Nazi Hunter (33 page)

By the time the central ghetto of Budapest was liberated that night, Raoul Gustav Wallenberg had vanished from view: the first
victim of the Cold War to come. It took less
than a week for the hero who had fought, bluffed, and outsmarted Eichmann, the Third Reich, the Final Solution, and the Arrow Cross, saving tens of thousands of Jewish lives at great risk to his
own, to be enmeshed for life (and, perhaps, death) in another criminal bureaucracy: the Iron Curtain with which Stalin had already begun to blanket Eastern Europe.

Accounts of what happened after he left Budapest for Debrecen come from prisoners and a few other civilians who saw or talked with Wallenberg or his driver, Langfelder, in the Soviet penal
system. The two men told their story whenever they could in the hope that these casual contacts, if they ever went free in the West, could send word to a mostly uncaring world.

At a checkpoint on the outskirts of Budapest, NKVD officers in green uniforms with red shoulder-boards slashed Wallenberg’s tyres, transferred him and Langfelder to an official Soviet car,
and dismissed the military escort. Not for another thirty-six years did it become public knowledge that their abduction had been ordered by a Red Army political commissar (
politrak
), Major
General Leonid Brezhnev, who later ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982: a period of stagnation from which he is remembered as a coveter of fast cars and expensive trinkets.

In 1981, former Red Army officer Yaakov Menaker, who had emigrated to Israel, told a Stockholm newspaper,
Aftonbladet
, that he had met several of the officers involved at a
veterans’ reunion and they had referred to Wallenberg’s arrest as a ‘successful secret operation’ directed by Brezhnev. A few days later, former Swedish Supreme Court
Justice Ingrid Gärde-Widemar, head of the Swedish Wallenberg Committee, acknowledged that ‘we have known since last fall that Brezhnev personally ordered the arrest of Raoul Wallenberg
in Hungary in 1945 when he was a Soviet Red Army
politruk
. We are one hundred per cent sure the information is correct, but our big problem was whether we should make this public or not.
We decided to keep silent in order not to jeopardize our efforts to seek Wallenberg’s release.’

Brezhnev died the following year. Two years later, a Ukrainian Catholic activist, Yosyp Terelia, published in an underground journal,
Chronicle of the Catholic Church in the Ukraine
, a
letter claiming that Brezhnev’s main objective had been Raoul’s dented Studebaker.
Terelia said he had two witnesses who had participated in the arrest, one of
whom later became a Catholic and confessed his role to his priest:

For this and other efforts, Terelia was sentenced in 1985 to twelve years of hard labour and exile.

Little knowing that they were under arrest and charged with being ‘German spies’ and ‘not in possession of valid papers’, the diplomat and his chauffeur were driven to
their destination, Debrecen, but not to see Marshal Malinovski. Instead, Raoul was told he would have to confer with civilian higher-ups in Moscow Then, with four armed escorts, he and Langfelder
were put aboard a train headed towards the Russian border.

Both men must have recognized that, particularly under communism, it is hardly customary to ship a chauffeur as a passenger along with an invited guest. Indeed, the decisions about
Wallenberg’s fate were already being taken in the Kremlin, for, in a message dated 16 January 1945 – the eve of Raoul’s departure for Debrecen – Soviet Deputy Foreign
Minister Vladimir Dekanosov had sent a note to Swedish Ambassador Staffan Söderblom in Moscow that ‘First Secretary Raoul Wallenberg of the Swedish Legation in Budapest has gone over to
the Russian side. Measures have been taken by the Soviet military authorities to protect Mr Wallenberg and his property.’ Meanwhile, back in ‘liberated’ Budapest, the NKVD began
interrogating and sometimes imprisoning those who had ever worked with Wallenberg.

Simon Wiesenthal says that ‘for years after the war, there would be so many diplomats and other foreigners shuffling back and forth through Russia and its prisons that one Swedish first or
second
secretary wouldn’t normally have worried Stalin.’ But the war was not yet over in January of 1945, and Wiesenthal thinks that what
did
worry the
Russians was Raoul’s link with the War Refugee Board, which Stalin perceived as a front for US intelligence and for ‘separate peace’ negotiations by the Americans and British with
Nazi Germany instead of the ‘unconditional surrender’ demanded by all the Allies. Indeed, the WRB’s field representative in Turkey, Ira Hirschmann, had been bargaining in Ankara
and the Middle East with Nazi go-betweens while other intermediaries were in contact with Heinrich Himmler, who was hoping to come to power and negotiate a ‘conditional surrender’ if
Hitler faltered. And the ‘condition’ Stalin feared the most was a fantasy occasionally voiced among both Axis and Allies: what if America and Britain (and perhaps the Free French)
signed a separate peace with Germany (and perhaps Japan) and victors and vanquished united to wipe out godless Bolshevism once and for all?

Learning of Hirschmann’s negotiations, the Soviet Foreign Ministry vehemently vetoed all such dealings. W. Averell Harriman, the US Ambassador to Moscow, was obliged to cable Washington
that the Soviet Union was not interested in the Jewish problem.

None of this was known to Raoul Wallenberg and Wilmos Langfelder who, still treated courteously as though in protective custody, bore the discomforts of a 1500-mile rail journey, largely through
war-torn Romania, which took two weeks. After a brief stop at Focsani at an internment camp for foreigners, they ate dinner with their escorts at a restaurant called Luther in Iasi, the Romanian
town on the Russian frontier. Then they boarded a Soviet train that took them through the Ukraine to Moscow.

