Asked when the Swedish Foreign Office (Utrikesdepartementet, UD) will have paid off its debt to Raoul Wallenberg caused by its delayed action in the immediate post-war years, the Swedish diplomat and former Minister for Foreign Affairs Jan Eliasson replied: ‘Never.’¹ The debt remains despite the process of coming to terms with what had been Sweden’s policy at that time, plus the apology made in 2001 by Sweden’s then Prime Minister Göran Persson to Wallenberg’s family.² This pattern is a familiar product of the official politics of memory since the turn of the last century, according to which past wrongs are publicly held up to legal scrutiny. Heads of state, usually born after the wrongs occurred, have apologized to the victims and their families in the hope of achieving closure and reconciliation. On the basis of modern moral values, and with the Second World War as the main hurdle, political leaders have bowed their heads and begged survivors for forgiveness.³

The list of Swedes who deserve a modern-day apology could be made longer. The wealthy entrepreneur Axel Wenner-Gren, who in addition to his business activities had attempted to broker peace in the summer of 1939, was blacklisted three years later by the British and US governments for his supposed inappropriately good relationships with Nazi luminaries. No evidence that Wenner-Gren was a German spy has ever been presented, even though the material collected on him in US archives eventually became almost as extensive as the UD’s Swedish files on Wallenberg. The diplomat Leif Leifland, who had good insights into both cases, noted a similar ‘anxious evasiveness’ on the part of Swedish decision-makers vis-à-vis the great powers, irrespective of whether they were located in the West or the East. He stressed that this comparison should not be carried too far: after all, the reprehensible actions of Sweden’s coalition government in the Wenner-Gren case did not have such fatal effects as the Swedish passivity in the Wallenberg case probably had in the immediate post-war years.⁴

The case of Wallenberg also differs from that of Wenner-Gren, and most others, in that the vanished diplomat has been discussed with considerable continuity in Sweden. For a long time it was an infected bone of contention in domestic politics, the main issue being how neutral Sweden should relate to its powerful neighbour and superpower to the east, the Soviet Union. Swedish politicians and UD representatives failed to persuade Soviet and Russian politicians to initiate and, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to fully support an investigation into the Wallenberg case. In retrospect, the official Swedish reaction to the Soviet capture of Wallenberg, especially from 1945 to 1947, had obvious shortcomings. It cannot be ruled out that the feeble action in the first few years after his disappearance led to neglected opportunities to secure his release.

That conclusion was also reached by the government-appointed commission of enquiry which presented its extensive findings in 2003. The enquiry’s chairman, civil servant and Liberal politician Ingmar Eliasson, expressed doubts about the report’s blunt title: Ett diplomatiskt misslyckande [‘A failure of diplomacy’]. His biography suggests that he favoured a title more in line with that proposed by Bertil Ohlin, also a member of the Liberal Party and its leader from 1944 to 1967, who in 1975 described the early actions as regards the Wallenberg case of those in charge of Sweden’s foreign policy as ‘a serious mistake’. The other members of the Eliasson commission supported the title ‘A failure of diplomacy’ because it was important to ‘call a spade a spade’. The then Minister for Foreign Affairs Anna Lindh, who was assassinated the year the enquiry was published, made no attempts to defend her party colleague and predecessor as Foreign Minister, Östen Undén, whose actions were heavily criticized in the enquiry. In retrospect but in the same spirit, the then Prime Minister Göran Persson, like Lindh a Social Democrat, stated that although he had not apologized until 2001, he had repeatedly expressed regret for the Swedish authorities’ actions in the Wallenberg case. Nor did any other politician object to the commission’s findings. Instead: ‘This report was placed on file without debate’, Eliasson noted, some ten years later.⁵

The admission, however, was extremely belated. As we shall see, previously published White Papers had presented a totally different picture of Sweden’s actions. The longstanding unwillingness to come to terms with this narrative has probably contributed to a still lingering frustration. Susanne Berger, an American scholar based in Germany, is one of those commentators who have repeatedly criticized Swedish politicians, from the early post-war period up to the present time, for not making enough of an effort to get the leaderships of the Soviet Union and then Russia to reveal once and for all the truth about what happened to Wallenberg. Berger argues that no Swedish government has attempted to exert sufficient pressure on the Soviet and Russian leaders to grant access to important, still classified information. She firmly rejects the idea that the Wallenberg mystery cannot be solved.⁶

Berger has certainly pointed out many flaws in the Swedish actions, but the analysis should not stop there. In a discussion about historical justice and comparisons between the historian and the judge, Martin Wiklund points out that it is important to try to understand the actors of that time on the basis of their operating conditions. That, however, does not prohibit the making of overall moral and ideological judgements. In a scenario where history is on trial in a court-like situation, justice may, for the historian, ‘function as a normative ideal that favours impartiality without implying indifference or value neutrality’.⁷ But if and when history is used as a moral yardstick, this balancing act becomes difficult because a particularly tricky question is whose morality is at issue – that of the historical actors, or our own moral perceptions in the early twenty-first century? As mentioned at the beginning of this book, it is unavoidable for history to be a dual thought process. This process is what ‘gives meaning to the past, on the basis of both the values of that time and our later moral horizon’, states Klas-Göran Karlsson.⁸ In other words, the Wallenberg case does include moral aspects, but it would be unfortunate if conclusions about it were to be dominated by moralizing in hindsight. It is thus a matter of singling out – as was done in ‘A failure of diplomacy’ – inadequate actions of diplomat Staffan Söderblom and Minister for Foreign Affairs Östen Undén and of placing these actions in the context of the early post-war period in order to better understand why the two men acted as they did. Such contextualization may, for example, provide clues as to why Raoul Wallenberg was not initially granted the same elevated position as another Swedish humanitarian role model, Folke Bernadotte, who, like Wallenberg, made his most important contributions during the final stages of the Second World War.

The ensuing history-cultural explanations embody a degree of divergence. Some are closely associated with Raoul Wallenberg whereas others are bound up with Swedish domestic and foreign policies and with general trends in the West, especially regarding the view of the Holocaust. As stated above, the explanations do not excuse the wait-and-see approach of Söderblom, Undén, and other actors; but they do help to shed an explanatory light on their handling of the Wallenberg case.

Trying to understand the Holocaust

Media reports of the Holocaust’s effects were published both in Sweden and in other countries while the genocide was ongoing. Protests against Nazi racial policy were expressed while the Second World War was still raging. As mentioned in the Introduction, these often appeared in Jewish publications, but texts about what was happening were also published in daily newspapers from 1942 onwards.⁹ In neutral Sweden, articles about pogroms and persecutions also appeared in some of the major newspapers from 1938 onwards.¹⁰ Even so, it should be emphasized that the Holocaust as we know it today was still largely unknown to the general public when the Second World War was entering its final stages. International research has highlighted the obstacles to these reports becoming widely known because they were often given a low profile in the newspapers, not least because the combined message of these unimaginable reports was not a good fit with prevailing views about journalism. Reporters assigned to writing about the war were expected to report news of a kind germane to established narratives. When news of mass persecution and mass murder began to leak out, journalists were simply not equipped for writing about it. Besides, these reports of the incredible and the unimaginable had to compete for attention with reports of wartime events, refugee flows, and day-to-day news.¹¹

Because of the low impact of previous attempts, the people assigned to report from the liberated concentration camps in Germany in the spring of 1945 realized that they would have to do so in new ways. True, the text and photo reports from Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and other camps had sent shock waves around the world, but the strong reactions did not necessarily reflect a general understanding of what had happened, or what had been the motives behind the Nazi extermination policy.¹² Attempts to draw attention to the persisting antisemitism in Sweden led to long debates in the Swedish Parliament, the Riksdag, about legislating against anti-Jewish propaganda. One Riksdag member praised Sweden’s official policy of neutrality but criticized ‘the official moral neutrality’, which meant that too few Swedes protested against lingering antisemitism. Others argued that persecution of Jews was a specifically German phenomenon and had no counterpart in Sweden.¹³ In 1947, the tense situation between the British and Jews in Palestine in the immediate post-war years, the difficulties experienced by Jewish refugees seeking new homelands, the pogroms in Poland, and other examples of persistent antisemitism made one writer warn that nothing had been learned. Active evil had been replaced ‘by a cold-blooded lack of action that is almost equally frightening’.¹⁴

The early post-war discussions demonstrate that information is not the same as knowledge. During the Second World War, there had been obvious problems for Jews and non-Jews alike in converting information about the genocide into an understanding of what was really going on, and to what extent. These difficulties persisted in the early post-war years, partly as a result of a reluctance among survivors to talk about their experiences or, among those who were willing, to attract attention. Information that had reached Allied and neutral governments during the war years was often not made public. Another difficulty was understanding the scale of the mass murder that was happening. For example, in 1942 the Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter received a detailed account of the Nazi genocide from Kurt Gerstein, who had joined the SS with the aim of finding out for himself what was going on. The information was passed on to staff at the UD, but no one there or in the Swedish government took any immediate action to pursue the matter. This inertia was due to a combination of reasons, including the difficulty of verifying Gerstein’s information, an unwillingness to contribute to what might be an example of ‘atrocity propaganda’, and political conflicts over whether or not Sweden should make any official protests against Germany.¹⁵

This lack of interest was not total. For example, Bo Enander and Franz Arnheim published a book entitled Så härskade herrefolket [‘How the master race ruled’] immediately after the end of the war, a book which included accounts of the course and consequences of the Holocaust.¹⁶ The Nuremberg Trials of 1945 to 1946 were also significant as they dealt with the Nazi genocide for the first time in a non-Jewish context. One aspect of the trials was the supplying of detailed historical background information about entrenched antisemitic prejudices. During the proceedings the prosecutors also repeatedly referred to the mass murders of Jews and, although less frequently, also of Roma. In addition, US lawyers highlighted the mass executions performed by the Einsatzgruppen death squads on the Eastern Front in the first phase of the Holocaust. However, the lawyers had not yet grasped the difference between the concentration camps, where life was certainly brutal and many people died, and the extermination camps on Polish soil, where the aim was the industrial mass murder of as many Jews and ‘undesirables’ as possible. During the Nuremberg Trials, the stated aim was to concentrate on the Nazi plan to launch a war of aggression. Even though there were recurring accounts of abuses of the Jews, these were not given the status of a separate category of crime but were classified under ‘crimes against humanity’ or ‘war crimes’. None of the lawyers was able to situate the Nazi crimes against the Jewish people as part of the overall Nazi ideology, whose very foundation was antisemitism.¹⁷

The encounter with grievously sick and exhausted women in refugee camps made a strong impression on a number of writers. Their texts told Swedish readers about the urgent requirements associated with rehabilitating people who had been subjected to so much cruelty. It was a major challenge to integrate them into Swedish society, not least because of the hostilities that re-emerged, for instance when Jewish women were harassed by Catholic Poles who had themselves been victims of Nazism but who were still antisemites.¹⁸ One of the many Swedes who became involved in assisting the humanitarian effort – work that was severely tested when tens of thousands of survivors of the extermination and concentration camps arrived in Sweden in the spring of 1945 – was the influential Social Democratic politician and reformer Alva Myrdal. She argued that the physical presence of the victims of Nazi genocidal policies helped to awaken Swedes once and for all to the consequences of the ideal of a society freed from what Hitler and his followers had termed ‘subhumans’ unfit to live. In the summer of 1945, she wrote: ‘Finally, the stench, the hunger, the agony from the German concentration camps have come crashing even into our Swedish consciousness.’¹⁹

Even so, this close contact with survivors did not automatically produce insights into what had been happening outside the safety of Sweden. The reception of the refugees alternated between considerateness and thoughtlessness. The reporting focused at least as much on the high quality of modern Swedish aid efforts as on the horrors that the new arrivals had endured.²⁰ The apparent reactions of the alleged perpetrators dominated in the Swedish press, but less attention was paid to the crimes they were acused of, including the Holocaust. As Finnish historian Antero Holmila has noted, as the crimes of individual perpetrators were being highlighted there was simultaneously an intense debate, also raging in the immediate post-war years, about whether it was reasonable to speak of a collective German guilt. There was no lack of comments about the extermination of Jews, but these were, to all intents and purposes, excusively associated with Germany and Nazism.²¹ Remarks that antisemitism was a widespread phenomenon and that ‘[t]he Jewish question is the common shame of every country and every people’ were among the exceptions.²²

It was thus rare in Sweden for commentators to raise aspects of complicity or passivity. Instead, the press coverage of the Nuremberg Trials emphasized that Swedes had also suffered during the war and were therefore victims of Nazism, too.²³ In the following years, however, scores were settled with individuals who had sided with the Nazis. Historian Johan Östling stresses that these experiences of Nazism took on great importance in post-war Sweden. One way in which this development was expressed was through total or secondary stigmatization. The former was applied to individuals who were branded as ‘Hitler’s Swedish lackeys’, and who continued to defend Nazism after the war ended in 1945. Secondary stigmatization mainly affected cultural figures, such as the literary critic Fredrik Böök and the singer and actress Zarah Leander, both of whom had more or less openly embraced the German cause. The stigma of Nazism also affected the historian of ideas Erich Wittenberg. In a high-profile debate in the late 1940s and 1950s, his application for an associate professorship was rejected despite his extensive scholarly output. Wittenberg represented German national conservatism and philosophical idealism. Consequently, he was associated with Nazism and the danger of its return. That he had firmly denounced Nazism on multiple occasions, and that as a Jew he had been forced to abandon his academic career in Germany and flee to Sweden in 1935, did not help his cause. At that time, fear of remnants of the Nazi ideology – in the Wittenberg case in the form of guilt by association – was stronger than any Swedish solidarity with victims of the Holocaust.²⁴

One reason why the Holocaust did not play a prominent role in the Nuremberg Trials, or in post-war societies in general, was the continuing lack of adequate words to describe what had happened. ‘Genocide’ was launched in 1944, but it took a number of years for the term to become widely established. Similarly, ‘Holocaust’ as a concept associated with the Nazi genocide was only adopted in the late 1950s. It came into wider use after the US television drama of the same name made its triumphant progress around the world in 1978–1979. As in other Western countries, the Holocaust television series engendered a large number of articles when it was shown on Swedish television in the spring of 1979. Only a few of these addressed aspects of the Holocaust related to Sweden, such as Swedish refugee policy before and during the Second World War, or the witness accounts that had reached Swedish ears early on. Most of the writers perceived the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon associated solely with Nazism and Germany.²⁵ With a few exceptions, it was not until the 1990s that questions about Sweden’s actions prior to and during the Second World War began to be debated, the main ingredients being criticism of the restrictive refugee policies and the pragmatic policies of negotiation and neutrality – policies to which critics have referred as policies of yielding or adaptation.²⁶

In the shadow of Folke Bernadotte

In Swedish history culture, events such as the efforts to feed the starving Greek population in 1941–1942 or the actions of the ‘Warsaw Swedes’, who served as couriers for the Polish Resistance in order to spread information about the Holocaust, have only gained attention on a few occasions, or only in the early twenty-first century. From an early stage, the spotlight has primarily focused on Folke Bernadotte and Raoul Wallenberg. One indication to that effect is that these two role models have repeatedly been discussed together. It has been said that Bernadotte and Wallenberg became acquainted before the war when both men were working in the United States.²⁷ However, their link was an indirect one and was connected with a 1944 proposal to send Bernadotte as a Red Cross representative to protect Jews in Hungary. Instead, the task was assigned to Valdemar Langlet, with whom Wallenberg later collaborated.²⁸

One important difference between the respective situations of the two men was that the Wallenberg case was coloured from the outset by the realities of the Cold War, including Sweden’s fragile relations with the new superpower of the Baltic Sea region, the Soviet Union. By contrast, Bernadotte was initially an unproblematic figure. This ‘man of destiny’, who in the final stages of the war had enjoyed ‘the confidence of both sides’, had bravely ventured into the wolf’s lair and negotiated with the egregious SS chief Heinrich Himmler in order to carry out ‘this magnificent humanitarian operation, which is a credit to the Swedish name’.²⁹ After the end of the war, Bernadotte published several best-selling pieces in which he recounted his memories of meetings with Himmler and of the perilous rescue operations in northern Germany in the spring of 1945. Admittedly, protests were heard early on that Count Bernadotte was highlighting his own efforts at the expense of other Red Cross workers. Another dilemma was Bernadotte’s favourable attitude towards SS General Walter Schellenberg, whom Jacob Wallenberg had contacted in 1944 to ask him to protect Raoul Wallenberg from his hardline and ruthless SS colleagues in Budapest.³⁰ In his introduction to the general’s posthumously published autobiography, the British historian Alan Bullock acerbically observed: ‘On certain subjects Schellenberg maintains a discreet silence’.³¹ Nor did Bernadotte acknowledge the involvement in, or at least the extensive knowledge of, the mass murder of Jews that a man in Schellenberg’s position would have had. Bernadotte’s testimony during the Nuremberg Trials largely adhered to the SS general’s story that his had been the voice of reason that had worked on Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Kaltenbrunner until they had agreed to release prisoners from the concentration camps. Folke Bernadotte’s endorsement of such a historical narrative was controversial to the highest degree.³²

The fact, however, remained: Bernadotte had brought back victims of the Nazi regime who were successfully being cared for in Sweden. This ‘proved’ that Swedish hospitals and their staff were among the best in the whole world. The rescue operation gave the Swedish public authorities support for their argument that Swedish humanitarian efforts, which had been widely publicized in the aftermath of the First World War with Elsa Brändström as the figurehead, had not been a one-off event. As the rest of Europe lay in ruins, Swedes – members of the royal family as well as ‘ordinary’ nurses and bus drivers – had shown that they were prepared to leave their war-spared homeland and risk life and limb to save some of the people who were in desperate straits. As a lauded friend of peace, Folke Bernadotte continued to attract great attention in the context of his Middle East mediation mission, and even more so after Jewish terrorists had assassinated him in Jerusalem in 1948. There was much praise for his efforts in Sweden, and tributes kept pouring in from the rest of the world, too.³³

One reason why Bernadotte’s contributions were so highly lauded at home had to do with the people he saved. Historian Mikael Byström has noted that there was a hierarchy in the view of refugees, a hierarchy based on geographical proximity and ethnicity. Those arriving from neighbouring countries were given the warmest welcome, although sometimes an ambivalence was expressed even about them. Both in speeches in the Swedish Parliament and in newspaper articles, for example, commentators distinguished between ‘ordinary Danes’ and ‘Danish Jews’. The former were accorded the highest status.³⁴ Most of the people who initially arrived on the White Buses were originally from Denmark and Norway. The Hungarian Jews that Wallenberg had rescued were not as visible in Sweden.

Neutrality as an ideal

During the Second World War, Sweden’s objective was to stay out of the conflict at all costs. This goal was one reason why neutrality was highly valued, both as a concrete policy and as an ideal. The Swedish enthusiasm for peace and neutrality can be traced back to the eighteenth century, but it was given a boost by the two world wars. Reports from the horrific battles of 1914–1918 served as an effective antidote to the message of activists who wanted Sweden to join the war on Germany’s side.³⁵ The hope of being able to stay outside once again guided Swedish foreign policy throughout the Second World War. This approach was later labelled ‘small-state realism’. The policy pursued under the leadership of Per Albin Hansson was characterized by constant attempts to ‘promote the desire for peace at the expense of the desire for resistance’.³⁶ In practice, this entailed making concessions to whichever warring party happened to be the strongest at the time. In the early years of the war, that meant that Germany could often dictate the terms. Towards the end of the war, the situation was radically different. Sweden’s priority then was to improve its foreign-policy relations with the Allies and, not least, with the Soviet Union. The latter had been strained ever since the Finnish Winter War of 1939–1940, when, with the exception of the pro-Moscow Communists, Swedes had sympathized with Finland.

This new orientation not only affected Sweden’s handling of the Wallenberg case; perhaps the most obvious consequence was the highly controversial extradition of the Balts in 1945–1946. Sweden’s coalition government of the war years had been replaced by a Social Democratic one. Most of the centre-right commentators opposed a far-reaching extradition to the Soviet Union of the Baltic, Soviet, and German soldiers who were currently in Sweden. So, too, did Social Democratic Minister for Foreign Affairs Östen Undén in the initial internal discussions in his party. He changed sides, however, and more than anyone else he became associated with the Swedish decision that most of the interned soldiers – more than the number required under international law – would be shipped east. Undén categorized the Soviet Union as a nation fully governed by the rule of law, whereas ‘political maturity was not particularly prominent’ in the Soviet-occupied Baltic states. Sweden’s future Prime Minister Tage Erlander expressed a similar view, saying that both the British and the Soviets had a sincere ambition to create a lasting peace, which contrasted sharply to the aggressive policies pursued in Germany during Hitler’s time in power.³⁷ These and similar statements contrasted sharply with the fate that awaited most of those extradited, who were either executed or shipped off to the Gulag.

