The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II

by Alex Kershaw

  One day, Erwin received a letter that had been smuggled out of the Kormend ghetto.2 It was from Cecil, Alice’s mother. Cecil admitted in the letter that Alice had always been her favorite child. She also begged Erwin to take care of Alice. “From now on,” Cecil stated, “Lici [Alice] is your responsibility.”3

  “Her words remained etched in my soul,” Erwin later recalled. “I made a solemn pledge to myself to fulfill Cecil’s last wish.”4

  Alice’s mother had sent a little package with the letter. It contained wedding cake that she had prepared in the ghetto from the last of her food supplies.

  Not long after, Alice’s mother, father, and sister were among the first people to be deported from Hungary.5

  SANDY-HAIRED JOEL BRAND, a squarely-built and broad-nosed thirty-eight-year-old Jew, was ushered into Adolf Eichmann’s office. It was May 8, 1944. The sharp-witted adventurer with extensive underground connections worked that spring, as his colleague Rudolf Kasztner did, for the Aid and Rescue Committee, a Zionist organization. The Committee had already helped thousands of Jewish refugees in Nazi-occupied Europe escape to Hungary and beyond.6

  Brand would never forget his first impression of Eichmann. He “had narrow shoulders slouched forward in his gray, tight-fitting SS officer’s jacket, epaulets displaying a lieutenant colonel’s four stars, a thick leather belt, light-brown hair cut short, large ears, a wide forehead, narrow lips, and flat blue eyes, small for his long, pale face.”

  “I believe you know who I am,” Eichmann told Brand. “I was in charge of the actions in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Now it is Hungary’s turn.”

  Brand could barely believe what he heard Eichmann say next.

  “I am prepared to sell you one million Jews,” said Eichmann, “blood for money, money for blood. You can take them from any country you like, wherever you can find them—from Hungary, Poland, the eastern provinces, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, wherever you wish. Whom do you want to save? Men who beget children? Women who can bear them? Old people? Children? Sit down and tell me.”

  Brand tried to keep his wits about him.

  “We want to ransom our people and save them from extermination,” Brand replied carefully, “but all our Jewish factories and businesses in Hungary are closed, and all our property has been seized.”

  “I know, of course,” said Eichmann, “what you say is true. I am not interested in Hungarian goods. I had you brought here to make a proposition [to me] that I believe will achieve our mutual objective. I want you to go abroad and get in direct touch with your people and with representatives of the Allied powers. Then come back to me with a concrete proposal. When we reach an agreement, you can rely on us to perform our part with our usual German thoroughness. I will get you the necessary documents for your journey.”7

  Brand would later recall the meeting with Eichmann in extraordinary detail, perhaps because he was quick to make notes after the meeting, knowing that it was crucial that he remember as clearly as possible what Eichmann was proposing.

  Brand met as soon as possible with other leaders of the Jewish Agency. They agreed that Brand should go along with Eichmann’s plan.

  On May 10, Eichmann called Brand back to his office at the Majestic.

  “I have obtained assent to our negotiations,” said Eichmann. “Are you ready to go?”

  “I am ready to leave at once,” Brand replied, “and I think I can offer you a large amount of foreign currency.”

  Eichmann was not interested in money. “Give me ten thousand trucks,” he said, “and I will give you one million Jews. You can give the Allies definite assurance on my word of honor that these trucks will never be used in the West. They are required for exclusive use on the Eastern Front.”

  “What kind of guarantee can you give that a million Jews will really be set free?” Brand asked.

  “If you return from Istanbul,” said Eichmann, “and tell me that the offer has been accepted, I will close Auschwitz and bring back ten percent of the promised million to the frontier. You can take one hundred thousand Jews away and afterward bring me one thousand trucks. We will go on like that, a thousand trucks for every hundred thousand Jews. You cannot ask for anything more reasonable than that.”

  Brand stood up. He made to leave.

  As he reached the door, Eichmann called to him.

