Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  For more than a decade, Raoul was lost from view while his mother and stepfather, his half-sister and half-brother, and a handful of his diplomatic colleagues, led by Per Anger, kept his cause alive, despite Soviet denials that Wallenberg was ever on their soil. Undén and other desk undertakers in his Swedish Foreign Ministry rebuffed and even denounced them as people who wanted ‘to declare war on Russia’ for one man’s sake and endanger Sweden’s neutrality.

  To his dying day, Söderblom would argue, as he did in 1980, that he was defending Sweden’s precarious neutrality in the Cold War by soft-pedalling Wallenberg in his approaches to the Kremlin: ‘The political climate was such that I thought it unwise to provoke the Russians. The Soviet government had been very positive and friendly toward Sweden. I therefore considered it inappropriate for me as ambassador to make unsuitable hints or innuendoes.’

  While Söderblom’s defence might have looked good in the 1950s, it hardly held water in the 1980s, when Per Anger, not long after his retirement from diplomatic service as Swedish Ambassador to Canada, contended that ‘a tremendous responsibility weighs upon the postwar Social Democratic governments . . . They have deliberately lain low and been unwilling to take any action they feared might have serious consequences for our relations with the Soviet Union. Were they, at first, so anxious to preserve our neutrality in the Cold War then starting, that Wallenberg was sacrificed on the altar of neutrality?’

  In 1956, Prime Minister Erlander paid Sweden’s first official visit to Moscow since the Revolution of 1917. At a meeting in the Kremlin, Erlander presented the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, with the testimony of more than a dozen witnesses to Wallenberg’s presence in Lubyanka and Lefortovo between 1945 and 1947 along with a strongly worded request that his fate be investigated. The hope was that a reformed regime might not only blame a miscarriage of justice upon the excesses of its Stalinist predecessors, but seek to make amends.

  Only half this hope was fulfilled ten months later. On 6 February 1957, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (later Foreign Minister and President) reported to the Swedish Ambassador in Moscow that Soviet authorities had made a ‘thorough investigation’ of the Wallenberg case and, while ‘none of these efforts provided the smallest indication that Raoul Wallenberg had spent time in the Soviet Union . . . in the course of their research, the Soviet authorities had the occasion to examine the files of prison infirmaries. They discovered in Lubyanka a handwritten report which may refer to Wallenberg. The report is addressed to [V. S.] Abakumov, Minister for State Security, from A L. Smoltsov, the head of the prison hospital service. It is dated July 17, 1947: “I am writing to inform you that the prisoner Walenberg [sic], known to you, died suddenly in his cell last night. He was apparently the victim of a myocardiac infarctus. In view of your instructions to me to supervise Walenberg personally, I ask you to let me know who should conduct the autopsy to ascertain the cause of death.”

  ‘The same report contains a second manuscript note from Smoltsov: “Informed the minister personally. Order given to cremate the body without autopsy. 17 July 1947.”’

  Gromyko’s memorandum went on to add that no further information, documentation, or testimony had been found: ‘Smoltsov died on May 7, 1953. The above-mentioned facts lead one to conclude that Wallenberg died in July 1947. Evidently he was arrested, like many others, by the Russian Army in the area of fighting. That he was later detained in prison and that false information was given about him to the Foreign Ministry by the Chief of State Security over a number of years is one aspect of the criminal activity of Abakumov. As is well known, the latter was sentenced by the Supreme Court of Justice and executed for serious crimes.

  ‘The Soviet Union expresses its sincere regret in relation to these circumstances and assures the government of the Kingdom of Sweden and the family of Raoul Wallenberg of its profound sympathy.’

  Neither his family nor his government could accept Raoul’s suffering a convenient heart arrest at thirty-four, just a few months after the last witnesses had him leaving Lefortovo for the gulag. Sweden later condemned the ‘autocratic manner’ in which the Soviet security police made ‘a diplomat of a neutral country a prisoner’ and kept him in jail. The official Swedish reply added, ‘Expressing its regrets, the Soviet government has admitted its responsibility’, and went on to reserve judgement, indicating that, to his fellow Swedes, Wallenberg was still alive until proven dead.

  In the next three years, their faith was rewarded by testimony from four veterans of the gulag – a Swiss, an Austrian, and two Germans – placing Wallenberg in Vladimir Prison, 150 miles east of Moscow, between 1953 and 1959.

