Raoul Wallenberg

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Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Wallenberg [ ˌɹɑːʊl ˈvalːənbæɹʝ ] (born August 4, 1912 in Kappsta on Lidingö near Stockholm ; traces of life until the end of July 1947, formally fixed date of death July 31, 1952 ) was a Swedish diplomat . He gained notoriety for his work to save Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust in World War II .

Origin and family

Raoul Wallenberg was born in Kappsta as the son of the naval officer Raoul Oscar Wallenberg (1888-1912) and Maria "Maj" Sofia Wising (1891-1979). His mother also had Jewish ancestors. Father Raoul Oscar Wallenberg, who belonged to the well-known banker and entrepreneurial family Wallenberg , died of cancer three months before his son was born. Wallenberg's paternal grandfather was also a diplomat. Six years after the death of her first husband, his mother remarried. Fredrik von Dardel became Wallenberg's stepfather. From this marriage his half-sister Nina emerged, who married the lawyer Gunnar Lagergren and whose daughter later married Kofi Annan .

education and profession

In 1931 Wallenberg went to the USA to study architecture ; he graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor's degree in 1935 . He also learned Russian . After his return to Sweden, his grandfather arranged a job in Cape Town ( South Africa ) for him, where he worked for a Swedish company sold the building material. In the same year he moved to the branch of a Dutch bank in Haifa , where he made friends with a Hungarian Jew. In 1936 he returned to Sweden to work for the Central European Trading Company. This company belonged to Koloman Lauer, who could not travel to the parts of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany or collaborating with him , which is why Wallenberg offered to travel in his place.

holocaust

Letter of protection signed by Wallenberg on August 24, 1944
Memorial for Raoul Wallenberg on the grounds of the Great Synagogue in Budapest

When, after the German occupation of Hungary by the Eichmann Command (supported by Hungarian forces) between April 27 and July 11, 1944, over 400,000 Jews from the provinces were locked up in ghettos and deported , Wallenberg's existence was shaken. Due to the influence of his family, he was able to return to Budapest on July 9, 1944 as the first secretary of the Swedish legation with the support of the US War Refugee Board , in order to seek measures to rescue Budapest's Jews with the support of the Swedish government . His government had given him a list drawn up by a Swedish diplomat in Hungary of 800 Hungarian people with ties to Sweden, whom Sweden guaranteed acceptance.

Wallenberg issued so-called Swedish protection passports . These documents identified the holders as Swedish citizens awaiting safe repatriation . Similar documents were also issued by Switzerland and the Vatican . Although they were not legally binding under international law , they were recognized by the Hungarian authorities and German agencies, even if they occasionally had to be helped with bribery . Together with the Swiss envoy Carl Lutz, Wallenberg organized the accommodation of his protégés in over 30 shelters, using camouflages such as “Swedish Library” or “Swedish Research Institute” and marking the buildings with Swedish flags . The Swedish shelters, together with those created at the instigation of the Spanish ambassador Ángel Sanz Briz , formed an international ghetto around the Great Synagogue in Budapest , which housed around 30,000 people. Together with other diplomats, Wallenberg was able to provide for the large number of his protégés thanks to American dollars . He set up an infirmary in every house and saved so many from death. In contrast, Wallenberg was only able to help the more than 80,000 Jews who were crammed into the Budapest ghetto by delivering food. This ghetto was established in Budapest in November 1944 on the orders of the Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Szálasi .

Adolf Eichmann threatened to have the "Judenhund Wallenberg" shot, although he was neither able nor authorized to do so. This led to an official protest from Sweden. International pressure on the Hungarian head of state, Reich Administrator Admiral Miklós Horthy , caused the deportations to be temporarily interrupted. But in October 1944, Horthy was replaced by Ferenc Szálasi in a German-backed coup of the Arrow Cross after Horthy had announced an armistice and Hungary's neutrality towards the Soviet Union .

When Eichmann had a large number of Jews driven on death marches towards the German border in November 1944 because of insufficient transport capacities, Wallenberg distributed food and asked for holders of Swedish protection passports. With his determined demeanor and by ticking off imaginary lists, he deliberately created the impression that these people had Swedish protection passports, which were then issued to them by hand without a stamp, picture or authorization. In this way Wallenberg succeeded in bringing about 200 of the unfortunates back to Budapest in trucks he had organized; Among them was the mother of the later Israeli politician Josef Lapid .

