Nazi Hunter (34 page)

That left Wallenberg’s destiny in Swedish hands. But the Swedish Ambassador in Moscow who had declined Harriman’s aid Staffan Söderblom, who, as head of Foreign Ministry’s
political department in 1942, had buried the first eyewitness account of gassings at Belzec – handed by an appalled German technocrat named Kurt Gerstein to a Swedish diplomat, Baron Guran
von Otter, on a train from Warsaw to Berlin because he ‘judged it too risky to pass information from one belligerent country to another’. Face to face and behind the scenes in Budapest,
Wallenberg had thwarted Eichmann, the ultimate ‘desk murderer’ who seldom saw his victims, but, in jail in Moscow, he was in no position to cope with a prototypical ‘desk
undertaker’ who could bury all hope through inaction or wishful thinking.

Like Wallenberg, the staff of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest had been taken into custody by the Red Army. Shipped to Bucharest by bus and then to Odessa and Moscow by train, they wondered all
the way whether they were prisoners or honoured guests. Worried that their train might be shunted to Siberia, Söderblom met them in Moscow with one repeated admonition: ‘Remember, when
you get home to Sweden – not one harsh word about the Russians!’ Wallenberg’s closest colleagues, Per Anger and Lars Berg, agreed to comply. Later, Anger would recall ruefully:
‘We never suspected then that when we’d passed through Moscow, Raoul was right there, confined in Lubyanka.’

During their stay in Moscow, Berg – who had hosted Raoul’s memorable dinner with Eichmann – was questioned by the NKVD
about Wallenberg. On the first
day, Berg was asked whether Wallenberg was a German spy. Scared though he was, Berg burst into laughter – and then told the Russians they were out of their minds.

The next day, his interrogators were back with another approach: had Wallenberg been spying for the Americans? If he wasn’t working for one, he must have been working for the other. Their
mentality could never understand a man who came to save a people – and, to a considerable extent, did.

Eventually, the Swedish contingent went on by train to Leningrad and then Helsinki and the Finnish port of Turku. They swallowed hard when, arriving in Stockholm on a Finnish ship on 18 April
1945, they were met by their own relieved relatives plus Raoul’s mother, Maj von Dardel, who had come down to the pier just in case her son was aboard. ‘Where is Raoul?’ she
pleaded. ‘I had hoped he was with you.’

Maj von Dardel had been hoping against hope ever since early February, when she’d called upon the Soviet Ambassador to Sweden, Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai, and been
told: ‘He’s safe. Don’t make a fuss and he’ll return.’

Madame Kollontai cuts an ambiguous figure in the Wallenberg saga. Daughter of a Czarist general, she was nonetheless a close associate of Lenin and heroine of the Soviet occupation of the
Alexander Nevsky Monastery in the Revolution. A fashionable clothes-horse and friend of Raoul’s banker cousin, Marcus Wallenberg, she led a movement back home to expel all non-proletarians
from the Communist Party and fire all technicians trained before the Revolution. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre says she fell into disfavour with Stalin and was recalled to Moscow in 1946 because of
the indiscreet assurance she gave Raoul’s mother.

On the other hand, Wallenberg’s Budapest ally and confidante, Baroness Elisabeth Kemeny, the Austrian bride of the Hungarian Foreign Minister who was hanged after the war, says Raoul was
in contact with Madame Kollontai and not only told her his ambitious plans to rebuild the Hungarian nation and reconstruct its Jewish community, but also asked her to help the Kemenys – all
of which, says Baroness Kemeny, Madame Kollontai reported to the Kremlin, thereby convincing Stalin that Raoul was a threat to the spread of communism.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Swedish Ambassador Söderblom – prodded by Wallenberg family influence and Raoul’s friends in the Foreign Ministry – made five
or six perfunctory inquiries about his missing fellow diplomat. Whether the latest rumour was that Raoul had died in an auto accident or that he was alive and well and living under a pseudonym in
Budapest or missing in an air raid, Söderblom invariably would caution Stockholm that this was not the time to bait the Russians, and what if Wallenberg turned up to ‘tell sensational
stories to the press’ against Sweden’s powerful and menacing eastern neighbour? Per Anger, who was reassigned to Cairo in 1946, says that ‘the Foreign Office had to urge
Söderblom not to fall into passivity.’