  “Hurry, Herr Brand, and come back quickly. I am not joking.”8

  MEANWHILE, TIME WAS RUNNING OUT for Vera Herman and her mother and father, just one of the tens of thousands of families now trapped in Budapest. There was nowhere left to run. “Somebody had convinced Adolf Eichmann,” recalled Vera, “that his headquarters would be safe from bombing if he left the Jews in Budapest, judiciously scattered throughout the city. He did that, but after two months, he realized that not knowing where the Jews lived would make it more difficult for him when the time came. So he rounded up the native Jews—the Jews of Budapest—into ghettos, and he put the alien Jews, like my family, into holding prisons.”9

  The Hermans were taken to a prison called Tolonc, a fieldstone medieval fortress on the outskirts of Budapest. “The first night,” recalled Vera, “it was filled to capacity, so we stood in the courtyard all night, packed so tightly that we could not even sit down. As we kept dozing off in a standing position, we resembled a field of wheat swaying in the breeze. Next morning, when they made room for us by deporting two thousand so-called inmates to Auschwitz, it was hardly an improvement.”10

  Also that morning, Emil Herman was separated from his wife and daughter. Vera believed she had seen the last of her father. Then she and her mother were herded into the fortress’s concrete dungeons. There was no furniture, not even bunks to lie on, just a cold floor and countless bedbugs and lice crawling the walls. But her mother, Margit, stayed strong, telling Vera that at least their rusting cups, which held a watery soup made from potato peels, provided much needed traces of iron; they had to spoon the soup into their mouths with stale crusts of bread.11

  Several days later, Vera and her mother were surprised by the visit of a missionary. He gave Vera and Margit some blankets.12 They did not know that he had hidden a thermos, full of hot tea, inside one of the blankets. As they walked back to their dungeon, one of them tripped and the thermos smashed to the ground, shattering into hundreds of pieces. “We could almost taste the incredible treat slowly soaking into the ground,” recalled Vera.13

  Not long after the missionary’s visit, Vera and her mother were taken to another prison—Kistarcsa, a holding camp for those bound for Auschwitz, run by the SS and administered by the Hungarian gendarmerie. Prominent Jews had been sent there as soon as the Nazis had arrived in Hungary that March. The first Jews from Hungary to be killed in Auschwitz—some eighteen hundred men and women—had, in fact, been dispatched from Kistarcsa on April 29, 1944. Another eighteen trains, with the same number of victims, had followed that summer.14

  JOEL BRAND ALSO KNEW that time was fast running out as he arrived in the Syrian city of Aleppo on June 10, 1944. It had been almost a fortnight since he had left Budapest, aiming to make contact with Allied officials through Jewish intermediaries. At all costs, he needed to discuss Eichmann’s offer—“blood for goods”—with the British and Americans so that he could return to Budapest and begin negotiations with Eichmann. The Gestapo were meanwhile holding his wife, Hansi, hostage during his absence.

  Brand’s train pulled into the station at Aleppo. Brand gave his luggage to a porter and was about to follow him onto the platform when an Englishman, wearing civilian clothes, entered his compartment.

  “Mr. Brand?”

  “Yes.”

  “This way please.”15

  At the compartment door, a jeep was waiting, its engine purring. Men in the jeep forced Brand into it, and he was driven away at high speed and taken to an army barracks. Brand realized that he had been seized by British intelligence. After breakfast the next morning, he was taken to a luxurious Arab villa and shown into a room full of British o
fficers. He explained in great detail the proposals made by Eichmann, then begged them to let him go.16

  Despite his protests, Brand was taken to Cairo, where the British again questioned him, this time for ten or twelve hours, day after day. In a report to the State Department, the British stated: “Assuming suggestion was put forward by Gestapo in form conveyed to us, then it seems to be sheer case of blackmail or political warfare . . . Implied suggestion that we should accept responsibility for maintenance of additional million person[s] is equivalent to asking the Allies to suspend essential military operations.”17

  On the tenth day of his imprisonment, Brand went on a hunger strike, writing in a letter that: “It is apparent to me now that an enemy of our people is holding me and does not intend to release me in the near future. I will do my utmost to break through the bayonets guarding me.”18

  Brand was eventually persuaded to give up his hunger strike. He later testified that Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East and a close friend of Winston Churchill, was present during one of his interrogations and said: “What can I do with this million Jews? Where can I put them?”19

  AT THE SAME TIME, back in Hungary, twelve hundred people were indeed being sent to their deaths in Auschwitz each day.