  The Swiss prisoner had never seen Wallenberg, but had conversed with him in 1954 by tapping on walls. One day, Raoul had tapped: ‘When you are freed, report to a Swedish consulate or legation. I am not allowed to write or receive letters.’

  In early 1955, the Austrian prisoner had been put in Wallenberg’s cell by mistake. Wallenberg told him he’d been kept in solitary confinement for years and implored him, upon his release, to tell any Swedish legation he’d met Raoul Wallenberg. If he couldn’t remember the name, ‘a Swede from Budapest’ would suffice. The next day, a Soviet political officer had the Austrian removed and warned him never to tell anybody about his encounter with Wallenberg.

  The two Germans told of meeting a Georgian prisoner named Simon Gogoberidse in Vladimir in 1956. Gogoberidse, an occasional cellmate of Wallenberg’s, said he was told by a prison official around the time of Prime Minister Erlander’s 1956 visit: ‘They’ll have to look for a long time to find Wallenberg.’ Gogoberidse, an exiled Social Democrat who had been kidnapped from Paris by the KGB, said Wallenberg was always made to share cells with Soviet citizens serving long sentences, not with foreigners, to minimize risk of his whereabouts reaching the West.

  Although Wallenberg was reported in remarkably good health (one witness later described him taking full advantage of his exercise periods, scooping up handfuls of snow and rubbing them into his face, chest, and arms to warm up before systematically exercising his whole body in the narrow pen), he went on a hunger strike in 1959. When he became ill a few months later, he was taken to the hospital wing of Moscow’s Butyrka prison, whose grim high wall stretches for two blocks and, says Solzhenitsyn, makes ‘the hearts of the Muscovites shiver when they see the steel maw of its gates slide open.’ The earliest victim of the Cold War had slipped through a crack in history.

  On March 29, 1971, Maj von Dardel wrote to Simon Wiesenthal in Austria. She told him she had read his 1967 memoir and had followed with fascination his unearthing of Eichmann and Stangl. ‘If you were able to find Eichmann,’ she wrote, ‘surely you could find my son.’ Her letter ended with ‘If before I die, I could embrace my own beloved son, this is all I ask.’

  Wiesenthal recalls: ‘She told me that nobody cared now, that the various Wallenberg Committees exist only on paper, that there is just a mother, a father, a sister and a brother working for Wallenberg, and her son is a victim. I was going to Sweden soon, so first I sent her a letter saying I hadn’t known that nothing was working. I never get involved in things other people are already occupied with. When I visited Stockholm, I met her and her husband: a lovely, charming old couple with this one sadness in their life. She lost her composure only once – when she told me she had been reading about Soviet mental hospitals – and then she apologized to me for her reaction: “Mr. Wiesenthal, you may imagine my feelings as a mother to think that my son Raoul is in one of these hospitals and I cannot help him.” She gave me all their information and documents and I said to her: “I see I must reopen the case and bring it to life.”’

  ‘I was very busy at the time, but I told myself: “The Nazi criminals can wait, but this case cannot.”’

  ‘Because he might still be alive?’ I ask him.

  ‘Yes,’ says Simon, ‘and because the murderers are living free, but he is not. And one other reason: We Jews have a long historic memory. Throug
hout our history, we record and we remember not only the sins and crimes and atrocities against us, but all the people who have helped us in the worst of times. When I am looking for Wallenberg, not only am I doing for the Jews, I am also doing for someone who did for the Jews.’

  20

  Enter Wiesenthal

  When Simon Wiesenthal entered the Raoul Wallenberg case a quarter of a century after his disappearance, he says there was ‘no organization – just the family force – and no clamour.’ To generate clamour, Wiesenthal employed the same hit-and-miss publicity-seeking technique that would work with Gustav Wagner, who succeeded Franz Stangl as commandant at Sobibor when Stangl moved up the extermination ladder to Treblinka, but would cost truth dearly in his quest for Dr Josef Mengele. This time, it worked extremely effectively in bringing Wallenberg’s fate out of the gulag’s darkness into the angry glare of the public eye.

  A few minutes before his next scheduled press conference, Wiesenthal approached a friendly journalist and asked him ‘to ask me what I am working on now. When he did, I answered that “except for the Nazis, I am preoccupied with the Wallenberg case.” Well, ninety-five per cent of the journalists in that room had never heard of Raoul Wallenberg, so now I was telling the whole story to the press. It got the case more publicity outside Sweden than it had in the past twenty-five years. Then I wrote articles about him for the Dutch press, in Der Spiegel, in our annual report, which is distributed worldwide.’

