As the preceding chapter stated, the purpose of this book is not to provide (yet) another biography of Raoul Wallenberg, but rather to show how knowledge about his life has influenced the formation of legends about him and to examine the effects that his elevation to the status of a role model have had on the selection of particularly significant events in his life. From this reasoning it follows that certain episodes from his life, especially those linked to his activities in Budapest in 1944–1945, are also discussed in subsequent chapters. The account presented here therefore makes no claim to be a comprehensive depiction of his life from the cradle to the (unknown) grave. Instead, it contains three main elements, one of which consists of some important milestones in his life. The other two deal with developments in Hungary in the half-century preceding the disaster there in 1944–1945 and with the US initiative known as the War Refugee Board, which, together with the Swedish Foreign Office (Utrikesdepartementet, UD), was Wallenberg’s sponsor and funder.

As was pointed out above, the story of Raoul Wallenberg is one with no definite conclusion. Its beginning, though, is well known – a childhood and adolescence as a member of one of Sweden’s most prominent families. In the second half of the nineteenth century, André Oscar Wallenberg had made the Wallenberg name famous in the world of finance. Before that, the family had left a mark on the activities of the Swedish Lutheran State Church. Shipping had been another family activity ever since Jacob Wallenberg’s service as a ship’s chaplain in 1769, an experience he wrote about in My Son on the Galley (1781, English translation 1994).

In the early twentieth century it was the turn of Raoul Wallenberg’s father, Raoul Oscar Wallenberg, to sign on. On 18 March 1910, two days before the second lieutenant was due to embark on a long sea tour, he plucked up his courage and paid a visit to the famous neurology professor Per Johan Wising and his wife Sophie Benedick. He had spent quite some time with their young and beautiful daughter, Maj Wising, and had fallen in love. His feelings were reciprocated and the young couple received her parents’ blessing. The marriage took place on 27 September 1911. Less than a year later, on 4 August 1912, young Raoul was born.

Raoul Oscar Wallenberg, however, never saw his son, having died of cancer three months earlier. As a single parent, Maj played a major role in her son’s upbringing and education, as did his maternal grandmother and his cosmopolitan paternal grandfather, Gustaf Wallenberg. Following a family quarrel Gustaf had left the banking business, which instead came under the influence of his brothers. The alternative for him was diplomacy, and he spent a long career serving in China, Japan, and Turkey. The great geographical distances did not prevent Gustaf from maintaining continuous contact with Raoul through letters.¹

In 1918 Maj Wallenberg married Fredrik von Dardel, who was head of the Swedish medical board, and the family was blessed with Raoul’s younger half-siblings Nina and Guy. Raoul grew up in central Stockholm, which was bustling with activity in the late 1920s. The many new buildings, especially in the central parts of the city, sparked his interest in architecture.

After completing school and his military service, Raoul began his great adventures. In letters to his grandson, Gustaf Wallenberg repeatedly stressed the great importance of perspectives and experiences from abroad, particularly because they could function as good alternatives to the Swedish ‘laissez-faire’ system that belittled ‘the individual resilience of men, especially the young, exposing them to temptations that are mathematically certain to have disastrous consequences’.² Raoul took his grandfather’s advice and was well served by his linguistic talent. He studied in the south of France, but on the advice of his grandfather then headed west. The United States, which Gustaf had visited in the late nineteenth century, was very different from the Old World. In Sweden, his grandfather asserted, education was militaristic and archaic. Young people were forced into compartments early on and told to wait their turn ‘to give or take whatever circumstances might call for’. The result was that Swedes as a people learned to march at a moderate pace, always retaining their place in line. The contrast with the United States was striking, Gustaf argued. There, young men were expected to take the initiative and make the best of a situation, whatever the odds, and this led to a healthy curiosity and an unfailing go-getter attitude. These were qualities he wanted Raoul to have the opportunity to acquire – not at one of the finer universities but at the ‘people’s’ university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Raoul studied from 1931 to 1935.³ The grandson’s impressions did not quite match his grandfather’s experiences at the end of the previous century, mostly because the technological and economic differences between the two countries were no longer as marked. This did not preclude Raoul from understanding that Gustaf’s intention for his grandson’s visit to the United States was not to learn how to build skyscrapers, but ‘to acquire a desire to build them!’ and to get a taste of the ‘American spirit’ that lay behind the nation’s many successes.⁴