The notion that Sweden was a northern utopia that had been spared the horrors of war was reinforced during the Second World War. Christian Günther, Minister for Foreign Affairs in the war-time coalition government, argued that neutrality could primarily be understood as a nation’s obligation to be impartial in relation to warring parties; but an even more important aim was to ensure that the country’s own territory was protected: under no circumstances should it become a theatre of war or a base for military operations by a foreign power.³⁸ To be sure, the fact that Sweden had escaped the horrors of war might arouse the envy of less fortunate people and even lead to ‘despondent anxiety or unhealthy self-flagellation’. In the future, too, it was of the utmost importance to try to help the less fortunate. Nevertheless, the priority remained self-evident: ‘Like every individual, a people may have duties to others; but first and foremost it has obligations to itself, to its own population, its country, its past, and its future.’³⁹

Only a few months later, however, Günther expressed doubts as to whether the emphasis on Swedish distinctiveness and the praise of Swedish neutrality might have gone too far. If the country continued to stress its own particular merits, there was a real danger that Swedes would not be in step with the rest of the world once the war was over.⁴⁰ There is much to suggest that his warning fell on deaf ears, though. On returning home, Swedes who had experienced the effects of the war were surprised at how little the worldwide conflict had affected their compatriots. This observation was confirmed by a study conducted in the summer of 1944. Most respondents said that although the war had brought some restrictions and limitations, familiar routines had governed their day-to-day existence.⁴¹ Foreign observers were also surprised at the Swedish state of innocence and outsidership. In 1943 Kurt Erich Suckert, who wrote under the pseudonym Curzio Malaparte, had travelled from the warring Soviet Union to peaceful Sweden. His semi-documentary Kaputt, published the following year, sharply contrasted the horrors of the Eastern Front with a summery Stockholm. In the Swedish capital, he had become aware that even educated and generally well-informed Swedes with an elevated standing in society displayed little insight into what was happening elsewhere in Europe.⁴²

A few months after the war ended in Europe, the American journalist Demare Bess reported from Stockholm. She began her article by recounting a meeting she had had with a friend and fellow countryman, an army officer who had recently visited Sweden for the first time. Her friend was impressed by the Swedish standard of living, which differed markedly from that of war-torn Europe and in some respects surpassed that of the United States. This fact bothered him. The Swedes had got off far too lightly compared to other countries which had been occupied and/or fought against Hitler’s armies. Writing for an American readership, Bess went on to qualify this harsh verdict. Sweden had essentially pursued a foreign policy like those of other smaller nations such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway. However, they had had geography against them, whereas Sweden had benefited from skilful diplomacy and a lot of luck. She admitted that there was some justification for American criticism of Sweden for its excessive accommodation with Germany in the early years of the war, but this had to be set against the sanctuary that both US bomber crews and Danish Jews had enjoyed in this bastion of peace.⁴³

The Swedish public was also able to learn about the partly contrasting US and Swedish perspectives on Swedish foreign policy during the Second World War. The Harvard historian Bruce Hopper, who had been in Sweden from 1941 to 1942, published an article in the Social Democratic magazine Tiden [‘The time’] in connection with the end of the war in Europe. He criticized the Swedish government’s failure to acknowledge that the transit of German soldiers through the country constituted ‘a violation of its neutrality that had been accepted under the threat of force majeure’. Otherwise he praised the fact that politicians, the press, and the Swedish people had preserved ‘the moral climate of neutrality’ as well as being willing to help refugees. Hopper’s main argument was that while Sweden ‘had been a very important lung for a suffocated Europe’, it was a small state that depended on a functioning balance of power. When that balance was destroyed in the early years of the war, with Germany as the dominant power, Sweden’s neutrality had also been lost and was only restored in 1943.⁴⁴

Although this criticism was mild, the response from the economist, Social Democrat, and editor of Tiden, Gunnar Myrdal, was unequivocal. He stressed that Sweden had a good conscience and its inhabitants had nothing to reproach themselves for. In his ‘peculiar article’, featuring an outside expert’s ‘cold analysis’, Hopper had not taken sufficient account of the fact that Sweden had ‘by and large skilfully played our role and safeguarded our interests without harming those of others’. There had been no lack of courage and risk-taking. The Swedish concessions to Nazi Germany had been ‘unavoidable’ and no greater ‘than necessity demanded’.⁴⁵ Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs made himself the spokesman of a similar view: ‘The intrinsic value that Undén primarily perceived in the policy of neutrality was the neutral state existing as an oasis beyond the world conflict’, summarizes historian Sten Ottosson.⁴⁶

Sweden’s prevailing foreign policy continued to be defended in Tiden, where issues related to the nation’s neutral position in a polarized Cold War climate were regularly discussed during the immediate post-war decades.⁴⁷ This stance helped ensure that neutrality and its visual expressions, such as soldiers standing on guard somewhere in Sweden, continued to be widely accepted in the decades that followed. It has been aptly said that in modern Sweden, memories of war were consigned ‘down to the dark and fearful cellars of the subconscious’.⁴⁸ Thus, with the exception of the immediate post-war years, when participation in Western or Nordic defence cooperation was being discussed, the Swedish ideal of neutrality persisted largely unchallenged throughout the following decades. One consequence of this was that Sweden was repeatedly portrayed as a nation periodically surrounded, trapped, and squeezed between competing great powers and disparate social systems. The Second World War had taught Sweden the need for far-reaching flexibility and the necessity of adapting to prevailing realities and buying time, for instance by making use of influential figures such as Marcus Wallenberg, who had been sent to negotiate with the Western Allies and had helped to avert an emerging conflict with Britain early in the war.⁴⁹

The rhetoric aimed at the outside world both during and after the Second World War was dominated by an emphasis on Sweden’s continued independence in the form of neutrality and non-alignment. As Undén explained, it also involved representing a policy of independence according to which Sweden could stand for freedom and democracy and criticize anti-democratic forces. The dilemma was that such statements must not collide with Sweden’s non-aligned foreign policy, which was based on friendship with all other nations whatever their form of government. Accordingly, the 1948 Social Democratic Party Congress resulted in two separate statements: one in which the Congress ‘supported the government’s policy of being friends with all [and] one in which it declared how deeply it detested some of those friends’.⁵⁰ One consequence of this foreign-policy balancing act was a long period of caution in Sweden’s relations with the two superpowers, but it also resulted in a distanced view of much of Europe. Post-war changes in how Swedish foreign policy was regarded saw strict neutrality giving way to a more active, and occasionally activist, perspective on the outside world. Sweden’s growing international involvement was only marginally directed at its immediate neighbourhood and the rest of Europe and all the more at newly independent nations in Africa and Asia. It was felt that unifying Sweden’s far-off foreign policy and aid policy could offer greater opportunities for both a political reorientation and a distancing from the alliance politics that dominated close at hand in Europe.⁵¹

Although this may seem paradoxical at first glance, the ideal of neutrality could be applied to Folke Bernadotte and Raoul Wallenberg. At an early point in time, it became the established view that they were special and profoundly honourable because they had voluntarily left Sweden for risky missions in war-torn Europe. Although neutrality was highly valued, their achievements were appreciated because they had chosen to forgo the tranquillity of life at home in order to help people in need. Texts about Wallenberg’s case repeatedly emphasized that he, as a Swede taking an active part in war-torn Hungary, had increased Soviet suspicion. The Soviets found it unlikely that Wallenberg would have left safe, neutral Sweden for brutal Budapest merely to save human lives. As already pointed out, the Soviet secret service believed this claim was a cover for espionage activities.⁵² An editorial in the newspaper Arbetet in 1957 sums up this mindset well: ‘Wallenberg’s fate stands forth in all its tragedy as symbolic of small, neutral, humanitarian-focused Sweden’s contribution to the Second World War.’ The writer concluded that the Swedish diplomat had been part of the conflict but had persevered with his peaceful humanitarian mission.⁵³

Sweden’s non-combative modern history thus created the setting for a narrative of progress characterized by the idea that neutrality was not only a legal and security-orientated concept; it also encompassed aspects of culture, emotion, and mentality. Neutrality developed into an ideal for the past, the present, and the future. Perceived as the foundation of Swedish modernity and Swedish prosperity, neutrality – as aptly summarized by historian Alf W. Johansson – became ‘a state of mind’.⁵⁴

Raoul Wallenberg in the wake of the Second World War

Se [‘Look’] was Sweden’s first picture magazine, founded in 1938 and inspired by the US magazines Life and Look and the British Picture Post. The cover of the first issue in August 1945 featured Margit Symo, ‘a fiery dancer of genuine Hungarian descent’, kneeling and aiming a bow and arrow at an unknown target. It was particularly striking that she did so without a stitch on her body. But it was not just her beauty, background as a dancer and film actress, or willingness to take off her clothes that made Se’s editors want to put her on the cover. She was, readers were informed, none other than Hungary’s answer to the First World War spy Mata Hari. Because Symo was liked by the Germans and skilfully kept on good terms with them, she had on several occasions managed to convey information to the Swedish Legation in Budapest about where and when pogroms against the city’s Jews would take place. The ‘beautiful photo reportage’ did indeed mention Raoul Wallenberg, but only in passing: according to Symo, his disappearance might be explained by his being murdered by the Nazis.⁵⁵

On the one hand, it is tempting to regard the report on Symo as a one-off piece with an unpleasant aftertaste. The mass murder of Budapest’s Jews became the backdrop for Symo’s peripheral rescue contribution, whose truth was impossible to prove but which gained its ‘news value’ from the combination of female spy and nudity. Attention, both in text and pictures, focused entirely on the cheerfully posing nude dancer who had been ‘a saving angel’ in Budapest. The interview with Symo, who later became a well-known actress in West Germany, was spiced up with details of her dramatic escape to Sweden aboard a Red Cross ship carrying prisoners of war, and with the plans for her forthcoming ‘show film’. The film would present her as the Swedish-Hungarian equivalent of another exotic, sensual, and ‘ethnic’ figure, the musical star Carmen Miranda.

On the other hand, the story about Symo adheres to a pattern. Wallenberg’s achievements – and disappearance – became known in the spring of 1945. In a large double-spread article in Dagens Nyheter on 6 March 1945, a Hungarian who had made his way to Sweden via an adventurous journey through Germany told Swedish readers about a ‘Swedish feat in Hungary’. His detailed account had great credibility, asserted the journalist who conducted the interview. The highest praise was due to Valdemar Langlet and Raoul Wallenberg, and in particular the latter’s efforts to save human lives. The writer stressed that Wallenberg had received sterling assistance at the Legation, but his indomitable will, and his ability to ‘take the bull by the horns’ in order to persuade the Arrow Cross leaders to respect the Swedish protective passports issued to Jews, was admirable, not least given that he had received death threats and that ‘armed gangsters’ had been sent out to impede or even prevent his work. The tribute continued the next day in a shorter version, with a correction, as Wallenberg had been given the title of attaché instead of secretary to the Legation.⁵⁶ An article in Expressen, a daily newspaper founded as late as 1944, also extolled Wallenberg’s efforts. A brief presentation began by saying that he was undoubtedly ‘a clever lad’ who had saved thousands of Jews ‘from death and concentration camps’. The writer went on to sketch some milestones in his career and concluded by saying that he was ‘known as a pleasant young man’. A longer article in the same paper also praised his contribution. His achievements implicitly contributed to spreading Swedish goodwill, as manifested in the many thank-you messages from all over the world addressed to his mother. At the same time, the journalist expressed concern that Wallenberg had disappeared without a trace. The latest news was undeniably bleak. The possibility that he was still alive ‘must be regarded as doubtful’.⁵⁷

The arrival in Stockholm in April that same year of the Swedish envoy Ivan Danielsson and his colleagues was another reminder of the Swedish efforts in Budapest. Before coming home they had been taken from the Hungarian capital to Moscow. At first their return did not direct any attention to Wallenberg’s situation. Instead, when one of those rescued was given the opportunity to speak, she expressed great gratitude for the way everyone at the Swedish Legation had been protected in Hungary, which had resulted in her being able to come to ‘that paradise of peace and light called Sweden’.⁵⁸

In May, Se published a photo reportage under the headline ‘The Budapest Legation – a stronghold in battle’. The opening text included a description of the Swedish endeavour to rescue Budapest’s Jews, albeit without going into the practical details, and of the fierce battle against the antisemitic Arrow Cross members who had entered the Legation on Christmas Eve. The ensuing photo spread, featuring photographs of one of ‘those who were there’ in the autumn of 1944, portrayed the Legation staff’s vulnerable situation during the city’s last months in German hands and ‘how even the diplomats had to defend themselves with weapons in their hands against fighting desperados’.⁵⁹ The individuals named in Se’s photo reportage were Lars G:son Berg, Margareta Bauer, and the Save the Children representative Asta Nilsson, called ‘Budapest’s angel’.⁶⁰ As in previous articles, the focus lay on the Swedish Legation’s collective work, although the efforts of Ivan Danielsson, Wallenberg, and Per Anger did receive special mention.

Not surprisingly, the best-informed accounts were to be found in Jewish periodicals such as the British The Jewish Chronicle and the Swedish Judisk Krönika [the title also means ‘Jewish chronicle’]. During the war, writers for these journals provided well-informed accounts of the ongoing genocide, stating where, how, and to what extent it was occurring. It was in these magazines, which had a much smaller readership than many daily newspapers and weeklies, that the fullest descriptions of the work done by Wallenberg and the other Budapest Swedes were published. Judisk Krönika also drew attention to the significance of a letter from King Gustaf V to Admiral Miklos Horthy, in which the Swedish King made it clear to the Hungarian head of state what the consequences would be after the war if no action was taken to halt the deportations of Hungarian Jews. The writer also highlighted the Red Cross efforts in the spring of 1945.⁶¹

At the end of 1946, the issue of Raoul Wallenberg’s disappearance was discussed in the Riksdag, the Swedish Parliament, for the first time. It was brought up again the following year, but at that point there was still no sign of the great dissatisfaction with the government’s actions that soon came to characterize the case.⁶² Articles about Wallenberg were published fairly regularly in newspapers and magazines in the immediate post-war years, and public demonstrations in his memory were held at irregular intervals in the late 1940s. In 1947, Riksdag members Bertil von Friesen, Ture Nerman, and Vilhelm Lundstedt nominated Wallenberg for the Nobel Peace Prize. Supporters of the nomination included Albert Einstein, but it did not win the approval of the Swedish government, which was necessary if a candidate was to be considered.⁶³ That same year, some of the people involved in trying to discover his fate founded a Raoul Wallenberg Committee. In the years that followed he was portrayed as ‘the spiritual monument’ whose ‘noble features’ personified a Swedish humanitarian tradition.⁶⁴ Soon after it became known that he had been abducted by Soviet troops, meetings were arranged with the main aim of putting pressure on Minister for Foreign Affairs Östen Undén and staff at the UD to discover his fate in Soviet hands and to secure his release and return to Sweden. One such meeting in the Stockholm Concert Hall in the summer of 1948 was estimated to have attracted about 1,000 people.⁶⁵ It is therefore incorrect to assert that there was a lack of public debate in Sweden from 1945 onwards and that an active rejection of commemorative efforts resulted in ‘more than 30 years of near silence’ about Wallenberg and his achievements.⁶⁶

From time to time, indeed, the Wallenberg affair – or case, as it came to be called – gained a particularly prominent place in the Swedish public sphere. Wallenberg’s relatives, as well as politicians, commentators, and journalists periodically returned to the topic of what he had achieved during the Second World War and what had happened to him since. He was certainly missing, and possibly dead, but this ‘agent of love for humanity’ and his contribution were still fondly remembered.⁶⁷ Wallenberg continued to be a symbol, declared Mia Leche Löfgren some ten years after his disappearance, because he ‘was a hero of peace, a figure of light in a dark and evil time’.⁶⁸

The Wallenberg case not only left its mark on political discussions in the Riksdag and the op-ed pages of newspapers. In the 1960s and 1970s, the authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö enjoyed great success with their police-detective novels, which contained recurring elements of social critique. When they located part of the plot of their 1966 novel The Man Who Went Up in Smoke in what they regarded as a friendly and open Budapest, far removed from Cold War notions of a brutal and repressive Communist-run Hungary, it was a short step to a reminder of what had happened in the city some twenty years earlier. When policeman Martin Beck agrees to find a missing man, the Swedish State Secretary instructs him on the importance of history not repeating itself. The last thing Sweden needs, the novel’s politician asserts, is yet another Wallenberg case.⁶⁹

As we know, however, remembrance always walks hand in hand with oblivion. The closely related question is therefore whether or not people and events in the past have obtained the recognition and the posthumous reputation that they deserve.⁷⁰ In the early years of the twenty-first century, the endeavour of Valdemar Langlet and his wife, Nina, to rescue Jews in Budapest has attracted some attention, but Langlet has also been categorized as ‘one of the forgotten ones’.⁷¹ However, the Langlets were by no means totally ignored after the war. One example is a 1979 series of television programmes entitled När kriget kom [‘When the war came’], in which one episode dealt with the Langlets’ efforts in Budapest in 1944–1945. The episode did not appeal to television reviewer Kerstin Hallert, whose main objection was that some relevant aspects had been downplayed. To begin with, there was a tendency to highlight the Langlets’ contributions at the expense of Raoul Wallenberg, because it was implied that the latter only assisted Jews with business connections and/or relatives in Sweden, whereas the Langlets wanted to save all those in need, whatever their ethnicity and status. Hallert found it upsetting that Wallenberg, who, unlike the Langlets, ‘had been left behind’, was only mentioned in a concluding interview with Per Anger. Hallert was also indignant that the programme producer, Sonja Pleijel, who was known for her ‘anything but anti-Soviet attitude’, and the rest of the programme crew had neglected to present how the Soviets had conducted themselves – conduct that had been particularly reprehensible in the Wallenberg case.⁷² Pleijel countered by observing that while Valdemar and Nina Langlet had indeed been able to return and had been helped, unlike Raoul Wallenberg, they had soon been forgotten. It was in order to highlight their achievements to the public that the programme focused on their actions rather than on Wallenberg’s.⁷³

The failure of diplomacy

While the Second World War was still going on, not many people in Sweden outside the UD knew what Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues at the Swedish Legation were doing in Budapest. One of those who did know, and who did his best to stay updated, was the diplomat Sven Grafström. Like Wallenberg, he has been remembered in the historical narrative for his courageous actions during the Second World War. During the German attack on Poland in 1939, Grafström had evacuated diplomats and other foreign nationals from Warsaw under difficult circumstances. While Wallenberg was carrying out his mission in Budapest, Grafström was stationed at the UD in Stockholm. His diaries, which were considered to contain so much sensitive information that they remained unpublished for 34 years, show that even UD staff had difficulty in obtaining information. On 29 December 1944, he wrote that Danielsson had gone into hiding and Wallenberg was being persecuted by the Arrow Cross. However, this information did not come from the Swedish Legation, because contact with Budapest had been broken. Instead, the information came from a German source.⁷⁴ Lennart Petri, who took over the investigations about Wallenberg in 1946, noted that it was only in July 1945 that he gained access to ‘a detailed account of what had happened in Budapest’.⁷⁵ In other cases, too, it proved difficult to clarify what had happened to other missing persons in Budapest, as well as in other parts of Eastern Europe that had come under Soviet control.⁷⁶ For example, a meeting between a Swedish UD official and the Finnish ambassador at the end of the war in Europe revealed how hard it was to obtain reliable information. Not only was the fate of the Swedes who had been operating in Berlin unclear. The Swiss chargé d’affaires in Budapest had disappeared as well. Also, there was still no information about what had happened to Wallenberg after he had ‘“saved himself” by going across to the Russians’. The frustration was not lessened by the fact that Swedish enquiries to Soviet officials continued to go unanswered.⁷⁷

The difficulties in obtaining information did not improve significantly after the war in Europe ended. Later estimates suggest that as many as 40 million people had become displaced persons. Many of them were living in dire circumstances while trying to discover the fate of missing family members, relatives, and friends, often to no avail.⁷⁸ In Eastern Europe, these problems were compounded by the deportations carried out by the Soviet security police. In Hungary alone, 750,000 civilians were sent to temporary camps before being transported to the Gulag to join hundreds of thousands of their compatriots captured by the Red Army on the Eastern Front.⁷⁹ It was thus hard to obtain information about people who had disappeared for various reasons during the war. This was particularly true of Budapest, where Wallenberg was one of several Swedes who had disappeared. However, the Swedish diplomat was not just an ordinary displaced person. He had been sent on an official mission, he had diplomatic status, and he had friends and acquaintances who had contacted the Swedish authorities for answers but had received no clarification as to whether there was any information about him at the UD or any other Swedish authority. The frustration at the difficulty of obtaining information through official channels caused at least one of Wallenberg’s relatives, who lived in Denmark, to contact Folke Bernadotte, who was Vice Chairman of the Swedish Red Cross, in July 1945, to ask about the possibility of travelling to Budapest in order to make enquiries on the spot.⁸⁰ Valdemar Langlet, who had remained in the Hungarian capital after its capture by the Red Army, was also unable to obtain credible information. It could not be ruled out that Wallenberg, who had been declared an outlaw by the Arrow Cross in December 1944, had been lured into a trap, but rumours suggested that he might just as easily have been abducted to Germany as to the Soviet Union. That Wallenberg might have been murdered by the Arrow Cross or abducted by the Germans were scenarios repeatedly mentioned as possibilities by Swedish-Soviet contacts in the immediate post-war years.⁸¹

An alley cat among the purebreds

A Swedish diplomat who had been a member of the pro-socialist ‘red gang’ of young radicals within the UD in the 1960s and 1970s later wrote a retrospective account eulogizing his boss, Per Anger. Not only had Anger supported them through thick and thin; the fact that he and Wallenberg had acted largely outside the rules and protocols in Budapest also made him appear more of a revolutionary than the gang members were.⁸² This view echoes a common description of Wallenberg, Anger, and Valdemar Langlet, who had all acted outside the normal boundaries in an exceptional manner and had courageously defied authority both among their own ranks and in their opponents’.⁸³ That Wallenberg, who was a dynamic and, in many ways, unconventional individual, was not a trained diplomat but had become one ad hoc owing to the mission he undertook in 1944, plus the fact that he came from a country with a conformist culture, further helped to highlight the distance between him and the professional diplomats.⁸⁴ His attire – he is said to have arrived in Budapest wearing a windbreaker, a simple hat, and a rucksack – was unlike that of a diplomat, as was his unwillingness to deal with ‘all kinds of bureaucracy’.⁸⁵ Wallenberg’s actions provoked many of his fellow diplomats. A number of them opined that he had broken the unwritten rules of how a diplomat should behave.

