Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust Read online

  JOHN BIERMAN

  Righteous Gentile

  The story of Raoul Wallenberg, missing hero of the Holocaust

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE: Holocaust

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART TWO: Gulag

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Illustrations

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Bierman was a journalist and biographer who for twenty-five years covered trouble spots all over the world for major news organizations in Britain, the USA and Canada. For ten years he was a staff correspondent for BBC Television News and the BBC World Service, and spent much of that time in the Middle East, where he discovered the story of Raoul Wallenberg, then virtually unknown. After the Wallenberg book, first published in 1981, he later published ten major biographies, including a book on the French Emperor Napoleon III, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and Laszlo Almasy, the real ‘English Patient’. He also co-authored two books with journalist Colin Smith, including Alamein, War Without Hate, now available as a Penguin ebook.

  John Bierman died in his home in Cyprus in 2006, leaving his wife Hilary and their son Jonathan, and three children from his first marriage.

  For Jonathan,

  so that

  he should know the best there is to know –

  and the worst.

  Author’s Note

  For those – and they must be very few by now – who need reminding, Raoul Wallenberg was a pseudo-diplomat who left the safety of neutral Sweden and went to Nazi-dominated Hungary in the summer of 1944 on a seemingly impossible mission. There, he managed, through a combination of courage, determination, guile and cunning, to rescue upwards of 20,000 Jews (some claim as many as 100,000) from the Nazi gas chambers. After that, he was taken prisoner by the advancing Red Army and was swallowed up in Stalin’s Gulag, never to emerge.

  Together with Oskar Schindler, Wallenberg is the best known of that small band of Righteous Gentiles, as the Israelis call them, who stood up to Nazi barbarism and saved significant numbers of Jews from the death camps, thereby demonstrating that lone individuals can, indeed, make a difference.

  It would be hard to imagine two individuals more different than Wallenberg and Schindler – the Swede quiet, serious and idealistic, the Sudeten German flashy, lecherous and opportunistic. Yet they had one very important attribute in common: a fundamental decency that made it impossible for them to stand by and let the Nazis get on unimpeded with the ghastly business of genocide. Remarkably, it was only many years after the end of World War II that the names of Wallenberg and Schindler came to the attention of the Western public. Schindler, of course, was made famous by Thomas Keneally’s Booker prize-winning novel* Schindler’s Ark (1983) and by Steven Spielberg’s memorable film Schindler’s List (1993), based on Keneally’s book.

  In the case of Wallenberg, Righteous Gentile – and a television documentary I made on the same subject for the BBC – played a similar if somewhat less emphatic role. When I was researching the book and filming the documentary during 1979–80, Wallenberg’s name was virtually unknown, so far as the general public was concerned, outside his native Sweden. I myself had never heard of Wallenberg until, while working as a BBC correspondent in Israel, I chanced across a brief and intriguing reference to him in the Jerusalem Post in the summer of 1979.

  The subsequent screening of the BBC film in a number of English-speaking countries in 1980 and the publication of the book in Britain and the United States the following year helped to make Wallenberg’s heroic deeds during the Holocaust, and his disappearance into the Soviet prison system, known throughout the world.

  A closed-circuit showing of the BBC documentary to members of the US Congress in the spring of 1981 helped persuade an overwhelming majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to vote for a bill conferring honorary US citizenship on Wallenberg, the only foreigner apart from Sir Winston Churchill ever to receive it. That measure, signed into law by the newly elected president Ronald Reagan in a ceremony at the White House, had a more than symbolic purpose. Its sponsors hoped it would put some diplomatic muscle behind US efforts to get the Kremlin to disclose the truth about Wallenberg’s fate. They wanted to know not just the how, when and why of his purported death in Soviet captivity, but to test the possibility that he might still be alive somewhere in the Gulag, and if so to secure his release.

  Compelling evidence led many people – including myself – to believe it just possible that Wallenberg could have survived three and a half decades of incarceration and that even in the intense Cold War atmosphere of the early 1980s it might be possible to rescue him, in however pitiable a condition, to spend his last years in freedom with friends and family.

  Another fifteen years on, it is well-nigh impossible to hold on to that belief. After all, if still alive Wallenberg would be eighty-three, which is some ten years longer than the average life span of Western men, even under comfortable conditions. And the collapse of Soviet Communism, with the emptying of the prison camps and the admission by the Russians of crimes of far greater magnitude than the wrongful imprisonment of one individual, however noble, has failed to produce a clue to his whereabouts.

  None the less, a small band of surviving siblings, old friends and colleagues, and younger admirers not only believe but declare their conviction that he has survived and is alive – perhaps under an imposed false identity – somewhere in the vastness of post-Communist Russia. Their fervour must be respected, even if it cannot be shared. Certainly, this tireless band of true believers deserves support and encouragement in its unremitting efforts to find out exactly what did happen to this remarkable man while in Soviet captivity. For the tantalizing fact remains that, so far, not one scrap of documentary evidence has surfaced to support the Russians’ official assurances that, regrettably, he died in custody during the bad old Stalinist days. Against this, a formidable body of circumstantial evidence exists to suggest that Wallenberg was alive, somewhere in the Gulag, well into the 1970s and perhaps beyond.