In the last weeks up to the conquest of Budapest by the Red Army in mid-January 1945, Arrow Cross members cruelly murdered between 10,000 and 20,000 ghetto residents in a horrific way. The Arrow Cross abducted repeatedly Jews from the ghetto to the Danube , where in front of their shooting had to move out in the bitter cold winter. With his determined demeanor, Wallenberg succeeded once again in saving people from certain death by claiming that they were holders of Swedish protection passports and even had their clothes returned. He had secured the support of individual Hungarian police officers who stood up against the terrorist behavior of the Arrow Cross members.

About 70,000 Jews survived in the Budapest ghetto. Shortly before the liberation of the general ghetto , its destruction is said to have been planned, which was ultimately prevented. Wallenberg is said to have threatened the German general Gerhard Schmidhuber that otherwise he would be brought to justice as a war criminal . Of the approximately 800,000 Jews who lived in Hungary during World War II, approximately 204,000 survived after the liberation by the Red Army.

Soviet detention

Memorial plaque for Carl-Ivan Danielsson, Raoul Wallenberg and Per Anger at the location of the former Swedish embassy in Budapest
Wallenberg Monument in Tel Aviv

On January 12, 1945, Wallenberg met Karoly Szabo , Pal Szalai and Otto Fleischmann for dinner; the three helpers were the last of his friends to see Wallenberg alive. Even after the conquest of Budapest by the Red Army, Wallenberg wanted to continue to campaign for his protégés and therefore meet the Soviet commander. On the way to Debrecen , however, Wallenberg was abducted to Moscow .

First, a Soviet agency confirmed to the Swedish envoy in Moscow that Wallenberg was in the care of the Red Army, which the Red Army immediately passed on to Stockholm and to the Wallenberg family. A spy of the NKVD in the Swedish Legation in Budapest, the Russian emigre Mikhail Tolstoy had awakened by his reports the impression Wallenberg working as an American spy. According to the Stalinist interpretation, anyone who happened to have contact with a spy was considered a spy himself. Naturally, this was all the more true of a diplomat, especially since Wallenberg sent reports of his rescue operation to the American financiers. The US government refused to confirm or deny that Wallenberg was a spy. Wallenberg's half-brother, who had good contacts with the Soviet embassy in Stockholm during the war, failed when trying to stand up for Raoul Wallenberg. Ambassador Alexandra Kollontai had good personal relations with Stalin , but had since been called back to Moscow.

It was not until 1993 that the arrest warrant became known. On January 17, 1945, none other than Vice Defense Minister Bulganin ordered that Wallenberg be brought to Moscow. Together with his chauffeur Langfelder, Wallenberg was taken to the NKVD Lubyanka prison. According to statements from fellow prisoners, Wallenberg was suspected of espionage. His origins from a Swedish bourgeois family made him even more suspicious of Stalin and the NKVD. Wallenberg was detained in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow for about two years . Until the beginning of 1947 it is known in which cells and prisons Wallenberg was, when and by whom he was interrogated. There is uncertainty about the time thereafter.

For a long time the Soviet Union denied that Wallenberg had even been in the Soviet Union. On February 6, 1957, following international pressure, the Soviet Union claimed in a note from Foreign Minister Gromyko that Raoul Wallenberg had been found dead in his cell in the Lubyanka on July 17, 1947 and presumably died of a heart attack. The death certificate was signed by the head of the infirmary in the Lubyanka, Smolzow, and addressed to the Soviet State Security Minister Viktor Abakumov . There was no explanation as to why Wallenberg's death had not been announced earlier. Russia continues to hold on to the day of his death without being able to provide any solid evidence.

The Swedish doctor Svartz learned at a medical congress in January 1961 from a Soviet colleague, A. L. Myasnikov, that Wallenberg was in a mental hospital. Myasnikov later denied having made such statements on the highest orders. Carl Gustaf Svingel , SPD negotiator for the “exchange of agents”, tried in 1965 through the Soviet negotiator Abrassimow, who was trying to get a Soviet spy imprisoned in Sweden free, to get his friend Raoul Wallenberg free. The Soviet side confirmed that Raoul Wallenberg was alive. However, Sweden did not respond.

Israel honored Wallenberg with a stamp in 1983.

The Swedish government has been heavily criticized for its behavior in the Wallenberg case. A number of witnesses claim to have seen Wallenberg in Siberian or Russian camps in 1981 . Inmates of the GULAG system who were released thanks to perestroika claim to have seen a foreigner, whose description fits Wallenberg, back in 1990.