  In 1972, Moshe Leder, who had been Wiesenthal’s secretary for eighteen years, emigrated to Israel to head the Russian section of Israeli Radio. Wiesenthal asked Leder ‘at least once a month in your Russian and Yiddish broadcasts to the Soviet Union, please to mention the name of Raoul Wallenberg. From time to time, somebody coming out of Russia may bring news or have a reaction.’ Wiesenthal recognized that he would first have to prove that Wallenberg was alive after 17 July 1947, the date on which Andrei Gromyko (a decade later) had pronounced Raoul dead, before he could hope to find him – dead or alive.

  When the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christer Wickman, came to Austria later in 1972, Wiesenthal – who would hold a credential from the Foreign Press Association of Vienna for twenty-eight years – attended his news conference as a journalist and asked him: ‘What is the latest about the fate of Wallenberg?’

  ‘As far as the Swedish government is concerned, the Wallenberg case is closed,’ Wickman replied bluntly.

  Simon says he took this personally as ‘a slap in the face to me, so I said to him: “For me, it is not closed. And I am sure that, for what you are saying now so quickly and directly, the Swedish people will never forgive you.”’ Simon realized then and there that the solution to the Wallenberg riddle would never come from Sweden.

  Such confrontations, however, made headlines and news – and brought Wiesenthal a phone call in 1974 from his first important witness, a Viennese doctor named Menachem Meltzer, who began: ‘You have been talking and writing about a man with whom I met and spoke.’

  ‘Who is the man?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Wallenberg.’

  ‘When did you talk to him?’

  ‘Summer of 1948.’

  ‘One year after he died,’ said Wiesenthal, probing guardedly.

  ‘According to the Russians,’ said Meltzer.

  Hearing that, Wiesenthal jumped into his car and drove out to see Meltzer, who lived on the Engerthstrasse at the far end of Vienna’s ‘Matzoh Island’, where the Wiesenthals had lived briefly during the First World War. ‘I was so excited,’ Wiesenthal recalls, ‘that I drove too fast and got a ticket.’ He brought along an assortment of photos: Wallenberg alone, other individuals, Wallenberg in groups, other groups without Wallenberg. Every time Raoul appeared, Meltzer identified him correctly. Then Wiesenthal sat back and listened to his story, which he likes to recount with a certain degree of glee:

  ‘Meltzer was a Jewish Austrian communist who in the 1930s went to the Soviet Union to help build a socialist paradise. He got there just in time for Stalin’s trials against foreigners, making them out to be spies, while back in Austria, things were going from bad to worse – meaning Hitler. As a wise Jew trapped in a situation he couldn’t escape from, he decided not to wait for Stalin to make a trial for him, too: “Before they will send me to Siberia, I will go voluntarily. Once I am in Siberia, they can no longer send me to Siberia.”

  ‘So he went to the NKVD and said: “I am a doctor. I am also an idealist. I know that in Siberia there are some places without doctors. I wish to go there.”’

  Lying low in Siberia with all the aplomb of the Good Soldier Schweik, Meltzer survived the Second World War with a minimum of discomfort, considering his situation. When the war ended, he was chief medical officer for all of Stalin’s concentration camps in northern Siberia. In the summer of 1948, he visited a labour camp in the Urals at Khal’mer Yu, which apparently was Wallenberg’s second stop in Siberia after a year in Vorkuta, seventy miles north of the Arctic Circle. There Wallenberg had apparently been stripped of all diplomatic privileges in the prisoner hierarchy. His rations reduced, he was sent to work as a slave labourer in the coal mines. The fate that Eichmann would have wished Wallenberg was enforced by Eichmann’s enemies, who were fast becoming his successors.

  Wallenberg’s defiant response was to thrive on hard labour, which led to his reassignment to Khal’mer Yu, farther north than Vorkuta. Dr Meltzer met him when workers were needed to build a dam, and he took twenty doctors north with him to examine the manpower pool at Khal’mer Yu. Meltzer told Wiesenthal:

  ‘All the men were waiting there on long lines and we had everybody’s dossier. When I looked at this one dossier and saw the name Wallenberg, that isn’t such an unusual name in Russia, where many people, particularly Jews, have Germanic-sounding names. Nor did I look up when I read the first name Raoul, but, knowing that the Russian letter R comes out P in Cyrillic, I thought it was a mistake and said to the prisoner: “Your first name is Paul, isn’t it?”’