  Brand’s colleague, Kasztner, went to see Eichmann at the Majestic and begged him to stop the deportations.

  “It’s up to you and your people to have everything settled quickly,” said Eichmann. “If I stop the deportations, you’ll all take me for a weakling, and you’ll make no effort at all to have the negotiations started.”

  After the meeting, Kasztner sent a telegram to Istanbul, hoping it would reach Brand and speed his return: “Deportations have been resumed.” 20

  But Brand did not return. And the deportations would not stop until the provinces had been emptied of Jews.

  On July 6, after more than four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews had been sent to their deaths in Auschwitz, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden explained why the British had to block the “blood for goods” negotiation with Eichmann. There could not be “anything that looked like negotiating with the enemy.”21

  Brand was finally released by the British in October 1944 but did not return to Budapest, fearing correctly that the Gestapo would kill him. After the war, he joined the Stern gang, which fought to expel the British from Palestine, permanently embittered at his treatment by British intelligence. At no point, he maintained, had he believed that the Allies would make a deal with Eichmann. But he felt that, at the very least, they should have tried to negotiate to stall deportations and buy time for Hungary’s doomed Jews. This, in fact, had been the recommendation of the War Refugee Board’s representative, Ira Hirschmann, who had urged in early July 1944 that Brand be sent back to Budapest as soon as was possible, armed with careful instructions “indicating that consideration is being given to the proposals in connection with money and possible immunity.”22

  A tragic figure, Brand would die in the 1960s of a heart attack in Germany, of all places, after testifying at a trial of Auschwitz officials.

  When later questioned about his “blood for goods” discussions with Brand, Eichmann did not deny making the astonishing offer, which had originated, he stated, with Heinrich Himmler. Whether he or Himmler would have made good on it is another question.23

  ONE MORNING IN ZILINA in June 1944, an old and sad-faced woman brought Rudolf Vrba his breakfast.

  He noticed that she was in tears and asked what was the matter.

  “They’re deporting the Hungarians,” she cried. “Thousands of them. They’re passing through Zilina in cattle trucks!”24

  Vrba was stunned. His escape from Auschwitz had seemingly been for nothing.

  7

  The Swedish Pimpernel

  IN WASHINGTON, the fate of Europe’s Jews had not passed unnoticed, though there had been scandalously little done about it.1 In the words of historian Arthur Morse, whose 1967 book, While Six Million Died, revealed the extent of inaction and obstruction among the Allies: “As [Hitler] moved systematically toward the total destruction of the Jews, the government of the United States remained bystanders . . . Those who tried to awaken the nation were dismissed as alarmists, cranks, or Zionists. Many Jews were as disinterested as their Christian countrymen. The bystanders to cruelty became bystanders to genocide.”2

  There were a few notable exceptions. In 1943, the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, himself a Jew, had asked aides to prepare a report titled “The Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” The eighteen-page report concluded that State Department officials “have not only failed to use the governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this governmental machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews . . . In their official capacity [they] have gone so far as to surreptitiously attempt to stop the obtaining of information concerning the murder of the Jewish population of Europe.”3

  In late 1943, Morgenthau passed the report on to President Roosevelt. “The matter of rescuing the Jews from extermination is a trust too great to remain in the hands of men who are indifferent, callous, and perhaps even hostile,” Morgenthau stressed in an accompanying letter. “The task is filled with difficulties. Only a fervent will to accomplish, backed by persistent and untiring effort, can succeed where time is so precious.” Roosevelt set up the War Refugee Board just a week later, on January 22, 1944. Its mission was to deal with the “the rescue, transportation, maintenance, and relief of the victims of enemy opposition and . . . the establishment of havens of temporary refuge for such victims.”4