The Ukrainian activist Josyp Terelja , who was imprisoned in the Soviet Union for his nationalism and Catholicism, wrote an autobiography in which he said he was a fellow prisoner of Wallenberg. He painted it and dedicated a significant part of his autobiography to it, which had had a great influence on him.

Even Sonja Sonnenfeld , as Managing Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee in Stockholm (since 1979) big part of that had to do Wallenberg world famous, practiced severe criticism of the Swedish government and was convinced that he has lived a long time. She initiated rescue operations for the "Angel of Budapest" in order to free him from a Soviet silent camp where, according to her research, he should have been. In her autobiography It began in Berlin - A Life for Justice and Freedom , she also described how she found support from Helmut Kohl , who campaigned for Wallenberg with Michail Gorbatschow .

In 1989, Wallenberg's clothes, money, diary and passport were returned to the Wallenberg family by the Soviets. In January 2001 the Swedish part of a Swedish-Russian working group stated that Raoul Wallenberg's death had by no means been proven. The Russian side made it clear that the Soviet side considered an exchange of Raoul Wallenberg to be possible in the first years after Wallenberg's capture. The Swedish side did not respond. It has also been speculated that, thanks to his prominent position, Wallenberg had a large number of connections important to Soviet espionage. In 2010 new documents emerged which made Wallenberg's survival beyond 1947 as “Prisoner No. 7” appear possible.

Possible causes of death

The former KGB general Sudoplatov devoted an entire chapter to the Wallenberg case in his 1994 autobiography. In it he claims that the Swedish Wallenberg family not only had important arms deals with the Soviet Union, which are to be seen as a violation of Sweden's neutrality during the Second World War, but also since the beginning of 1944 through secret contacts with representatives of the Soviet government to what they were striving for Separate peace treaty with Finland from September 19, 1944 contributed. Through the kidnapping of Raoul Wallenberg from Budapest in January 1945, ordered by Bulganin , Stalin wanted to blackmail the Wallenberg family in order to use their international connections to raise foreign capital for post-war reconstruction. As bait, Stalin had spread the idea of wanting to build a home for the Jewish people on the Crimean peninsula and not in Palestine. According to Beria , Sudoplatov had such talks with the American ambassador Harriman . Since Raoul Wallenberg apparently refused to cooperate, he was killed by lethal injection in a prison section of the Lubyanka and, on the orders of the Minister for State Security, Abakumov , burned without an autopsy, which was a common practice at the time.

A former KGB officer claimed in 1992 that Wallenberg died suddenly during an interrogation in 1947, but that this was not the intention of the MGB . If that were to be true (admitting a deliberate murder of Wallenberg on the orders of Stalin would be unproblematic, since millions of such murders are known), it remains open under what circumstances and under what circumstances this happened. Because of his fame and "worth", Wallenberg is believed not to have been subjected to physical torture. During his mission, Wallenberg often proved that he could withstand strong psychological pressure. This increases the likelihood of an interrogation method that also has analogies at the time: breaking the will with psychotropic drugs . It has been known since 1956 that László Rajk , a prominent victim of communist terror in Hungary, made his “confessions” during the public show trial (1949), including under the influence of drugs. In prison he was under "treatment" by a state security professor of psychiatry. The Swedish government exerted increased international pressure on Moscow in mid-1947 after it was convinced of Wallenberg's captivity in the USSR. Shortly thereafter, the top Soviet leadership ordered the rapid "settlement of the Wallenberg case". It is possible that the Soviet secret police wanted to intensify the interrogation and drastically increased the dose of a psychological drug that could cause "sudden, unintentional" death.

Such a version is also supported by the fact that at least a dozen former German prisoners of war who were fellow inmates of Wallenberg testified after their return home in 1956 that they were questioned by NKVD officers specifically about Raoul Wallenberg on July 27, 1947: what they were about found out about him and who they talked to about him. They were all isolated in solitary confinement. Shortly afterwards, on August 18, 1947, the infamous Vyshinsky Note was written in which the Soviet Union spread the lie that Wallenberg was never in the country. The simultaneous interrogation of the witnesses reinforces the impression that the interviews took place after a sudden event and not before a planned event. It bears witness to the weight of the testimony of 1956 by Wallenberg's former German fellow prisoners, that in early 1957, after twelve years of persistent lies, the Soviet Union admitted Wallenberg's imprisonment for the first time - as a crime of Stalin - (in the above-mentioned "Gromyko Note").

However, it cannot be ruled out that the Politburo ordered the liquidation of the prisoner with the expression “Settling the Wallenberg Case”, which was in its directive to the Ministry for State Security from mid-1947.

