by Alan Levy
In mid-March 1945, Raoul was transferred to another Lubyanka cell which had just been vacated by Langfelder. When Wallenberg learned of his chauffeur from his cellmates, he was overjoyed and asked the prison duty officer to deliver his own cigarette ration to Langfelder. But Langfelder had been transferred to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, after which he vanished into the more remote reaches of the gulag.
Claudio de Mohr, former Italian cultural attaché in Bulgaria, was in Lefortovo when Wallenberg was transferred across town from Lubyanka in April 1945. De Mohr was in cell 152 when new prisoners were brought into cell 151. As usual, they communicated by tapping in code on their walls, which is how de Mohr learned that one of his new neighbours in the gulag’s diplomatic ghetto was ‘Mr Raoul Wallenberg from the Swedish legation in Budapest.’
Bernard Rensinghoff and Ernst Wallenstein, former German attachés in Bucharest, learned from Wallenberg’s tappings that he was interrogated frequently and told only that ‘for political reasons, you will never be sentenced’. According to Rensinghoff, an inspector interrogating Raoul had told him ‘that he was a political case. If he considered himself innocent, it was his responsibility to prove this. The best proof of his guilt was that the Swedish legation in Moscow and the Swedish government had done nothing on his case. Raoul Wallenberg had asked the inspector . . . to be allowed direct contact with the Swedish legation in Moscow or the Red Cross or at least to write to them. This request was refused with “Nobody cares about you. If the Swedish government or its legation had taken any interest in you, they would long ago have contacted you.”’
The NKVD had a point. When he’d disappeared, there was heavy cable traffic about his case between Washington and his recruiter, Iver Olsen, the Treasury Department’s and War Refugee Board’s representative in Stockholm who also worked for the OSS. On a memo about Wallenberg, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau pencilled a note: ‘I am personally interested in this man.’
Washington instructed the US Ambassador to Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, to offer the Swedes any American assistance that could hasten Raoul’s return. Interviewed by a team from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre shortly before his death at ninety-four in 1986, Harriman recalled:
‘I did a quite natural thing. I went to see the Swedish Ambassador and asked if there was anything we could do to help. I offered American aid and he said no, there was not a thing we could do and, under those circumstances, there wasn’t.’
On 12 April 1945, around the time Wallenberg was transferred from Lubyanka to Lefortovo, Harriman cabled Washington about his meeting with the Swedish Ambassador: ‘THE SWEDES SAY THEY HAVE NO REASON TO THINK THE RUSSIANS ARE NOT DOING WHAT THEY CAN AND THEY DO NOT FEEL AN APPROACH TO THE SOVIET FOREIGN OFFICE ON OUR PART WOULD BE DESIREABLE.’ His cable was sent at 10 a.m. That afternoon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, and there was a new President, Harry S. Truman, a new attitude toward winning the war without looking back, and, before long, a new cabinet. If anyone glanced at Harriman’s cable on that memorable day, it and Wallenberg were quickly forgotten in Washington. The cable was buried even before FDR was. For not the first of many times, Raoul Wallenberg was betrayed by an accident of history. It would be thirty years before America would take any further action on his behalf.
That left Wallenberg’s destiny in Swedish hands. But the Swedish Ambassador in Moscow who had declined Harriman’s aid Staffan Söderblom, who, as head of Foreign Ministry’s political department in 1942, had buried the first eyewitness account of gassings at Belzec – handed by an appalled German technocrat named Kurt Gerstein to a Swedish diplomat, Baron Guran von Otter, on a train from Warsaw to Berlin because he ‘judged it too risky to pass information from one belligerent country to another’. Face to face and behind the scenes in Budapest, Wallenberg had thwarted Eichmann, the ultimate ‘desk murderer’ who seldom saw his victims, but, in jail in Moscow, he was in no position to cope with a prototypical ‘desk undertaker’ who could bury all hope through inaction or wishful thinking.