In 1949, Lars G:son Berg assessed Wallenberg’s record in his book Boken som försvann: Vad hände i Budapest. Withdrawn for unclear reasons, the book was republished in 1983. Berg’s assessment was retained in the Swedish reissue but edited out in the 1990 English-language version, entitled The Book That Disappeared: What Happened in Budapest. Berg stressed that Wallenberg’s contributions had been enormous but also noted that his colleague’s tendency to go to extremes had been problematic. Wallenberg’s actions had forced the head of mission, Ivan Danielsson, to take measures he did not want to take; besides, said Berg, they had contributed to UD officials in Stockholm receiving a less than accurate description of what was happening in the Hungarian capital. Berg’s ambivalent attitude was expressed as follows: ‘I admire Raoul more than any other human being. That is not to say that I always approved of all his actions in Budapest, which might sometimes have been downright dangerous for purely Swedish interests.’⁸⁶

Wallenberg’s stubborn and idealistic drive to succeed was certainly laudable because it helped to save many Jews. However, in retrospect it has been claimed that he kept acting foolhardily, egotistically, and ruthlessly. This was particularly true of his deliberate bypassing of his boss, Danielsson, who advocated a less defiant policy towards the Germans and the Hungarian Arrow Cross.⁸⁷ Such unconventional and controversial behaviour probably contributed to Wallenberg’s not being well regarded by the officials of the government ministry charged with finding him and securing his release. To Wallenberg, acting outside protocol was probably of minor importance, because he did not primarily regard himself as a Swedish diplomat. His main activity was humanitarian, and he was in Hungary on behalf of the War Refugee Board. One result may well have been that the UD did not regard Wallenberg as ‘one of its own’ and therefore assigned lower priority to his case.⁸⁸

Soviet smokescreens

There are several other likely explanations for the lack of interest and concrete action in the Wallenberg case. One is linked to the messages received by Staffan Söderblom and others from the Soviet Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladimir Dekanozov, who had a background in the Soviet secret service and close ties with NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria. In response to an enquiry about Wallenberg, Dekanozov informed Söderblom that the Swedish Legation was safe in the western part of Budapest and measures had been taken to protect Wallenberg. A similar reassuring message was conveyed by the Soviet ambassador to Sweden, Alexandra Kollontay. Over a number of years she had established good contacts among the Swedish elite, including with several members of the Wallenberg family, whom she had met in the early 1930s. When she assured UD staff in Stockholm in January 1945 that Wallenberg was in safe Soviet custody, it was therefore a highly credible statement. She was probably unaware of the Soviet leadership’s reasons for arresting him. Her continued enquiries with Moscow about his fate caused irritation and may have been the reason why she was not allowed to remain in the ambassadorial post in Stockholm. The likelihood of her being kept in the dark, combined with her reassuring message, probably contributed to several months passing without any Swedish request being made that the Soviet authorities should return Wallenberg to his homeland without delay.

It was not until the end of April 1945 that Staffan Söderblom contacted Dekanozov again. By then, a reply with a different content had begun to take shape. The Soviets maintained that Wallenberg had had contact with Red Army soldiers; however, he had soon driven off in a car and had then died somewhere in Hungary under unclear circumstances.⁸⁹ Another Soviet tactic was to avoid responding to Swedish enquiries. This silence was one reason why UD staff continued to seek answers from Moscow through official channels, trying to interpret Soviet actions (as well as the lack of them) as best they could. At the same time, however, they began to search elsewhere for clues to Wallenberg’s disappearance, in particular via more or less credible witnesses who claimed to have information about him.⁹⁰

Reasons of a partly different nature have to do with financial considerations. One of these was tied to Swedish-Soviet trade relations and what was known as the ‘billion-kronor loan’. Back in the early 1920s, the Social Democrats had suggested making a loan to the Soviet Union, but the proposal was rejected by the Riksdag. So was a similar proposal ten years later, after Marcus Wallenberg the Elder had warned of too great a risk and too low an interest rate. In 1944, Swedish-Soviet financial negotiations resumed again. The idea that these talks would have led to Stalin ordering the kidnapping of Raoul Wallenberg in order to exert pressure on the Swedish government was dismissed by the commission of enquiry into his case. The notion has since been revived by historian Peter Axelsson, though. He does not dismiss the possibility that one relevant factor while Stalin and Söderblom were discussing Wallenberg in Moscow in 1946 was indeed the concurrent negotiations over the billion-kronor loan by Sweden’s Social Democratic government, a government whose motives in this regard were political rather than financial. If it had transpired that the missing Swede was sitting imprisoned in the Soviet Union, the billion-kronor loan would have been politically impossible; moreover, the scheme would have denigrated the reputations of its main proponents.⁹¹

Another financial aspect of Wallenberg’s disappearance which has been used to explain the feeble and belated Swedish response is based on a story launched soon after his disappearance. The tale claimed that he was carrying a large sum of money and that the fuel tank of his Studebaker was filled with gold and gemstones belonging to Jews who wanted to save their valuables from the plundering Arrow Cross, Germans, and Russians.⁹² This story, which has popped up intermittently, has in recent years been dismissed as Soviet propaganda, not least because such a scenario invited the conclusion, favourable to the Soviets, that Wallenberg had been murdered as part of a robbery in Hungary.⁹³ This conclusion is very reasonable, but it needs to be placed in the context of accusations made against Swedish embassy personnel in the years around the end of the war. A handful of them were accused of having acted for their own benefit by trading on the black market or exploiting vulnerable individuals. The UD took these accusations seriously. If Wallenberg had turned out to have been guilty of a similar crime, it would probably have been difficult to go on the offensive against Moscow.

Lobbying by Wallenberg’s relatives and US proposals

Even after the Soviet abduction of Wallenberg, American interest in his case was considerable. When Swedish newspapers printed articles about the Swedish diplomat’s activities in Budapest, the articles became the subject of diplomatic correspondence.⁹⁴ Wallenberg’s achievements were also reported to American readers. In April 1945, The New York Times published an article that highlighted his actions and also discussed his abrupt and unexplained disappearance from the Hungarian capital.⁹⁵ By all accounts, the brothers Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg were keen to gain clarity about Raoul’s disappearance, but Wallenberg’s half-brother, Guy von Dardel, was extremely active. He tried to win US support for Wallenberg’s cause by travelling to the United States in the spring of 1947, hoping to meet Harry S. Truman to gain his support in the search for Wallenberg. No such meeting with the President materialized, but von Dardel did write a number of letters to high-ranking Americans and managed to get a letter published in The Washington Post.⁹⁶ In addition, Wallenberg’s mother worked behind the scenes to gain support from influential Americans. In late November 1946, Maj von Dardel wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt in which she stressed that thousands of Hungarian Jews had been saved by her son, who had worked on behalf of both ‘the swedish king and the american president [sic]’. Maj von Dardel was keen for her letter to be published, so that the American public could help shape opinion in favour of Raoul Wallenberg and his release. Another hope she had was that Eleanor Roosevelt might consider chairing an American Raoul Wallenberg Association.⁹⁷

Most of Maj von Dardel’s hopes remained unfulfilled, but after two months Eleanor Roosevelt forwarded the letter to the US State Department and to Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Union’s UN ambassador and later long-time Minister of Foreign Affairs. George Warren, the US adviser on refugee affairs, was careful to express his admiration for Wallenberg’s achievements but added that according to the last report of October 1945, the Swede had left Budapest for Debrecen in March of that year, after which all traces had ceased. Warren’s comment was: ‘It does not appear that any official action can be taken until some clue as to his whereabouts is received.’⁹⁸ Soviet records of correspondence between the Soviets and the Americans indicate that the von Dardel visit did not go unnoticed, but no directives came from Moscow about possible countermeasures.⁹⁹ Unsurprisingly, Gromyko’s reply to Eleanor Roosevelt was non-committal. He had forwarded Maj von Dardel’s letter to the Soviet Consulate General ‘for taking appropriate measures’.¹⁰⁰

Guy von Dardel’s lobbying may have contributed to the hope-inducing expressions of admiration for Wallenberg’s achievements that came from Americans in the public sphere. One of the world’s most widely circulated magazines, the Reader’s Digest, extolled the Swedish diplomat. He had been snatched away from those he had rescued, which was both a tragedy and the basis of a legend.¹⁰¹ In an article in The Boston Globe and in a letter to the former Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, the influential newspaper and radio journalist Dorothy Thompson appealed to Wallace for help to find out what had happened to Wallenberg. Thompson further affirmed that the US government would do everything in its power to clarify the fate of the Swede who had heeded Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plea for humanitarian action in a desperate situation. She was convinced that there had been some kind of mistake which the Soviet authorities would surely be willing to rectify.¹⁰²

Wallace did as Thompson asked him, but he received no answer from the Soviets.¹⁰³ Thompson was not content to urge Wallenberg’s cause in the press. Twice in 1947, she appealed to Eleanor Roosevelt and asked her to contact Stalin. The former First Lady made it clear that she had no influence over the Soviet leadership and that she could do nothing beyond what she had already done in contacting Gromyko.¹⁰⁴ That same year, Elisabeth Bailey – the wife of Roger Bailey, one of Raoul Wallenberg’s architecture instructors from the University of Michigan – contacted Guy von Dardel and told him that she had informed the Senator for Michigan, Arthur Vanderberg, about the case.¹⁰⁵ Vanderberg in turn contacted diplomat Dean Acheson, who was then Deputy Secretary of State and became Secretary of State two years later. Acheson replied that the US government would like to exert pressure on its Soviet counterpart, but to do so required the initiative of the Swedish authorities. He sent a similar reply to Guy and Maj von Dardel, who had written to both him and Vanderberg.¹⁰⁶

Östen Undén, Staffan Söderblom, and the Raoul Wallenberg case

When Iver Olsen reported to the War Refugee Board in 1944, he noticed a tension between the UD and Wallenberg, who had ‘jumped in with too big a splash’. The latter’s energetic efforts did not appear to be appreciated by the people who preferred traditional diplomatic methods, but those methods had not helped the vulnerable Jews. One US commentator predicted that the Swedish diplomat would not be met with gratitude back home despite the help he had given.¹⁰⁷ This turned out to be essentially true. While Wallenberg was still operating in Budapest, John Pehle, who headed the effort at the War Refugee Board, had written to thank the Swede for the great work he had done.¹⁰⁸ Representatives of the War Refugee Board continued to display a strong involvement on Wallenberg’s behalf. They requested – and received – help from the US Embassy in Moscow in their attempts to uncover Wallenberg’s fate.¹⁰⁹ However, it took several months before the US decision-makers ultimately responsible for Wallenberg, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr, were informed. The US offer to assist in the investigation was not sent to the Swedish Foreign Minister but to Staffan Söderblom, the Swedish ambassador in Moscow. He, in turn, did not pass on the US requests for Swedish pressure in the matter to Stockholm. He also dismissed the offers of US assistance made by the US ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, ‘and not even politely’, as one later commentator acerbically observed.¹¹⁰

Foreign Minister Östen Undén also remained cool when it came to contacts with Western countries. In a 1947 meeting with representatives of the then newly formed Wallenberg Committee, he expressed strong doubts that a Soviet minister could possibly be making untrue statements. He further questioned whether the Committee members would have been equally suspicious if the opposite party had been the United States. Other participants in the meeting dismissed this comparison because the United States was a democratic country that offered opportunities for monitoring and follow-up.¹¹¹

Evidently Undén was not personally influenced by the shift from German towards American influence that had taken place in Sweden after the Second World War, particularly in cultural respects. In the early years of the war, he had made a name for himself as an independent truthteller who paid little heed to tactical considerations; one example is provided by his repeated objections to the German transit transports through Sweden. This, then, was a man who ‘operated above party affiliations’.¹¹² His position within the Social Democratic movement was a powerful one, and he had the support of the Prime Minister, Tage Erlander, who regarded him as the most astute member of the government.¹¹³ He also won the appreciation of many women Social Democrats during the divisive internal battle over whether or not Sweden should become a nuclear-weapons nation. Like Erlander, Undén supported the Social Democratic Women’s League, which campaigned for a ‘no’ vote.¹¹⁴ Despite recurring criticism of how he handled the 1945 to 1946 extradition of the Balts and the Wallenberg case, his time as Minister for Foreign Affairs between 1945 and 1962 was often portrayed in a favourable light. In 1969, when the newspaper Expressen named the most important Swedes of the twentieth century – a list, incidentally, which did not include either Folke Bernadotte or Raoul Wallenberg – Undén was accorded the honorary title of ‘Mr. Neutrality’.¹¹⁵ When his biography was written some 15 years later, renewed emphasis was placed on his achievement in steering a free Sweden between the East and the West. The author did not conceal his admiration for the former Foreign Minister; the biography was intended to be a tribute to a Swedish politician of international stature.¹¹⁶

While he was Minister for Foreign Affairs, Undén’s critics argued that he was by no means neutral. A few years after the war, the eminent Swedish publicist and political scientist Herbert Tingsten made it clear why his earlier appreciation of Undén had turned into its opposite. Tingsten’s criticism was not softened when he learned of the minister’s more or less favourable statements about North Korea and East Germany or his willingness to vouch for Soviet excuses regarding what had happened to Raoul Wallenberg.¹¹⁷ One possible explanation for Undén’s statements is that they might have been uttered as part of the internal struggle over foreign policy which took place in Sweden in the immediate post-war years. A number of diplomats and senior military officers, as well as Liberal and Conservative politicians, were critical of Undén and desired a relaxation of the policy of neutrality so as to enable a rapprochement with the Western powers. Undén vigorously opposed such proposals.¹¹⁸ Instead, his policy was one of demonstrably distancing Sweden from the United States. One result of this was that the US proposals concerning Wallenberg did not initially meet with any Swedish interest.¹¹⁹ At the same time, just as Olof Palme did later, Undén declared that non-aligned Sweden was not engaged in ‘inciting hatred of the Soviet Union’. In this respect he was aligning himself with an optimistic view of the neighbour to the east that was held by many Swedes in the immediate post-war years. This attitude lasted longer in Sweden than in many other Western countries, and it was particularly apparent in those who were in charge of Sweden’s foreign policy. It is therefore not surprising that official Sweden wanted neither ‘anti-Americanism nor anti-Sovietism’.¹²⁰

In the world of the popular press in the 1950s, pairs of opposites dominated: good-evil, democracy-dictatorship, development-underdevelopment and freedom-oppression. With a few exceptions, the United States was associated with the positive concepts and the Soviet Union with the negative ones.¹²¹ In the political debate, in which the Wallenberg case was a recurring bone of contention, the division was less clear-cut. The fact that Rolf Sohlman, a Swedish diplomat with many years of experience in Moscow and an expert on Russia, was on good terms with Undén invited criticism, both within the UD and in the public debate. Such objections often went hand in hand with claims that Undén was ‘too apt to listen to Soviet views’.¹²² There is reason to maintain that a foreign-policy duel was fought throughout the initial post-war decades. This duel took place partly inside the UD between pro-Western officials – a majority – in one corner and Undén and his supporters in the other,¹²³ and partly in newspaper columns, with Undén and Tingsten as the main adversaries. Against the anti-Communism expressed primarily by Tingsten stood an ‘anti-anti-Communism’, which was particularly conspicuous in the Social Democratic press.¹²⁴

Unlike Undén, Söderblom had gained a reputation for being accommodating towards German demands even while the Second World War was still going on. Undén’s critics argued that because Sweden’s relations with the Soviet Union were severely strained, it was an unfortunate move to appoint a German ‘collaborationist’ as ambassador to Moscow. This rumour reached Soviet politicians, and according to this view of history, it raised obstacles to Söderblom during his time as Sweden’s envoy in Moscow from 1944 to 1946. There, too, he pursued a policy of accommodation. His colleague Sven Grafström wrote acidly that Söderblom had first genuflected to the south and then to the east.¹²⁵ Söderblom feared that like his predecessor in the post, Vilhelm Assarsson, he, too, would be deported owing to the frosty relations between Sweden and the Soviet Union.¹²⁶ The lawyer and author Omi Söderblom draws a somewhat different picture in a comprehensive and well-written 2021 study of her great-uncle Staffan Söderblom and the Wallenberg case. In certain respects, the book – based on new source material – was written with the intention of not assuming a defensive position in her kinsman’s favour. Nevertheless, her book is in many ways a vindication of Staffan Söderblom, a career diplomat held in high esteem by Per Albin Hansson and Östen Undén. He was a key player in the great efforts to keep Sweden out of the Second World War, and he helped to obtain free passage through the Soviet Union for Swedes and other Nordic residents while the fighting was still going on. The blackening of his character, intensified by the link ‘between the mythologizing of Wallenberg and the brutalization of Söderblom’, is due in no small part to a smear campaign led by Grafström, a campaign which resulted in a ‘political stigmatization’. That it took hold and persisted was not least due to the fact that Söderblom’s continued strong involvement in the Wallenberg case contrasted with Undén’s palpable lack of interest.¹²⁷

While this more nuanced depiction of Söderblom is welcome, there are nevertheless good reasons to examine his time as ambassador in Moscow. His policy has been likened to a bridge-building project geared to achieving wide-ranging cooperation between Sweden and the Soviet Union. What Söderblom did not realize was that the Soviet Union was busily constructing a power empire within Europe. In this process, good relations with Sweden were not high on the agenda. Söderblom nonetheless tried to achieve good relations with the authorities in the Kremlin. Among other things, this attitude meant that he downplayed the plundering and other brutal actions committed by Soviet troops in Budapest and Berlin.¹²⁸ In his memoirs, Per Anger recalled Söderblom’s words in this spirit when Wallenberg’s colleagues and other Swedes from the Legation in Budapest reached Moscow in April 1945: ‘Remember – not one harsh word about the Russians!’¹²⁹ In recent times, Söderblom’s actions – with their obviously unfavourable consequences for the investigation into Wallenberg’s disappearance – have hence been categorized as ‘passive’ and ‘remarkable’ by Swedish officialdom.¹³⁰

In interviews conducted 35 years after his meeting with Stalin, Söderblom insisted that in a meeting with ‘the top man’ – which was to be regarded as ‘an unusual favour’ – it would have been unwise to make accusations against the Soviet authorities. It was of paramount importance to keep the door open for further negotiations and ‘to say nothing that might aggravate the situation’. The main aim was not to provoke the Soviet authorities.¹³¹ However, the fact remains that what Söderblom said to Stalin actually weakened the Swedish negotiating position. In the spring of 1945, a rumour had spread that Wallenberg had been killed by Nazi sympathizers in Budapest.¹³² In his meetings with Soviet politicians and officials, Söderblom espoused this view. He told them he was convinced that Wallenberg had ‘fallen victim to an accident or to bandits’ in Budapest. In June 1946 Söderblom raised the matter with Joseph Stalin, whose ‘voice and look gave the impression of a friendly attitude towards his visitors’. The Swedish ambassador’s sympathetic description of the Red Tsar in his report to his colleagues in Stockholm had the same tone as his account of the meeting during which Söderblom informed the Soviet leader of his own conviction that Wallenberg had been killed in Hungary.¹³³ Söderblom added that it was probable that ‘the Soviet-Russian military authorities have no accessible information about Wallenberg’s further fate’. It was hardly surprising that the Soviet replies to the Swedish enquiries about Wallenberg stated that the Swedish diplomat was not in their country.¹³⁴

Furthermore, the Swedish government never considered suggesting an exchange of individuals. Switzerland had found itself in a similar situation when two people from its Legation in Budapest were detained by the Red Army. There were two Soviet fighter pilots in Switzerland, and so the idea of an exchange was raised. Discussions took place within the Swiss Foreign Ministry as to whether such an exchange was compatible with the principles of international law and extradition law, but finally an agreement between the Swiss and the Soviets was negotiated towards the end of 1945. The exchange took place the following year.¹³⁵ Similar exchanges, this time involving spies, later occurred between Italy and Denmark respectively on the one side and the Soviet Union on the other. Swedish embassies monitored similar cases. The Swedish diplomat Gunnar Hägglöf tried to interest Undén in a similar Swedish action, but he was told that ‘Sweden does not want to engage in any “human trafficking”.’¹³⁶ When Per Anger again raised the idea in the late 1950s, Undén’s response was similar: ‘Swedish governments do not do that sort of thing.’¹³⁷

Rudolph Philipp and the Wallenberg campaign

Although Raoul Wallenberg’s achievements and fate were repeatedly highlighted in the daily press and weekly magazines during the immediate post-war period, silence mostly prevailed at the official level. The few and half-hearted efforts by politicians and diplomats to discover the fate of the missing Swedish diplomat have been summed up as ‘too little, too late’.¹³⁸ In addition, it took time before his actions was officially recognized in Sweden. On Gustaf VI Adolf’s 70th birthday in November 1952, Wallenberg was awarded the Illis Quorum medal for his humanitarian work in Budapest, with the added comment that the award was not posthumous.¹³⁹ For reasons to which we shall return, it took a few more decades before he was honoured with monuments in Sweden.¹⁴⁰

Judging from Undén’s diary entries, he was satisfied with the efforts made in the immediate post-war period to discover Wallenberg’s fate. In the course of the investigation he became convinced that Wallenberg was dead, a view that Gustaf VI Adolf said he shared at a meeting in 1959.¹⁴¹ It should be noted that Undén changed his position about Wallenberg’s fate over time. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, after initially telling people who worked close to him that the missing Swede was probably dead, he began to harbour hopes that Wallenberg might still be alive. After the Soviet announcement in 1957 that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack, Undén told his staff that it was probably true.¹⁴² Outwardly, however, he maintained the official Swedish position that the missing Swede could still be a Soviet prisoner.

