Raoul Wallenberg was 31 years old, the scion of one of Sweden's most prominent banking families, with no previous diplomatic experience, when he arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944. Hungary's 437,000 Jews had already been largely deported — approximately 320,000 to 330,000 had been sent to Auschwitz since May, where most were killed within hours of arrival. Wallenberg's assignment, under a joint Swedish-American humanitarian operation funded partly by the War Refugee Board, was to do whatever could be done for those who remained.
What he did in the next six months has no real equivalent in the history of the war.
The Schutzpass
Wallenberg's first invention was purely bureaucratic. The Schutzpass — Swedish for "protective pass" — was a document he designed himself: an impressive-looking official form bearing the Swedish crown, stamps, and signatures that declared the bearer to be under the protection of the Swedish legation, pending emigration to Sweden. It had no legal standing under international law. Adolf Eichmann, who was running the Hungarian deportations, knew it had no legal standing. It didn't matter. The document looked official. When presented at the right moment to the right German or Arrow Cross official, it worked.
Wallenberg had 5,000 authorized. He issued tens of thousands. He forged the excess himself or had them forged under his supervision. Other neutral diplomats — Swiss, Portuguese, Spanish, Vatican — adopted similar approaches after watching his results.
He established thirty-two Swedish "safe houses" throughout Budapest, buildings declared extraterritorial Swedish property and used to house Jews with protective papers. At the peak, these houses sheltered approximately 15,000 people.
The Trains
The deportations resumed in October 1944 with the Arrow Cross fascist coup. Eichmann, who had been preparing to leave Hungary, returned. The deportations now moved by foot march toward Austria — tens of thousands of people marched in winter through mud and cold, many dying along the way.
Wallenberg drove alongside these marches in his yellow Studebaker, distributing Schutzpasses from the car window, pulling out people who had papers, arguing with SS officers about their authority to hold Swedish-protected persons, sometimes succeeding through sheer force of personality and refusal to accept the word "no."
He appeared at rail yards where deportees were being loaded into cattle cars. He climbed on top of the cars and walked across them, passing protective documents in through the ventilation slats. German officers screamed at him to stop. He screamed back. He pulled people off the trains. He was shot at on at least one occasion. He drove away and went to the next train.
January 17, 1945
When Soviet forces entered Budapest in January 1945, completing its liberation from German and Arrow Cross control, Wallenberg went to meet the Soviet commander to discuss the humanitarian situation of the city's Jewish population. On January 17, 1945, he drove to Soviet headquarters at Debrecen.
He was never seen as a free man again.
The Soviet Union arrested him, transported him to Moscow, and held him as a prisoner. The official Soviet explanation changed repeatedly: first they denied knowing anything about him, then they stated he had died of a heart attack in Lubyanka Prison on July 17, 1947. This was almost certainly a cover story for his execution or death under interrogation, though the precise circumstances remain unknown.
For decades after the war, Soviet officials refused to provide evidence of when he died or where he was buried. His family spent forty years seeking information. The Swedish government spent forty years being told nothing of substance. His mother and stepfather died without knowing what had happened to him.
He was declared legally dead by Sweden in 2016, seventy-one years after his arrest. His fate remains one of the most significant unsolved diplomatic questions of the postwar period — the man who saved 100,000 lives, taken by the power that liberated the country he saved them in.
Sources & Further Reading
Kati Marton, "Wallenberg: Missing Hero" (Arcade Publishing, 1995); Swedish Foreign Ministry White Book on Raoul Wallenberg (Stockholm, 2001); Yad Vashem Righteous Among Nations file.
