Hungary was the last place in Nazi-occupied Europe where Jews were to be found in significant numbers in the closing stages of the Second World War. Some 725,000 believed that with the advance of Soviet forces, as the Red Army was driving the Germans back across Eastern Europe, they might escape the fate that had befallen their brethren. Then, in March 1944, SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest charged with the task of murdering them.
Eichmann was obsessed with achieving the biological extermination of the Jewish race. He abhorred the idea that upon arrival at Auschwitz, some were spared immediate death if they were deemed capable of slave labour. The first deportations commenced in May 1944. In just 46 days, 300,000 Hungarian Jews were shot or gassed. By June, 12,000 were being transported to Auschwitz each day to end up as ash on the crematorium floor.
Eichmann was being entirely candid when he told a colleague that “Jewish death lists are my favourite reading matter before I go to sleep.” There was nothing banal about his evil. He was inconsolable when Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, tried to suspend further transportations in July 1944. And he raged when ordered by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, to stop. Denied the means to convey his quarry by cattle truck, Eichmann instead ordered Hungary’s remaining Jews be marched to the Slovakian border and from there to the death camps of Poland.
Raul Wallenberg, the 32-year-old scion of a powerful Swedish Lutheran dynasty of bankers and diplomats, arrived in Budapest in July 1944 with a mission to save the Jews of Budapest. In one of the Second World War’s most courageous acts of subterfuge, he exploited the Nazi weakness for bureaucracy by inventing the Schutzpass, a blue and yellow document adorned with the Swedish three crowns emblem. It had no authority in international law but purported to provide the bearer with the official protection of the neutral Swedish legation.
Alex Kershaw, who worked for The Guardian, Independent and Sunday Times before turning his hand to books, describes in this intensely moving, graphic and skilfully researched study, the extraordinary story of how Wallenberg succeeded in saving 100,000 Jews from certain death. Financed with $200,000 from the Washington-based War Refugees Board, Wallenberg established a network of dozens of Swedish safe houses, hospitals and orphanages. He freed Jews by penetrating the convoys of slave labourers and deportees and bribing their Nazi guards.
Upon learning that hundreds of Jews had been rounded up at the Dohani Street Synagogue in central Budapest, he marched in and simply ordered the SS guards to release them, claiming them as Swedish citizens. Kershaw describes how Wallenberg received information that General August Schmidhuber, commander of German forces in Budapest, had amassed 500 troops to liquidate the Budapest ghetto. Wallenberg confronted the general and threatened that he would be hanged as a war criminal if a massacre ensued. Schmidhuber desisted.
But whereas German officers often cowered under the pseudo-diplomatic legality of Wallenberg’s threats, their Hungarian accomplices were not so amenable. Kershaw contends, with justification, that Hitler’s Hungarian accomplices were the most enthusiastic of all German collaborators. Lieutenant Colonel László Ferenczy instructed his gendarmerie to torture Jewish children in order to compel their parents to reveal hidden valuables. This study contains horrific accounts of drunken Fascist members of the Arrow Cross raiding Swedish and Red Cross safe houses and murdering Jewish toddlers who had been offered sanctuary.
After Admiral Horthy’s forced abdication, Arrow Cross members celebrated by wrenching hundreds of Jews from their homes and slaughtering them in the streets. Slave labourers were marched to the banks of the Danube, shot and thrown into the river. All Arrow Cross members were obliged to partake in torture and murder sessions which served as a test of their loyalty to the cause. Their ranks included the notorious Minorite monk, Father Andreas Kun, who, clad in a black cassock, admitted to having butchered 500 Jews with his revolver. Kershaw describes how Wallenberg sought to personally confront Arrow Cross leaders by marching into their Varoshaz Street headquarters. In the basement he heard the screams of tortured, raped and disfigured Jews and saw how the drains had been blocked with clotted blood.
Kershaw provides poignant testimony from those whom Wallenberg saved. One stated that Wallenberg “gave us back our dignity, our humanity, here was someone who thought we were human beings worth saving.” Another remarked that he “radiated power and dignity. There was truly a kind of divine aura about him.”
Following Hungary’s liberation by the Red Army, Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet NKVD officers and transported to Moscow. The reason for his arrest has remained an enigma. Kershaw, citing reputable sources, suggests that Wallenberg may have been privy to intelligence pointing to Soviet involvement in the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. Others suggest that the Russians unsuccessfully tried to recruit him as an agent. By 1979, Wallenberg’s parents, having spent decades searching in vain for their son, lost all hope and took their own lives.
Kershaw also recounts the pursuit of Eichmann by Mossad. Hunted down and kidnapped in Buenos Aires, he was brought to trial in Israel and is the only person to have been sentenced to death by an Israeli court. His ashes were scattered over the Mediterranean so as not to poison Israeli soil.
Tom Lantos, a United States Congressman, was one of the Jewish survivors. One of his first acts upon election was to introduce a bill conferring honorary US citizenship upon Raul Wallenberg. The bill was passed unanimously in 1981. Sir Winston Churchill was the only other recipient of this honour. President Reagan eulogised Wallenberg as a man whose accomplishments were of “biblical proportions.”
Kershaw, who has also written Blood and Champagne about the life and times of Robert Capa, The Longest Winter about the Battle of the Bulge, and The Few about the Battle of Britain, observes the irony of how Wallenberg, one of the greatest heroes of the Holocaust, became one of the most famous victims of Stalin’s terror.