After returning from the US, the 23-year-old Raoul Wallenberg followed his grandfather’s advice and went to South Africa, where he represented the Swedish African Company. For seven months he travelled around the country selling all kinds of goods. His insights into South African society led to reflections on nature, culture, and ethnic tensions.⁵

The next stop on his journey was Haifa in Palestine, where he worked in a bank. The atmosphere between the bank manager and the employees was tense. Raoul sided with the latter, who felt they were being exploited, but he still received a good reference from the bank management. During his time in Haifa, he came into contact with Jews who had fled Hitler’s henchmen. Through their stories he received detailed descriptions of what was happening in Nazi Germany. It was an experience that would become significant to his future.

After his stay in the Middle East, Raoul once more returned to Stockholm. Gustaf Wallenberg died in 1937, and the international banking career he had planned for his grandson had not yet been realized. Raoul’s architectural training was not valid in Sweden, and he had no plans to return to university studies. He began working at the Wallenberg-owned Enskilda Bank, but to his great frustration no offer of permanent employment materialized. His setbacks in the banking world do not appear to have affected his social status in Stockholm in the late 1930s and early 1940s, though. He was known as a good host who liked to arrange ‘small’ social gatherings. One visitor described one of these events as more of a ‘splendid dinner’, not least owing to the fine wines that were served.⁶

Idleness seems not to have been an option for Raoul, and he soon moved on from banking. Through the agency of his paternal uncle and godfather, Jakob Wallenberg, Raoul obtained a post with a company called Mellaneuropeiska Handels AB, which specialized in food imports from France and Hungary and was owned by Kálman Lauer. As a Hungarian Jew, Lauer could not move freely in Central Europe, and so Raoul had to make many trips there.⁷

From antisemitism to extermination

While the persecution of Jews in Hungary had long been well known, it had not always existed. Antisemitism has deep roots in much of Europe, but from the late nineteenth century until the end of the First World War, Hungary had been something of an exception, although antisemitism did persist alongside more or less successful attempts to curb it. At the times when there was broad support for social inclusion, that attitude helped encourage both Christian and Jewish Hungarians to view Hungarian national identity favourably. One way to further strengthen this identity was by helping minorities to become part of a Hungarian community. A concrete result of this manifest political desire was that many Jews were assimilated, and the Jewish religion was accorded equal status with other faiths.⁸ At the same time, secularized Jews – especially in Budapest, with its Jewish population of more than 20 percent – worked in various ways to be accepted as fully fledged Hungarians. Some of their Christian compatriots did not look kindly on such initiatives. In the second half of the nineteenth century, conservatives in Hungary argued that Jewish emancipation was a threat to national homogeneity and cohesion. Another argument was that commercially successful Jews – in some parts of the Hungarian countryside, the word ‘shopkeeper’ became synonymous with ‘Jew’ – were representatives of capitalism, which by its very nature was harmful and incompatible with traditional Hungarian national values. According to this view, the Hungarian nation was particularly vulnerable in the capital, which was considered ‘too Jewish’. This belief resulted in an antisemitic play on words, as the first part of the capital’s name was replaced by the German word ‘Jude’ to create ‘Judapest’.⁹

Antisemitism in Hungary was fuelled by the collapse of the Habsburg Empire after the First World War and in the wake of the Armistice of November 1918. The deterioration of the Jews’ situation was particularly marked in Eastern and Central Europe, where the ensuing years saw continued strife in the form of territorial conflicts, often combined with Communist offensives to the west. The ultimate goal of the revolutionary troops was a world revolution, affirmed Leon Trotsky, organizer and leader of the Red Army. The presence in the ranks of the Red revolutionaries of Jews such as Béla Kun, the leader of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, helped to fuel antisemitic sentiments. The loss of large parts of Hungary’s population and territory under the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 added to the crisis. One ‘solution’ to the problem, supported across the political spectrum, was a renewed belief in ‘Christian values’ as the foundation of the nation. These were on a collision course with continued Jewish assimilation, and together with Communists, Jews became scapegoats in a radicalized social climate. In 1920, Hungary became the first nation in Europe to introduce anti-Jewish laws after the First World War.¹⁰

