Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust

by Bierman, John

  The account also describes how, following Operation Margarethe, anti-Semitic propaganda began to flood the press and radio to soften up the Gentile population for condoning the deportations that were to come. ‘For weeks they propagated nothing but the worst kind of Jew-baiting. It almost seemed as if Hungary had only one problem – the Jewish one…All anti-Jewish literature was hailed as a brilliant intellectual achievement and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”* was presented to the population daily as spiritual nourishment.’

  Meanwhile, the Jews of Budapest were ‘occupied literally for weeks with the filling out of questionnaires, declarations of every kind, or they had to stand in line in front of government offices, police stations, etc., in order either to obtain the necessary forms or to return them…They never knew whether they could return to their homes, whether a member of their family had been deported or interned, or whether their houses, if not already requisitioned, were not destroyed by bombs.’

  Every Allied bombing raid gave rise ‘to the most ridiculous stories with only one theme – that the Jews had signalled to the bombers or given the enemy information by wireless.’ One such story, current at the time, was that British and American pilots were dropping dolls filled with explosives for Hungarian children to pick up. Somehow the Jews were supposed to be co-operating in this, for dolls of the same kind were reportedly found in the cellar of a Jewish house. How the Jews managed to get the dolls up to the bombers, so they could then be packed with explosives and dropped back onto the city, was not explained.

  ‘The Jews felt helpless and outlawed…When they walked in the streets they kept close to the walls of the houses, as they never knew when they would be arrested on the false charge of having pinned the yellow star on wrongly, or even of intentionally hiding it. This became a kind of game among the younger police members. Those who were arrested were taken to the internment camp, from which there was neither release nor escape.’

  Suddenly, and at random, certain streets would be sealed off and all the Jews thus rounded up would be sent off to forced labour. Since, at Eichmann’s instructions, the Jewish Council had already organized a labour service among able-bodied Jewish males to provide workers on demand, they asked the Obersturmbannführer why he did not make use of it. Eichmann simply answered that the street arrests were ‘part of the procedure.’ As the joint account points out, ‘It would have been impossible to state more clearly that it was meant to terrorize the Jews.’

  Eichmann had certainly managed to mystify the authors of this account by his pretensions to expert knowledge of Jewish affairs. ‘He was born in Palestine, where his German parents had settled,’ they wrote, ‘and spent a great part of his youth there. It therefore does not appear paradoxical that Eichmann, who hated Jews violently and was possessed with the idea of exterminating them, spoke the Hebrew language well, and was very proud of this.’ Other prominent Jews who came into contact with Eichmann were less easily taken in. They knew he was born in Germany and concluded that his knowledge of Hebrew was limited to a few liturgical phrases any first-year theology student might know. As for his knowledge of Yiddish, that language was basically a Middle High German patois, easy for a German to comprehend.

  Of Eichmann’s two principal lieutenants, the joint account notes that Wisliceny liked to call himself Baron (which he was not), while its authors thought Krumey ‘the most humane of the senior SS officers.’

  Although during this phase the Jews of Budapest mainly escaped deportation, Jewish Council headquarters were constantly receiving reports from the provinces – usually brought in by sympathetic Gentiles – of the brutalities being perpetrated there. The joint account tells of one small town where the Jews, on their way to the deportation trains, were ‘driven through the mud-filled streets’ and ‘children of more than one year were forced to walk at the same speed as the adults, driven on by blows of the whip.’

  At another town, a number of Jewish men lay down on the railway tracks and refused to get in the waiting train. ‘All of them were shot dead on the spot.’

  In a town called Tata, ‘a young mother who ten minutes before had given birth to twins…was picked up by the hands and feet and thrown into the van; the new-born babies were pitched in after her.’

  In a town called Kassa, the eighty-four-year-old mother of a prominent Jewish citizen was taken from the operating table after having her foot amputated and put into a railway car. ‘Her son, who was present, tried to shoot himself. The weapon was knocked out of his hand, so that he only managed to shoot away half of his face. Covered with blood and unconscious, he was also put into the wagon.’