  ‘No, it’s Raoul,’ the man assured Meltzer. ‘I am Scandinavian.’

  Meltzer glanced up to see a swarthy man of medium height with sharp features and an intense stare, none of which looked very Viking to him. So he said: ‘But that’s not a Scandinavian name.’

  ‘Yes, it can be,’ Raoul replied. ‘Do you know the explorer Amundsen?’

  ‘The one who discovered the South Pole?’

  ‘Yes, he was Norwegian and his first name was Roald. I am Swedish and my first name is Raoul.’

  That was the extent of their conversation. Meltzer examined Wallenberg and found that, while ‘he had a strong heart’ (a year after his ‘death by heart attack’ in Lubyanka), his lungs had not yet recovered from his months in the mines. Meltzer deferred him from heavy labour for three months. Wallenberg seems to have stayed in Khal’mer Yu until early 1951, when he was transferred to a camp for political prisoners at Verkhneural’sk in the southern Urals. After two years there, he left Siberia for Vladimir.

  Meltzer, the wandering Jew who had volunteered for Siberia, was repatriated to Austria in 1951. He moved to Israel and died there not long after his disclosures to Wiesenthal. But he had provided Wiesenthal, the world, the Swedish Foreign Ministry (which questioned him in Vienna), and the von Dardel family with the first written official Soviet evidence that Wallenberg was alive and reasonably well in Khal’mer Yu a year after his official demise in Moscow. ‘We had proved our point,’ says Simon. ‘Gromyko had lied and Wallenberg could still be alive.’

  In early 1979, responding to Simon’s public appeal for information about Wallenberg, the Soviet dissident Yuri Belov, freed from hard labour and deported from his native land, passed through Vienna and paid a call on Wiesenthal. Belov told Simon that, back in 1963 in a Soviet prison camp, he’d been working on a sanitary detail with a Hungarian prisoner. ‘The Hungarian took Belov to see an American communist who was dying of cancer in the prison hospital,’ Wiesenthal recounts. ‘The American had fled the [Senator Jos
eph] McCarthy era [of 1950s Red-hunts] in the US to escape possible jail and, soon after he settled in the workers’ paradise, he tried to organize a strike, so they threw him into the Lubyanka Prison and from there they sent him to the gulag. Like every foreign prisoner, Belov’s partner inquired after his own countrymen in case he could tell their families something if he ever went home, but the American said “No, I didn’t meet any Hungarians, but there was a diplomat in Lubyanka who’d been working in Hungary. I don’t remember his name, but he was Scandinavian – Swedish, I think. He made a hunger strike in one of the camps, so they brought him back to Butyrka Prison in Moscow and put him in the mental hospital.”’

  Wiesenthal asked Belov when the American had said he’d seen the Swede in Moscow. The answer was 1961. As he had with Meltzer, Wiesenthal took Belov to the Swedish Embassy to swear a deposition. Belov spent the next decade working for the International Society for Human Rights in Frankfurt cataloguing and protesting the misuses of psychiatry and other political persecution in the Soviet Union.

  Meltzer and Belov are two key witnesses Wiesenthal has produced to unlock the chain of lies surrounding Wallenberg’s undying existence, but he has also screened out many pretenders who come out of Russia hoping to use the name Wallenberg as a ticket to a toehold in the West. Though one or two may have been Soviet ‘disinformation’ artists – providing false clues which, when debunked, could discredit the whole Wallenberg quest – most were just, in Wiesenthal’s words, ‘crooks and confidence men without any confidence that they can survive on their own. Seventy years of revolution in Russia didn’t improve the people any. They are materialists who worship capitalism so much that they think if they say names like Rockefeller or Wallenberg some of their money will rub off on them. Sometimes I am flying especially to Israel to meet such people with their stories. But as soon as I ask them “Where were you with Wallenberg?”, they say to me “No, this is my secret. My life with Wallenberg will be in a book I am already writing, so I cannot tell you this. Later I let you write the preface.” So I cut the interview short and go spend a couple of days with my daughter and her family, who live in Israel.’