Valdemar Langlet had been living in Hungary since the early 1930s. In a book about the country, written for a Swedish audience and published in 1934, he depicted the heightened ethnic divisions of the interwar years in a single sentence: ‘For the Jew, opposition to Christians is a religious matter; for most Magyars, by contrast, it is a racial issue.’¹¹ With this in mind, it is scarcely surprising that the Hungarian government, inspired by the German Nuremberg Laws of 1935, introduced three sets of anti-Jewish laws in the period 1938–1941. Under these laws, Jews were not allowed to exceed 20 percent of employees in a long list of business activities; criteria were established for what constituted a Jew; and finally, marriage between Jews and non-Jews was banned.¹²

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, in what was codenamed Operation Barbarossa, Hungary fought alongside the Germans. Afterwards, some 16,000 Jews who had no record of Hungarian citizenship were deported. They were shot dead in Ukraine by soldiers of the SS and the Hungarian army. About 2,000 Hungarian Jews who had also been deported managed to escape and returned to Hungary, where they spread information about the genocide taking place in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union. In January 1942, units of the Hungarian army massacred Serbs and Jews in Novi Sad, located in a part of Yugoslavia occupied by Hungary. In addition, tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were forced to serve unarmed in work units, often in the immediate vicinity of battlegrounds. Diaries written by Hungarian officers and soldiers rarely referred to these Jews but when they did, it was often in the context of what antisemitic propaganda termed ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’. The main argument was that most Jews were Bolsheviks, that is, they were allies of the Soviet enemy.¹³ In all likelihood, this and other antisemitic ideas contributed to the difficult conditions of the Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers on the Eastern Front. Over 40,000 of them perished in the Soviet Union, and 4,000 died as forced labourers in Serbian copper mines. The 5,000 or so who survived and were sent back to Hungary also spread the word about the mass murder occurring on the Eastern Front. Similar information was passed on by Polish-Jewish refugees, who were given sanctuary in Hungary in 1942–1944. However, as Yehuda Bauer and others have noted, willingness to listen was very limited, mainly because many Jews were Hungarian nationalists who could not imagine that anything similar to what was taking place in the Soviet Union could ever happen to Jews in Hungary. Another factor was serious divisions among Jews in Hungary, but the awareness that their position was extremely vulnerable mattered more than anything else: ‘They were caught on an island in shark-infested waters, and they had no boat. If the island was flooded, they were doomed.’¹⁴

Despite the obvious antisemitism in Hungary, the Horthy regime under Miklós Kállay, who was Prime Minister from 1942 to 1944, refused to agree to German demands – supported by hard-line Hungarian antisemites – for ‘the final solution to the Jewish question’ by deporting the nation’s Jews to extermination camps in Poland. The Hungarian government’s reluctance to give in to German demands was reinforced by the reversal of the fortunes of war after several German military defeats in 1942–1943, the most notable being the Battle of Stalingrad. Adolf Hitler’s dissatisfaction over Hungary’s failure to do enough in the ‘crusade’ against Communism was made very clear at a couple of meetings between the two leaders in 1943–1944. Another stumbling block was the German leader’s view that the Hungarians were not cooperating sufficiently on ‘the Jewish question’. The result was that German troops entered Hungary, paving the way for a form of control similar to that in Norway. This involved the installation of a government that was pro-German, fascist, and comprised of local members.¹⁵