  It was during this period that negotiations which were to be the subject of great post-war controversy took place between the SS and Rudolf Kasztner, one of the Jewish leadership though not a member of the Central Jewish Council. These negotiations, in which the Nazis offered to trade a million Jewish lives for ten thousand trucks and other non-lethal war material, were opened by an apparently reluctant Eichmann on Himmler’s orders. In retrospect, it seems clear that Eichmann’s preference was to send all of Hungary’s Jews to the gas chambers, even if it meant denying the hard-pressed Reich the chance of obtaining badly needed material. Had he really intended to do business, he could easily have stopped or slowed down the deportations. On the contrary, he conducted them with frenzied haste, as we have seen, so that, daily, there were fewer lives over which to haggle with Kasztner and his aide, Joel Brand.

  Despite this, Kasztner – and world Jewish leaders abroad who were privy to these secret negotiations and hoped to persuade the Anglo-Americans to agree to a deal – clung desperately to the hope that a substantial number of Jews might thus be rescued. The negotiations dragged on month after month.

  Himmler, who it seems really did want to strike a deal, eventually put Kurt Becher, another SS Obersturmbannführer, in charge of the negotiations, relegating Eichmann to a supporting role. But, as the Jewish Council leaders noted, Eichmann was at odds with Becher. ‘Becher was against the deportations because he had to obtain the goods by all means and clearly realized that without living Jews as exchange objects no goods or materials would be forthcoming.’ Eichmann, on the other hand, ‘took the attitude that continued deportations would stimulate the Jews abroad to greater efforts to satisfy his demands, even if the number of Jews in Hungary decreased more and more.’ What emerges is that he merely hoped there would soon be no Jews left to haggle over, and the whole business could be dropped.

  In the event, the United States and Britain refused in principle to bargain with the Nazis or to consider supplying them with material to help their war effort against the Russians. Even if the Allies had been more flexible, the ‘trucks for lives’ negotiations seem in retrospect to have been bound to founder on the rock of Eichmann’s opposition. Kasztner’s only accomplishment was to organize the passage of 1700 prominent Jews – including members of his own family – who eventually reached Switzerland, via Belsen, having paid the Nazis $2000 a head.*

  One prominent Hungarian Jew who never had any illusions that the Kasztner negotiations would succeed was Miklós (now Moshe) Krausz,† the Jewish Agency representative in Budapest. As a radical Zionist, his interest was not just in rescuing Jews but in getting them to Palestine, then under British rule, as citizens of a future Jewish state. The Swiss legation in Budapest was representing British interests and Krausz knew they had at their disposal several hundred immigration certificates for Jews waiting to go to Palestine.

  He convinced the Swiss that it might be possible to negotiate an agreement for Jews holding these certificates to travel by rail to the Rumanian Black Sea port of Constanza, and then by sea to Istanbul, and on to Palestine. The Swiss approved the idea and began negotiating with the Hungarian and German authorities. To carry out the administrative work involved in preparing such a transport, the Swiss gave Krausz office and living space in one of their legation buildings. The Germans and Hungarians were cautiously receptive to the plan, t
he Germans if only because they believed that by letting a couple of thousand Jews escape they might be able to get on with the task of deporting the rest to the extermination camp without arousing a world outcry.

  About the middle of July 1944 Horthy announced his government’s agreement in principle to the scheme, provided the Rumanian and Turkish governments agreed to co-operate. Krausz was told to go ahead and prepare a transport of approximately 2200 people. This transport was to travel under a collective Swiss passport, under the flag of the Red Cross, and be accompanied by officials of the Red Cross and the Swiss legation. News of the impending transport spread like wildfire among the Jews of Budapest and thousands of them besieged the Swiss legation’s ‘Palestine Office’ in Vadász Street, clamouring for places on the train.