In the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech in 1956 in which he attacked Stalin, hopes rose of learning more about the Gulag prisoners, who had been non-persons during the Red Tsar’s time in power.¹⁴³ Many people still assumed that Wallenberg was alive, and a number of those who displayed the greatest commitment to his case had only been active in Sweden for a few years. The first director of the Raoul Wallenberg Aid Committee was Eugen Reiz, who was born in Hungary in 1883 and held a doctorate in cultural history from the University of Kraków. He had subsequently worked in Germany but had fled after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and arrived in Sweden in 1938. As well as helping the Hungarian refugees who came to Sweden in the last year of the war, until his death in January 1947 Reiz was a driving force when it came to obtaining information about Wallenberg’s fate. Another leading figure was the Austrian-Jewish journalist Rudolph Philipp. He had been a volunteer fighter in the First World War, was politically active, and was involved in trade unions during the interwar period before fleeing to Sweden in the late 1930s, where he mainly earned his living as a fencing instructor.¹⁴⁴ Philipp was the first to write a book, published in 1946, about Wallenberg’s achievements in Budapest. In his book as well as in subsequent publications, Philipp levelled scathing criticism at the actions of the Swedish government and the UD.¹⁴⁵

Wallenberg’s relatives had established a good rapport with Philipp during the interviews on which his book was based. Wallenberg’s stepfather Fredrik and his half-brother Guy von Dardel arranged for the book to be translated into English, then distributed it in manuscript form to the World Jewish Congress, and tried unsuccessfully to have it published by an American publisher.¹⁴⁶ Reviews of the book in the Swedish press varied. In addition to describing it in less than flattering terms as a ‘sensational book’, critics pointed out that the first person to draw attention to Wallenberg was not a Swede. Even so, it was clear to them that Philipp was the right man for the job. ‘He is a whole Ministry for Foreign Affairs in himself’, proclaimed one reviewer, adding that Philipp had written a book that no Swede could have managed to write.¹⁴⁷

In the autumn of 1946, Philipp lent the Swedish government the materials on which his book was based. From statements he made at the time, representatives of the government had been convinced by his conclusion that Wallenberg was still alive.¹⁴⁸ A few months later, hope increased that an answer would come from Moscow. Prior to Folke Bernadotte’s visit to the Soviet capital, the head of the Soviet Red Cross had responded to an inquiry from Bernadotte about Wallenberg.¹⁴⁹ As was the case with Stalin’s promise to Söderblom that there would be further investigation, no answer materialized after the visit.

Shortly thereafter new findings were presented. Albert Szent-Györgi, a Hungarian who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, had been forced into hiding in Budapest because as a resistance fighter he had helped Jews flee the country. He was given sanctuary at the Swedish Legation. His son-in-law Györgi Libik worked as Per Anger’s driver and was one of the last people to see Wallenberg before he was taken into Soviet custody. Szent-Györgi was part of a delegation of Hungarian politicians that travelled to Moscow in May 1945, where, like Söderblom, he conducted negotiations with Soviet politicians. Even there and then, Szent-Györgi concluded that there was no Soviet antipathy towards Wallenberg. However, he believed that the missing Swede had met his fate as someone hunted and hated by both the Arrow Cross and the Germans. He maintained this opinion until his death in the United States in 1986.¹⁵⁰

Szent-Györgi’s standpoint attracted general attention when he and his compatriot, the publicist Jenő Lévai, who had been rescued by and worked with Elsa Brändström after the First World War and been helped by Wallenberg during the Second World War, spoke out in the summer of 1947 about Wallenberg’s last days in Budapest. Lévai had previously written a book about the Angel of Siberia and had been commissioned by the Hungarian Wallenberg Committee (founded in 1945 but already dissolved by this time) to write a book about Wallenberg. Both Szent-Györgi and Lévai argued that the most likely explanation was that the Swedish diplomat had been killed by Germans or the Arrow Cross, as he was unlikely to have been offered any protection by the Soviets. Lévai referred to a study performed by the Hungarian authorities which he had seen. Among the tens of thousands of Hungarians who had returned from captivity in the Soviet Union, no one had seen or heard of the Swede. However, this conclusion met with stiff opposition, as did statements about ‘how easy it was to die in Hungary’ for anyone who was there in January 1945.¹⁵¹

The debate becomes heated

One example of the explosive power of Wallenberg’s case occurred in July 1947, when the Stockholm branch of the Swedish section of the International Women’s Federation for Peace and Freedom, whose members had early on become engaged in trying to discover Wallenberg’s fate, invited Lévai and Szent-Györgi to an evening of discussion about the Swedish diplomat’s disappearance. The meeting, which was reported even by newspapers based outside Stockholm and with very varied ideological affiliations, had a dramatic beginning when it became clear that Szent-Györgi would not participate because he had gone abroad. Lévai did appear, but after reading out his speech translated into Swedish, he made it clear that the extensive material he had collected over two and a half years, comprising thousands of pages and hundreds of witness accounts, could only be examined by specialists. When Lévai dismissed people who were working to prove a preconceived hypothesis, it was obvious that he was referring to Rudolph Philipp, who was also present. Philipp’s response was that Lévai was lying ‘from beginning to end’. After noisy reactions from the audience, Lévai promised to present evidence to an impartial delegation within 36 hours. Before leaving the meeting to travel to Oslo, he presented the documentary find he had made in Budapest: a draft of a Nansen Plan for Hungary allegedly written by Wallenberg. This was rejected by Wallenberg’s fellow diplomat Lars G:son Berg, who had been present at the opening of the bank vault in Budapest where Wallenberg’s belongings had been stored. No document concerning a Nansen Plan had been found there, and there was doubt that the draft referred to by Lévai had even been written by a Swede. Like Philipp, G:son Berg argued against Lévai’s claim that the Arrow Cross or the Germans had murdered Wallenberg, saying that this would have been virtually impossible ‘after he had come under the protection of the Russians’.¹⁵² The meeting became ‘a heated debate in the otherwise peaceful Women’s Federation premises’ and ended with ‘a gentle but determined women’s deputation which departed immediately’ in order to renew contact with Lévai.¹⁵³

In the wake of the meeting Philipp received praise. Some of those who believed that the answers to the questions about Wallenberg were to be found in Moscow lauded Philipp for his great commitment and comprehensive efforts. Not everyone was satisfied, though. Philipp’s critics questioned his failure to present clear evidence for his thesis.¹⁵⁴ An editorial writer for one of the leading evening newspapers had not realized that Philipp was Austrian but described him as a compatriot of Lévai. It must, the writer continued, ‘be regarded as almost macabre that these Hungarians should sit here in Stockholm and air their internal antipathies in public’. What added to the bitter aftertaste was that this was a deeply tragic event which had preoccupied and tormented the Swedish people for over two years, ‘causing bitter disappointment to all the official investigators’.¹⁵⁵

Undeterred, Philipp renewed his attack on Lévai. Like Lévai, Philipp had interviewed a number of people in Budapest who had followed Wallenberg’s activities from close quarters. They had distanced themselves from Lévai because they feared what his information, published in a Hungarian book, might lead to as the Soviet Union further tightened its grip on Hungary. Philipp said that this was one of several reasons why they had no confidence in the Hungarian Wallenberg Committee.¹⁵⁶

The controversial nature of the assertion that Wallenberg was dead is also shown by the fact that the Swedish publisher removed the section in the Hungarian edition in which Lévai implied that Wallenberg had died in Budapest. He was asked to write a new version with an ending in which the Swedish diplomat disappears into the unknown. The change did not go unnoticed. The fact that Lévai laconically and abruptly ended his tale on 17 January, Wallenberg’s last day in the Hungarian capital, and did not report on the investigations into what had happened thereafter ‘must be interpreted by the Swedish reader as a necessary and forced political consideration’, one reviewer asserted.¹⁵⁷ Another writer stressed that the main reason the book was worth reading was ‘not the merit of the author but that of the subject’. A particularly serious matter was the way in which the Swedish translation had been ‘fiddled and tampered with by means of changes and omissions’ because there were people in Sweden with knowledge of ‘Raoul Wallenberg’s subsequent fate’ that collided with Lévai’s claims. Despite the changes made to the Swedish edition, the message from the Hungarian original was still clear, and this satisfied the Soviet authorities. That was less than surprising, since ‘[t]he person who thinks that anyone can sit in Hungary and write anything other than what suits the Soviet power can cast the first stone’.¹⁵⁸ Despite such devastating criticism, the first two Swedish editions of the book quickly sold out. But after pressure from Rudolph Philipp and Maj von Dardel, among others, the book was withdrawn and the third edition pulped.¹⁵⁹

New information in October 1947 suggesting that Wallenberg was still alive revived the issue of his disappearance.¹⁶⁰ Philipp continued to pursue the matter, renewing his attacks on those who, like the Hungarian Vilmos Böhm, claimed – ‘even though they knew better’ – that the Germans had killed Wallenberg.¹⁶¹ It soon became clear that Philipp was the strong man of the Wallenberg campaign. As time passed, he gained the approval of people who shared his view that the Swedish government was doing too little in the matter, not least because his demands were reasonable in that it was the Soviet Union that was accountable for whatever had happened to Wallenberg, and because – unlike the Swedish government – his starting point was not one of doubt.¹⁶²

Philipp vs. pro-Moscow Communists

In 1945, Philipp made his voice heard in earnest in his new homeland when he published a quasi-autobiography that was very much a showdown with the Czech shoe king Tomáš Bata and his system of exploitation. Under this system, workers became co-owners, but without any obvious benefits as they were encouraged to compete against each other in pursuit of higher production goals while being held responsible for any losses the company might incur.¹⁶³ Anyone who took a stand alongside the workers in an explicit critique of a capitalist exploitative system might be expected to garner sympathy from the left. This was by no means a given, though. Ten years earlier, Charlie Chaplin had that exact experience when his film Modern Times went from being a project cherished by leading Soviet cultural politicians to a cautionary tale, as his critique of the machine society ran counter to the large-scale investment in heavy industry in the Soviet Union.¹⁶⁴ Philipp, too, had previously been on good terms with influential Communists in Moscow. His criticism of Bata led to him being made a guest of honour in the Soviet capital, but the outcome of his elevation was unexpected. At first there had been a consensus that the Bata system was an example of capitalist predation, but the Soviet Communists adopted the basic idea that workers should be encouraged to compete against one another, with prizes for the most successful, regardless of whether they were producing women’s stockings or tractors. Inspired by Bata, the Soviet Union introduced ‘shock workers’, called udarniki, who wore a badge of honour like a medal on their chests. Although Philipp was paid for a new edition of his critical book on the Bata system, it was withdrawn a few weeks later. Nor did the film, intended for export only and with a final scene showing the Soviet flag flying over Bata factories, see the light of day.¹⁶⁵

For Swedish pro-Moscow Communists, this type of criticism was not welcome, and that mindset also coloured their attitude in the Wallenberg case. In the Communist daily paper Ny Dag, it was therefore Jenő Lévai’s opinion that prevailed. The newspaper’s writers sympathized with the idea that Wallenberg had been murdered by the Arrow Cross, which meant that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with his disappearance. Confidence in the authorities in Moscow was also expressed by Ny Dag’s reproducing an argument from the Soviet magazine Novoye Vremya. The gist of that argument was that people from ‘reactionary circles’ were exploiting ‘the tragedy of Raoul Wallenberg’ with the aim of disseminating propaganda against the Soviet Union.¹⁶⁶ Ny Dag’s readers were left in no doubt that Rudolph Philipp was one of these reactionaries, and ‘[his] book, based on hearsay and rumour and dictated by counter-revolutionary fervour’, found no favour with the newspaper’s reviewer.¹⁶⁷ This censorious tone was echoed when the Riksdag debated Wallenberg’s disappearance in May 1951. ‘The international trickster Philipp’ was one of those who continued to write ‘abusive letters’ as part of an anti-Soviet propaganda campaign.¹⁶⁸ It is worth noting that such views were not only expressed in Ny Dag. For example, an editorial writer in the Liberal newspaper Expressen criticized both Philipp and Lévai and ‘the competition’ between them in their unsavoury struggle over the truth about Wallenberg’s fate.¹⁶⁹

For a couple of decades Philipp held a prominent position in the public sphere, claiming time and again that Wallenberg was alive and no effort should be spared to free him. Together with Maj von Dardel and others, he wrote an open letter to Sweden’s Prime Minister in March 1951. The group welcomed a public enquiry announced by Tage Erlander and expressed their good will by explaining that they wanted to avoid the issue becoming subjected to party politics. They had therefore persuaded members of the centre-right opposition not to push the matter any further, so that the government could pursue its efforts to trace the missing Swede in peace. However, they stressed that one thing was already clear: evidence existed according to which the Soviet Union was responsible for Wallenberg’s disappearance.¹⁷⁰ In April 1953, encouraged by the testimony of the freed Italian diplomat Claudio de Mohr plus the death of Stalin about a month earlier, Philipp expressed the hope that the Kremlin authorities would do away with their earlier mistakes so that Sweden could have ‘one of her finest sons’ back.¹⁷¹

The silence from Moscow persisted but Philipp stubbornly maintained his belief that Wallenberg was alive. In 1955, he said that it was wrong to call the Wallenberg case a mystery, as there were numerous testimonies from prisoners who stated that they had either shared a cell with Wallenberg or had had contact with him via tapping. Several returning prisoners from the Soviet Union, of various nationalities, recounted stories of a man called Wallenberg whose conduct was exemplary even in prison and who had instilled courage in them. Their narratives strengthened Philipp’s conviction that the missing Swede was not a forced labourer but rather a privileged prisoner of the state. That view also formed the starting point for the application by Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow, Rolf Sohlman, which underwent an important change before it was sent to Marshal Voroshilov. Maj von Dardel did not wish to ask for a ‘pardon’ for Wallenberg, as that would be tantamount to admitting that he had committed crimes against the Soviet Union. Instead of ‘pardon’, it was ‘justice’ that should be demanded. However, there had been no response to the request. The combative Philipp argued that one factor contributing to the weak response from Moscow was that the official Swedish proposals were too cautiously presented. When the Speaker of the Riksdag’s Second Chamber, Gustaf Nilsson, had met with Bulganin and Voroshilov, Ambassador Sohlman had been hovering ‘like a nursemaid by his side’. That had prevented Nilsson from speaking freely, and as a result his intervention had been ineffective.¹⁷² Likewise, it was a recurring problem that the people in charge of Sweden’s government and its foreign policy did not react strongly enough against the ‘agents and provocateurs’ who served the Soviets by spreading false information about what had happened in Budapest in 1944–1945, and who also helped to discredit serious witnesses that had recently come forward.¹⁷³

When, in 1957, the Soviets presented information to the effect that Wallenberg had died in the Lubyanka prison in 1947, Philipp was quick to speak out. The document was ‘a web of fabrications’. It was his firm conviction that Wallenberg was alive, and therefore the fight for his release would continue.¹⁷⁴ Philipp continued to be troubled by Östen Undén’s reluctance to exert further pressure. He also criticized those who, for reasons of realpolitik, defended the Minister for Foreign Affairs’ initial wait-and-see position in relation to the Wallenberg case.¹⁷⁵ However, after the news from Moscow that Wallenberg had died in 1947, some of Philipp’s most persistent critics were neutralized. Writers in Ny Dag dealt as best they could with the news from the Kremlin, among other things by blaming ‘international businessmen’ who had spread all sorts of stories about the missing diplomat, stories which had resulted in the Swedish government’s investigators repeatedly being led astray. The leader of the Swedish Communist Party, Hilding Hagberg, commended Wallenberg. His achievements had been exemplary, as anti-fascists in all countries agreed. The news of his death was therefore bitter, but it also demonstrated a Soviet determination to ‘liquidate post-war mistakes and ensure the most comprehensive democratization and safeguarding of the laws as well as of the rights of the people’.¹⁷⁶ While unwavering loyalty to the authorities in Moscow persisted, the writers in Ny Dag stopped asserting Soviet innocence; instead, they were more than willing to support Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko in 1957 when he declared that as far as the Soviets were concerned, the Wallenberg affair was closed.¹⁷⁷ Nor did the Ny Dag journalists see any further reason to write about Philipp.