The British historian David Cesarani argues that the German takeover of Hungary was not primarily and directly due to ‘the final solution of the Jewish question’. Nor should the attacks on Hungary’s Jews be seen as the result of an irrational hatred that took resources away from the German war effort in an already strained situation. There were several strategic reasons for the Germans to militarily ‘secure’ Hungary. In addition, the Hungarian peace overtures, launched after several of the nation’s leaders became convinced that Germany was losing the war, were no secret to Berlin. Preventing the Hungarians from following the Italian example, with the aim of reaching a separate peace with the Soviet Union or otherwise withdrawing from the war – perhaps after a British airborne landing – was therefore a high-priority German objective. The Jews ‘represented untapped potential’, as they could first be plundered and then become a welcome partial solution to the ever-increasing need for slave labour.¹⁶ German researchers have stressed that the incorporation of Hungary and the subsequent persecution of Jews were motivated by military priorities but even more by economic ones. The extent of the German seizure of Hungarian Jewish assets and the impact of the loss of Jewish labour on the Hungarian economy have been a point of contention between German and Hungarian scholars in recent years.¹⁷

Whatever the German reasons behind the invasion of Hungary, the result was devastating for Hungary’s Jews. A new Hungarian government was formed, and its ministers included a number of well-known right-wing politicians who were also outspoken antisemites. Within days, the strongly antisemitic Arrow Cross movement was legalized. SS officer Adolf Eichmann only commanded about a hundred men in the Sondereinsatzkommando (special taskforce) he led. They were certainly experienced and had a reputation for being ‘effective’, but without active Hungarian help their mission could not have been carried out. They were strongly supported by Hungarian politicians in the new government as well as by the Hungarian police. Soon after the transfer of power, stricter anti-Jewish legislation was passed, making it compulsory for Jews in Hungary to openly wear the Star of David. A further step was the appointment of two explicitly antisemitic secretaries of state, who paved the way for the German extermination policy. By the beginning of April, work on rounding up Jews was in full swing. It was motivated on the Hungarian side by a conviction that the confiscation of Jewish property would improve matters, as the fact that it had not been done before was one important cause of the nation’s previous economic difficulties.¹⁸

During the spring and summer of 1944, the Germans and their Hungarian allies transported hundreds of thousands of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps.¹⁹ The work was done systematically province by province, and exceptions were few. Only Jews with hard-to-replace jobs or skills were permitted to stay. The guidelines also included rules for replacing deported Jews with other workers as quickly as possible, so as not to hamper the war effort.²⁰

Horthy explained to one of his colleagues in the summer of 1944 that he had little use for Jews and Communists. It did no harm for them to be deported, with a few exceptions because some Jews were also good Hungarians.²¹ These were clearly not numerous, however, as the Regent did not act to stem the deportations of Jews in the first few months. At first he seems to have been reluctant to acknowledge the news about what was happening in the Hungarian countryside, and he emphasized that those already deported were unharmed. When the Vrba-Wetzler report was delivered to Horthy at the end of May 1944, he could no longer live with such a delusion. Trying to assert himself in relation to the German occupiers, and under pressure from foreign leaders – who included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Britain’s King George VI, and Sweden’s King Gustaf V – Horthy ordered an end to the deportations in early July, by which time an estimated 430,000 Jews had already been taken to the death camps.²²

After the Hungarian leader negotiated a ceasefire with the Soviet Union in October, he was forced to resign and was taken to Germany. The new Hungarian government was dominated by men from the Arrow Cross movement. Persecution of Jews intensified almost immediately. While the Red Army troops slowly but surely closed their ring around the Hungarian capital, 38,000 Jews were murdered. In addition, Eichmann was given willing permission by the Arrow Cross to resume deporting Jews from Budapest in the autumn of 1944, which led to some 80,000 being taken to slave-labour or extermination camps. This was the final phase of a scheme of deportation that in every way exceeded previous measures, including the extensive actions in the summer of 1942 when large numbers of Jews in Warsaw were sent to the death camps. From mid-May onwards, some 12,000 Jews were transported by train, mainly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eichmann and his closest associates made full use of their logistical skills, which ultimately led to more than 437,400 Jews being loaded onto 150 trains.²³

