germans poised to burn their bridges behind them, real estate was cheap in Budapest, so Wallenberg was able to buy thirty buildings in Pest which
he made into ‘safe houses’ flying the Swedish flag and offering shelter and refuge to thousands of Jews. Some of the younger inhabitants vowed to protect Raoul’s property and he
even, on occasion, dressed some of his more Aryan-looking Jews in SS uniforms to stand guard outside his safe houses.

Eichmann and Wallenberg – two losers in civilian life who, in wartime, built their names in different directions – first met in late July or early August of 1944 in
the Arizona night club in Budapest: at Wallenberg’s instigation but Eichmann’s invitation. There they discussed the possibility of Sweden buying real estate from the Nazis. Wallenberg
offered 200,000 dollars for forty houses. Eichmann, who knew the Swede wanted them for sanctuaries, brushed him off lightly with: ‘Surely, Mister Secretary, you can’t be serious. Why,
the
Americans once offered us two million dollars for the Jews of Slovakia!
³⁰
Why should the Hungarian Jews be worth
less?’