No official car awaited their arrival on Wednesday, 31 January. Instead, their escorts took the Swedish diplomat and his Hungarian chauffeur on a tour of the newly completed Moscow subway: each
station a museum of Russian art, some of it revolutionary, some of it Stalin Gothic. To Wallenberg as an architect, these were to be his last images of freedom. Alighting at the Dzerzhinskaya
station that evening, he and Langfelder were led into a floodlit former hotel flying a red flag. This was Lubyanka Prison, headquarters of the NKVD and last known address for hundreds of thousands
of political prisoners.

There Wallenberg and Langfelder were separated. There they faded from sight. By March of 1945, the Soviet-controlled Kossuth
Radio in Budapest was claiming Wallenberg had
been murdered en route to Debrecen by Hungarian fascists or ‘agents of the Gestapo’. This became the official Soviet line for more than a decade.

It would be more than two decades before another ‘liberated’ architect, Simon Wiesenthal, would first hear the name of Raoul Wallenberg and drop everything to
enter his case. ‘For us Jews,’ says Wiesenthal today, ‘human life is very holy and there is a passage in the Talmud that is maybe 1500 or 2000 years old, but it applies to
Wallenberg right now. It says that when you save one human life, you save the whole world.’

19

Throughout the 1950s, as foreign captives trickled back to the West from Soviet prison camps, one could chart Raoul Wallenberg’s movements (and some of his driver, Wilmos
Langfelder’s) from 1945 onward, if never upward, through the Gulag Archipelago: ex-citizen Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s designation of his native land’s vast clandestine penal system
which ‘begins right next to us, two yards away from us’ and in which, said Solzhenitsyn in 1975, ‘Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat . . . has been imprisoned for thirty years
and they will not yield him up.’

Gustav Richter, former German police attaché in Bucharest, shared cell 123 in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, Wallenberg’s first port of call in the gulag, with him for more than a
month in 1945. He said Raoul asked several times: ‘What will my relatives say when they learn I’m in prison?’ Richter replied: ‘Under the circumstances, I think you have no
cause for shame.’

Twice a month, prisoners were allowed to petition any Soviet official, even Stalin. Raoul wrote to the prison director, protesting his arrest and treatment and demanding the right to contact the
Swedish Embassy in Moscow. His petition went unanswered. During their time together, Richter said Raoul was taken out for interrogation only once – ‘for an hour or an hour and a
half,’ after which he reported that he was accused of espionage and told: ‘Well, we know who you are. You belong to a great capitalist family in Sweden.’

In mid-March 1945, Raoul was transferred to another Lubyanka cell which had just been vacated by Langfelder. When Wallenberg learned of his chauffeur from his cellmates, he was overjoyed and
asked the prison duty officer to deliver his own cigarette ration to Langfelder. But Langfelder had been transferred to Lefortovo Prison
in Moscow, after which he vanished
into the more remote reaches of the gulag.

Claudio de Mohr, former Italian cultural attaché in Bulgaria, was in Lefortovo when Wallenberg was transferred across town from Lubyanka in April 1945. De Mohr was in cell 152 when new
prisoners were brought into cell 151. As usual, they communicated by tapping in code on their walls, which is how de Mohr learned that one of his new neighbours in the gulag’s diplomatic
ghetto was ‘Mr Raoul Wallenberg from the Swedish legation in Budapest.’

Bernard Rensinghoff and Ernst Wallenstein, former German attachés in Bucharest, learned from Wallenberg’s tappings that he was interrogated frequently and told only that ‘for
political reasons, you will never be sentenced’. According to Rensinghoff, an inspector interrogating Raoul had told him ‘that he was a political case. If he considered himself
innocent, it was his responsibility to prove this. The best proof of his guilt was that the Swedish legation in Moscow and the Swedish government had done nothing on his case. Raoul Wallenberg had
asked the inspector . . . to be allowed direct contact with the Swedish legation in Moscow or the Red Cross or at least to write to them. This request was refused with “Nobody cares about
you. If the Swedish government or its legation had taken any interest in you, they would long ago have contacted you.”’

The NKVD had a point. When he’d disappeared, there was heavy cable traffic about his case between Washington and his recruiter, Iver Olsen, the Treasury Department’s and War Refugee
Board’s representative in Stockholm who also worked for the OSS. On a memo about Wallenberg, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau pencilled a note: ‘I am personally interested in this
man.’

Washington instructed the US Ambassador to Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, to offer the Swedes any American assistance that could hasten Raoul’s return. Interviewed by a team from the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre shortly before his death at ninety-four in 1986, Harriman recalled:

‘I did a quite natural thing. I went to see the Swedish Ambassador and asked if there was anything we could do to help. I offered American aid and he said no, there was not a thing we
could do and, under those circumstances, there wasn’t.’

On 12 April 1945, around the time Wallenberg was transferred from Lubyanka to Lefortovo, Harriman cabled Washington about
his meeting with the Swedish Ambassador:
‘
THE SWEDES SAY THEY HAVE NO REASON TO THINK THE RUSSIANS ARE NOT DOING WHAT THEY CAN AND THEY DO NOT FEEL AN APPROACH TO THE SOVIET FOREIGN OFFICE ON OUR PART WOULD BE
DESIREABLE
.’ His cable was sent at 10 a.m. That afternoon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, and there was a new President, Harry S. Truman, a new attitude
toward winning the war without looking back, and, before long, a new cabinet. If anyone glanced at Harriman’s cable on that memorable day, it and Wallenberg were quickly forgotten in
Washington. The cable was buried even before FDR was. For not the first of many times, Raoul Wallenberg was betrayed by an accident of history. It would be thirty years before America would take
any further action on his behalf.