Eichmann’s continued goal to kill as many Jews as possible was on a collision course with SS leader Heinrich Himmler’s new position on ‘the Jewish question’. At this time, discussions were being held about releasing Hungarian Jews in exchange for lorries and petrol. Eichmann was one of the negotiators, but Himmler was in the background monitoring the process. One possible explanation is that the SS leader wanted to use the discussions as a smokescreen for peace talks with the Western Allies. Continued mass murder would make such negotiations more difficult.²⁴ The deportations also ran counter to the wishes of other leading Nazis to use Hungarian Jews as slave labour. In fact, in the Hungarian operation, the Germans selected only between 10 and 30 percent of the arriving Jews for labour. At the same time, more people were being killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau than before. An estimated five to six times as many people as before were mass-murdered in the camp between March and November 1944. This brutal extermination policy led to a reduction in the number of Jews in Hungary from around 750,000 in 1941 to 140,000 in 1945.²⁵

The United States and the creation of the War Refugee Board

Following Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, reports circulated at irregular intervals of an ongoing war of extermination against Jews and other groups not included in the Nazis’ national, or, as they put it, people’s community. One difficulty was that claims about millions of people being subjected to systematic persecution and mass murder seemed implausible, even to representatives of Jewish communities in countries that were at war with Germany or neutral. It was commonly thought that such depictions were greatly exaggerated propaganda products, like those that had circulated during the previous world war.

Such notions, combined with the virtual impossibility of obtaining visual evidence of an ongoing genocide, meant that even people with first-hand knowledge of what was going on found it difficult to be heard. Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski had witnessed German atrocities and claimed to know what was happening in the Bełżec extermination camp. Once in Britain and then in the United States, he met with Polish politicians, representatives of the World Jewish Congress, and representatives of the British and US governments, including Anthony Eden, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Felix Frankfurter. During one meeting the last-mentioned, a judge of Jewish birth and a member of the Supreme Court, stressed that he did not believe the information, which was not the same as accusing Karski of being a liar: ‘I did not say he was lying, I said I did not believe him.’²⁶

Other holders of high-ranking positions in the United States also either had difficulty accepting the information or chose to ignore reports of an ongoing mass murder in Europe. However, the US Holocaust whistleblower Josiah E. DuBois Jr had little difficulty convincing his boss, Secretary of the Treasury Henry J. Morgenthau Jr, of what was going on. In the First World War, the latter’s father had personally witnessed the horrific consequences of the Young Turks’ genocide of the Armenians. Even before the outbreak of the Second World War, the son had feared for the safety of European Jews, though he could not foresee the extent of ‘those terrible eighteen months’ during which reports poured in that Jews in Eastern Europe were being murdered or left to starve to death.²⁷

During much of 1943, a political game was played in which DuBois managed to persuade Morgenthau not to adhere to the formal channels via the State Department, where there were people who were delaying plans to assist the Jews of Europe. Instead, the Secretary of the Treasury should try to persuade President Roosevelt personally to take action. Once the President had become convinced of the need for an immediate rescue effort, the War Refugee Board was established on 22 January 1944.²⁸ Its purpose was clear from the outset: to take all available measures as soon as possible ‘to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the prosecution of the war’.²⁹ Despite this ambitious goal, the organization received rather limited support from the President. It remained closely tied to the Treasury Department, which in turn cooperated with a number of Jewish organizations in both the United States and Europe. Estimates suggest that measures involving staff of the War Refugee Board saved some 200,000 Jews from the Holocaust, 120,000 of whom were in Budapest.³⁰

Raoul Wallenberg’s mission

In the UK there were many critics of the War Refugee Board because it was founded on the assumption that Jews were a specific category of victims. On the basis of such reasoning, there was a danger that it ‘was following policies that put saving the Jews before the universalistic goal of winning the war’.³¹ As a neutral state, Sweden was not inherently opposed to saving Jews on the one hand and winning the war on the other, and this type of objection continued to fall on deaf ears in Sweden. Cooperation between the Swedish government and the War Refugee Board proceeded without any major complications.