In the Austrian news magazine Profil on November 12, 2012, a report appeared under the title Endstation Gulag , which shows the possibility that Raoul Wallenberg only died in Vorkuta in 1950.

Official declaration of death

After a family member applied for a death certificate in the spring of 2016, the Swedish tax authorities, as the competent civil status authority, officially set July 31, 1952 as the date of death in October 2016. According to Swedish law, a date had to be chosen that was at least five years after the disappearance, i.e. after July 1947. In this respect, the date of death was determined purely formally.

1953 secret trial in Hungary

Wallenberg Monument in Budapest

A show trial was to prove that Wallenberg was not deported to the Soviet Union in January 1945. Everything was prepared for a trial with "evidence" of a Zionist conspiracy against Wallenberg. Three people from the leadership of the Central Council of Jews in Budapest, László Benedek, Lajos Stöckler and Miksa Domonkos, as well as the two "eyewitnesses" Pál Szalai and Károly Szabó were arrested. Károly Szabó's arrest on April 8, 1953, came from an ambush on the street. He disappeared without a trace; his family received no news from him for six months.

On January 12, 1945, Wallenberg had three guests for their last dinner in Budapest, Ottó Fleischmann, Károly Szabó and Pál Szalai appeared in the Swedish Embassy on Gyopár Street to say goodbye. The next day, January 13, 1945, Wallenberg reported to the Russians. Ottó Fleischmann lived in Vienna after the war; the other two eyewitnesses, Pál Szálai and Károly Szabó, were arrested in 1953.

It was a secret trial with no charge and most of the files were later destroyed. The Hungarian journalist and writer Mária Ember did research in Moscow in the early 1990s and organized several publications and a Wallenberg exhibition on the preparations for the trial in Budapest. In a high-level note from Ernő Gerő to Mátyás Rákosi on March 1, 1953, the “Zionist leadership” of the Central Council of Jews in Hungary was described as the “Murderer of Wallenberg”.

After six months of interrogation and torture, the prisoners' health was ruined, mentally desperate and exhausted. The show trial in Moscow was initiated, following on from the trials surrounding the so-called doctors' conspiracy . Preparations in Budapest were broken off not immediately after Stalin's death in March 1953, but only after Lavrenti Beria had been eliminated and liquidated . Depending on their state of health, the arrested were released somewhat delayed because of the necessary "restoration". Miksa Domonkos died of torture shortly after his release.

Honors Wallenberg

Wallenberg window in Michaeliskirche (Erfurt)
Wallenberg's briefcase in bronze (memorial near his birthplace in Kappsta on Lidingö)

Raoul Wallenberg was named for his rescue work a. a. from King Gustav VI. Adolf with the highest Swedish award (for civilians) "Illis quorum meruere labores" (1952) and honored by the Yad Vashem memorial as Righteous Among the Nations (1966). He was from Israel , the United States (1981) and Canada as well as the Hungarian capital Budapest to honor citizens appointed. In 1995 he was posthumously awarded the Council of Europe's European Human Rights Prize . A plaque in honor of Wallenberg was placed on the Great Synagogue in Budapest. There are streets named after him in the Berlin districts of Marzahn and Wilmersdorf as well as in Leverkusen, as well as in the XIII. District of Budapest and in the 22nd district of Vienna . In Washington, DC there is a place called Raoul Wallenberg Place. In New York City a park (Raoul Wallenberg Forest) was named after him. Furthermore, the law faculty of the Swedish University of Lund named an institute for human rights after Wallenberg. In 2009 an asteroid was named after him: (140620) Raoulwallenberg . A memorial was erected in Stockholm in Wallenberg's honor.

Desecration of the Wallenberg monument in Budapest

On May 22, 2012, the Wallenberg memorial, which is located in the 2nd district of Budapest, was desecrated by unknown perpetrators. Like the Holocaust Memorial Shoes on the Danube Bank in 2009, it was disfigured with pig's feet.