Like Wallenberg, the staff of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest had been taken into custody by the Red Army. Shipped to Bucharest by bus and then to Odessa and Moscow by train, they wondered all the way whether they were prisoners or honoured guests. Worried that their train might be shunted to Siberia, Söderblom met them in Moscow with one repeated admonition: ‘Remember, when you get home to Sweden – not one harsh word about the Russians!’ Wallenberg’s closest colleagues, Per Anger and Lars Berg, agreed to comply. Later, Anger would recall ruefully: ‘We never suspected then that when we’d passed through Moscow, Raoul was right there, confined in Lubyanka.’
During their stay in Moscow, Berg – who had hosted Raoul’s memorable dinner with Eichmann – was questioned by the NKVD about Wallenberg. On the first day, Berg was asked whether Wallenberg was a German spy. Scared though he was, Berg burst into laughter – and then told the Russians they were out of their minds.
The next day, his interrogators were back with another approach: had Wallenberg been spying for the Americans? If he wasn’t working for one, he must have been working for the other. Their mentality could never understand a man who came to save a people – and, to a considerable extent, did.
Eventually, the Swedish contingent went on by train to Leningrad and then Helsinki and the Finnish port of Turku. They swallowed hard when, arriving in Stockholm on a Finnish ship on 18 April 1945, they were met by their own relieved relatives plus Raoul’s mother, Maj von Dardel, who had come down to the pier just in case her son was aboard. ‘Where is Raoul?’ she pleaded. ‘I had hoped he was with you.’
Maj von Dardel had been hoping against hope ever since early February, when she’d called upon the Soviet Ambassador to Sweden, Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai, and been told: ‘He’s safe. Don’t make a fuss and he’ll return.’
Madame Kollontai cuts an ambiguous figure in the Wallenberg saga. Daughter of a Czarist general, she was nonetheless a close associate of Lenin and heroine of the Soviet occupation of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in the Revolution. A fashionable clothes-horse and friend of Raoul’s banker cousin, Marcus Wallenberg, she led a movement back home to expel all non-proletarians from the Communist Party and fire all technicians trained before the Revolution. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre says she fell into disfavour with Stalin and was recalled to Moscow in 1946 because of the indiscreet assurance she gave Raoul’s mother.
On the other hand, Wallenberg’s Budapest ally and confidante, Baroness Elisabeth Kemeny, the Austrian bride of the Hungarian Foreign Minister who was hanged after the war, says Raoul was in contact with Madame Kollontai and not only told her his ambitious plans to rebuild the Hungarian nation and reconstruct its Jewish community, but also asked her to help the Kemenys – all of which, says Baroness Kemeny, Madame Kollontai reported to the Kremlin, thereby convincing Stalin that Raoul was a threat to the spread of communism.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Swedish Ambassador Söderblom – prodded by Wallenberg family influence and Raoul’s friends in the Foreign Ministry – made five or six perfunctory inquiries about his missing fellow diplomat. Whether the latest rumour was that Raoul had died in an auto accident or that he was alive and well and living under a pseudonym in Budapest or missing in an air raid, Söderblom invariably would caution Stockholm that this was not the time to bait the Russians, and what if Wallenberg turned up to ‘tell sensational stories to the press’ against Sweden’s powerful and menacing eastern neighbour? Per Anger, who was reassigned to Cairo in 1946, says that ‘the Foreign Office had to urge Söderblom not to fall into passivity.’
Söderblom had not even consulted with Stockholm before refusing Averell Harriman’s offer. Later, Söderblom gave his Home Office to understand that the US itself had decided not to intervene. In October 1945, he reported that ‘the Americans have not made any approach to the Soviets’ – without mentioning who had discouraged them.
Of all the muffed opportunities to retrieve Wallenberg, the most maddening came on 15 J
une 1946, when Söderblom’s stint in the Soviet Union was nearing an end. The only ambassadors Stalin normally saw were the US and British envoys, when they had special messages from their President or Prime Minister for him. The austere ‘man of steel’ never met with diplomats from small neutral nations. Well, almost never, for he granted a farewell interview to Söderblom in the Kremlin.
This rare face-to-face confrontation was the high point of a curious figure’s diplomatic career, and he knew it even then. In an absolutely fawning report to the Foreign Ministry, made public only in 1980, Söderblom wrote that he found Stalin in his marshal’s uniform looking ‘fit and in vigorous health. His short but well-proportioned body and his regular features made an especially agreeable impression. His tone of voice and demeanour gave an impression of friendliness.’ In an interview in the 1980s for an Australian film documentary, Between the Lines, produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Söderblom went a few steps farther, on camera. An ageing, twisted man – still full of himself in retirement – Söderblom told how his host ‘shook hands with me and’, as if he needed any introduction, ‘said “Stalin.” I nearly got tears in my eyes.’