  But the transport never did leave. Krausz’s best efforts, and those of the enthusiastic Swiss consul-general, Charles Lutz, were thwarted by the endless prevarications of the Nazis, who, among other reasons, did not want to upset their friend and ally, the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, by allowing Jewish immigrants to enter the Holy Land.

  Chapter 6

  The new-found resolve that Horthy demonstrated in sacking Sztójay, and along with him the two most virulent anti-Jewish officials of his régime, Endre and Baky, was strongly influenced by the withdrawal of neighbouring Rumania from the war and by the combined pressure of the neutral missions in Budapest. These had been galvanized into action by the tireless Wallenberg, who bombarded the Sztójay government with requests, demands, and protests.

  At Horthy’s instructions the new Latakos government sent a note to the head of the German legation, Edmund Veesenmayer, demanding that the management of Jewish affairs be restored to the Hungarian authorities and that Jewish possessions stored in German warehouses be handed over. Horthy even called Veesenmayer to Buda Castle and reiterated these demands personally, adding the new demand that Eichmann and his Sondereinsatzkommando be withdrawn. This unprecedented display of independence in a satellite caught the Nazis in an uncharacteristic moment of self-doubt. The collapse of their Rumanian allies, the advances of the Russians in the east and the Anglo-Americans in the west, and the trauma following the 20 July bomb plot against Hitler all combined to deprive them temporarily of their customary brutal self-confidence.

  Veesenmayer referred Horthy’s demands to Berlin. SS Reichsführer Himmler replied on 25 August that after the loss of the Rumanian oilfields it was not worthwhile to risk a crisis with Horthy and his new government on account of the remaining Hungarian Jews. This might jeopardize the now indispensable oil production of Hungary’s Zala region.

  On 30 August the Germans reached a new agreement with the Latakos government. Eichmann and his Kommando would leave. It was undoubtedly the greatest setback and humiliation Eichmann had suffered in his entire career. Dumbfounded, he flew to Berlin, where he appealed in vain to Himmler. He turned next to Hitler’s cabinet office. They were immersed in graver matters than the Hungarian Jewish question and did not hear him out. Himmler, determined not to let his efforts at personal fence-mending be wrecked by Eichmann’s insistence, tossed a compensatory morsel to his embittered subordinate – the Iron Cross, Second Class. It was the first decoration Eichmann had received in his eleven years of loyal service with the SS.

  With most of his officers now on enforced leave, Eichmann himself went off with his Iron Cross to nurse his grievance. He was the guest of his similarly unemployed friend, Lászlo Endre, at the latter’s castle near the Austro-Hungarian border.

  The departure of Eichmann did not, however, mean that all threat was suddenly over for the Jews of Budapest. Horthy and Latakos knew they had gone about as far as they could go in reasserting Hungary’s sovereign rights over its own citizens and that the Germans would not tolerate the removal of restrictions on the Jews, especially with the Russians beginning to advance into the eastern Hungarian Plain.

  Horthy’s agreement with Veesenmayer therefore provided for the concentration of all able-bodied Jews, male and female, in camps in the Hungarian provinces, where they would be put to work for the Hungarian–German war effort.

  Children, old people, and those unfit for labour would be concentrated in two other camps, while the sick would be sent to ‘hospitals.’ To the Jews of Budapest and their would-be protectors among the neutrals it looked better than the cattle trains to Auschwitz, but not much better. Mass extermination could be achieved by slower methods than gassing; overcrowding, undernourishment, back-breaking labour, insanitary conditions, and generally brutal treatment could be expected to take a heavy toll in such camps. Furthermore, the concentration of Jews in this way would make it easy for them to be suddenly sent off to the death camps if and whenever the Nazis decided to reassert their control over Hungary.

