by Alex Kershaw
The Schutzpass that Wallenberg had in mind would signify that the bearer was under the official protection of the Swedish Embassy and therefore could not be deported to death camps such as Auschwitz. The Nazis and Hungarian authorities were often impressed by official documents, especially ones printed in color with royal insignia stamped on them. And so he stressed to Anger that the protective passes be as convincing as possible—they should be printed in yellow and blue colors and embossed with Sweden’s national coat of arms.
Wallenberg soon found the resources to print fifteen hundred passes. Later, when he discovered how effective they were, he would print many thousands more.4 And to help distribute them, Wallenberg quickly hired dozens of Jewish coworkers for a Section C department at the embassy, which he would run with Per Anger and other diplomats’ assistance. Because these Jews worked in an official capacity for the Swedish embassy, they and their families did not have to wear the yellow Star of David. Wallenberg discovered, within days of arriving in Budapest, that he had his choice of the most effective Jewish managers and administrators still alive in Hungary; several had worked in senior positions for a Hungarian subsidiary of the Phillips Corporation.
On the evening of July 14, Wallenberg made his first telephone call to Lauer in Stockholm, using their agreed code. The call lasted less than thirty minutes and was interrupted several times by German censors. Wallenberg was able to confirm to Lauer that the Jews from the provinces had been deported. He could not mention Auschwitz directly by name but hinted at it, and stressed that he needed “money, money, and more money” to begin his rescue work. Lauer contacted Iver Olsen, and 110,000 Swiss crowns ($100,000) were paid into an account in Wallenberg’s name at Enskilda Bank in Stockholm. Finally, Wallenberg had the funds he needed to begin saving lives.5
ANOTHER GENTILE IN BUDAPEST already knew how to deal with the Nazis and Eichmann, and had managed to protect thousands of the city’s Jews—the vice consul at the Swiss Embassy, Carl Lutz, a dark-haired, bespectacled forty-nine-year-old who had also devised his own system of protective passes. A career diplomat, the formidable Lutz had spent twenty years in the United States before being posted to Palestine, where, like Wallenberg, he had befriended Jews who had suffered Nazi persecution. He had been working in Budapest since 1942 and was therefore intimately aware of the political situation.
Lutz came from a far more modest background and was more than a decade older than Wallenberg, but they would soon become close colleagues, equally determined to save Jewish lives.6 Their first meeting took place at Lutz’s office on July 15, 1944, in the former U.S. Embassy overlooking Freedom Square. Most days that summer, this large square in front of the building was crowded, as were the streets around the Swedish Embassy, with long lines of desperate people trying to obtain Schutzpasses.7
According to Lutz’s biographer, Theo Tschuy, Wallenberg explained that several officials and diplomats he had consulted in recent days had mentioned Lutz. He was, apparently, the man to talk to if Wallenberg wanted advice on how best to help protect Hungary’s last Jews. Could he share his expertise? Lutz was only too happy to oblige, and quickly explained his methods, mentioning how he had acquired buildings where those with Swiss protective passes could live. Being creative and breaking the rules were essential. The Nazis could be beaten at their own game—by exploiting their weakness for bureaucracy and slavish obedience to well-spoken superiors. Crucially, as long as Horthy was able to control Ferenczy’s gendarmerie and key officials in the government, there was time and space in which neutral diplomats could outmaneuver Eichmann and the Gestapo. But Eichmann was not to be underestimated. Lutz had met with him in recent weeks and had been left with the impression of a “forceful, intrepid officer, a daredevil who knew what he was about.”
Eichmann had told Lutz: “We German soldiers aren’t afraid. Where would we be if we were scared to death? My comrades are fighting in Russia, and I’m fighting in this job.”8 Anyone who tried to obstruct him would, sooner or later, be regarded just like the Russians—as his sworn enemy.
Wallenberg apparently made an extraordinary confession to Lutz—his mission was in part a public relations exercise. In the United States, there had been allegations that Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg—Raoul’s opportunist cousins—had undermined the Allied war effort through extensive business dealings with the Nazis. To deflect criticism, the Wallenberg family lawyer, Allen Dulles, had suggested that it might look good for Jacob and Marcus if their cousin, Raoul, tried to help the Jews. Indeed, Wallenberg’s presence in Budapest might perhaps restore the family’s good name in Washington.