Proud that he spoke Russian and all the more humble because he wasn’t speaking through an interpreter, Söderblom told Stalin: ‘I am grateful to Your Excellency that you have agreed to receive me before my departure from Moscow. I do not want to take up much more of your valuable time as I have no reason to plead with you on any matters, nor do I wish to approach you regarding any difficult problems.’ He proceeded to present greetings from his King and Prime Minister before expressing Sweden’s desire to live at peace as a good neighbour to the Soviet Union.
Then Stalin, every inch the gracious monarch of Marxism-Leninism and the gulag and nearly a quarter of a billion people, asked Söderblom: ‘Do you have any special requests?’
To this breathtaking, but anticipated, question, Söderblom replied: ‘I have nothing special to take up with you, but since you ask, I would like to mention one matter.’ After sketching Swedish intervention on behalf of humanity in Budapest, he said that ‘among those who saved twenty-five to thirty thousand Jews was a Swedish diplomat, Wallenberg’, who was last seen with Russian soldiers when ‘he disappeared without a trace.’
Stalin smiled benignly and said: ‘Of course we shall look into this matter for you, Mr Ambassador. I shall write down the name to make sure I remember. The name was Wallenberg? If, as you suggest, there is any chance he is in the Soviet Union, our investigation will provide an answer.’
We all have moments when we regret saying too much. What happened next made Tage Erlander, Sweden’s Prime Minister from 1951 to 1969, declare when he found out about it that the conversation between Söderblom and Stalin was ‘dangerous and perhaps disastrous . . . It would have been better if it had never taken place.’ Perhaps in his soul of souls, which only an Ingmar Bergman might penetrate, Söderblom lived to regret the words he volunteered when he saw the almighty Stalin actually jot down the name on a pad and stick the scrap of paper into his uniform jacket:
‘I, personally, think Wallenberg was a victim of robbers, or perhaps an accident in Budapest,’ said Söderblom.
Stalin smiled knowingly and puffed on his pipe. The audience was over. The same undertaker in diplomatic pinstripes who had once buried the Final Solution’s first revelation in the files had now embalmed his countryman and colleague by shredding his last hope of intervention from above. No wonder Wallenberg’s NKVD interrogator was so sure nobody cared.
While Söderblom and Stalin were consigning Raoul to oblivion or worse, Rensinghoff and Wallenstein, the German diplomats whose cell was above his, helped him with his French for an appeal he addressed to Stalin in what was then the language of diplomacy; it went unanswered. In the spring of 1947, Wallenberg tapped hastily on his ceiling, ‘We are being taken away.’
Unlike the German and Italian ‘enemy’ diplomats, most of whom were eventually repatriated, Wallenberg the ‘neutral’ was absorbed into the mainstream of Soviet political prisoners shipped to Siberia, which lends credence to the theory that the Russians believed Sweden had disowned him. According to one who was in the transit room at Lefertovo when Wallenberg was shipped out, he said bitterly: ‘They just want to make me disappear into darkness and fog.’
As if to make this perception of his official, on 18 August 1947, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky issued a note declaring that Wallenberg is not in the Soviet Union and he is not known to us.’
What about the 16 January 1945 letter from Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Dekanosov to Ambassador Söderblom that Wallenberg was in Red Army hands? That, said Vyshinsky, was based on ‘indirect information from a commander of infantry troops fighting for Budapest. At the time, it was impossible to verify the report. Since then, a thorough investigation has failed to produce a positive result. The Soviet officer who provided the information about Wallenberg has not been found. Nor has Wallenberg been found in the camps for prisoners of war and internees.’
Vyshinsky went on to ‘draw your attention to the fact that Wallenberg in January 1945 was in a war zone where Soviet troops were involved in violent fighting at a time when anything could have happened. He could, on his own initiative, have left the region that was occupied by Soviet troops. There might have been an enemy air attack. He could have perished under enemy fire or fallen victim to an assassination attempt . . . Our own hypothesis is that Wallenberg either died during the fighting in Budapest or was abducted’ by the Arrow Cross.