  The Hungarians, however, had managed to get inserted into the agreement a proviso that conditions in the provincial concentration camps were to be ‘consistent with European standards,’ to be verified by the Red Cross. It was at this point that the International Red Cross belatedly began to vindicate itself after a long period of foot-dragging. The IRC delegation in Budapest, at last augmented by headquarters in Geneva, accepted the task of inspecting the proposed camp sites and, as Samu Stern was to record later, ‘courageously siding with us…failed, in the course of one and a half months, to find a single site in all of western Hungary which was suitable for “accommodation consistent with European standards.”’ As a result – and as a consequence of repeated Allied and neutral protests – the Hungarian government was apparently glad to drop the plan altogether.

  On 29 September Wallenberg reported to Stockholm: ‘The agreement reached between the Hungarians and the Germans that all Jews were to be evacuated from Budapest to the countryside outside the capital has hitherto been completely sabotaged by the Hungarian authorities and has not yet resulted in a single Jew leaving Budapest.’ But he warned that as a consequence the Germans were threatening to take things into their own hands and were again concentrating SS units in Budapest.

  ‘It has not been possible to ascertain whether it is again their intention to send these Jews out of the country, but it may be assumed that they will be unable to put their plans into effect without resorting to violent measures against the government.’

  Thus, cautiously optimistic that the worst was over, Wallenberg was beginning to run his operation down and thinking about returning home. ‘Certain members of the staff have been dismissed in accordance with the decision to bring the work of the department gradually to an end,’ he reported. ‘The number of employees is now about one hundred. About forty of these will have to return their identity cards to the legation within the next ten days. They will be allowed, however, to retain the cards issued by the Hungarian Home Office. These exempt them from wearing the Star of David and from labour service.’

  Wallenberg was also able to report that holders of Swedish protective passports who had been drafted for labour service were being released from the labour companies the following day and that ‘the general release of internees can to a great extent be attributed to the work of this department.’ Wallenberg added cryptically but revealingly, ‘The official on whose order these people are being released has been worked upon with great diligence.’

  The same day, 29 September, Wallenberg wrote to Koloman Lauer: ‘I am going to do everything possible to get home soon, but you must understand that such a big organization cannot be wound up easily. The moment the [Russian] occupation is accomplished this organisation will automatically cease to function. Until then, though, the work of our organization will remain necessary. It would be very hard just to stop it. I will try to get home a few days before the Russians arrive.’

  Things continued to improve. On 12 October, with the air full of rumours that Horthy was about to sue for a separate peace with the Allies, Wallenberg reported to Stockholm: ‘The release of internees has now been completed. Now only Jews who are considered to be
criminals remain interned by the Hungarians.’ Jews were being sent to dig fortifications on the eastern approaches to Budapest, but ‘in so far as it is possible to judge, the treatment of these Jews is not inhuman,’ and ‘an effort to obtain the release from labour service of those Jews who possess Swedish protective passports has met with some success.

  ‘The Russian advance,’ Wallenberg continued, ‘has increased the hope of the Jews that their unfortunate plight will soon be ended. Many have of their own accord already ceased wearing the Star of David. Their fears that the Germans might at the last moment carry out a pogrom still remain, however, despite the fact that there are no positive signs that any such happening will occur.’

  The same day Wallenberg sent a personal note to Ivar Olsen, obviously in an ‘end of term’ mood.

  When I now look back on the three months I have spent here I can only say that it has been a most interesting experience, and I believe not without results. When I arrived the situation of the Jews was very bad indeed. The development of military events and a natural psychological reaction among the Hungarian people have changed many things. We at the Swedish legation have perhaps only been an instrument to convert this outside influence into action in the various government offices. I have taken quite a strong line in this respect, although of course I have had to keep within the limits assigned to me as a neutral.

  It has been my object all the time to try to help all Jews. This, however, could only be achieved by helping a whole group of Jews to get rid of their stars. I have worked on the hypothesis that those who were no longer under the obligation to wear the star would help their fellow-sufferers. Also I have carried out a great deal of enlightenment work among the key men in charge of Jewish questions here. I am quite sure that our activity – and that means in the last instance yours – is responsible for the freeing at this time of the interned Jews. These numbered many hundreds…