Söderblom had not even consulted with Stockholm before refusing Averell Harriman’s offer. Later, Söderblom gave his Home Office to understand that the US itself had decided not
to intervene. In October 1945, he reported that ‘the Americans have not made any approach to the Soviets’ – without mentioning who had discouraged them.

Of all the muffed opportunities to retrieve Wallenberg, the most maddening came on 15 June 1946, when Söderblom’s stint in the Soviet Union was nearing an end. The only ambassadors
Stalin normally saw were the US and British envoys,
when
they had special messages from their President or Prime Minister for him. The austere ‘man of steel’
never
met
with diplomats from small neutral nations. Well, almost never, for he granted a farewell interview to Söderblom in the Kremlin.

This rare face-to-face confrontation was the high point of a curious figure’s diplomatic career, and he knew it even then. In an absolutely fawning report to the Foreign Ministry, made
public only in 1980, Söderblom wrote that he found Stalin in his marshal’s uniform looking ‘fit and in vigorous health. His short but well-proportioned body and his regular
features made an especially agreeable impression. His tone of voice and demeanour gave an impression of friendliness.’ In an interview in the 1980s for an Australian film documentary,
Between the Lines
, produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Söderblom went a few steps farther, on camera. An ageing, twisted man – still full of himself in retirement –
Söderblom told how his host ‘shook hands with me and’, as if he needed any introduction, ‘said “Stalin.” I nearly got tears in my eyes.’

Proud that he spoke Russian and all the more humble because he wasn’t speaking through an interpreter, Söderblom told Stalin: ‘I am grateful to Your
Excellency that you have agreed to receive me before my departure from Moscow. I do not want to take up much more of your valuable time as I have no reason to plead with you on any matters, nor do
I wish to approach you regarding any difficult problems.’ He proceeded to present greetings from his King and Prime Minister before expressing Sweden’s desire to live at peace as a good
neighbour to the Soviet Union.

Then Stalin, every inch the gracious monarch of Marxism-Leninism and the gulag and nearly a quarter of a billion people, asked Söderblom: ‘Do you have any special requests?’

To this breathtaking, but anticipated, question, Söderblom replied: ‘I have nothing special to take up with you, but since you ask, I would like to mention one matter.’ After
sketching Swedish intervention on behalf of humanity in Budapest, he said that ‘among those who saved twenty-five to thirty thousand Jews was a Swedish diplomat, Wallenberg’, who was
last seen with Russian soldiers when ‘he disappeared without a trace.’

Stalin smiled benignly and said: ‘Of course we shall look into this matter for you, Mr Ambassador. I shall write down the name to make sure I remember. The name was Wallenberg? If, as you
suggest, there is any chance he is in the Soviet Union, our investigation will provide an answer.’

We all have moments when we regret saying too much. What happened next made Tage Erlander, Sweden’s Prime Minister from 1951 to 1969, declare when he found out about it that the
conversation between Söderblom and Stalin was ‘dangerous and perhaps disastrous . . . It would have been better if it had never taken place.’ Perhaps in his soul of souls, which
only an Ingmar Bergman might penetrate, Söderblom lived to regret the words he volunteered when he saw the almighty Stalin actually jot down the name on a pad and stick the scrap of paper into
his uniform jacket:

‘
I, personally, think Wallenberg was a victim of robbers, or perhaps an accident in Budapest
,’ said Söderblom.

Stalin smiled knowingly and puffed on his pipe. The audience was over. The same undertaker in diplomatic pinstripes who had once buried the Final Solution’s first revelation in the files
had now embalmed his countryman and colleague by shredding his last hope
of intervention from above. No wonder Wallenberg’s NKVD interrogator was so sure nobody
cared.

While Söderblom and Stalin were consigning Raoul to oblivion or worse, Rensinghoff and Wallenstein, the German diplomats whose cell was above his, helped him with his
French for an appeal he addressed to Stalin in what was then the language of diplomacy; it went unanswered. In the spring of 1947, Wallenberg tapped hastily on his ceiling, ‘We are being
taken away.’

Unlike the German and Italian ‘enemy’ diplomats, most of whom were eventually repatriated, Wallenberg the ‘neutral’ was absorbed into the mainstream of Soviet political
prisoners shipped to Siberia, which lends credence to the theory that the Russians believed Sweden had disowned him. According to one who was in the transit room at Lefertovo when Wallenberg was
shipped out, he said bitterly: ‘They just want to make me disappear into darkness and fog.’