  For reasons which remain obscure, the Soviet official file on Wallenberg was destroyed and all that remain, scattered here and there throughout the compendious but poorly organized Kremlin archives, opened to investigators since Gorbachev began the process of liberalization which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union, are tantalizing hints and ambiguous references.

  In some dusty corner of those archives the definitive document may yet be found which discloses when, where, on whose orders and by what means Raoul Wallenberg, the saviour of so many, met his end. Meanwhile, his fate remains one of the most poignant and disturbing mysteries of the Cold War, just as his deeds during the Holocaust remain among the most inspiring achievements of the World War that preceded it.

  Paphos, Cyprus.

  June 1995

  PART ONE

  Holocaust

  P
rologue

  Early in March 1944, Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann was supervising the construction of a hostel for Gestapo officers on a site some fifty miles from Berlin. The work was being carried out by a group of Jews brought in from the ‘model’ concentration camp at Theresienstadt, and Eichmann, who knew almost nothing of building or construction, had not much to do apart from keeping an overall eye on the work force and ensuring that the Jewish engineers and their labourers performed their task with appropriate zeal.

  Eichmann was disgruntled. This was not the kind of work for which he had joined the SS and clambered up through the ranks to achieve the status of lieutenant-colonel in charge of Department IV-B-4 of the Reichssicherheitshauptampt (RSHA), better known as the Gestapo and SD. Nor was it the proper work of his department, which was responsible for ‘Jewish Affairs and Deportation,’ a euphemism for the concentration, deportation, and extermination of the Jews of occupied Europe and the satellites and allies of the Nazis. That task, however, was virtually completed and life had subsequently lost some of its sparkle for Adolf Eichmann. He had already, with great efficiency and dispatch, cleared as many Jews as could be found alive from Germany and Austria, from France, Belgium, Holland, and all the other countries Germany had overrun, and from the satellite and allied states such as Rumania and Bulgaria. To his chagrin he had been denied access to the areas of most densely concentrated Jewish population under Nazi rule – Poland and the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. And now, it seemed, there was nothing fulfilling for him to do.

  However, there was still one country within the Nazi sphere of influence which had a substantial Jewish population. In Hungary, more than three-quarters of a million Jews still lived in comparative safety, thanks to the vacillation of the regent, Miklós Horthy. Though he had little love for them, Horthy could not quite bring himself to allow ‘his’ Jews to be subjected to Hitler’s Final Solution – especially since he now believed that his Nazi allies were bound to lose the war.

  The secret instructions brought to Eichmann that day by his immediate boss, SS Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, were to change all that. Bearing the signature of SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler himself, these instructions told him to leave the building site forthwith and ready himself and a Sondereinsatzkommando, a special action group, to leave for Hungary on short notice. That country was about to be taken over by the Germans to enforce the total obedience of Horthy, their increasingly reluctant ally. A matter of top priority was Horthy’s compliance with the demands for the Final Solution of the Jewish problem. Eichmann and the Kommando, which he would personally lead, were to organize the concentration and deportation of the Hungarian Jews in the quickest possible time.

  Eichmann was elated. This was the ‘big job’ that would re-establish his reputation in the Nazi hierarchy as an organizational genius – perhaps bringing him his long-awaited promotion to the rank of full colonel, and a decoration besides. It would also give him a chance to outshine in speed and volume the achievement of his fellow-SS Obersturmbannführer, Hans Hoffle, who had organized the deportation to the death camps of Warsaw’s five hundred thousand Jews.

  On a less exalted level, it would give him the opportunity for a brief reunion with his wife, Vera, and their three small sons – Klaus, Horst, and Dieter – for he had to proceed first to the Gestapo concentration camp at Mauthausen, not far from his home in Linz. Although relations with Vera were not good, mainly because of his relentless womanizing, Eichmann enjoyed the company of his two older boys. He could also look forward to the good fellowship of a big reunion with his departmental assistants, now dotted about Europe, who were all coming to Mauthausen to be briefed on the forthcoming operation in Hungary.

  That spring of 1944, Raoul Gustav Wallenberg also felt discontent. At thirty-one, he had lost his way. A gifted descendant of a rich and influential dynasty, a man brought up in the assurance that he had the background and personal qualities to do great things, he nevertheless found himself focusing his considerable talents on the importation of goose breasts and pickled cucumbers and the exportation of smoked salmon and cods’ roes – this at a time when the Great Powers were locked in combat and events were unfolding that would shape the future for generations in Europe.