In conjunction with discussions about new witness accounts, both in the early and late 1950s, Philipp maintained his conviction that the Swedish diplomat was still in Soviet custody. One new development was that he toned down his criticism of the leaders of Sweden’s foreign policy. That, however, was the calm before the storm. Philipp was one of the driving forces when, in February 1951, the Wallenberg campaign – together with several other organizations, some of which were women’s federations and associations – presented the Swedish government with a letter demanding that it was high time not only to request Soviet investigations, but also to express an unambiguous demand to Moscow that Wallenberg must be returned to Sweden. A similar message was conveyed in a magazine article by Philipp in early 1951, in which he claimed to present the truth about Wallenberg – a truth which, by implication, was not necessarily recognized by members of Sweden’s government and UD officials.¹⁷⁸ Philipp’s activities were probably one reason why the question about what the Swedish government and the UD had achieved in the Wallenberg case was raised in the Riksdag in February 1951.¹⁷⁹ The tone was further sharpened in the winter of 1951–1952, when Philipp repeatedly accused Erlander, Undén, and State Secretary Folke Thunborg of incompetence and tardiness in the matter. He also claimed that Hungarian witnesses who had testified that they had seen Wallenberg alive after he had been declared missing by the Soviets had ended up in trouble. The witnesses’ statements were particularly sensitive for the Hungarian Communist regime. Owing to the carelessness of UD officials, the Hungarian police had arrested these witnesses soon after the police became aware of them, whereupon the witnesses were forced to withdraw their statements under threat.¹⁸⁰

Peace was finally made between the UD and Wallenberg’s relatives, and the latter handed over the material they had collected, including through Philipp, to the UD. A year later, however, outraged accusations were again heard in the public debate. Against the express wishes of the Swedish government, representatives of the Wallenberg campaign wanted to publish a classified exchange of notes between Sweden and the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, Philipp renewed his attack on UD officials who were, in his opinion, spreading a malicious rumour that Wallenberg had been guilty of misconduct in Budapest.¹⁸¹ By the late 1950s, the language was much milder. Then Philipp was pleased that a Justice of the Supreme Court of Sweden had agreed with him in recognizing the truthfulness of some of the witness accounts of the returned Gulag prisoners. This was a great advantage, because ‘[n]othing is more alien to me than to seek conflict with those in power in Sweden. We depend as much on the goodwill of the Swedish Government Offices as on that of the Kremlin’.¹⁸²

This affable tone had previously been the exception rather than the rule. In 1945, Philipp had politely debated with Tage Erlander about the police and their degree of impartiality in Swedish society.¹⁸³ When they met again a few years later, to discuss Raoul Wallenberg, the tone was much more hostile. One of the people who accessed tape recordings from the meetings described Philipp as ‘terribly harsh in his criticism of the Swedish Foreign Office’s actions’, and notes from the meetings give the same impression, with Philipp repeatedly and unhesitatingly interrupting Erlander and other representatives of the government and the UD.¹⁸⁴ In his autobiography, the Prime Minister diplomatically referred to Philipp as the Wallenberg family’s ‘energetic collaborator’.¹⁸⁵ Erlander’s diary entries contained different and much less polite descriptions. In these, the Prime Minister accused Philipp, ‘the family’s well-intentioned evil spirit’, of writing ‘mendacious articles’ and of constantly derailing the conversations between them with his ‘idiotic and vicious attacks’. Erlander also described Philipp, and his ‘ally’ Arvid Fredborg, a Conservative journalist who in 1943 had published the strongly Third Reich-critical book Bakom stålvallen [English edition: Behind the Steel Wall, A Swedish Journalist in Berlin 1941–43], as ‘ruthlessly manipulative’. After Khrushchev’s resignation in 1964, Erlander wrote that a new leader might provide new opportunities. It was a modest hope. On one point, though, he was quite clear: ‘Philipp will be phoning like a madman.’¹⁸⁶

Östen Undén and his colleagues at the UD joined Philipp’s critics. Arne S. Lundberg, who had been the lead man in charge of the Wallenberg case for a number of years, complained in the early 1950s that it was difficult to establish well-functioning cooperation between the Swedish government and Wallenberg’s immediate family. Lundberg strongly advised against any assertive diplomatic measures, such as the presentation of a démarche to the authorities in Moscow, and also defended the need for secrecy. Philipp’s presence made this necessity far harder to ensure, he said, because experience showed that sooner or later he would publish, in a more or less distorted form, conversations that had been held behind closed doors.¹⁸⁷ Sven Grafström joined in the lament, describing Philipp as a ‘complete hysteric who had found easily duped victims in Raoul Wallenberg’s despairing mother and his half-brother Guy von Dardel’.¹⁸⁸ Among Grafström’s colleagues, words such as ill-judged, nervous, unbalanced, aggressive, and suspicious were used to describe Philipp, although his deep knowledge of Central European affairs won grudging recognition.¹⁸⁹ Anyone who challenged the notion that Wallenberg was alive in Soviet captivity ran the risk of being accused by Philipp of doing ‘Moscow’s bidding’, which was not popular.¹⁹⁰ Nor did Queen Louise of Sweden, who admittedly possessed no formal influence, have much confidence in Philipp.¹⁹¹ He, in turn, continued to have limited confidence in the Swedish authorities’ handling of the Wallenberg case, as again became evident in connection with Erlander’s proposal in 1965 for a new White Paper about the exchange of notes between the UD and Moscow. Philipp argued that such a White Paper was counterproductive because it signalled that the case was closed, which meant that Wallenberg no longer fulfilled the function of a prominent prisoner of state and a potential bargaining chip. Philipp argued forcefully that handling the case in such a way was irresponsible, which ultimately meant that the Swedish government bore as much responsibility for Wallenberg’s imprisonment as did the Kremlin.¹⁹²

The fight for Raoul Wallenberg continues

In the late 1940s, one writer criticized the raw force and brutality of the Soviet Union, which was abundantly obvious in the Wallenberg case. Even the Swedish authorities did not escape the criticism unscathed. Those in charge of Sweden’s foreign policy were described as individuals who caused no anxiety in the Kremlin.¹⁹³ Similar criticisms continued to be made, and they were justified. Disagreements about the Wallenberg case existed at the Swedish government level, within the UD, and at the royal court. One commentator said that overall, ‘it was difficult for individuals within the UD administration to assert themselves in the Wallenberg affair’.¹⁹⁴ Per Anger later expressed a similar opinion. He had been put in charge of the Wallenberg case in 1949. As he stated in 1979, he became increasingly critical of the Swedish government’s mode of action. After a number of confrontations with Erlander and Undén, he resigned the position as the government’s spokesman in favour of increased involvement with the Wallenberg Committee. When he spoke out in the early 1980s, his verdict was harsh: ‘the lost years’ after the war ended had been characterized by ‘unimaginably lame and very-nearly-lame attempts to get to the bottom of the matter’.¹⁹⁵

These high-level tensions may be glimpsed in political memoirs as well. Carl-Fredrik Palmstierna, a baron, courtier, historian, and close acquaintance of Maj and Guy von Dardel, was both criticized and applauded for his eagerness – expressed in his autobiography Fjädern i min hand [‘The feather in my hand’] – to point to problematic conditions in 1970s Sweden in general, and the Swedish unwillingness to put pressure on the Soviet authorities in the Wallenberg case in particular.¹⁹⁶ Palmstierna had tried in vain to influence Gustaf VI Adolf to assume an active role and demand an answer as to what had happened to the missing diplomat. Palmstierna said that Dag Hammarskjöld reacted coldly to a similar suggestion because the UN Secretary-General was caught up in ‘that blasted Foreign Ministry esprit de corps!’ Nor was Palmstierna successful when, in 1966, he urged the prominent Social Democrat Alva Myrdal to include Raoul Wallenberg in her speech on political prisoners in conjunction with the formation of the Swedish branch of Amnesty International.¹⁹⁷ Myrdal’s party colleague Ulla Lindström, who was a minister from 1954 to 1964, did not share Palmstierna’s view. In her autobiography I regeringen [‘In the government’], she argued that official Sweden had done everything in the nation’s power. She dismissed State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Arne S. Lundberg’s special personal involvement in the matter, putting it down to Lundberg’s allegedly having ‘something of the Wild West novel and detective thriller in his nature: missing heroes and suspected spies arouse his particular interest, attract him irresistibly, it would seem’.¹⁹⁸

Unsurprisingly, the recurring schisms led to occasionally tense contacts between the UD and Wallenberg’s relatives in what could sometimes be an almost hostile atmosphere. Eric Sjöquist writes, ‘a peculiar struggle was going on over Raoul Wallenberg – not primarily between Sweden and the Soviets, but between the official Swedish authorities and the private campaigns, including those conducted by the Wallenberg campaign and the von Dardel family, which were pushing for something to be done about the case’.¹⁹⁹ The latter were not content with exerting pressure but pursued their own ways of drawing attention to the case. These included helping to organize international hearings about Wallenberg’s disappearance and writing letters to American and Soviet leaders. These approaches and contact channels had not secured the prior approval of the Swedish government and the UD.²⁰⁰

Raoul Wallenberg and Henry Kissinger

One consequence of the Wallenberg family’s activity in the case was that leading Swedish politicians repeatedly expressed concern over initiatives beyond their control. One example can be found in the discussions that were held in 1952 after the Swedes believed for the first time – thanks to the testimony of the previously mentioned Claudio de Mohr – that they had firm evidence that Wallenberg had been taken to the Soviet Union in 1945. It was hoped that this information would lead to an opening in the talks with Moscow. Tage Erlander’s concern about an unforeseen move at home is telling: ‘Just as long as the relatives don’t cause any trouble.’²⁰¹ Cooperation subsequently improved, but the mutual suspicion between the Swedish government and the UD on the one hand and Wallenberg’s family on the other was still expressed on later occasions.²⁰²

One such incident occurred in 1973 and proved troublesome not only for the Swedish government but also for US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Maj von Dardel had asked the US government to raise the Wallenberg case in conjunction with the impending state visit of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Thomas R. Pickering, a young US State Department official who later became US ambassador to Russia and other countries, plus four other State Department officials suggested that the United States should support her appeal, not least because Wallenberg had been hired by the American Iver Olsen, and make an official enquiry to the Soviet authorities about the fate of the Swedish diplomat. Pickering’s recommendation was not supported by his superior, Henry Kissinger.²⁰³ Instead, Kissinger secretly contacted the UD to give advance notice of his response. He intended to contact Wallenberg’s mother to express his sympathy, but also to tell her that it was not possible for the United States to pursue the case. It was a matter for the Swedish government and the Red Cross.²⁰⁴ Leif Leifland, who worked on the Wallenberg case for a number of years, argued that the American reluctance to become wholeheartedly involved in the Swede’s fate in the early 1970s was mainly because Kissinger did not want to jeopardize the chances of an agreement with the Soviet Union over the Middle East. The fact that Olof Palme had spoken out sharply against US foreign policy in general and the Vietnam War in particular was less important than ‘relations with the other superpower and concern for peace in the Middle East’.²⁰⁵

The story of Maj von Dardel’s letter became public in March 1979, just over a year after her death. Sven Strömberg, Swedish Radio’s correspondent in London, had been granted permission to go through classified US documents. His findings were presented in a double-spread article in the Sunday supplement of the leading Swedish daily paper Dagens Nyheter, an article which attracted attention not only in Sweden. It was not long before the article was picked up by representatives of US intelligence. This is hardly surprising, because over the years Strömberg had commented on both Swedish and American efforts in the Wallenberg case. He stressed that high-ranking Swedish officials had rejected US invitations to cooperate in the matter both before and now, but he was even more critical of Kissinger’s actions. Given that he had grown up in a family forced to flee Germany in 1938, a different reaction would have been expected and desirable. Kissinger, ‘who at one time was persecuted as a Jew by the Nazis’, should not have dismissed the possibility of discovering what had happened to Wallenberg out of hand. Strömberg’s explanation of why Kissinger had ultimately refused to endorse von Dardel’s appeal was the American’s critical view of Sweden’s Vietnam policy.²⁰⁶

Whatever explanation was given for Kissinger’s decision, we catch a glimpse of him as a modern equivalent of one of the foremost exponents of realpolitik: Klemens von Metternich. The Austrian diplomat features prominently in Kissinger’s 1954 doctoral thesis, published three years later as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822. Robert D. Kaplan has convincingly argued that this book demonstrates the decisive influence that the Holocaust – as well as the feeble negotiating efforts of the British and French leaders vis-à-vis Adolf Hitler in the context of the Munich Agreement of 1938 – had on Kissinger’s thinking about international relations. Anyone who is able to draw the lines from his analyses of early nineteenth-century diplomacy to the decisions he made during his time as US Secretary of State will gain insights into the principles of realism that Kissinger espoused through A World Restored. These principles include the belief that disorder is worse than injustice; that the idea that one’s own side is morally superior to the other is misleading and harmful; and that stability is preferable to rapid change and demands for universal justice.²⁰⁷ Given such a background, his decision in 1973 not to discuss Raoul Wallenberg with the Soviet authorities may be regarded as highly rational. Avoiding an issue that was sensitive for Soviet politicians and diplomats was ‘a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight’, to quote his favourable assessment of those diplomats who, after the devastating Thirty Years’ War, negotiated the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 proceeding from their conviction of ‘the necessity to come to an arrangement with each other’, not on the basis of ‘some sort of superior morality’.²⁰⁸

Quiet diplomacy as a contentious domestic political issue

The main political objective in Sweden during the Cold War was that the country should continue its neutrality policy from the Second World War by means of strict non-alignment. The question of how this policy should be applied in practice sometimes led to disagreement, though. One example was the noisy discussions that erupted after Khrushchev suddenly and unexpectedly cancelled his state visit to Sweden in 1959. The leader of the Swedish Conservative Party, Jarl Hjalmarson, had opposed the visit from the outset and renewed his attack on the Social Democratic government. As a result of his criticism, Hjalmarson was excluded from the Swedish delegation representing Sweden at the United Nations that year. The official Soviet explanation for the cancellation of the state visit was anti-Soviet agitation. That the Wallenberg case was part of this agitation is clear from an internal Soviet report. It stressed that from the outset, the centre-right opposition in Sweden had used the Wallenberg affair to conduct ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’.²⁰⁹

Continually fuelling the domestic debate over Raoul Wallenberg were recurring Soviet moves and witness accounts that reached UD staff in an irregular stream from the end of the war and for half a century thereafter. These utterances reached the public sphere as well, which was not something that might have been taken for granted. As a result of the lack of clarity and evidence about Wallenberg, a great deal of attention was paid to people who claimed to have seen or met the Swedish diplomat. One early statement came from Stella Kuylenstierna-Andrassy, a Swede who had married into one of Hungary’s most influential families, writing about her experiences of the turbulent war years in Hungary and her dramatic escape from the Red Army in 1945. One of the stops along the way was ‘Hungary’s most beautiful city’, Sopron, where she maintained that Wallenberg had set up an office. According to some accounts he had been killed in bombing raids on the city, whereas other rumours claimed that he had been taken as a Soviet prisoner to the nearby Cseklész Castle following the occupation of the area by the Red Army at the end of March 1945.²¹⁰

Some three decades later, Britt and Hans Ehrenstråle claimed something completely different. Hans Ehrenstråle was a Swedish diplomat who had been a successful mediator in Greece in 1944 and had carried out humanitarian work in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Poland in the years after the war ended. During the last-mentioned mission, partisans had taken the Ehrenstråles to a badly wounded and exhausted man. Although it was not possible to identify him, they thought it highly likely that the man in question was Raoul Wallenberg, who had been brought to the area on prisoner transport.²¹¹ The fact that this Polish trail was presented by two highly respected people with considerable international experience helped to make it impossible ‘despite all the peculiar circumstances, to dismiss their story out of hand’.²¹² In practice, however, both explanations were rejected, but there were many other trails to follow.

After the tentative start, the UD began a very extensive effort in the 1950s, much of which was carried out in secret. All of the 136 volumes pertaining to the Wallenberg case that have been made public contain investigations with witnesses, conducted with source-critical accuracy in accordance with the rules and guidelines that characterize practitioners of the historical past. All leads and suggestions were dealt with and followed up. Turning them into evidence was extremely difficult, partly because there was a need to preserve the safety of individuals. This was the case, for example, with a Polish contact who was active in dissident circles and had already been subjected to reprisals by the Polish Communist regime.²¹³ Some informants acted in good faith but provided dubious information, while others freely invented. However, a large number of consistent reports, often based on information obtained through tapping on prison walls and water pipes or conversations between prisoners, left little doubt that Wallenberg had been, and possibly still was, in Soviet captivity. A steady stream of such witness accounts came in the wake of the repatriation, starting in the 1950s, of German prisoners of war, as well as people of other nationalities who had also been imprisoned in the Gulag. A number of these statements were raised at irregular intervals during the investigative process.²¹⁴ Despite this comprehensive endeavour, however, the ministers responsible could do nothing more than refer to previous investigations – all of which had been fruitless – when attention paid to these witness accounts led to questions being asked in the Riksdag.²¹⁵

Prison guards have repeatedly come forward with more or less fanciful stories.²¹⁶ In some cases the witnesses’ credibility was considered to be high, but there were other complicating factors. The information that Wallenberg had died in a Soviet prison as early as 1945 or 1946 was hard to verify. The source was a KGB agent who had defected to Britain and whose identity had to be kept secret because his family was still living in the Soviet Union. When the former agent was eventually interviewed by UD staff, his testimony still seemed credible despite some contradictions, but the chances of having it verified were basically non-existent.²¹⁷

Other witnesses who either claimed to have met Wallenberg after 1945, but outside the Soviet Union, or who claimed to have had direct or indirect contact with him in prisons and prison camps were easy to dismiss at an early stage. For example, around 1970 a traumatized German nurse did not think it unlikely that she had treated Wallenberg, but it turned out that she had been working in places where he had never been. Nor did it take long to reject the claim made by a Hungarian resident of Rome who relayed a compatriot’s claim that Wallenberg had been observed in Kyiv in the late summer and autumn of 1947, or that of a Hungarian who firmly asserted that he was the last person to see Wallenberg in Budapest at a time four weeks after his disappearance. The former German prisoner of war who ‘liked to talk about his memories in theatrical terms’, while clearly appearing to pay no attention to detail, was dismissed almost immediately, as was the woman who claimed that Raoul Wallenberg – who had allegedly acquired an alias, whereupon he had lived and worked in Tallinn – was her father. Another person who came forward was certainly ‘not a pleasant acquaintance’, and his account was probably ‘another Wallenbergian will o’ the wisp’; but nevertheless, the story was recorded and researched before it, too, could be disputed.²¹⁸

No testimony was dismissed immediately, but suspicion ran high from the outset about the fairly incoherent information offered by a certain ‘Mr Budapest’. A similar reaction met the man who had waited for decades before establishing contact with the UD, not least because the diplomat who interviewed him was surprised that while he had a crystal-clear memory of having seen a sign bearing the name ‘Raoul Wallenberg’ in a Gulag camp, he had no idea that the man was Swedish. A former Gulag prisoner in exile in Israel revealed, as soon as the Swedish diplomat who had come to interview him stepped through the door of his Tel Aviv home, that he had never met the missing Swede. The supposed witness had come forward because he wanted company, if only for a few hours. Another informant emphasized his own credibility by proclaiming that he had no interest whatsoever in the reward offered by the Swedish state to anyone who could provide clues in the Wallenberg case. That did not prevent him from enclosing his account number in his next letter to the UD.²¹⁹

Other witnesses remained relevant for a relatively long period of time – sometimes for decades – even in cases where they appeared at an early stage to be ‘liars’ or ‘pathological individuals’ who had already exhibited ‘psychological peculiarities … at an early stage in Russian captivity’.²²⁰ The same held true of witnesses who were de facto exposed as liars, such as the exiled Polish Jew Abraham Kalinski. A handwriting analysis showed that he had forged a letter from a doctor in Vladimir Prison stating that Wallenberg was alive after 1947.²²¹ In accordance with established practice, UD officials continued to conduct a dialogue with the Pole even after he unilaterally broke a vow of secrecy in the late 1970s and continued to elaborate on his claims, as when he asserted in 1985 that Wallenberg had died of pneumonia as late as February that year.²²² The conclusion was that he was ‘an intellectually confused and emotionally unstable person with what appears to be a manifest need to play a prominent role in the matter of Raoul Wallenberg’.²²³ Because such statements were made in secret, in accordance with the policy of quiet diplomacy, it was difficult for representatives of the Swedish government and the UD to repudiate these accounts publicly. After Kalinski had been interviewed several times in 1979, one journalist argued that his testimony was ‘strong’ and credible.²²⁴ Following Kalinski’s appearance on the Swedish television news programme Aktuellt, another journalist, accepting the story that Wallenberg was still imprisoned in the Soviet Union, complained that no representative of the Swedish government had listened to the Polish refugee before.²²⁵

Occasionally the witness accounts led to Swedish requests to Moscow for the information to be investigated. The answer was practically always the same: since it had been established that Wallenberg had died in July 1947, there was no need for new investigations.²²⁶ UD officials did not give up. When opportunity arose, they sought to gain new clues in the Wallenberg case via informal contacts in the Soviet Union. For example, Tage Erlander discussed the issue with Hjalmar Mehr, then a member of the Stockholm City Council. Because of his Jewish origins, Mehr had become aware of the Nazi genocide early on and had helped to receive Jewish and Baltic refugees.²²⁷ In 1954 he travelled to the Soviet Union to study its attitude towards the disabled, of whom there were many after the war. He also met the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. The latter had worked as a war correspondent and had paid close attention to the horrific fate of the Soviet Jews. Before Mehr left Sweden, Arne S. Lundberg asked him to sound out the Soviet position on the Wallenberg case.²²⁸

The approach adopted by Sweden’s Social Democratic governments may be summarized as quiet diplomacy combined with the exertion of concrete pressure in conjunction with Swedish-Soviet state visits. Prime Minister Tage Erlander’s commitment, like that of Undén, appears to have been weak at first, but there are many indications that the Prime Minister gradually became increasingly involved.²²⁹ In conjunction with the 1965 White Paper, he claimed that he had worked on the case every week for ten years.²³⁰ Erlander repeatedly raised the matter with the Soviet leaders. During these talks he stressed that the matter might seem small from the Soviet point of view but that it was ‘large and important’ for Sweden. An answer to the question might help to remove an ‘irritant’ in relations between the two countries.²³¹ Prior to Nikita Khrushchev’s impending but later cancelled state visit in 1959, Erlander and Mehr discussed the advisability of writing a letter to the Soviet leader. Maj von Dardel also wrote a letter to Khrushchev prior to his scheduled visit. Erlander perceived clear domestic political advantages from writing a letter and presenting it together with the letter from Wallenberg’s mother, as it would show that the diplomatic effort was not only being conducted in secret. However, he was strongly advised against such an action by Lundberg, as it would make further diplomatic negotiations more difficult. Instead, the matter was dealt with by the presentation of an official Swedish note to the Soviet government.²³²