Wallenberg was now determined, however, to do far more than save his cousins’ reputation in the eyes of the Allies. He told Lutz he had wanted for some time to throw himself into important work that “went beyond” mere moneymaking. This was his chance.
Lutz quickly warmed to Wallenberg and was impressed by his honesty. He told Wallenberg that he hoped that Switzerland, which had its own share of nefarious dealings with the Nazis, would also step up its efforts to save Jews, just as Sweden had now that the Nazis looked certain to be on the losing side.
Wallenberg then handed over his list of prominent Jewish businessmen: famous industrialists, tycoons, and exporters, some of whom had connections with the Wallenberg family. According to Tschuy, Wallenberg explained that he was no longer content to save solely those on the list. Only since his arrival had he come to realize the extent of the tragedy that had occurred that summer. Lutz warned Wallenberg that he would encounter opposition from his own embassy, and perhaps his cousins, if he stepped too far beyond diplomatic protocol. But Wallenberg didn’t appear to care. He said it didn’t matter what Stockholm wanted. What were a few hundred rich men compared to a quarter-million lives?9
A FEW DAYS AFTER HIS MEETING with Lutz, with some of the money deposited into his account at Enskilda, Wallenberg set about buying buildings in Pest. They were close to the seventy-two buildings that Lutz had already secured for Jews officially protected by the Swiss. To acquire the protective houses, Wallenberg had to get permission from Lieutenant Colonel Laszlo Ferenczy, the head of the Hungarian gendarmerie who had been so ruthlessly effective in carrying out Eichmann’s deportations of Jews from the provinces.10
Wallenberg did not speak Hungarian, so he asked if a Mrs. Elizabeth Kasser, who worked for the Hungarian Red Cross, could interpret for him during his meeting with Ferenczy.11 Her husband, Alexander Kasser, general secretary of the Swedish Red Cross, accompanied his wife and Wallenberg, hoping to win concessions from Ferenczy, too.12
Many years later, Elizabeth Kasser recalled that Wallenberg was kept waiting in Ferenczy’s office, much to Wallenberg’s obvious irritation.13 He was literally a man on a mission, eager to get down to business, with no time for formality unless it suited his interests—he had just angrily rebuked seventy-six-year-old Admiral Horthy in person over the deportations. (“Horthy is an imposing figure, but I felt morally taller,” Wallenberg had told an aide.14) When Ferenczy finally turned up, he made a long speech about how Wallenberg and the Kassers should be ashamed of themselves for helping filthy Jews, what Eichmann and his men called Untermenschen—subhuman beings. Ferenczy then launched into a further diatribe, much of which Kasser did not translate because she did not want Wallenberg to explode.
When Ferenczy had finished, Wallenberg apparently handed over his list of 630 prominent and wealthy Jews, for whom the Swedes had already arranged visas. Perhaps impressed by Wallenberg’s calm and collected response, Ferenczy agreed to deal with the matter. Before the meeting was over, Wallenberg had also persuaded Ferenczy to allow him to acquire buildings to house the Jews on his list until they could leave for Sweden. It was Wallenberg’s first victory. “As soon as we were out of sight of that building,” recalled Elizabeth Kasser, “we put our arms around each other and did a sort of Indian dance in the street.”15
Others would not be so easily charmed.
IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME that Marianne
Lowy and her family heard from other Jews about a “miraculous person who had arrived with the sole purpose of saving Hungarian Jews.” It was said that he came from a prominent Swedish family, who were like the Rockefellers in America. Marianne’s husband, Pista, decided to act on the rumor. He visited the Swedish embassy, where he met Wallenberg and was issued Schutzpasses for his family. “They stated that we were under the protection of the Swedish king,” remembered Marianne. “My father had been in an internment camp for six weeks by now. So when we got the Schutzpasses, we sent a messenger to where my father was, and lo and behold, the Gestapo let him go. The next morning, there he was, standing on the doorsteps of my parents’ home. He had been beaten but he was alive . . . That was the first miracle that Wallenberg performed for us.”16 Marianne and her family would later discover that just hours after her father was released, those who had been imprisoned with him were taken to Auschwitz.