Though Vyshinsky’s message was so self-serving that it might have been scripted by Söderblom for Stalin, there were those who still wanted very badly to believe the Big Lie. Erlander’s new Swedish government was Social Democratic and its Foreign Minister, Östen Undén, was a Marxist law professor with infinite faith in the Soviet experiment. When a Wallenberg Action Committee visited Undén with evidence that Raoul was still alive in the gulag, the Foreign Minister turned to one of the members, Birgitta de Wylder-Bellander, and asked: ‘Mrs Bellander, do you think Vyshinsky is lying?’
Considering that Vyshinsky had prosecuted Stalin’s great purges of the 1930s, winding up many a courtroom harangue with ‘Shoot the mad dogs!’ Mrs Bellander’s affirmative answer should not have surprised Undén the way it did. ‘But this is terrible, terrible!’ he burst out. ‘It is quite unthinkable!’ Indeed, he and most of the Foreign Ministry – to whom Wallenberg was an outsider, a wartime addition who was never ‘one of us’ and who might have endangered his colleagues by his boldness in Budapest – steadfastly declined to think the unthinkable
In 1947, the year Vyshinsky denied Wallenberg’s presence inside the Soviet Union and presumed he had died in Hungary, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) wrote a personal letter of inquiry to Stalin, who answered the scientist with written assurance that he knew nothing about the missing Swedish diplomat. Less trusting than Raoul’s own employers, Einstein joined three deputies from Sweden’s Parliament the following year in nominating Wallenberg for the Nobel Peace Prize, which goes only to living persons.
There were rumblings, too, within the Swedish Foreign Ministry. According to Rabbi Abraham D. Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, ‘Lars Berg got so fed up that, after the war, he quit Sweden and quit the Foreign Service. Later, he turned up in Rio [de Janeiro] and became the Swedish Consul there . . . But he wrote a book about Wallenberg that was published in 1947 in Sweden. It was on the stands for one day. All the copies were bought up by persons unknown – presumably from the Foreign Ministry.’
To placate the Wallenberg agitators, whose efforts had made Raoul a national hero, Per Anger was assigned to pursue the case upon his return from Egypt in 1948. During Anger’s two years on the job, he says, ‘Undén persisted in his negative attitude, and many times I was ready to give up. I had not gained the slightest attention at the highest level for my conviction that Wallenberg was in Russian imprisonment, or for what I thought should be done
to set him free.’
Late in 1950, on their way to a conference in Oslo, Undén invited Anger into his train compartment to talk over Wallenberg. Anger reiterated his certainty that Wallenberg was still alive in Soviet custody and stated his opinion that ‘the only language the Russians understand in a situation such as this is: meet force with force, or offer something in exchange.’ The Swiss and the Italians had retrieved their diplomats by exchanging them for Soviet agents. A Dane named Hakon Dahl, who had been in the gulag for six years, had been exchanged for a Russian jailed in Copenhagen. ‘I added,’ Anger remembers, ‘that we in Sweden had given the Russians a billion crowns in credits during our 1946 trade negotiations without asking anything in return. We’d had several spy cases in Sweden in which Soviet citizens were involved. Was it not conceivable that instead of expelling a spy, we could hold such a person, expecting to exchange him for Wallenberg?’
‘The Swedish government does not do such things,’ Undén answered frostily, turning his attention to other matters. Soon after, Anger was granted a transfer.
Simon Wiesenthal concurs with Anger’s viewpoint: ‘There was another time when Sweden could have got Wallenberg back. The Swedish government could have exchanged him for Colonel Stig Wennerstrom, the Swedish military attaché in Moscow who was spying for the Russians for fifteen years and had the rank of a general in the KGB. When the Swedes caught him in 1963, he was sentenced to twenty years. That was before I was involved, but I have the feeling the Soviets would have given back Wallenberg for Wennerstrom. Naturally, it would have been up to Wennerstrom whether he would go – because, when he was convicted, he didn’t lose his Swedish citizenship, just his freedom.’