The famous Swedish physician Nanna Svartz (1890–1986) became the subject of biographies and eulogies in the early twenty-first century, writers focusing on her skill as a doctor and medical researcher, on her becoming Sweden’s first female professor at a state university, and on her exposing the unfortunate consequences of the fact that women who pursued careers were still primarily responsible for the family and home. It is rarely, if ever, mentioned that Svartz became a central figure in the Wallenberg case in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s because of reports that Wallenberg was being held in a mental hospital.²³³

The Swedish-Soviet negotiations were given new impetus after Svartz asked her Soviet colleagues whether any of them knew anything about Wallenberg. The Soviet physician A. L. Myasnikov contacted her during a conference in Stockholm in 1954, and at a subsequent meeting with her in Moscow he added more detail to his statement that Wallenberg was being held in custody. While in the Soviet capital she also encountered Vladimir Semyonov, whom she had known since the early 1940s. At that time he had been working under Madame Kollontay, who, after developing a serious illness, had been treated and cured by Svartz in what was described as something of a miracle.²³⁴ These ties of friendship may have contributed to Semyonov’s initial confirmation of Myasnikov’s statement, with the addition that Wallenberg was not in good health. The Soviet diplomat presumably realized that he had gone too far. When Svartz tried to reach him the following day, she was informed that he had gone to Africa and would not return for a number of weeks. Svartz, who was a colleague of Fredrik von Dardel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and a good friend of Erlander, shared this new information, which she considered highly credible, with the Prime Minister. In 1961 Erlander wrote to Khrushchev demanding Wallenberg’s release. When Rolf Sohlman delivered the letter to the Soviet leader, Khrushchev brusquely dismissed both the Swedish ambassador and the hope that there was any new information to consider. However, the issue lived on. When Minister for Foreign Affairs Torsten Nilsson met Khrushchev in May 1963, the latter denied knowledge of Nanna Svartz and added that there would have been no reason for the Soviet Union not to hand over Wallenberg if he had still been alive, but that this was not the case.²³⁵ Less than a year later, talks in which the Wallenberg question was the main issue were held in Sweden between Gromyko and Erlander. The Soviet Minister for Foreign Affairs maintained that the information Svartz had received in 1961 was based on a misinterpretation. When Svartz again contacted Myasnikov in the mid-1960s, both by letter and at a meeting with him and two officials from the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he also agreed with the explanation that a linguistic misinterpretation had occurred. This amended version scarcely improved Swedish-Soviet relations, and it posed a severe challenge to the friendship between Erlander and Svartz.²³⁶ The ‘misinterpretation’ did not do away with the allegations that Wallenberg was a prisoner in a Soviet mental hospital. On the contrary, such assertions continued to be made in the decades that followed.²³⁷

The fairly good atmosphere that had prevailed at the meeting between Nilsson and Khrushchev in 1964 had mostly evaporated a year later when the Soviet leader arrived in Sweden on a state visit. He was greeted by bold placard headlines from the tabloid Expressen, demanding in both Russian and Swedish: ‘Where is our fellow countryman? Where is Raoul Wallenberg?’ Bilingual headlines reappeared inside the newspaper atop double-spread articles describing Wallenberg’s contributions in Budapest, reportage from the streets where he had walked while still a free man, and speculation about his fate after he had been taken into custody by Soviet personnel.²³⁸ Together with Nilsson, Erlander again confronted Khrushchev with the information regarding Wallenberg in Soviet custody, but the negotiations did not lead to a breakthrough. The Soviet leader firmly maintained that he could not be held responsible for the crimes that had taken place under Stalin’s rule, when thousands of people had disappeared without a trace into prisons and prison camps. He had nothing new to add. Pursuing the case could not be regarded as anything other than a component in the Cold War, and it risked leading to a marked deterioration in relations between Sweden and the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Soviets found it difficult to understand that the Swedish government was poisoning relations between the countries by stubbornly pursuing the disappearance of just one man when millions of Soviet citizens had perished in a war in which Sweden had not participated. The mood was not helped by Khrushchev’s dismissal of King Charles XII, who had invaded Russia in the early eighteenth century when Sweden was a Great Power in Europe. Charles XII was certainly no longer such a key figure in the Swedish historical narrative as he had been before the Second World War. Even so, the Soviet leader’s disparagement of Sweden’s warrior king, followed by an audacious parallel between the ill-fated (for Sweden) war of that time – which had effectively ended in Sweden’s defeat after losing the Battle of Poltava in 1709 – and present-day Swedish aggression against the Soviet Union, was not appreciated by Khrushchev’s Swedish hosts. Initially perceived as a joke, his statement soon became ‘something oddly thick, clumsy, and unpleasant’.²³⁹

The Soviet attitude hence led to discord on the Swedish side. For three years, Nanna Svartz had kept her story secret. As a result of Khrushchev’s lies and unwillingness to discuss the matter, she was prepared to make it public but was persuaded not to by Olof Palme. Leading Social Democrats were also frustrated, partly owing to Khrushchev’s uncooperativeness and partly because the Soviets did not understand the demands made by Swedish domestic opinion on the Swedish government over the Wallenberg case.²⁴⁰ Wallenberg’s relatives and other activists in the Wallenberg campaign were not the only critics of the Swedish government’s policy. True, there were times when the opposition parties did not object to the official policy.²⁴¹ However, more often than not centre-right politicians submitted questions to be raised in the Riksdag and engaged with the case in other ways, often demanding greater transparency and a tougher approach to the Soviet Union. A number of them probably agreed with the acerbic non-socialist editorial writer who, in the wake of the state visit, criticized the cautious Social Democrats in the government, who eulogized Swedish ideals of neutrality but who were unable to put Khrushchev up against the proverbial wall because they assumed that ‘[t]he sunshine of the dictator must be regarded as a gift of grace and takes on an extra glow when compared to his thunder’.²⁴²

Is Raoul Wallenberg still alive?

Wallenberg’s disappearance engaged many Swedes, thereby guaranteeing it a continued central place in the Swedish public sphere. By the beginning of the 1950s, 1.6 million Swedes had already signed a petition to Joseph Stalin demanding to know what had happened to Wallenberg. At the same time, Stig Dagerman, by that time acclaimed as a novelist and fearless journalist who had written in-depth reports about the suffering in Germany in the year after the end of the war, published one of his daily texts. These were known collectively as ‘Dagsedlar’, with the implication of ‘a slap in the face’. Writing in verse, Dagerman criticized the Swedish government’s appeasement of Soviet rulers and also a more general Swedish unwillingness to stand up for humanitarian values. In the name of neutrality (he wrote caustically), the Swede pulls down his hat and covers his ears to avoid seeing and hearing the victims of dictatorships. He believed that this Swedish lack of backbone was manifested in the wake of the incident known as the Catalina affair, involving the disappearance of a Swedish Air Force DC3 that was gathering signals intelligence in the direction of the Soviet Union and the subsequent shooting-down by Soviet fighter jets of a Catalina plane sent out to find out what had happened to the DC3. Dagerman wrote sarcastically that the Swedish authorities did not take a stand to honour the memory of their fellow countrymen who had been killed, but instead ducked for cover behind Sweden’s policy of neutrality. He added that this stance had also affected Raoul Wallenberg, who had been left to his fate by a passive Foreign Minister and by many of his compatriots who had said as little as possible about the missing Swede. Dagerman’s socially critical writings gained an extended lifespan when some of his thousand or so daily verses, including those cited above, were printed in a collected volume. The first edition was published in 1954, the year Dagerman passed away, and the book has been reprinted fairly regularly up to the present day.²⁴³

When Folke Bernadotte’s hero status was questioned in the 1950s by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, the response from the UD was an official White Paper alongside outraged articles in the Swedish press in which virtually all writers, regardless of their ideological affiliation, defended the Swedish count of royal lineage.²⁴⁴ The UD also initiated a White Paper on Raoul Wallenberg. One reason was to demonstrate that, despite the Soviet authorities’ declaration that he had died in 1947, a great deal of effort had been and was still being made to clarify the matter. In a radio commentary in February 1957 (also published in the White Paper of the same year), the man in charge of the case, Arne S. Lundberg, emphasized the sheer amount of material and number of names of individuals that formed part of the investigation: ‘The file must be the largest in the UD’s archives.’ The investigation carefully recorded the many twists and turns of the Swedish-Soviet contacts. However, there was no self-criticism of the UD’s handling of the case. On the contrary: answering the rhetorical question of whether more could have been done at an early stage, the answer was no, because ‘no countries, not even the great powers’, had been successful in recovering prisoners accused of espionage.²⁴⁵

The comments about the enquiry made it clear that views about the Swedish operations and the Soviet response were largely divided along party-political lines. At the same time, the pro-Moscow Swedish daily newspaper Ny Dag expressed its admiration for a forward-thinking Soviet Union, which the paper contrasted sharply with the villainous United States.²⁴⁶ This attitude marked a pivot by the newspaper with regard to the Wallenberg case. For a decade, the paper had dismissed the idea that he had been or still was a Soviet prisoner, but now the paper asserted that both the Swedish and the Soviet people had previously been deceived by the Soviet security services under the loathsome Beria.²⁴⁷ However, this view met with objections from other quarters. In the conservative journal Svensk Tidskrift, the editorial writer wondered whether everything that could have been done had in fact been done. The investigation itself was welcome, but it should have been undertaken earlier. The writer also wondered why so much effort had initially been put into enquiring about Danielsson and other diplomats from the Legation in Budapest, whereas clarification of what had happened to Wallenberg had been viewed as less urgent. The writer also focused a spotlight on Söderblom and Undén’s slowness to act: ‘unfortunately, the possibility exists that this attitude on the part of the UD has had disastrous consequences’.²⁴⁸

Internal criticism was almost completely absent from the report published by the UD in 1965. This was not surprising, as the Social Democratic Party leadership was aware of the high domestic political price if the Swedish government appeared feeble and submissive to its powerful neighbour to the east.²⁴⁹ Consequently, Tage Erlander maintained that the Swedish government ‘had left no clue unexplored, however tenuous it may have seemed. We have used every opportunity to raise the matter diplomatically or through personal contacts. An intensive examination of all the material and the detailed internal deliberations has always been taking place.’²⁵⁰ The comments included disappointment that the existing material had not led to more results. ‘Darkness continues to loom just as frighteningly over the fate of the Swedish diplomat’, but it would be even worse if the enquiry led to the end of the efforts. Closing the case would be nothing less than ‘a dishonourable end’.²⁵¹ There was also frustration that the enquiry had led to more questions than answers.²⁵² This time, however, the opposition’s criticism was more circumspect. The editorials of some of the major newspapers expressed support for Erlander’s affirmation that no stone had been left unturned in the hunt for Wallenberg, albeit with the added comment that Sweden had acted too sluggishly and tardily in the first few years.²⁵³

Another contentious issue was the credibility of the information supplied by Nanna Svartz and some released Gulag prisoners to the effect that Wallenberg was still alive. Support for that view came from a number of US writers who presented ‘enough anecdotal evidence’ and also from a number of Swedes, including Wallenberg’s colleagues from Budapest, Lars G:son Berg and Per Anger. The latter held on to the view that Wallenberg was alive until proven otherwise well into the 1990s.²⁵⁴

In the Swedish government’s private internal discussions, however, doubts were expressed that the Swedish diplomat was still living, even though there might be grounds for taking Svartz’s story seriously. What was there to suggest that the Soviet authorities would admit their mistake and send back ‘a wreck of a human being’, wondered one minister. She found it far more believable that they had preferred to close the case once and for all by administering a lethal injection to a patient who had become a foreign-policy liability.²⁵⁵

Doubts were also expressed in the Swedish public sphere, primarily in connection with what was considered a lack of credibility in the version presented by Svartz. The historian Hans Villius and his wife Elsa raised source-critical objections in accordance with the principles of the historical past. They advised that it was important to approach the problem objectively: ‘If you become too emotionally involved, you risk having the facts obscured and locking yourself into the human tragedy’.²⁵⁶ What they objected to was that all manner of vague stories claiming that Wallenberg was alive were given more credence than the Soviet death certificate stating that he had died on 17 July 1947. To be sure, the question of the certificate’s authenticity was not settled, but relying on accounts that ‘seemed credible’ was not good enough. Instead, witness narratives ‘must contain information which makes it clear beyond doubt that they are true’. The Villiuses maintained this conclusion in a book, Fallet Raoul Wallenberg [‘The Raoul Wallenberg case’], which was published in 1966 and received considerable attention.²⁵⁷ They reaffirmed their views more than ten years later, when the Georgian Simon Gogoberidze came to play a part in the Wallenberg enquiry. He was another in a long line of unreliable witnesses, a phenomenon which has placed the vanished Swede ‘on one occasion in Verkhneuralsk in Siberia, on another in Butyrka Prison in Moscow, on another in a mental hospital, and on yet another in Vladimir’.²⁵⁸ Wallenberg’s half-brother Guy von Dardel reacted strongly, saying that the Villiuses all too casually dismissed testimony that could well be credible. They had no way of knowing whether Wallenberg was still alive or not. A mere suspicion that this might be so should spur renewed efforts to obtain clarification from the Soviets.²⁵⁹ He was supported by Svartz, who questioned the authenticity of the death certificate and argued that there were indications that Wallenberg was still alive.²⁶⁰ The Villiuses maintained their view and pointed to a large number of contradictions between the witness statements. The fact that so many people were prepared to disregard these could only be explained by wishful thinking: ‘One wishes that the man who did so much to save people from death should not himself have fallen victim to it, but still be alive’.²⁶¹

The last word had not yet been spoken, though. Together with others ‘with some knowledge of the facts’, and on the basis of the oral witness statements, Carl Fredrik Palmstierna was convinced that Raoul Wallenberg had been alive at least into the early 1960s. Acting on this contention, he launched a frontal attack on the then-dominant view among Swedish historians in the early 1970s. Their focus on source-critical methods was often pursued ‘ad absurdum’: ‘If a lie was printed but existed at the same time as the event, it was assigned a higher value than a source that was passed down orally and was in this sense a later one’, he wrote, aiming his remarks at the Villiuses. The line of argument they had trumpeted in 1966 was a textbook example of an approach to history which he firmly rejected.²⁶²

The sensitive question of whether or not Raoul Wallenberg was still alive also led to exchanges of views within the American public sphere. In Lost Hero: The Mystery of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish-born rabbi Frederick E. Werbell and the author and historian Thurston Clarke placed great faith in the information conveyed by Nanna Svartz. They also claimed that her enquiries had resulted in Wallenberg being taken from the mental hospital to remote Wrangell’s Island. They did not take a stand as to whether his life had ended there, but they argued that by the mid-1960s both Erlander and Svartz had concluded that Wallenberg was dead. In the light of the information available in the early 1980s, they agreed with this conclusion.²⁶³

Lena Biorck Kaplan, President of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States, reacted strongly. She stressed that such a conclusion had no support from either Erlander or Svartz and ran counter to ‘much evidence, well beyond 1965, that Wallenberg is languishing deep within the bowels of the Soviet Union’. Unfounded assertions about the Swede’s death were unfortunate for many reasons, not least because it ‘does an injustice to the thousands of people of good will throughout the world who are working day and night for Raoul Wallenberg’s release’.²⁶⁴

The Gulag in the Swedish cultural debate

The polarized Cold War climate was very much in evidence in the cultural debate in many Western countries. Particularly fierce battles raged over Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968) and the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In both cases, the focus was on the Communist terror apparatus and its catastrophic effects on millions of people. Solzhenitsyn’s novels in particular helped to spark a debate in the West about Soviet society. His partly first-hand depiction of the Soviet camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, was written over a ten-year period from 1958 to 1968 and was published in the West in 1973–1975. It attracted a great deal of attention and led to a large number of opinion pieces in the West, not least because Solzhenitsyn stressed that the terror system, which clashed badly with slogans of equality and justice, was a well-integrated part of Soviet Communism. In one of the first reviews of The Gulag Archipelago in the West German press, the influential historian Joachim Fest made it clear that with his book Solzhenitsyn had turned the radical notion that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a victory for good morals upside down. One consequence occurred in France, where the encounter with Solzhenitsyn’s insider perspective led to the abandonment of Communism by a large number of left-wing intellectuals.²⁶⁵ In the United States, The Gulag Archipelago, coupled with Solzhenitsyn’s forced exile in 1974, also attracted attention and became part of the political debate. The Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson was an outspoken anti-Soviet and liberal ‘cold warrior’ who advocated increased military buildup, a greater focus on human rights, and allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate. He found Solzhenitsyn’s shocking testimony from the Soviet labour camps to be further evidence of that nation’s inability to comply with human rights. This view was also endorsed by other dissidents such as the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov. After Solzhenitsyn emigrated to the US in 1976, he repeatedly sided with Jackson when the latter criticized Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter over a succession of years for appeasing the Communist rulers in the Kremlin.²⁶⁶

Jackson’s recurring criticism of US leaders’ policy towards the Soviet Union in the early 1970s became known as ‘the Solzhenitsyn Affair’. A Swedish Solzhenitsyn Affair was playing out at the same time, based on the awarding of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Soviet novelist. By then he had been classified as a ‘non-author’ in the Soviet Union, and he feared – with good reason – that he would be stripped of his Soviet citizenship if he left the country to accept the prize in Stockholm. A suggestion that Solzhenitsyn could receive the award at an official gathering at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow was not implemented. Criticism of the Swedish government and of Gunnar Jarring, the Swedish ambassador in Moscow, was harsh, and it was voiced on both sides of the Atlantic, leading Olof Palme to defend the Swedish position both in the Swedish media and in The New York Times. Although the comparison was not always explicit, the implication of the objections was that Social Democratic governments were characterized by a submissiveness towards Soviet rulers, regardless of whether the issue was the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg or the Nobel Prize to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Another controversial aspect was that Solzhenitsyn’s books invited comparisons between the Nazi and the Soviet Communist camp systems. On the occasion of the 1976 international hearing named after the scientist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, Simon Wiesenthal stressed that it was relevant to compare Nazism and Stalinism. Wiesenthal, who had lived and worked in the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941, and who encountered Soviet prisoners of war in German concentration camps during the subsequent war years, had gained early insights into both the German and the Soviet terror apparatuses and saw a ‘tremendous similarity … between these two totalitarian states – the Nazi and the Soviet – in the treatment of prisoners’. However, he had been so preoccupied with tracking down Nazi criminals that he had had no opportunity to ‘deal with the crimes committed in the misused name of socialism’.²⁶⁷ It was no long stretch to apply similar comparisons to Raoul Wallenberg. For example, such comparisons were made in Kati Marton’s book about Wallenberg in the early 1980s – a book that contrasted his Western humanism, which involved a defence of law and rights, logical arguments, and common sense, with the Nazis’ ‘useless, mindless extermination’ of Jews, which was marked, as in Stalin’s realm, by terror and informers. Arriving in the Soviet Union was not like coming to any other country, but to another planet.²⁶⁸

The Swedish debate about the Holocaust television series not only discussed the Nazi genocide. One commentator said that it was regrettable that the Soviet camp system had not been the subject of a similar series, because there was still silence about ‘the Russian Holocaust’.²⁶⁹ The silence had not been universal, though. Journalist Edward af Sandeberg, who had been arrested after the final battle for Berlin and sent to the Gulag, was a recurring subject of newspaper articles in the post-war years. It was clear that he and other Swedes had been taken to the Soviet Union, but there was great frustration at the lack of response to Swedish enquiries.²⁷⁰ Unlike Wallenberg, af Sandeberg was released. On his return he announced that he had come across a Romanian in the Soviet camp system who in turn claimed to have met Raoul Wallenberg in February 1946.²⁷¹ That message was passed on to the UD, but it was not the one that made the headlines. Instead, considerable attention was given to af Sandeberg’s ‘outrageous allegations’ that Swedish Legation secretaries in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and Vienna had engaged in black-market trading.²⁷² Such accusations had been made by Communists in the past, but this did not endear af Sandeberg to the left. In Nu kan det sägas [‘Now it can be said’], he recounted his experiences of the Red Army’s advance into Berlin, his captivity in the Soviet Union, and the NKVD’s great influence on Soviet domestic and foreign policy.²⁷³ Such accounts encountered vigorous opposition in pro-Moscow newspapers. They dismissed both Edward af Sandeberg and Rudolph Philipp as writers of falsehoods, adding that af Sandeberg, alternately referred to as ‘the Nazi editor’ and ‘Goebbels’ newsman’, was not to be trusted because he was still coloured by Nazi German values.²⁷⁴

