Chapter 4
* While Eichmann was to become known to the Western press as ‘the forwarding agent of death,’ Novak earned the title ‘the Stationmaster.’
Chapter 4
* Presumably Per Anger.
Chapter 5
* Stern himself seems to have been taken in by these methods for a while.
Chapter 5
† When Petö wrote this memoir in Brazil in 1955, he believed Wallenberg had died in 1945.
Chapter 5
* It was the practice of the Hungarian gentry to disdain business and the professions, hence the preponderance of Jews in these spheres.
Chapter 5
* A discredited document, probably forged by the tsarist secret police of Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, purporting to show how the Jews were plotting to take over the world.
Chapter 5
* In 1956 Kasztner was murdered in Tel Aviv by unknown assailants, who felt he had betrayed his trust by enabling a wealthy handful to buy their freedom, leaving the rest of the Jews to their fate.
† Curiously, Krausz was the only one among scores of witnesses and sources consulted in the preparation of this book who tried to diminish Wallenberg’s role in the rescue of the Budapest Jews. In Jerusalem in the summer of 1979, he told me that Wallenberg was sent to Budapest largely at his (Krausz’s) instigation, and that when he arrived he was ‘rather naïve’ and had to be shown by Krausz how to go about his task. Krausz stated categorically that Wallenberg never went out in person to rescue people from the ‘Death Marches’ (see Chapter 7), that he had not enjoyed good relations with Per Anger, and that it was not true that Wallenberg had ever been in Haifa. He thought Wallenberg had become something of a legend only because his family had ‘paid journalists to write about him.’
Chapter 6
* Members of the Hungarian Fascist Party, the most extremist of all the rightwing groups.
Chapter 7
* Skorzeny was the leader of the daring raid that had snatched Benito Mussolini from Allied captivity in 1943.
Chapter 7
* Baron Kemény was in fact arrested by Allied troops in northern Italy soon after the war and handed over to the Hungarians. He was tried for war crimes by a ‘people’s court’ and executed.
Chapter 7
* With characteristic modesty, Anger failed to mention that he made some forays to the border without Wallenberg and was personally responsible for a number of rescues. In 1956, when he was attached to the Swedish embassy in Vienna, he again went to the Austro-Hungarian border to help refugees from the Soviet takeover that followed the Budapest uprising of that year. He told the author how he saw a group of people coming across the border, including some Jewish women, one of whom fell into his arms and said: ‘Per Anger, this is the second time you have saved me.’
Chapter 7
* While preparing a television documentary about Wallenberg the British Broadcasting Corporation attempted unsuccessfully to locate this film. Both the Vatican and IRC headquarters in Geneva said they had no idea what had happened to it.
Chapter 8
* Baroness Kemény was evacuated with other government wives and families – and most of the diplomatic corps – on 29 November. Wallenberg went to see her off at the station, taking a bunch of flowers.
Chapter 9
* In their zeal to save lives this group produced 120,000 Swiss passes, which so devalued them that they eventually became virtually worthless.
Chapter 9
* This calculated thrust struck home. Szálasi postponed the transfer until New Year’s Eve. The children never were moved; by that time things had begun to fall apart altogether.
Chapter 10
* Szalay was, in fact, the only prominent Arrow Cross man to escape execution after the liberation of Budapest. In recognition of his energetic efforts in cooperation with Wallenberg, a People’s Court cleared him of all charges and set him free.
Chapter 10
* On the limited black market operating inside the General Ghetto, the rate for a loaf of bread was 500 pengös. The official price of rationed bread was 1½ pengös and the black-market price outside the ghetto 10 to 12 pengös.
Chapter 10
* Wallenberg gave shelter to a number of non-Jewish oposition figures, including the Social Democrats Árpád Szakasits and Anna Kethly. The former became president of Hungary (1948–50), the latter Speaker of the Hungarian Parliament. Dessewffy survived the war and became a liberal member of the first post-war Hungarian Parliament.
Chapter 12
* This was the date of President Roosevelt’s death. Obviously, Ambassador Harriman had matters other than Wallenberg on his mind.
Chapter 12
* According to Foreign Office Secretary-General Leif Leifland, twenty-five pages were omitted from the document collection for legal reasons. Leifland insisted that nothing which might embarrass the government had been suppressed.