The Raoul Wallenberg Award , named after him, has been presented in the United States since 1985 and the Raoul Wallenberg Prize of the Council of Europe since 2014.

literature

  • Jenö Levai: Raoul Wallenberg. Translated by F. Vajda, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne 2002, ISBN 0-7316-5431-5 (English translation of the first book on RW, which was published in Hungarian in 1948 and was then forbidden).
  • Lew Besymenski , Ulrich Völklein : The truth about Raoul Wallenberg. Steidl, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 978-3-88243-712-6 .
  • John Bierman : Raoul Wallenberg, the lost hero. Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Knaur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-426-03699-1 .
  • Ingrid Carlberg: Raoul Wallenberg - the biography . with an introduction by Kofi A. Annan ; translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg; MacLehose Press, Querus, London [2015], ISBN 978-0-85705-328-2 .
  • Ingrid Carlberg: Raoul Wallenberg - the biography: The extraordinary life and the mysterious disappearance of the man who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust . with a foreword by Kofi Annan; from the English by Susanne Dahmann. 1st edition (German first edition) btb Verlag, Munich, September 2019, ISBN 978-3-442-75760-2 .
  • Christoph Gann : Raoul Wallenberg: save as many people as possible. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-45356-2 (also: Dt. Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-423-30852-4 ; dtv 30852).
  • Stefan Karner (Ed.): In the footsteps of Wallenberg. Studienverlag, Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-7065-5412-1 .
  • Victor Karelin : Back then in Budapest: the book by Raoul Wallenberg. Herder Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau 1982, ISBN 3-451-19546-1 .
  • Jonny Moser : Wallenberg's errand boy. Picus Verlag, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-85452-615-6 .
  • András Masát , Márton Méhes, Wolfgang Rackebrandt (eds.): Raoul Wallenberg - man in inhumanity. Results of international research. Ed. Kirchhof & Franke, Leipzig, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-933816-14-9 .
  • Tanja Schult: A Hero's Many Faces. Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-230-22238-0 .
  • Sonja Sonnenfeld : It started in Berlin. A life for justice and freedom. Donat Verlag, Bremen 2001, ISBN 978-3-934836-32-7 .

Movies

Opera

Web links

Commons : Raoul Wallenberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sweden declares Raoul Wallenberg dead 71 years after disappearance . In: The Guardian , October 31, 2016; accessed on October 31, 2016.
  2. ↑ Shoes on the Danube Bank
  3. ↑ My father's secret: Retter in Gestapo-Kluft , under: Spiegel online , one day , May 4, 2013.
  4. ↑ The secret ambassador . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1992, pp. 88-106 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Did Raoul Wallenberg survive as "Prisoner No. 7"? , found on derstandard.at on April 5, 2010.
  6. ↑ Pawel Anatoljewitsch Sudoplatow : The henchman of power. Revelations by a KGB general (“special tasks”) . Gemini Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86789-728-0 .
  7. ↑ Rudolf Ströbinger : The mystery Wallenberg . Burg Verlag, 1982
  8. ↑ Katja Tichomirowa: The Wallenberg case . In: Berliner Zeitung , January 31, 2001.
  9. ^ Sewell Chan: 71 Years After He Vanished, Raoul Wallenberg Is Declared Dead . In: The New York Times . October 31, 2016, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed November 1, 2016]).
  10. ↑ Sweden declares Wallenberg dead . Mirror online
  11. ^ József Szekeres: Saving the Ghettos of Budapest in January 1945, Pál Szálai "the Hungarian Schindler" . Budapest Archives, Budapest 1997, ISBN 963-7323-14-7 , p. 74.
  12. ^ Wallenberg family archives, Email from Marie Dupuy (Marie von Dardel) niece of Raoul Wallenberg to User: Tamas Szabo February 16. 2007.
  13. ↑ in the Hungarian State Archives MOL 276.f. 56/184. es.hu
  14. ↑ szombat.org ( Memento of May 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Mária Ember: Rank akarták kenni . Héttorony Könyvkiadó, Budapest 1992, ISBN 963-7855-41-6 , Hungarian (content: On the history of the kidnapping and murder of Raoul Wallenberg and the preparation of a related show trial in Hungary, 1953) / English book review: Mária Ember, They Wanted to Blame Us, Budapest 1992. hungarianquarterly.com ( February 5, 2012 memento in the Internet Archive ).
  15. ^ Raoul Wallenberg on the Yad Vashem website
  16. ^ Raoul-Wallenberg-Strasse (Marzahn). In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  17. ^ Wallenbergstrasse (Wilmersdorf). In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  18. ↑ leverkusen.com
  19. ↑ en.tracesofwar.com Memorial Raoul Wallenberg Stockholm
  20. ↑ Meggyalázták Raoul Wallenberg budapesti szobrát - ( Memento from May 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Népszabadság Online, May 22, 2012 (Hungarian)
personal data
SURNAME Wallenberg, Raoul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Kappsta on Lidingö , Stockholm County , Sweden
DATE OF DEATH after July 1947