At the same time as the debate over Wallenberg’s disappearance was going on in the summer of 1947, one of the most widely read Swedish weekly magazines ran a serial about a farmer’s son from the Swedish province of Jämtland who had been a prisoner in the Gulag for four years. Similar reports were published at irregular intervals over a ten-year period in Swedish magazines.²⁷⁵ The year 1949 saw the publication of a Swedish translation of Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko’s influential book I Chose Freedom, in which he described Stalin’s purges and the NKVD’s reign of terror and incarceration.²⁷⁶ Another book that was translated into Swedish was Unto Parvilahti’s memoir of almost a decade of imprisonment in the Gulag. Parvilahti, who had volunteered for the Waffen-SS, was arrested in 1944 and handed over to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1945, together with 20 other Finnish citizens who were holders of Nansen passports, at the initiative of Finnish Communist Minister of the Interior Yrjö Leino. In Berijan tarhat: Havaintoja ja muistikuvia Neuvostoliitosta vuosilta 1945–1954 (published in the UK as Beria’s Gardens: Ten Years’ Captivity in Russia and Siberia and in the United States as Beria’s Gardens: A Slave Labourer’s Experiences in the Soviet Utopia), which was also translated into several other languages, including Swedish, Parvilahti described the prison system and his encounters with fellow unfortunates from different countries. He also portrayed life in Vladimir Prison, where other Gulag prisoners claimed to have met Wallenberg. It was a prison that had housed many notable prisoners and where the diet was better and vermin control more effective. Despite the few bright spots, the book was a scathing condemnation of the Soviet regime’s cover-up of abuses and terror directed at its own population.²⁷⁷

Reactions to Parvilahti’s book were marked by accusations that he had participated in and documented mass executions and had also committed other crimes during the Second World War. In the court case held in Helsinki in the autumn of 1958, which was described alternately as a case of defamation and a case of denazification, he went on the counterattack.²⁷⁸ One commentator discussed the Soviet camp system only in passing but devoted all the more space to the apologetic comments Parvilahti repeatedly expressed, with the aim of portraying the soldiers who fought in the Waffen-SS as brave and, with a few exceptions, innocent of war crimes.²⁷⁹ Another writer instead stressed how the Finnish authorities had cravenly and submissively complied with Soviet directives. The extradition of Parvilahti and others with him on unclear grounds was indefensible, said this writer, as were the Soviet slave camps, which demonstrated ‘the appalling indifference to human beings that characterizes the Communist system’.²⁸⁰

Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror also received mixed reviews, gaining supporters among anti-Soviet commentators while being dismissed as US Cold War propaganda by left-leaning writers. In addition, in the immediate post-war period, Herbert Tingsten, who had abandoned his life as a political scientist to become editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, regularly pointed to the similarities between Nazism and Communism.²⁸¹ Such comparisons were also made in connection with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and, above all, in Hannah Arendt’s totalitarian analysis of this bureaucrat and mass murderer, whose ‘I obeyed orders’ defence could be found in most dictatorships.²⁸² The argument met with resistance. True, Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet society was hardly progressive, but at a time of strong left-wing sympathies, it was still something of a model among left-wing intellectuals, who did not at all appreciate talk of the Gulag and terror. Ever since its foundation, the Soviet Union had been defended by left-wing intellectuals, who travelled there and admired the new society. Even many people who had never been to Communist Eastern Europe defended the system there. For most people who pursued their ideals in the East, Solzhenitsyn was not a role model but rather an example of a regressive reactionary. His criticisms of Soviet abuses were relativized and trivialized by means of comparing or equating them with the drawbacks of Swedish society. Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and driven into exile in 1974, also had defenders, but the attacks were such that reactions to his novels were described as ‘hate propaganda’ a few years into the 1970s. In this context, the film and theatre director Alf Sjöberg referred to the ‘icy wind of neo-Stalinism’.²⁸³

Solzhenitsyn’s interest in Wallenberg was indirectly revealed in the former’s book The First Circle, which appeared in Swedish translation in 1969. A central figure in the book is the Soviet Minister of State Security and head of the military police in Soviet-occupied territories, Viktor Abakumov. His name had been frequently mentioned in connection with the 1957 White Paper. At that time, the Soviet authorities had labelled Abakumov – who had fallen into disgrace after Stalin’s death and was executed in 1954 – a high-handed executioner.²⁸⁴ Thanks to Solzhenitsyn’s novel, Björn Nilsson, a journalist at one of Sweden’s most widely read tabloids, began to wonder whether it might be time to learn more about Abakumov. The Soviet minister had certainly been known to enrich himself at the expense of prisoners, but he had managed to escape reprisals until his execution in 1954. And – most importantly – he had been the person responsible for Wallenberg’s fate in Soviet captivity.²⁸⁵

One motivating factor was the witness statements that Wallenberg had been sent to one of the camps of the Gulag archipelago, a phenomenon which had become well known thanks to Solzhenitsyn’s novels. Perhaps further witness accounts from the Gulag might help dispel the fog regarding ‘this brave man’s fate’, and once and for all ‘prove that the explanation of his death in 1947 was fabricated’, wrote Simon Wiesenthal.²⁸⁶ Of particular interest was Solzhenitsyn’s mention of one Erik Arvid Andersson, a Swedish ‘billionaire’s son’ who makes a brief appearance in the second part of The Gulag Archipelago. When the author saw a photograph of Wallenberg, however, he could not recall anyone with that appearance in the prison-camp system, and neither he nor anyone else could explain who was hiding behind the name Erik Arvid Andersson.²⁸⁷ That did not stop him from involving himself in the Wallenberg case. On the basis of his own experience, Solzhenitsyn attested that it was possible to survive in the Gulag for 25–30 years. He applied this conclusion to Wallenberg, whom he included in the category of Gulag prisoners who had endured the most and suffered in silence decade after decade.²⁸⁸ The Swedish diplomat could therefore still be alive, said Solzhenitsyn, and he called for an international opinion to shed light on the case.²⁸⁹ As will be seen in the next chapter, his wish was soon granted.

Solzhenitsyn’s statement also contributed to renewed optimism in Sweden. The legendary journalist Barbro Alving, better known as Bang, had been involved in the Wallenberg case for some time, and she was one of those who drew attention to Solzhenitsyn and his statements about the missing diplomat.²⁹⁰ There was also a great commotion after Solzhenitsyn had visited Maj von Dardel and expressed his support for her struggle and his belief in the witness statements that her son was still alive.²⁹¹ Solzhenitsyn could be associated with Wallenberg in other, and indirect, ways as well. After more than a year’s work, television producer Gunnar Möllerstedt’s three-part documentary programme on Wallenberg was broadcast on Swedish television in 1974. In an interview prior to the premiere, Möllerstedt made it clear that viewers hoping for a solution to the mystery would be disappointed, as there were still a large number of unanswered questions. Several of the leading Swedish politicians who might have been able to answer them, including Tage Erlander, Torsten Nilsson, and Olof Palme, declined to take part. What Möllerstedt was able to demonstrate unequivocally, though, was how the Swede had become a pawn in a game between the great powers, a game in which Sweden had no reason to participate. Not only Soviet abuses needed to be brought to light; the same applied to the negligence of Swedish officials. On the latter point, Möllerstedt called for Sweden not to shy away from pillorying a system that demanded a never-ending flow of victims, of whom Raoul Wallenberg was one and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn another.²⁹²

Continued quiet diplomacy

During his time as one of Erlander’s right-hand men Olof Palme had already been working on the issue of Wallenberg’s disappearance, for example in conjunction with the Swedish state visit to the Soviet Union in 1956 and the publication of the White Paper on the Wallenberg case in 1965. While he was Prime Minister, the Wallenberg case was also one of the most important issues that Palme dealt with. In unofficial contexts, he had already stated – back in the 1960s – that he considered it probable that Wallenberg was dead. During a meeting between Palme and Maj and Fredrik von Dardel in February 1970, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance, the von Dardels remained critical of the Swedish government’s failure to make any new progress, even though they were certain that Soviet authorities continued to tell untruths. Palme retorted that he had worked hard to obtain an answer about what had actually happened to Wallenberg in Soviet captivity, but had had no reason to reconsider the conclusion reached in 1965 to the effect that it was unrealistic to expect any reconsideration by the Soviets.²⁹³ This was probably the reason why Palme did not raise the issue of his fellow countryman’s disappearance during negotiations with Alexei Kosygin in 1976.²⁹⁴

In a letter to the Prime Minister in the spring of 1973, Maj von Dardel commented tartly that he had ‘time and again made headline-grabbing statements about abuses in various other countries, statements in which you tend not to mince your words’. These contrasted sharply with his habit of being ‘very quiet about a Swede named Raoul Wallenberg’.²⁹⁵ Palme was not completely silent, though. For example, in 1985 he paid tribute to Raoul Wallenberg and Folke Bernadotte in a speech at Stockholm’s synagogue to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Wallenberg’s ‘heroic activities’ in particular were worthy of all attention imaginable. Palme stressed that the Swedish government had left no stone unturned in trying to find out what had happened to Wallenberg and that this work would continue: ‘We owe it to Raoul Wallenberg.’²⁹⁶

The Swedish-Jewish community appreciated the Prime Minister’s tributes to Bernadotte and Wallenberg but found it remarkable that Palme never once mentioned Israel. This was particularly problematic given that, in a speech three years earlier, he had equated the extermination of Jewish children during the Second World War with the suffering of Palestinian children during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.²⁹⁷ Nor did Palme’s declaration of the importance of continued efforts in the Wallenberg case convince the latter’s relatives. They insisted that the approach led by Palme – amounting to attempts to exert a quiet influence on the Soviet leaders – had not been successful, and nor was it desirable.²⁹⁸

The Social Democrats had been in power almost continuously since 1932 until they lost the Riksdag elections in 1976. After that loss, the policy regarding the Wallenberg case changed, at least at first. Quiet diplomacy increasingly gave way to public actions. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Centre Party member Karin Söder, visited Wallenberg’s parents and promised them that the UD would do everything possible to discover the truth about their son’s fate. However, the measures adopted by the new centre-right government resembled those of the previous Social Democratic government; and proposals put forward by centre-right politicians for a new White Paper or a citizens’ commission of enquiry, which had been presented in the Riksdag but had not been supported by the Social Democratic government, failed to gain support after the transfer of power in 1976.²⁹⁹ The Liberal Party politician Per Ahlmark had taken an interest in the Wallenberg case as a journalist and debater, but in his new role as deputy Prime Minister he was soon criticized for keeping too low a profile. Similar criticism was levelled at his party colleague Ola Ullsten. As Minister for Foreign Affairs in January 1979, he presented a note to the Soviet government requesting Wallenberg’s release. A few months later he demanded that Soviet authorities reopen the investigation into Wallenberg’s fate, which caused irritation in Moscow.³⁰⁰ The strained relations may have contributed to Ullsten’s not mentioning the missing Swede when he met Alexei Kosygin during a state visit to the Soviet Union in 1980.³⁰¹ At the European security conference in Madrid in 1981 and the conference on human rights in Geneva the following year, Swedish delegates did mention the Wallenberg case, but they did so almost in passing and following pressure, especially from Canadian and American politicians.³⁰² Thus the members of the centre-right government also failed to gain clarity about Wallenberg, and with a few exceptions, their policy did not deviate in practice from that of their Social Democratic predecessors.³⁰³

By contrast, a noticeable shift occurred in the political literature. Books by and about Social Democratic politicians who were active in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s frequently mentioned Wallenberg and the search for him. True, some non-socialist, particularly Liberal, politicians did act at the national level to encourage continuing efforts both to search for and to honour the missing diplomat.³⁰⁴ However, he was rarely or never mentioned when their party colleagues, such as Ola Ullsten, Gösta Bohman, Thorbjörn Fälldin, and Karin Söder, who held important ministerial posts after 1976, later wrote or were interviewed about their political experiences. There is much to suggest that the doubts about Wallenberg’s continued existence that were evident during Palme’s years as Prime Minister persisted, and perhaps even increased, during his successors’ time in government.

The Swedish effort measured by American standards

Stig Bergling was a Swedish intelligence officer arrested by Israeli security police in 1979 on suspicion of spying for the Soviet Union. He confessed almost immediately. In connection with his trial, he proposed an exchange between Sweden and the Soviet Union, in which he would be one party and Raoul Wallenberg the other. An overview study of the Swedish intelligence apparatus states that the proposal received no response, either from the Swedish judiciary or from the Soviet authorities.³⁰⁵ This is only partly true, though. The Liberal minority government led by Ola Ullsten thought it was worth a try. Senior representatives at the UD questioned the scheme but attempted to implement it as best they could. Embassy staff in Moscow made enquiries but the response from the Soviet liaison officers was cool, not least because the official position was that Wallenberg had died in 1947.³⁰⁶ When the attempt became public in Sweden a year later, criticism was fierce. Failing to inform the Swedish security service, which had uncovered Bergling’s spying, and bypassing the legal entities responsible for trying Bergling’s case had been serious mistakes. Social Democratic ministers with previous experience of the Wallenberg case also questioned the kind of informal contacts that the Ullsten government had attempted. Such human trafficking at the highest level had never happened when they were in power, they said.³⁰⁷ By this time, the trial against Bergling was over and he had been given a life sentence. He nevertheless maintained his view that an exchange would have been possible. In the early 2000s he claimed, on vague grounds, that Wallenberg had still been alive at least until 1989.³⁰⁸

Repeated criticism has been directed at the Swedish government for not following the example of the Swiss, who soon after the end of the war succeeded in having citizens of theirs in Soviet captivity released in exchange for Soviet citizens whom they had detained.³⁰⁹ However, the idea had come up in Sweden from time to time. Exchanges like the one Bergling wanted had occasionally been proposed from the 1950s onwards. In 1965, for example, talks about an exchange were held between Swedish diplomats and a ‘person who represented the Eastern bloc’. The idea was that Wallenberg would have been traded for the Swedish air-force officer Stig Wennerström, who had been given a life sentence a year earlier for spying for the Soviets.³¹⁰ The negotiations fell through, but the idea of an exchange arose again in the years around 1980. The new attention then being focused on Wallenberg had led to a debate in the American media over Sweden’s policy regarding him. In early 1983, an influential conservative columnist named George Will sharply criticized the Swedish government’s handling of the Wallenberg case. Will argued that the Swedish politicians in charge had been afraid of the Russians and still were.³¹¹ Sweden’s ambassador to the United States, Wilhelm Wachtmeister, stressed that the Swedish government had done and was still doing everything in its power to ascertain the missing diplomat’s fate.³¹² Wachtmeister was supported in the debate by the US writer, Erik Fredriksen. He argued that Sweden’s actions during most of the Second World War were highly regrettable, but the rescue of the Danish Jews in the autumn of 1943 plus the Red Cross efforts in 1945 were proof that Sweden had not just hidden behind its neutrality.³¹³ Other US commentators took up the Wallenberg case, either to point out that the United States was also not blameless in its handling of the case or to wholeheartedly support Will.³¹⁴

Some of the debaters who argued that Swedish authorities had done too little to find out about Wallenberg noted that in a long series of missed opportunities, the most recent one had occurred less than a year and a half earlier. In conjunction with the grounding of the Soviet submarine U 137 in Swedish waters in October 1981, these commentators had proposed trading the Soviet submarine crew for Wallenberg or at least for definitive Soviet information that he was no longer alive. They were not alone: Swedes all over the country phoned newspaper editors with the exact same suggestion. Members of the Swedish Raoul Wallenberg Association publicly delivered a similar message when they demonstrated outside the Soviet embassy in Stockholm.³¹⁵ The idea of an exchange was also discussed at the UD. Diary notes from the crisis meetings that were held while the submarine was still aground reveal that a few voices had called for the Swedish government to abandon its long-held precautionary principle. However, the most influential figures at the UD considered that responding to one crime (the detention of Wallenberg) with another (using the submarine and its crew as hostages) was incompatible with Sweden as a state governed by the rule of law.³¹⁶ In contrast to the position he had held in 1979, Ola Ullsten, who was Minister for Foreign Affairs during the submarine crisis, argued that it was unethical to demand the exchange of Soviet citizens for a Swede. In addition to the moral and legal problems, informal contacts with people who had good insight into the Soviet power apparatus supplied the same answer as that given in connection with the Bergling case: Wallenberg was no longer alive, and so there was no counterparty for an exchange.³¹⁷

In retrospect, Wachtmeister believed that Will and his allies had made a mistake when bringing the U 137 into the picture. If the Swedish government had used the Soviet submarine crew as prisoners and pawns, it would have violated both moral and legal principles. This argument was likely to be well received in the United States because at that time American embassy personnel were still being held hostage in Iran. Wachtmeister was hopeful that he had emerged victorious, at least judging by reactions in Washington political circles. Mounting a defence against Will had been of paramount importance because ‘[i]f such an accusation were allowed to stand unchallenged, our reputation in America would be damaged’.³¹⁸ By all accounts, however, the damage had already been done. In the international literature about Wallenberg, it became more the rule than the exception to view him as a victim of Swedish neutrality and associated Swedish cowardice in the nation’s contacts with the Soviet Union.³¹⁹

The new Russian openness and Raoul Wallenberg

As successive Social Democratic and centre-right governments failed to clarify the Wallenberg case, it became less and less important as a domestic political controversy. There was certainly still frustration, though, when the issue was raised in the Riksdag in the late 1980s. A representative of the Conservative Party praised the fact that Social Democratic Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson had once again raised the matter with Soviet authorities but regretted that Sweden had never submitted a formal request for Wallenberg’s return.³²⁰ The diary entries from 1986 of the then Conservative Party leader Ulf Adelsohn mention an extensive presentation of the Raoul Wallenberg case with historical flashbacks by Ingvar Carlsson. Between the lines, it is clear that the two party leaders had very modest hopes of a Soviet response to new Swedish enquiries.³²¹ At the same time, Wallenberg’s international fame was a double-edged sword. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, held an extraordinary session to extol the Swede’s achievements. However, no official representative of Sweden attended, probably as a result of explicit Swedish criticism of the Israeli government for its policy regarding Palestine.³²²

A few years later, the situation was different when the memory of Wallenberg offered new opportunities for Swedish international diplomacy. When Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson visited the United States in 1987, he chose to discuss existing Swedish-American schemes of cooperation. He also agreed with Ronald Reagan’s eulogy over the rather short-lived Swedish colony in Delaware, whose three-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary was the following year. In his reply Carlsson refrained from mentioning Wallenberg by name but he surely noted the goodwill associated with the missing Swede, who was, in Reagan’s words, now ‘a citizen of both our countries’ and thereby ‘a bond between us’, as well as ‘an inspiration to our peoples’.³²³ The Israelis also again praised Wallenberg when Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Sten Andersson travelled there to inaugurate Raoul Wallenberg Street in Tel Aviv in 1990, a visit that gave him the opportunity to discuss the Middle East issue with representatives of both Israel and the PLO.³²⁴

The huge global shifts that occurred during the second half of the 1980s and led to the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union had effects on the Wallenberg case. UD staff believed there was little likelihood that Wallenberg was still alive. To continue pursuing the issue without new and convincing material would place considerable strain on Swedish-Soviet relations.³²⁵ When the Wallenberg case was nevertheless again raised in 1986 there was evident frustration among the Swedish diplomats working on it, who made attempts to forestall the same routine replies that they and their colleagues had received in 1957, 1965, and 1979. They did not hesitate to point out that continued Soviet lack of interest could well lead to worsened relations between the two countries.³²⁶ That the Soviet Union’s new leader Mikhail Gorbachev was signalling change and greater openness was noted, but the UD initially viewed these new signals with some scepticism. The tentative character of the actions taken by diplomats was not lost on those who argued that the previous patterns of guarded contacts with the powerful country in the East were being repeated, and that there was much to show that the UD was hoping that ‘the whole thing would fizzle out’.³²⁷