  Spring came quite a bit later to Wallenberg in neutral Stockholm than it had come to Eichmann near Berlin, five hundred miles further south, and so did the call to Budapest. Walpurgis Night, 30 April, is traditionally the start of spring in Sweden – supposedly the end of seven cold, dark months, but all too often merely a continuation of seemingly endless winter. But in 1944 a warm spring arrived on schedule and Wallenberg and his friends – a charmed circle of privileged young people in a haven of neutrality – celebrated it that night.

  The next day Wallenberg and his friend Magnus von Platen lunched al fresco with two pretty girls in Stockholm’s Djurgorden Park.

  Jeanette von Heidenstam, Wallenberg’s girl friend at the time – later to become a celebrated Swedish television personality – recalls the relaxed mood of that day, the brass band playing Viennese waltzes, the students strolling by in their white caps, and blue and white anemones smothering the grass in the park. ‘It was a joyful day, everything just perfect – or so it seems to me looking back – a day of pure delight in an atmosphere of joy and youth, without a fear for the future.

  ‘We had a marvellous lunch, and then we lay in the grass, among the flowers, and talked and talked, and laughed a lot. I can’t remember what we talked about. All I can remember is that sense of bliss at the release from winter, and of delight in each other’s company.’

  Jeanette von Heidenstam also remembers vividly the last day of that magical May, when she received her first proposal of marriage. It was from Wallenberg. He took her to Drottningholm, on the outskirts of Stockholm, where there is a superb theatre, rather like a miniature Versailles, set in a park. ‘We walked hand in hand for a while, then sat by the lake drinking coffee among the little white tables, and suddenly Raoul took my hand and said, “I would very much like you to marry me.”

  ‘I was confused. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t exactly refuse him, but said something about being very young. I was only eighteen to his thirty-one, and I didn’t yet know what I wanted in life, except that I had ambitions to be an actress or something of the kind and was not at all ready for marriage. I liked him very much and felt tremendously flattered by his proposal, but somehow he didn’t overwhelm me, otherwise I might have said Yes. He never asked me again. Some time later he phoned me to say he was going to Budapest on a mission for the government. He didn’t say what kind of mission it was, though I remember him saying it might be very dangerous. He left shortly after that and I never saw him again.’

  It was only a few days after Wallenberg proposed to Jeanette that he was unexpectedly given the chance he had perhaps been waiting for – the chance to do something more purposeful and worthy of his talents than dealing in delicatessen imports and exports. Would he be interested, he was asked, in going to Budapest to organize and run a humanitarian department at the Swedish legation? It was felt that this was a job that might best be done by someone who was not a professional diplomat, although he would be given full diplomatic status to carry out his mission.

  The task of the new department would be to extend the protection of the Swedish crown to as many as possible of Hungary’s Jews, who were now in danger of falling victim to the same Nazi savagery that had engulfed their co-religionists elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe.

  That neutral Sweden should feel compelled to act, however belatedly, on behalf of the Jews of Europe was a radical departure; that it should choose such an apparently unlikely agent for that purpose was exceptional. But from the moment Wallenberg was offered the job – though he was to question, argue, and haggle over the conditions under which he would take it on – he was committed to it and all thoughts of marriage were abandoned.

  The man had met the mission and they were to prove perfectly matched, mu
ch more so than the mandarins of the Swedish Foreign Office could have imagined.

  Chapter 1

  On 12 March 1944 all the SS officers of Eichmann’s Department IV-B-4 were assembled at Mauthausen. There was no time to lose, Eichmann told them. Operation Margarethe, the German occupation of Hungary, was to be launched in seven days. It would be quick and, if at all possible, bloodless. The Eichmann Kommando would go in with the army and begin work immediately. Eichmann outlined a provisional programme for his subordinates. Hungary would be cleared province by province, from east to west, leaving Budapest to the last, and the whole operation would be completed in record time. ‘Now the turn of Hungary has come. It will be a deportation surpassing every preceding operation in magnitude.’ But he cautioned: ‘For the time being I just want to finish off the prominent Jews; but at the same time I want to make sure that the political and economic life of Hungary is not interfered with, because the Wehrmacht depends on the stability of these institutions.’

  On 18 March Dieter Wisliceny and Hermann Krumey, Eichmann’s principal lieutenants, left Mauthausen at the head of a convoy of 30 vehicles to link up with the German invasion force. Eichmann stayed behind to celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday, 19 March, at home and then followed on at the head of a 120-vehicle convoy. This unit was integrated with the Wehrmacht’s columns for their show-of-force parade through Budapest.

  Then Eichmann went to the five-star Hotel Majestic, which had been commandeered by the SS. For all his dedicated professionalism and devotion to duty, Eichmann was a man who liked his creature comforts. In addition to hard work, there would be the Hapsburg-style luxury of Budapest’s Majestic and its superb dining-room to look forward to. He would have his horses and his dogs. And there would be wine and women – the best that Europe had to offer.