Raoul Wallenberg. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Born to an prominent Stockholm business family in 1912, he never quite made it in the Swedish business world and had several failed ventures on his resumé when he was dispatched to Budapest on a humanitarian mission in July 1944.
In Budapest, he found his vocation. He was tireless in his efforts to save Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps, alternately defying the Nazis and negotiating with them. In January 1945, as the Soviets surrounded Budapest, he crossed the lines and demanded to see General Malinovsky, in a last-ditch attempt to save the remaining Jews in the ghetto. A few days later, the Soviets issued a warrant for his arrest, and he was transferred to Moscow. The Swedish authorities believed that he was under Soviet “protection.” It took weeks for them to conclude that he was missing.
RAOUL WALLENBERG: THE BIOGRAPHY by Ingrid Carlberg Reviewed by Patricia le Roy, author of Girl with Parasol
Raoul Wallenberg. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Born to an prominent Stockholm business family in 1912, he never quite made it in the Swedish business world and had several failed ventures on his resumé when he was dispatched to Budapest on a humanitarian mission in July 1944.
In Budapest, he found his vocation. He was tireless in his efforts to save Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps, alternately defying the Nazis and negotiating with them. In January 1945, as the Soviets surrounded Budapest, he crossed the lines and demanded to see General Malinovsky, in a last-ditch attempt to save the remaining Jews in the ghetto. A few days later, the Soviets issued a warrant for his arrest, and he was transferred to Moscow. The Swedish authorities believed that he was under Soviet “protection.” It took weeks for them to conclude that he was missing.
Seventy years later, the trust placed in Soviet good intentions by both Wallenberg and his government seems amazing. But, back then, Stalin was still good old Uncle Joe, a Western ally, and little was known about his conspiratorial mindset, ruthless regime, and unshakeable conviction that ‘whoever is not with us, is against us.’
Seen through Soviet eyes, neutral Sweden was the marketplace where diplomats and secret policemen and journalists and spies lived side by side and traded whatever they could. In Stockholm, Raoul Wallenberg was on social terms with British and American diplomats, even though his export firm worked with the German zone only. His family sold ball bearings to the Nazis, and on occasion conveyed German peace feelers to the West. In Budapest, Wallenberg was on negotiating terms with the SS and the Arrow Cross, yet the funds he was spending were American, and his girlfriend was the daughter of a Dutch spy. Why on earth would Stalin have thought he could be trusted? Especially when it was discovered that he was carrying his own detailed propositions for reconstructing Hungary after the war. Stalin already had plans for postwar Hungary which did not include outside assistance (as General Marshall found out).
Was Wallenberg a courageous but misguided adventurer? Possibly. Ingrid Carlberg’s new biography, translated from the Swedish, provides an exhaustively researched account of his life and possible afterlife in the Soviet Gulag, but avoids making what she calls “ungrounded assumptions about individuals’ motives or emotions.” This is a pity, for it means that we see Raoul mainly from the outside.
The photographs show an anxious-looking young man. His father died before he was born, and his dominating grandfather sent him to study architecture in the United States, and made sure he also spent time in France, South Africa and Palestine. Back in Stockholm, Raoul failed to find work as an architect (his US qualifications were inadequate), and his cousins kept him at arm’s length from the family business, for his open mind and cosmopolitan education aroused suspicion in what Carlsberg stresses was a very conservative society.
The mission to Budapest seems to have given him the sense of purpose he had never found. “That is the kind of thing I would like to do,” he had said on seeing a Leslie Howard film (Pimpernel Smith http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034027/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) about saving the Jews. In Budapest, he was the right man in the right place, inventive, indefatigable, calm, heroic, handing out passports, defying the Arrow Cross, keeping the SS at arm’s length.
When he placed himself under Soviet protection, he put a noose round his own neck. Wallenberg seems to have fallen victim to Swedish incompetence, Cold War suspiciousness, and possibly his own conviction that he led a charmed life. We have no way of knowing what he thought when he approached the Soviets. Did he think he could manoeuver them as he had played off the Germans?
It is still not known exactly when and how he died. Did he die on July 17, 1947 of a sudden heart attack, as the Soviets alleged? Or was he the mysterious Prisoner Number 7, who was interrogated in the Lubyanka on July 22 and 23, 1947? Even when the KGB opened its archives in the 1990s, the case was not resolved. The Wallander family has been trying for more than half a century to clarify his fate, but Russian evasiveness has replaced Soviet untruths, and it seems we will never know.