One result of the new Swedish policy was the endeavour to save as many of Hungary’s Jews as possible. In May 1944, the American attaché in Stockholm, Iver Olsen, began to search for a Swede who could work for the War Refugee Board and act as a foreign, neutral observer in Hungary. The situation was urgent. Now, in the eleventh hour of the war, ‘the Jews of Hungary must also set out upon that path of horror along which millions of European Jews have already walked during this war’, read the April 1944 issue of Judisk Tidskrift.³² Information about what was happening also reached Swedish government members and diplomats. It was increasingly clear to them what the outcome of the war would be, and that a new world order was at hand after Germany’s increasingly predictable defeat. One problem was that in the same month, Olsen had reported to the US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury that Swedish banks and companies were continuing to help the Germans to obtain large amounts of neutral currency. If the Swedes ceased such activities, it would have a favourable effect on the US view of Sweden. The same would be true if Sweden chose to comply with US requests for Swedish representation on the ground in Hungary.³³

A proposal for Sweden’s state Lutheran Church to appeal to its Hungarian counterpart met with sympathy at the Swedish Bishops’ Conference but was not considered feasible.³⁴ The other concrete proposal was to find a suitable Swede who could lead a rescue operation in Hungary. Marcus Ehrenpreis, rabbi of the Stockholm synagogue, asked Lauer if he knew of anyone capable of carrying out such a mission. Lauer recommended Raoul Wallenberg. At first Ehrenpreis appeared to doubt Wallenberg’s suitability, but he was soon convinced that Wallenberg was the right person for the job. Lauer arranged a meeting between Wallenberg and Olsen. The War Refugee Board made a formal request to Wallenberg, who accepted it. The proposal also won almost immediate support from diplomats in Stockholm and Washington.³⁵ Representatives of the War Refugee Board initiated discussions with Sweden’s State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Erik Boheman, as did Wallenberg, who announced in a letter of 19 June that he was ‘making my services available to meet the UD’s needs’. Neither the representatives of the War Refugee Board nor Swedish UD staff expected any formal obstacles from the Hungarian government, since Wallenberg was not going to engage in any business activities but was to concentrate on rescue efforts in Budapest. If the Hungarians were to cause problems, Boheman promised that the Swedish government would expel the Hungarian chargé d’affaires in Stockholm, while his colleague Sven Grafström stressed that ‘any [hostile] intermezzo with the authorities [in Hungary] should of course be avoided’.³⁶ In turn, the Americans promised to ensure that the funding from the War Refugee Board reached its destination.³⁷

In Budapest Wallenberg’s arrival was eagerly anticipated. Valdemar Langlet was ill, and the rest of the Swedish Legation was overwhelmed with work.³⁸ Wallenberg immediately began gathering information about the ongoing genocide in Hungary.³⁹ Like representatives of the US State Department and the War Refugee Board, the UD was receiving continuous information about the increasingly acute situation of the Jews in Hungary. During the summer of 1944, it became clear to both US and Swedish officials that the Germans and their Hungarian allies had already murdered most of the Jews in the Hungarian countryside, whereas the majority in the capital were still alive. These reports included the testimony of two young Slovak Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who had managed to escape from Auschwitz. Their detailed report revealed what was happening in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. After his arrival in Budapest, Wallenberg received similar, albeit less detailed, witness statements on several occasions.⁴⁰

Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest

The Hungarian capital, in which Wallenberg arrived in 1944 for the third time, was marked by conflicts with no end in sight, alliances of highly uncertain duration, and shifting loyalties.⁴¹ The fact that there were many cases of links between rescue operations and intelligence activities in Hungary contributed to the climate of uncertainty.⁴² Sweden intensified its efforts to rescue the persecuted. From Stockholm, Gösta Engzell of the Swedish Foreign Affairs Council worked to help Jews in Hungary. On the ground in Budapest, Ivan Danielsson and Per Anger had been busy for some months assisting as many people as possible who sought help at the Swedish Legation, located in Buda. Wallenberg threw himself headlong into the work. At first his time in the Hungarian capital was characterized by the calm before the storm, in what has aptly been called Budapest’s ‘Indian summer’. However, the situation soon worsened and in early June, Ivan Danielsson reported that the situation for the city’s Jews was ‘becoming more alarming day by day’.⁴³