As if to make this perception of his official, on 18 August 1947, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky issued a note declaring that Wallenberg is not in the Soviet Union and he is not
known to us.’

What about the 16 January 1945 letter from Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Dekanosov to Ambassador Söderblom that Wallenberg was in Red Army hands? That, said Vyshinsky, was based on
‘indirect information from a commander of infantry troops fighting for Budapest. At the time, it was impossible to verify the report. Since then, a thorough investigation has failed to
produce a positive result. The Soviet officer who provided the information about Wallenberg has not been found. Nor has Wallenberg been found in the camps for prisoners of war and
internees.’

Vyshinsky went on to ‘draw your attention to the fact that Wallenberg in January 1945 was in a war zone where Soviet troops were involved in violent fighting at a time when anything could
have happened. He could, on his own initiative, have left the region that was occupied by Soviet troops. There might have been an enemy air attack. He could have perished under enemy fire or fallen
victim to an assassination attempt . . . Our own hypothesis is that Wallenberg either died during the fighting in Budapest or was abducted’ by the Arrow Cross.

Though Vyshinsky’s message was so self-serving that it might have been scripted by Söderblom for Stalin, there were those who
still wanted very badly to believe
the Big Lie. Erlander’s new Swedish government was Social Democratic and its Foreign Minister, Östen Undén, was a Marxist law professor with infinite faith in the Soviet
experiment. When a Wallenberg Action Committee visited Undén with evidence that Raoul was still alive in the gulag, the Foreign Minister turned to one of the members, Birgitta de
Wylder-Bellander, and asked: ‘Mrs Bellander, do you think Vyshinsky is lying?’

Considering that Vyshinsky had prosecuted Stalin’s great purges of the 1930s, winding up many a courtroom harangue with ‘Shoot the mad dogs!’ Mrs Bellander’s affirmative
answer should not have surprised Undén the way it did. ‘But this is terrible, terrible!’ he burst out. ‘It is quite unthinkable!’ Indeed, he and most of the Foreign
Ministry – to whom Wallenberg was an outsider, a wartime addition who was never ‘one of us’ and who might have endangered his colleagues by his boldness in Budapest –
steadfastly declined to think the unthinkable

In 1947, the year Vyshinsky denied Wallenberg’s presence inside the Soviet Union and presumed he had died in Hungary, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) wrote a personal letter of inquiry
to Stalin, who answered the scientist with written assurance that he knew nothing about the missing Swedish diplomat. Less trusting than Raoul’s own employers, Einstein joined three deputies
from Sweden’s Parliament the following year in nominating Wallenberg for the Nobel Peace Prize, which goes only to living persons.

There were rumblings, too, within the Swedish Foreign Ministry. According to Rabbi Abraham D. Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, ‘Lars Berg got so fed up
that, after the war, he quit Sweden and quit the Foreign Service. Later, he turned up in Rio [de Janeiro] and became the Swedish Consul there . . . But he wrote a book about Wallenberg that was
published in 1947 in Sweden. It was on the stands for one day. All the copies were bought up by persons unknown – presumably from the Foreign Ministry.’

To placate the Wallenberg agitators, whose efforts had made Raoul a national hero, Per Anger was assigned to pursue the case upon his return from Egypt in 1948. During Anger’s two years on
the job, he says, ‘Undén persisted in his negative attitude, and many times I was ready to give up. I had not gained the slightest attention at the
highest level
for my conviction that Wallenberg was in Russian imprisonment, or for what I thought should be done to set him free.’

Late in 1950, on their way to a conference in Oslo, Undén invited Anger into his train compartment to talk over Wallenberg. Anger reiterated his certainty that Wallenberg was still alive
in Soviet custody and stated his opinion that ‘the only language the Russians understand in a situation such as this is: meet force with force, or offer something in exchange.’ The
Swiss and the Italians had retrieved their diplomats by exchanging them for Soviet agents. A Dane named Hakon Dahl, who had been in the gulag for six years, had been exchanged for a Russian jailed
in Copenhagen. ‘I added,’ Anger remembers, ‘that we in Sweden had given the Russians a billion crowns in credits during our 1946 trade negotiations without asking anything in
return. We’d had several spy cases in Sweden in which Soviet citizens were involved. Was it not conceivable that instead of expelling a spy, we could hold such a person, expecting to exchange
him for Wallenberg?’