Thanks to their Schutzpasses, Marianne’s parents were able to move to one of Wallenberg’s newly acquired protected houses in Pest, where properties were selling at knockdown prices. Marianne decided to stay in Buda with her husband Pista, who had been released from a forced labor battalion because of the Schutzpass from Wallenberg. Eventually, he would find refuge in one of several satellite embassies, which Wallenberg soon set up to house his workers and other protected Jews. Marianne, strong-minded and stubborn, had already acquired false papers and had opted to stay with a relative outside the city. When she wasn’t pretending to be a good Catholic housemaid, she tried to find food for her family, scavenging and bartering whatever she could. Thankfully, she was not stopped and searched on her many visits to her family and the false papers she carried with her were not discovered.17
But soon her daily wanderings became even more dangerous as the Allies started to bomb Budapest. “The air raids didn’t make us unhappy,” recalled Marianne. “We told ourselves that if we got hit by a bomb, we’d never know it, so what was the difference. On the other hand, if the bomb missed us, it meant we’d get one day closer to the time when we’d be liberated. That was our one pleasure from the bombings. The other pleasure was that the gentiles were getting a kind of poetic justice. They didn’t allow us to go to the public swimming pools, or on picnics or excursions. Well, now they couldn’t go either; they had to spend their Sundays running to the air-raid shelters and waiting for the all-clear.”18
DIPLOMATS NORMALLY REQUIRED several months to become acquainted with a new posting. Remarkably, Wallenberg hit the ground running, taking only a few weeks to understand how best he might be effective. He had spent a total of almost eight weeks on previous visits to Budapest and knew his way around the city. He had also been superbly briefed by Danielson, Anger, Lutz, and other diplomats already involved in rescue activities. But he proved remarkably adaptable and well organized from the start, and was soon working long hours to expand the Swedes’ humanitarian efforts. He joined forces with other neutral diplomats; bombarded the Hungarian authorities, the War Refugee Board, and Stockholm with official reports on the plight of the Jews; and exerted greater and greater pressure on officials he believed he could influence.
Nevertheless, it was quickly clear that Wallenberg would need to organize a “man-made miracle” if he was to succeed against the Gestapo and its Hungarian accomplices.19 Indeed, the sheer scale of the challenge he faced in Budapest was made painfully obvious when he learned that the relatives of his business partner, Kalman Lauer, had already been sent to the gas chambers. From the day he had arrived in Budapest, Wallenberg had known how worried Lauer was about them and how urgently he had wanted news of their fate.20 “Please be so good as to inform Dr. Lauer and his wife,” Wallenberg wrote his mother, Maj, only a week after entering Hungary, “that I have unfortunately found out that his parents-in-law and also a small child belonging to his family are already dead. That is to say, that they have been transported abroad, where they will not live for very long.”21
Wallenberg had indeed found a formidable adversary in the Gestapo. Clearly, as he had anticipated, he would need to be unconventional in his methods. He was soon prepared, according to Per Anger, to try almost any tactic to succeed. He was also willing to form relationships with anyone who could provide inside information about what the SS and the Hungarian fascists were planning next.22 Under the circumstances, Wallenberg was determined to ignore legal niceties, a fact that fast annoyed some of his diplomatic colleagues, who would later describe his actions as dumdristig—dumb-daring. They reportedly resented this rather distant, aristocratic workaholic putting all their lives at risk by stepping beyond diplomatic protocols.23
Word quickly got back to the Swedish Foreign Office in Stockholm about the energetic young Wallenberg. In a report to the War Refugee Board in Washington, Iver Olsen noted that “the Swedish Foreign Office is somewhat uneasy with Wallenberg’s actions in Budapest and perhaps feels that he has jumped in with too big a splash. They would prefer, of course, to approach the Jewish problem in the finest traditions of European diplomacy, which wouldn’t help much.”24