Chapter 12
* Stalin’s cynical indifference to the fate of Wallenberg – and his refusal even to authorize answers to Maj von Dardel’s impassioned appeals to him – contrasts interestingly with the agonies he is said to have suffered at the uncertainty surrounding the fate of his own son, Yakov, a Red Air Force pilot known to have been taken prisoner by the Germans but never found after the war. The British knew Yakov had committed suicide in a POW camp but kept the news from Stalin to spare his feelings.
Chapter 12
* Sweden did not, however, follow President Jimmy Carter’s lead and boycott the Moscow Olympics, as partisans of Wallenberg had been urging long before the invasion of Afghanistan.
Chapter 12
* Makarova, the daughter of a senior Red Army officer, had defected to Sweden in 1945, arriving with a group of refugees from the Baltic states annexed by the Soviets; Granovsky was another political refugee. The Russians wanted them all back.
Chapter 12
* In the 1960s no attempt was made to swap Colonel Stig Wennerström of the Swedish Air Force. He had been ‘turned’ by the Soviets when he was military attaché in Moscow in the 1950s and before becoming military attaché in Washington. At his trial in 1963 it was said he was a full-time Soviet agent, holding the rank of a major in the KGB. After serving his twelve-year sentence, with time off for good conduct, Wennerström retired to the country in Sweden. ‘We couldn’t have exchanged him,’ commented a senior Swedish Foreign Office official in 1979. ‘He’s a Swedish citizen.’ Another potential spy swap came to nothing in September 1979. Swedish Defence Ministry employee Stig Bergling, accused of spying for the Soviets, asked the Swedish government through his attorney if he could be exchanged for Wallenberg. According to the government, soundings were made in Moscow, but ‘the Russians showed no interest.’ Bergling was subsequently jailed for life.
Chapter 13
* Dekanosov was known as one of Stalin’s top diplomatic hatchet men. He had been the Soviet ambassador in Berlin up to the time of the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941.
Chapter 13
* De Mohr was almost certainly mistaken about this date; later evidence suggests strongly that Wallenberg was removed from Lefortovo Prison in the summer of 1947.
Chapter 13
* In this context, the Latin alphabet, not the Cyrillic alphabet of the Russian language, which has thirty-three letters. Russian prisoners used a different method.
Chapter 13
* Whether this was before or after Söderblom’s disastrous interview with Stalin is not clear.
Chapter 13
* Note that this information is the same as that given by Hille, above.
Chapter 14
* Abakumov was liquidated in 1954 in the purge that followed the downfall and execution of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police.
Chapter 14
* He claimed the Russians threatened him with prison for life if he did not agree to spy for them after being released.
Chapter 15
* The hospital where Fredrik von Dardel was administrator. Dr Svartz and the von Dardels were friends and Maj von Dardel was her patient.
Chapter 15
* In a conversation with me in 1979, Professor Sivartz recounted that Miashnikov told her Khrushchev was furious, pounding the desk with his fist and finally ordering Miashnikov out.
Chapter 15
* Despite the implication that these statements had been publicized, the fact is no public reference had yet been made to Professor Miashnikov’s role in the Wallenberg affair. This was to remain secret for another seventeen months.
Chapter 15
* From a written memorandum published in 1965 in a Swedish government White Book.
Chapter 16
* This phraseology suggested that the Soviets had now slammed closed the door they had previously left slightly ajar. The Gromyko memorandum of February 1957 had contained the formulation that ‘the conclusion should be drawn’ that Wallenberg had died in 1947.
Chapter 17
* The Soviet counter-intelligence agency, whose acronym means ‘Death to Spies.’
Chapter 17
* Wynne was a key figure in the case in which Soviet senior scientific officer Oleg Penkovsky was executed for selling state secrets to the West. Wynne, the liaison between Penkovsky and British and. US intelligence, was sentenced to eight years in prison in 1963 but was exchanged a year later for Soviet master-spy Konon Molody, alias Gordon Lonsdale, who was serving a twenty-five-year term in Britain.
Chapter 18
* After the war, the remains of twelve thousand Polish officers were found buried in Katyn Forest in eastern Poland. The Russians claimed that the Nazis were responsible; the Germans maintained that the Russians carried out the massacre during their occupation of that part of Poland. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the Russian government finally admitted Soviet responsibility for the crime.
Chapter 18
* Already mentioned in the testimony given by the witnesses Mulle and Rehekampf.
† It is a particularly grim irony that the humanitarian Wallenberg should have been forced to share a cell with Mamulov, of whom Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written, ‘can anyone imagine a fouler butcher?’