A month later, Admiral Horthy broke off his government’s cooperation with the Germans and ordered the deportations to be halted. For the majority of Jews in the Hungarian countryside this measure came too late, but the decision entailed a reprieve for those living in the capital’s ghetto. Both at this time and later, Wallenberg engaged in intensive negotiations with German and Hungarian officials as well as with Jewish organizations. Like Danielsson and Anger, he wrote reports to the UD in Stockholm in which he repeatedly highlighted the plight of the Jews.⁴⁴ A few weeks after his arrival, Wallenberg changed his strategy and decided that most of the funds at his disposal would no longer be used for bribes and tickets out of the country. Instead, he and Valdemar Langlet began to spend more money on acquiring housing that could function as safe houses. In total, Wallenberg rented more than 30 buildings in Budapest, including hospitals and soup kitchens, from which Swedish flags were hung to mark that the people in the buildings were Swedish citizens. Tens of thousands of Jews lived in these buildings under Swedish protection, and hundreds of them worked for Wallenberg.⁴⁵

American goodwill remained at a high level. Advice was conveyed via Secretary of State Cordell Hull on how Hungarian refugees could be smuggled out of Budapest by barge or rail, to areas close to those controlled by Yugoslav partisans. Hull was aware that these proposals were difficult, if not impossible, to implement but showed great confidence in Wallenberg’s ability to rescue as many people as possible. Representatives of the War Refugee Board agreed with this assessment. They were impressed by Wallenberg’s ability to act intelligently and discreetly while taking full advantage of the circumstances prevailing at the time.⁴⁶ Like his Swiss colleague Carl Lutz, Wallenberg worked doggedly to produce identity documents that would protect Jews, who, once in possession of such a document, would instantly change their nationality and thereby come under the protection of a neutral nation.⁴⁷

In October 1944 the situation deteriorated drastically after the openly antisemitic Arrow Cross Party came to power. Wallenberg was originally due to return to Sweden in September 1944, but he remained in Budapest as the political situation grew worse. The months following the Arrow Cross takeover proved to be the worst and the most dangerous, both for the persecuted Jews and for Wallenberg and others who were trying to help them. Things came to a head in October, as Wallenberg described in his reports to Stockholm. The one dated 12 October was marked by cautious optimism. Jews with Swedish passports were being released from internment and labour camps, and the Germans had promised to leave them in peace. A mere ten days later, however, the situation had become much more alarming. The Arrow Cross Party intensified its persecution of Jews and no longer allowed any exceptions.⁴⁸

In the last few months of 1944, Wallenberg accomplished many of the deeds that would later form the basis of most accounts of his important work in Hungary, as evidenced not least by the tales of survivors.⁴⁹ Everyone with insight into the work realized the danger of the situation. Eichmann wanted to ‘get the Jewdog Wallenberg’ out of the way, but the assassination attempt failed. Wallenberg slept in different houses every night. He was under the protection of police officer István Parádi, who also fended off several Arrow Cross attacks on Jews.⁵⁰ The greatest threat was from the ever more desperate Germans and Arrow Cross members, who increasingly questioned or ignored rules and exceptions. This led to raids on safe houses and to Jews being forced on death marches instead of being deported by train. As soldiers under Eichmann’s command and Arrow Cross members continued their antisemitic operations to the bitter end, no Jew was safe in Budapest.⁵¹

As the Red Army slowly but surely broke down the stubborn resistance in and around Budapest, it became clear that the staff of the Swedish Legation would be forced to travel to Sweden via the Soviet Union. Both Lauer and Wallenberg believed this would almost certainly be a physically arduous and bureaucratically complicated journey home. In the last days before he was arrested by Red Army soldiers, Wallenberg was unsure whether the Soviet authorities perceived him as friend or foe, but there is no indication that he or anyone else foresaw what was to come.⁵²