Before agreeing to the mission in Budapest, Wallenberg had pointedly demanded assurances that he could use the funds provided him for any means, including bribery. That July, in Budapest, he told Alexander Kasser, the Swedish Red Cross official: “The times are such that nobody has the opportunity, the patience, or the time to analyze what is illegal because everything that is done by the Nazis in the name of law is inhuman, unjust. Therefore, whatever is illegal becomes legal. The main thing is to help.”25
IT HAS BEEN CLAIMED that Wallenberg had his first meeting with Eichmann that July. According to Per Anger, it may have occurred on July 19, at Eichmann’s office at the luxurious Hotel Majestic.26 Going by the experiences of visitors such as Joel Brand and Kasztner, who had already visited Eichmann at his headquarters, Wallenberg would have been carefully searched at the entrance to the hotel—Eichmann was increasingly paranoid about assassins.27 Wallenberg would have been pointed upstairs by two gun-wielding SS men.28
Eichmann’s large office on the second floor had a magnificent view, but he was often to be found seated behind his large walnut desk, his back to the windows. On his desk were a framed photograph of a dull-haired woman and two children—Eichmann’s family back in Austria—and usually his revolver and holster, near his right hand. Thick smoke from his cigarettes often clouded the view through the large windows behind him.29 He looked like a harried bureaucrat, albeit in a Gestapo uniform. “It was only his eyes that were unusual,” recalled Joel Brand. “Steel-blue, hard, and menacing, they seemed to be boring into the person facing him . . . He wore an elegant uniform and his movements were brisk and somewhat jerky. His way of speaking was unusual, too. He would fire off a few words and then pause. When he was talking, it always reminded me of the chatter of a machine gun.”30
It was possibly at this meeting that Eichmann made a key revelation, according to some sources: The Gestapo had already investigated the young Swedish diplomat with the famous name and had not liked what they had found.31
“Why did you go to Palestine in 1937?” asked Eichmann.
“Because it interested me,” Wallenberg is said to have replied. “I believe the Jews should have a state of their own, don’t you?”32
“I know all about you,” snapped Eichmann. “You’re a Jew-lover who receives all his dirty dollars from Roosevelt. We know that the Americans have put you in Budapest and we know that your cousin Jacob is another Jew-lover and an enemy of the Reich.”33
The Gestapo knew that the Wallenberg brothers were sophisticated operators, with connections to both Allied and Axis leaders. Marcus Wallenberg had represented Swedish trade interests with Britain. Jacob, “cool and cynical,” had dealt with Germany, milking contacts and making healthy profits from the Nazi war machine. But then, because of his association with groups plotting to replace Hitler, Jacob had been warned to stay away from Germany, given his connections to Hitler’s enemies.34
“We k
now about your so-called passes,” blustered Eichmann. “They’re all frauds! The Jews who’ve escaped to Sweden with them are all enemies of the Reich.”35
Wallenberg apparently did not reply to Eichmann’s boorish outburst. Instead, he is said to have calmly given him a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of whisky. The gesture was appreciated. Eichmann’s mood improved. He then offered to allow a trainload of “protected Jews” to go to Sweden if Wallenberg could come up with a ransom. The same kind of deal had been arranged with Rudolf Kasztner of the Jewish Council; there was in theory no reason why Wallenberg shouldn’t also get in on the action: Jews’ lives were for sale, and Eichmann was willing to offer a fair price.
The story goes that Wallenberg did not take up the offer—he was not interested in Eichmann’s “token generosity,” and the meeting was soon over.36
What can be confirmed is that Wallenberg’s issuing of thousands of Schutzpasses did indeed irk Eichmann. He was eventually so angered by it that he snapped at a Red Cross official: “I am going to kill that Jew dog Wallenberg.”37 Word of Eichmann’s threat made its way back to the Swedish Embassy in Berlin, and a formal complaint was lodged with Veesenmayer, who retorted unapologetically that Wallenberg “operated in an unacceptable manner for the benefit of Hungarian Jews.”38