  By early summer 1944, it was clear that the War Refugee Board would need to establish a rescue operation in Hungary itself, on the ground, if any Jews were going to be saved. But it could not send an American because the United States was at war with Hungary, an Axis power. It needed to find someone from a neutral country to head the rescue mission. The Swedes had a sizeable diplomatic presence in Budapest, and so the War Refugee Board’s representative in Sweden, Iver Olsen, was instructed to look for a Swedish citizen who would be willing to organize the rescue in Budapest. American funds would support the operation.

  Olsen had worked in the Treasury Department before being sent to Sweden with the War Refugee Board. He already had a formidable record of success, having managed to arrange and finance the rescue of more than a thousand political and intellectual refugees from the Baltic States. He had even gone so far as to hire high-speed boats, which could outrun German U-boats and patrol craft. But his greatest single achievement had come through working closely with American and Norwegian trade unions to organize the transport from Norway to Sweden of over ten thousand endangered Norwegians.5

  Olsen’s search for someone to head a rescue effort in Hungary began with a June 12, 1944, cable from Washington. The well-connected Olsen had only to walk down a corridor in his building that day to the headquarters of the Middle European Trading Corporation to get started. He knew its director, Kalman Lauer, a small, rotund, middle-aged Hungarian Jew, whose wife’s parents were now trapped in Budapest. The two men are said to have first talked about someone to head up the rescue as they shared the elevator in the eight-story office building in Stranvagen, where both Olsen and Lauer worked. “I’m looking for a Swede,” Olsen apparently said. “Someone with good nerves, good language ability. He’ll have to speak both German and some Hungarian. Someone who would be willing to go to Budapest and spend the next two months trying to save Jews from the Nazis. An independent spirit who does not need much direction. It’s a big order.”6

  Lauer told Olsen about his thirty-two-year-old colleague, Raoul Wallenberg, a dynamic, quick-thinking young businessman, fluent in German and Russian, and already familiar with Budapest. As it happened, Wallenberg had been planning for several weeks to visit Budapest, hoping to be able to rescue Lauer’s relatives, but the Germans had not yet granted him a visa allowing him to travel via Germ
any to Hungary.7

  Wallenberg had been born into the most powerful family in Sweden. Its motto “Esse, non Videri”—“To be, not to be seen”—was fitting for a dynasty of highly influential Lutheran bankers, archcapitalists, and diplomats who had long been accustomed to dominating Swedish society and industry, particularly through the immensely powerful Enskilda bank, whose tentacles reached into every profitable business sector in Scandinavia and beyond.

  Raoul Wallenberg had some Jewish blood: his great-great grandfather was Jewish before converting to Lutheranism.8 His grandfather, Gustaf Wallenberg, had encouraged his education abroad and extensive travels in America and the Middle East. A diplomat and envoy, Gustaf had been a dominant influence on Raoul, whose father, a Swedish naval officer, had died of cancer at age twenty-three, three months before Raoul was born. “It was a great loss for Raoul and for everyone in the family,” recalls Wallenberg’s half-sister, eighty-nine-year-old Nina Lagergren. “His mother—my mother—was left alone. Raoul was a great comfort. Of course, they were very close. He was a loving, empathetic child, very clever and artistic, with a beautiful voice.”9

  Raoul Wallenberg was no ordinary young aristocrat with an outsized sense of entitlement. From an early age, he had shown an extraordinary determination to learn all he could about the world beyond Sweden. He read the encyclopedia, Nordisk Familjebok—all thirty-five volumes—from cover to cover. According to one schoolmate: “Even his appearance was remarkable, with his large, brown eyes and his wavy, dark hair. His way of expressing himself and his interest in everything between heaven and earth were new to us. To begin with, we were cautious—we couldn’t understand how anyone could be so totally uninterested in football and getting up to mischief, but the dreamer, as we called him, won our respect with time.”10