The following years, however, did lead to one concrete change: the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 increased access to archives inside Russia. The availability of new documents certainly meant that the issue of Swedish subservience to the Soviet Union in the Wallenberg case came up for discussion again.³²⁸ In addition, Swedish historians were divided as to how the Soviet documents concerning Wallenberg, in particular the death certificate from 1947, were to be interpreted.³²⁹ The question of whether this document was credible was an old one, but between the lines of the debate it became clear that there were very limited possibilities of finding new answers. Outside academia, however, there was no lack of people expressing renewed Swedish optimism: now the Soviet archives would be opened, they hoped, and they would reveal the answers to the Wallenberg case.³³⁰ Support for such hopes also came from the Russian side; for instance, it was manifested in the way Boris Pankin expressed himself in the early 1980s versus the early 1990s. Soon after he replaced Aleksandr Yakovlev in 1983 as Soviet ambassador to Sweden, Pankin was invited to dinner at the home of Johan ‘Joja’ and Lena Bonnier in the company of a number of representatives of the newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Expressen, of whose boards the host was a member. In his welcoming address to Pankin, Joja Bonnier began not by referring to the Soviet submarine recently stranded in Swedish waters but rather by demanding: ‘What have you done with Raoul Wallenberg?’ Towards the end of the dinner Pankin gave a speech of thanks in which he referred back to the initial question, but then claimed that he had forgotten what it was.³³¹

In 1991, a year after Pankin had left his post in Sweden, he claimed that he had personally pursued the Wallenberg case internally even before glasnost and perestroika had become the new watchwords. In his autobiography he regretted Wallenberg’s fate and sharply criticized the Soviet powers responsible for the Swede’s abduction.³³² Whether Pankin had any significant influence on the case is unclear, but there was a noticeable change in attitude in the Soviet Union and Russia in the years around 1990. One unambiguous example of the new tone was the message from Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Union’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1985 to 1090, to his Swedish counterpart. In 1989, Shevardnadze regretted what had happened ‘during a tragic period’ in Soviet history at a time when many other people had also been harmed, and he affirmed that the Soviets also wanted the truth to come out.³³³ This was also the hope of Wallenberg’s relatives, who received an invitation to Moscow that same year. They hoped that the new openness, and new individuals at the top of the security service, would unearth new information, but none was forthcoming. They were, however, presented with some of Wallenberg’s personal belongings.³³⁴

Towards the end of his life, Andrei Sakharov raised the issue of Raoul Wallenberg with Aleksandr Yakovlev, a politician, diplomat, and historian who was a driving force behind the glasnost and perestroika reforms, but to no avail.³³⁵ Sakharov’s widow Yelena Bonner declared soon after her husband’s death in 1989 that she no longer had any hopes that Wallenberg was still alive. She concluded that the information that he had died in 1947 was correct.³³⁶ Another dissident, the then recently released Ukrainian Catholic activist Josyp Tereya, declared in 1987 – after 24 years in Soviet camps, prisons, and mental hospitals – that Wallenberg might indeed be alive, but if so it was unlikely that the Soviet authorities would release him.³³⁷ However, just because there was much to suggest that Wallenberg had been killed, or was a lost cause even if he was still alive, this did not mean that there was any consensus as to why he had ended up as a prisoner in the Soviet Union and what had happened to him there. A report by the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky to the effect that Wallenberg had been executed because he refused to be recruited as a Soviet agent circulated in the debate, but it was viewed with suspicion by professional historians. They disagreed on why Wallenberg had been arrested, though.³³⁸

This debate occurred at a time when the view of modern Swedish history was undergoing a major shift. The discussion centred not only on the less-than-desirable aspects of the welfare state but also on the policy of neutrality, or rather the deviations from it. Consequently, the Second World War came back into focus in the 1990s, but no longer with reference to such aspects as ersatz coffee, wood-gas cars, and stalwart soldiers standing guard somewhere in Sweden. This coming to terms with the shortcomings of neutrality, which also included a heated debate about the White Buses and Folke Bernadotte’s hero status, coincided with two other processes.³³⁹ From the early 1990s onwards, Sweden made a U-turn as its leading politicians paved the way for Swedish membership of the European Union. It thereby became increasingly important for Sweden to ‘write itself into’ the broader European historical narrative. At the same time, the Holocaust was becoming internationalized. Around the year 2000, Sweden played an increasingly important role in this process through the international activities of the Living History information initiative, which was created in order to increase public knowledge of the Holocaust.³⁴⁰

The then Prime Minister, Social Democrat Göran Persson, was one of the initiators of Living History in 1997. Partly as a result of its activities, the official Swedish stance underwent a major change in the late 1990s. In 1998, artist and Holocaust survivor Lenke Rothman’s monument Att minnas – den goda gärningen [‘To be remembered – the good deed’], which is dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, was inaugurated in the Riksdag. At the ceremony, Conservative Party leader Carl Bildt focused on modern Swedish history. In contrast to the Swedish policy of appeasement during the Second World War, he highlighted Wallenberg’s achievements.³⁴¹

Bildt has aptly been described as Olof Palme’s ideological polar opposite.³⁴² When the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust was held in 2000, with its focus on remembrance, research, and education, it became clear that Bildt and Göran Persson shared the same views, at least regarding Raoul Wallenberg. One prominent feature of the conference was a ceremony in memory of Wallenberg. In his inaugural address to the conference, Persson emphasized the contrast between Sweden’s actions during the Second World War, which in some respects had been less than honourable, and the heroic efforts of the Swedish diplomat. That Sweden must come to terms with the dark chapters of its past was a position Persson returned to several times during his ten years as Prime Minister (from 1996 to 2006), although he was also on several occasions an outspoken defender of Sweden’s policy during the Second World War.³⁴³

Innocently imprisoned then and now

The ambivalent attitude towards quiet diplomacy has reappeared from time to time over the past half century. In addition to widespread criticism of such an approach to politics, cases frequently occurred which invited comparisons with Wallenberg’s. The Swedish government chose not to raise the case of Dagmar Hagelin, a young Swedish woman murdered in 1977 by Alfredo Astiz, an officer in the Argentine military junta, at a 1980 UN conference in Geneva on human rights. Ola Ullsten, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, acknowledged the similarities in how Swedish governments many years apart had dealt with Raoul Wallenberg and Dagmar Hagelin, mainly by arguing that the cases did not benefit from publicity. However, he did not believe that the government of which he was a member bore any responsibility for this quiet diplomacy. The people who had withheld information from the public about Swedes who had come to grief in foreign countries were ‘UD men’.³⁴⁴

In the 2000s, there were some cases where Swedish diplomats and politicians did succeed in securing the release of Swedes by working quietly. One example is the case of Annika Östberg, who was transferred from a prison in the United States to Sweden after many years of pressure. However, her case was problematic. Quiet diplomacy has largely been associated with the innocently convicted, whereas Östberg was imprisoned in the Unites States for almost 28 years, convicted as an accomplice in two murders, which were committed by her then boyfriend.³⁴⁵ In the early 2010s, criticism of quiet diplomacy was mainly associated with the case of Swedish journalists Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson, who were arrested in July 2011 after they had illegally entered the conflict-ridden Ogaden region in Ethiopia, and their Swedish-Eritrean colleague Dawit Isaak, detained in Eritrea since 23 September 2001. In November 2005 quiet diplomacy bore fruit for Isaak, but his time in freedom only lasted two days. Since then, renewed diplomatic efforts to secure his release have failed.³⁴⁶ A recurring point of view has been that there is a potential ethnic factor in these modern examples of quiet diplomacy: several commentators have argued that if Isaak, and the Swedish-Chinese writer and publisher Gui Minhai, who went missing in Thailand in 2015 and later turned up in Chinese custody, had had a different skin colour and ‘typical’ Swedish names, the outcome of the negotiations with the regimes in Eritrea and China would have been different.³⁴⁷

At first, the Isaak case attracted limited attention in the Swedish media. From the autumn of 2002, however, articles began to multiply, and in 2005 the Swedish media began to seriously focus the spotlight on him.³⁴⁸ One factor that contributed to the high profile of his case was that the UD’s actions were inconsistent with the high ideals that have characterized Swedish foreign policy. While Isaak was sitting in prison, Sweden had given aid to Eritrea – money that might, in a worst-case scenario, have been used to build new prisons where more innocent people would be behind bars. The fact that the EU was still sending money, originally at Sweden’s initiative, did not help matters.³⁴⁹ In addition, one of the most intense phases in the highlighting of Isaak’s case coincided with Sweden’s presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2009. Critics argued that Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt should accept the consequences of the failure of quiet diplomacy and exert strong pressure on the Eritrean government.³⁵⁰ Simultaneously, Sweden’s four largest newspapers launched a campaign calling for the Swedish journalist’s release, culminating in the presentation of over 200,000 signatures to Eritrea’s chargé d’affaires in Stockholm in May 2009.³⁵¹ Later that year Dawit Isaak was awarded the Tucholsky Prize, named after the German author and anti-Nazi Kurt Tucholsky.³⁵² In November 2009, more than 90 Swedish newspapers published an article by historian and author Peter Englund on the subject of freedom of expression and Dawit Isaak, to the accompaniment of many comments, most of which were favourable.³⁵³ In the spring of 2010, newly accessed facts revealed the appalling conditions under which Isaak was forced to live in prison.³⁵⁴ The Eritrean response was a vague promise of a trial.³⁵⁵ Just over a year later came the tenth anniversary of Isaak’s imprisonment, which was widely publicized. At the same time unconfirmed reports circulated that he had died in prison.³⁵⁶

This last statement invited comparisons between the tragic fates of Wallenberg and Isaak. A number of people committed to finding answers to what happened to Wallenberg have written about Isaak as well. They have adopted a political-pedagogical use of history, stressing the similarities between then and now rather than the differences. For example, historian Mattias Hessérus ignored the concrete differences between Sweden’s contacts with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and those with Eritrea in the twenty-first century. Instead, he emphasized the similarities between the diplomatic failure in the Wallenberg case and the inadequate foreign-policy-orientated handling of Isaak’s case. Both situations revealed the political limitations of quiet diplomacy and the curtailment of the media’s power. When nothing is said in official contexts, the media are helpless, as it is hard for them to report on silence. This last aspect was thought-provoking. It is frightening that ‘the logic that long characterized the Raoul Wallenberg case now seems to be repeating itself in the handling of Dawit Isaak’, Hessérus wrote.³⁵⁷

A similar application of the political-pedagogical use of history occurred in an article by the diligent Wallenberg researcher Susanne Berger and the journalist and publicist Arne Ruth in Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. They wrote that the UD had not learned its lesson from the Wallenberg case; instead it repeated similar mistakes. The ‘smokescreen’ that Swedish diplomats put out in 2009 was ‘exactly the same’ as that used to cover up uncomfortable facts about Wallenberg. Berger and Ruth mainly reacted to Isaak’s being without legal representation, but also to the vagueness of the UD’s actions. They argued that the maintenance of business relations with the dictatorship of Eritrea was a sign that the Raoul Wallenberg tragedy risked being repeated.³⁵⁸ In another context, it was pointed out that the Swedish government both then and now had offered credit and aid to the Soviet and Eritrean dictatorships but without demanding Wallenberg’s and Isaac’s freedom in exchange.³⁵⁹ Wilhelm Agrell pointed out that one essential difference between the Wallenberg and Isaak cases was that while the former soon gained a tireless advocate in Rudolph Philipp, Isaak has not been represented by an equally stubborn defender. But Agrell has also noted a number of structural similarities in the handling of the two cases, despite the change over time which has meant that ‘over the years, in terms of its foreign policy Sweden has walked the not very long road from anxious neighbour of a great power to a quiet and well-groomed small state that finally gets to sit at the grown-ups’ table’.³⁶⁰

Dawit Isaak’s imprisonment has also been discussed in recent years, notably in 2021, the twentieth anniversary of his detention. Many of the objections are recognizable, such as criticism of the UD’s initially feeble commitment and the shortcomings of quiet diplomacy.³⁶¹ One of the most striking examples was an advertisement from Reporters Without Borders with quotations regarding ongoing efforts to secure Isaak’s release. The quoted statements came from three Swedish Foreign Ministers, summed up as ‘20 years of big words and quiet diplomacy’ with zero results.³⁶² The criticism was met with a defence of ‘the patient consular and political work’,³⁶³ together with the hope of indications that the Eritrean regime was on the ropes, which might pave the way for Isaak’s release.³⁶⁴

The big difference compared to ten years earlier was that the Raoul Wallenberg case was no longer an object of comparison. Instead, it was generally contemporary people who were mentioned – both other innocently imprisoned people and famous Swedes who could potentially influence those in power in the dictatorships that kept Swedes imprisoned without judicial review.³⁶⁵ When there was an occasional historical reference, it was to a person who, like Wallenberg, was regarded as a role model in the spirit of the Scarlet Pimpernel: Nelson Mandela.³⁶⁶

One history-cultural insight is that it is rarely possible to isolate people and events and relegate them to a distant ‘then’; sooner or later, present-day aspects intrude. The question of what lessons we have actually learned from the Wallenberg case and how they influence Swedish policy today, for example in connection with Dawit Isaak, once again brings out the relevance of the inadequate diplomatic and political handling of the Wallenberg case. But regardless of whether Wallenberg is used as a positive or a negative example, his present-day position as a role model is rarely questioned. The post-war Raoul Wallenberg has gone from being a festering and ideologically charged bone of contention to being a strong Swedish brand, but this development depended on the Swedish diplomat attracting international attention in the 1970s and 1980s, with the United States as the hub.

In addition to the American interest in Raoul Wallenberg, other nations’ actions have also had a major impact on the Swedish history of the Wallenberg case. Unsurprisingly, various ways of relating to the Soviet superpower characterized the debate in the first post-war decades. Subsequently, the end of the Cold War, Sweden’s membership of the EU, and the growing international interest in the Holocaust, which has found expression in many different ways, have been of great significance. However, the external influence needs to be complemented by the view of the past in Sweden, a view which has influenced the conception of Raoul Wallenberg and the memory of him to at least as great an extent.

In the decades following the end of the Second World War, a combination of a historical and practical past dominated in Sweden, although the latter concept should be seen as particularly robust in this context. The ‘then’ of the Second World War and the ‘now’ of the Cold War merged into an explanatory model represented by both politicians and professional historians. In accordance with small-state realism, a relatively small nation like Sweden had to make repeated concessions regarding its non-alignment and neutrality in order to preserve its independence. Another concurrent factor was that an earlier domestic admiration for Sweden as an imperial power in the Baltic Sea during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was increasingly outcompeted by a more up-to-date historiography combined with an optimistic view of the future. Admittedly, attention was paid to the Holocaust itself and to the survivors who now and again made their presence felt in the public sphere.³⁶⁷ It was rare, however, for this dark chapter to feature prominently in depictions of and debates about the Second World War, and even rarer for there to be discussions about the ways in which Sweden was part of this history. This was compounded by a confusion of concepts, as some of the Communists and Syndicalists who had been interned in labour camps because they were considered a security risk afterwards claimed that they had been in concentration camps. In their interpretation of the war years, they depicted themselves as a kind of resistance fighters in contrast to the establishment. Folke Bernadotte and Raoul Wallenberg, who were rarely named in these contexts, were implicit exceptions to a politically ‘brown’ standpoint according to which royalty and business leaders had generally sympathized with Adolf Hitler’s Germany.³⁶⁸

During the 1990s, this viewpoint became widely adopted as people increasingly came to terms with Sweden’s modern history. There was one important difference, though. In retrospect, it is obvious that the focus on the morally charged issues of Swedish modern history paved the way for an important change. The earlier intermittent interest in the Holocaust was replaced by recurring discussions of its significance during the Second World War, for posterity, and in a Sweden which during this decade became part of the EU.³⁶⁹ Raoul Wallenberg’s shifting status during this same period can be illustrated with a few telling examples. Against the background of the continuing great American interest in the missing Swede – an interest still evident at this time in the form of ceremonies and tributes – a translated volume of letters written by and to Raoul Wallenberg was published, as well as several new books about him and his fate; one Swedish journalist and US correspondent asked why the Swedish efforts to pay tribute to him were still rather few and half-hearted.³⁷⁰

A few years later, in conjunction with the first of three big conferences in Stockholm – a conference which was also a highly publicized national and international event in the Swedish information campaign about the Holocaust – the same journalist argued that Prime Minister Göran Persson should not talk about Folke Bernadotte and Raoul Wallenberg. They were already well known and extensively used to demonstrate Swedish contributions during the Second World War. Instead, in line with the many cases of coming to terms with the past, he should talk about the dark sides of Sweden’s modern history which included antisemitism, racism, and a restrictive refugee policy before and during the early years of the war.³⁷¹

In memory of Raoul Wallenberg

Just like other history cultures, Swedish history culture is by no means clear-cut. The early twenty-first century has seen Swedish society come to terms with the past, but also attempts to include the dark chapters in the grand narrative. Calls are still being made for dealing with the dark sides of modern Swedish history, but they are fewer in number and lack the intensity of the 1990s. At that time, it was a common criticism that Folke Bernadotte had exaggerated his own importance in saving thousands of concentration-camp prisoners during the last months of the war. A charge levelled against the Count was that he failed to mention the Danes and Norwegians who had played a decisive role in preparing the White Buses operation. Over time this criticism has subsided, though, and in recent decades Bernadotte has regained popularity.³⁷² A similar development occurred regarding the view of non-alignment and neutrality: over time, the debates of the 1990s have led to a sense of pride that these reckonings have taken place.

That Swedes are considered to have come to terms with old sins once and for all has opened the door to a revival of the view of Sweden as a model moral country. It fits better into such a context to cite Wallenberg’s achievements as a neutral Swede in Budapest in 1944–1945 than to dwell on the long and sorrowful aftermath of his disappearance. As part of integrating Wallenberg into a good narrative of Swedish modern history, he has been placed in the ranks of successful Swedes such as Alfred Nobel and Dag Hammarskjöld.³⁷³ Wallenberg was also awarded four medals in the 1980s and 1990s; and in 1987, along with Folke Bernadotte and Dag Hammarskjöld, he became the subject of a postage stamp under the collective title ‘In the service of humanity’.³⁷⁴ To put it another way, Wallenberg’s rescue efforts in Hungary have become increasingly important as the Holocaust has been given an ever-more prominent position in Swedish history culture. This does not amount to saying that the diplomatic failure has been entirely shut away in a cupboard. The link between Wallenberg and quiet diplomacy is not made as often as it used to be, but it still surfaces now and then. The fact that Vladimir Putin has been caught out in strategic power lies over the past two decades has gained renewed topicality following the Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Swedish writers have reminded us that such lies are nothing new in Soviet and Russian history; among many other examples, Soviet denials and half-truths have run like a central thread through the Raoul Wallenberg case.³⁷⁵

A narrative that has been ‘corrected’ can still invite debate, however. This was demonstrated, for example, in connection with the Raoul Wallenberg Room at the Army Museum, the first permanent Wallenberg exhibition in Sweden, which opened in January 2009. The author, critic, and journalist Kaj Schueler saw the exhibition as ‘a beautiful memorial to Wallenberg’ that was informative but not intrusive.³⁷⁶ A different reviewer felt that the Second World War was missing from the exhibition and noted the conspicuous absence of Nazis, Arrow Cross members, and Jews. ‘The staging is almost demonstratively low key’, said this commentator, arguing that the exhibition conveyed material for a legend of a Swedish saint more than for a universal tale of a hero.³⁷⁷

That there are differences of opinion over how history should be understood and interpreted is not surprising. However, such disagreements are often swept under the carpet when it is time for anniversaries and commemorative years. While world wars, genocides, disasters, and other significant events tend to have a strong impact on people for a long time and contribute to new and alternative interpretations, anniversary celebrations and commemorative events are of a different nature. Their purpose is rather to reinforce established notions of the past, and of the ways in which that past relates to developments now and to the future.³⁷⁸

The 2012 commemorative year highlighted Raoul Wallenberg as a Swedish brand. It was also a kind of countermeasure aimed at Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who at the same time had signalled his desire to draw attention to Wallenberg – not primarily in connection with the persecution of Jews then and now, though, but rather as part of a far-right offensive.³⁷⁹ Even so, solemn speeches in Wallenberg’s honour were not a guarantee of success, as was demonstrated by the reactions to the presence of Iran’s ambassador, which constituted a problem given that the country’s then President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had a reputation as a Holocaust denier. Swedish opinion shapers also criticized Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt for not officially denouncing the measures taken by the national-conservative Viktor Orbán and his populist Fidesz party with a view to moving away from democracy and freedom of expression.³⁸⁰

Bildt explained that the figure of Raoul Wallenberg which formed in the lead-up to and during the centenary celebrations of his birth on 4 January 1912 was an exemplary historical personage and therefore offered an opportunity to learn from history. Accordingly, his achievements were worthy of emulation, and the focus should hence not be on his time in Soviet captivity but on his achievements in Budapest.

One visible indication that reconciliation had finally been achieved was the partial rededication of Gustav and Ulla Kraitz’s bronze briefcase, originally part of the Hope monument outside the UN building in New York. Located outside the offices of the UD on a black granite bench, the case bearing the initials R.W. can be interpreted as meaning that Raoul Wallenberg is once and for all accepted as a Swedish diplomat on a fully equal basis, and that his colleagues’ failure to bring him home from the Soviet Union is a closed chapter.³⁸¹