Raoul Wallenberg: The Diplomat Who Saved Budapest

In the summer of 1944, the Holocaust reached Hungary with a speed and scale that had no precedent. Between mid-May and early July, roughly 437,000 Jews were deported from the Hungarian countryside, the overwhelming majority of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were murdered on arrival. By July, only one large Jewish community in Hungary remained: the roughly 200,000 Jews of Budapest. It was into this city, on 9 July 1944, that a 31-year-old Swedish businessman with no diplomatic experience arrived, carrying a newly issued diplomatic passport and a list of names.

His name was Raoul Wallenberg. Over the next six months he would become one of the most consequential rescuers of the Holocaust, and then, in January 1945, he would vanish into Soviet custody and never be seen in freedom again. His story is one of extraordinary courage, of the power of paper and bluff against a machinery of murder, and of a mystery that remains unresolved more than eighty years later.

Hungary in 1944

Hungary had been an ally of Nazi Germany since 1940, and its Jewish population had already been stripped of rights, conscripted into brutal labor battalions, and in some cases deported. But until 1944 the Hungarian government of Miklós Horthy had refused German demands to hand over its Jews for mass murder. That changed on 19 March 1944, when German forces occupied the country. Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest within days to organize deportations, working with willing Hungarian officials and gendarmes.

The deportations from the provinces were carried out at a pace of up to 12,000 people a day. In early July, under mounting pressure from neutral governments, the Vatican, the Swedish king, and the United States, Horthy ordered them halted before Budapest's Jews could be sent east. The city's Jewish population had been granted a reprieve, but no one knew how long it would last.

It was at this moment that the American War Refugee Board, established by President Roosevelt in January 1944, sought a way to intervene directly. Sweden, as a neutral country with a legation in Budapest, offered a channel. The Swedish Foreign Ministry agreed to appoint a special envoy with a rescue mandate, and Wallenberg, who had traveled to Hungary on business and had family connections through the Wallenberg banking dynasty, was chosen for the post.

The Schutzpass

Wallenberg's most famous tool was a document he essentially invented. The Swedish legation had already been issuing a small number of provisional passports to Jews with connections to Sweden. Wallenberg redesigned the document as the Schutzpass, or protective pass: an impressive-looking certificate printed in blue and yellow, bearing the Swedish crown, official stamps, signatures, and a photograph of the holder. It declared that the bearer was under the protection of the Kingdom of Sweden and awaiting repatriation.

Legally, the document meant very little. Sweden had no obligation to the people named on it, and Hungary was under no obligation to honor it. But Wallenberg understood that both German and Hungarian officials had a deep respect for official-looking paperwork, and that in a bureaucracy of murder, the appearance of authority could be as effective as the substance. He negotiated with the Hungarian government for permission to issue 1,500 passes, then bargained the number up to 4,500. In practice, his office issued far more, and forged copies circulated in the tens of thousands.

He also built an organization. Within weeks, Wallenberg had recruited a staff of some 350 people, most of them Jews who were themselves protected by their employment at the legation. He rented more than thirty buildings in Pest, hung Swedish flags from their facades, and declared them Swedish territory. These "Swedish houses" eventually sheltered many thousands of people, packed into apartments in conditions of extreme overcrowding but beyond the reach, at least in principle, of deportation squads.

The Arrow Cross Terror

On 15 October 1944, Horthy announced on the radio that Hungary was seeking an armistice with the Allies. Within hours the Germans had deposed him and installed the Arrow Cross, Hungary's fascist party, under Ferenc Szálasi. The reprieve for Budapest's Jews ended immediately. Arrow Cross gangs roamed the city, dragging Jews from their homes, shooting them in the streets, or marching them to the banks of the Danube, where victims were ordered to remove their shoes before being shot into the river. The shoes became one of the enduring images of the Hungarian Holocaust, and today a memorial of cast-iron shoes stands on the embankment in Budapest.

In November, Eichmann resumed deportations, but with the rail lines to Auschwitz disrupted by the Soviet advance, he ordered tens of thousands of Jews to march on foot toward the Austrian border, some 200 kilometers away, in cold and rain and without adequate food. Thousands died on the road or were shot by their guards.

This was the period of Wallenberg's most direct and dangerous work. Survivors described him arriving at the marching columns and at the railway yards with lists of names, sometimes real and sometimes invented, and demanding the release of "his" Swedes. He climbed onto the roofs of train cars to pass Schutzpasses through the doors. He bluffed, threatened postwar prosecution, and bribed. He confronted armed Arrow Cross men with nothing but the moral authority of a neutral flag. Colleagues at the legation and in the Swiss, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vatican missions carried out similar rescues, and together the neutral legations created an "international ghetto" of protected houses that held perhaps 30,000 people.

The Last Weeks

By late December 1944, the Red Army had encircled Budapest, and the city was under siege. The Arrow Cross, knowing the end was near, grew more murderous rather than less. In the final days, plans reportedly circulated to massacre the roughly 70,000 Jews confined to the city's main ghetto. According to accounts from the period, Wallenberg conveyed a warning to the German commander, General Gerhard Schmidhuber, that he would be held personally responsible for the killing as a war criminal. The massacre did not take place. When Soviet troops reached the ghetto in mid-January 1945, they found it intact.

Historians differ on exactly how many people Wallenberg saved. The figure often cited is around 100,000, though this includes the ghetto's population and the work of many other rescuers. More conservative estimates attribute tens of thousands of lives directly to his operation. By any measure, the number is among the largest achieved by any individual during the Holocaust.

Disappearance

On 17 January 1945, Wallenberg left Budapest under Soviet escort, telling colleagues he was traveling to meet the Soviet commander at Debrecen to discuss postwar relief for the city's survivors. He was never seen again in freedom. The Soviets arrested him on suspicion of espionage, and he was transferred to Lubyanka prison in Moscow.

For years the Soviet government denied any knowledge of him. In 1957 it produced a document claiming that he had died of a heart attack in Lubyanka on 17 July 1947. The claim has never been independently verified. Fellow prisoners reported encounters with a Swedish diplomat in Soviet camps well into the 1950s and beyond, and a Swedish-Russian working group that examined the case in the 1990s concluded that the truth had not been established. In 2016, Sweden formally declared him dead, with the date fixed by legal convention, not by evidence.

Legacy

Wallenberg's memory has been honored around the world. Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations in 1963. In 1981 he became only the second person, after Winston Churchill, to be made an honorary citizen of the United States, through legislation introduced by Congressman Tom Lantos, who was himself a Budapest survivor sheltered in a Swedish house. Streets, schools, and monuments bear his name in Budapest, Stockholm, London, New York, Jerusalem, and dozens of other cities.

His story endures because of what it says about the power of an individual in the face of a system built to make individuals feel powerless. Wallenberg had no army and no legal authority. He had a printing press, a flag, a staff of frightened but determined volunteers, and a willingness to look armed men in the eye and refuse to accept that the people in front of him were already dead. It was enough to save tens of thousands. And it was, in the end, not enough to save himself.