Chapter 18
* Wallenberg obviously was not accorded this privilege.
Chapter 18
* He was, in fact, in prison again by this time.
Chapter 18
* A reference to Anna’s second daughter, Daniella, born in September 1978.
† Presumably 1978.
Chapter 18
* Presumably 1979.
‘An agent of the Lubianka’ means a KGB man or an informer.
Chapter 19
* In July 1949 Secretary of State Dean Acheson, replying to an appeal from Guy von Dardel, pledged ‘any assistance the United States can give.’ There seems to have been no follow-up.
Chapter 19
* Pickering was merely the conduit through which the recommendation was passed on to Kissinger. The official mainly responsible for this effort was Walter J. Stoessel, Jr., at the time assistant secretary of state for European affairs.
Chapter 19
* A distant relative of Wallenberg’s mother and a friend of the family.
Chapter 19
* Philipp died in Stockholm in 1980. He was a lonely and embittered man and his only regular visitor seemed to have been Nina Lagergren, who, at his request, took possession of the mountains of documents – most of them relating to the Wallenberg affair – which cluttered his tiny apartment.
† Wiesenthal, as we have seen, was brought into the case at Maj von Dardel’s request in the mid-1960s, although Soviet affairs are not, strictly speaking, his speciality. She sought his help because of his many remarkable successes in tracking down Nazi war criminals in remote parts of the globe, thanks to his private worldwide intelligence network and the exhaustive files of his documentation centre in Vienna. He is said to have played a part in the capture of, among others, Eichmann, though this is fiercely disputed by his free-lance and official rivals, including the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Wiesenthal has received no money from Wallenberg’s family for his tireless efforts over the years.
Chapter 20
* Nevertheless, the local population seemed to know whom the statue was meant to represent. A Swedish journalist, Eric Sjöqvist, visited the site in 1964 and was told by his cab driver, ‘Everybody knows it’s Wallenberg.’
† Taken to task by an Israeli journalist, Naftali Kraus (see below), for his too ready acceptance of Wallenberg’s ‘death,’ Lévai protested in a letter of 10 March 1975 that proofs of Wallenberg’s survival did not appear until ten years after he wrote his Wallenberg biography and that ‘I tried to imply the real truth.’ This, of course, does not explain why he ignored Wallenberg’s decisive intervention in his otherwise meticulously detailed Eichmann in Hungary, but, as he said in his letter to Kraus, ‘Neither then nor now is it possible to write about it here.’ Lévai was to outrage the Israelis in 1969 by delivering a lecture at Yad Vashem in which he argued that Szálasi and the Arrow Cross were not really anti-Semitic and that the real villain had been Horthy. This, of course, was in line with Marxist ideology, which holds that the ‘masses’ are not capable of anti-Semitism, only the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, such as Horthy.
Chapter 21
* The parcel also contained a ring with ‘an unusually big diamond’ and an illustrated, hand-lettered pamphlet praising Wallenberg’s efforts on behalf of the Jews. ‘Probably a Christmas present from one of his assistants and admirers,’ says Berg.
Chapter 21
* On Hitler’s orders the conspirators were hanged by piano wire from a row of butcher’s hooks while a movie cameraman filmed their death agonies for the Führer’s subsequent entertainment.
Chapter 21
* ‘Rambow’ turned out to be a Gestapo informer – one of a number of so-called V-men infiltrated into the Red underground by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, whom we have already met. Leber, Reichwein, Jakob, and Saefkow were all subsequently arrested and executed. Müller, a cold, dispassionate killer who was known to have a great respect for Soviet secret police methods, was never captured after the collapse of Nazi Germany. Neither was his body ever found. He was last seen in Hitler’s bunker on 29 April 1945, and some surviving colleagues believe he went over to the Russians and joined the NKVD, which he so much admired. It is pure speculation, of course, but one can just imagine Müller finding that Wallenberg, the adversary of his former subordinate Eichmann, was now a captive of his new employers…
Chapter 21
* This was one Otto Braun, who was described in the relevant dispatch as ‘a German residing in Budapest, who is said to be in a position to aid escapes and concealments.’
Chapter 22
* In 1957, the Kremlin informed the Hungarian government that Langfelder died in the Lubianka in March 1948. As in the case of Wallenberg, the supposedly natural cause of death strains credibility. Before his arrest, Langfelder was known to be a particularly robust young man.
Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust Page 25