Nazi Hunter (28 page)
Authors: Alan Levy
Another obstacle to instant success in his homeland was that his American diploma didn’t entitle Raoul to practise architecture in
Sweden and nothing he saw on the
horizon encouraged him to study for his licence there. Instead, he was persuaded by his grandfather to acquire some commercial experience as a trainee with a trading company in South Africa for six
months, and then to apprentice with a bank in Palestine. To a friend, Gustaf Wallenberg wrote of his grandson:
Most of all, I want to make a man of him by giving him a chance to see the world and, through mixing with foreigners, to acquire what most Swedes lack: an international
outlook.
Based in Cape Town, Raoul travelled the length and breadth of an uneasy, but seemingly placid, British dominion to sell chemicals, timber, and building materials for the
Swedish-South Africa Export-Import Company. His employer wrote to his grandfather: ‘I have found him a splendid organizer and negotiator. He has seemingly boundless energy and vitality as
well as great imaginative powers: an original mind.’ Another partner wrote that Raoul had the ‘remarkable gift of quickly and thoroughly acquainting himself with whatever he sets his
mind to.’ Sharpening these skills with international experience was preparing Raoul Wallenberg for a mission which not even his great imagination and original mind could have envisioned in
1936.
From South Africa in 1936, Raoul moved on to Palestine, which England had conquered in World War I and, under League of Nations mandate, ruled imperiously as if it were an unruly British colony.
His clerking for the Holland Bank branch in Haifa went unpaid, for no Swede could obtain a visa to work in a Dutch bank under the tight British population control.
In the bustling port of Haifa, he encountered the first flood of Jewish refugees from Germany to Palestine. Stripped of their proud past, their wealth and position in society, brutalized and
terrorized by storm troopers who sang of ‘
When Jewish blood spurts from the knife
’ at every parade, degraded and deprived of German citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935,
they were the lucky ones who escaped early. Struggling for survival and a fresh start, these bedraggled burghers of Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, and Hamburg touched a chord in a displaced architect
in search of himself.
Palestine – which then included what are now Israel and Jordan – had been pledged as a Jewish homeland by Britain’s Balfour
Declaration of 1917. It
should have been the one place in the world where Jews fleeing Hitler could find a haven in the early days of the Third Reich, but now the territory’s Arab natives worried that the Jewish
influx would drive them out. Fuelled by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, a rabid Jew-hater and Nazi sympathizer, and a young nationalist named Fawzi al-Qawukji, who openly
imitated Hitler, the combustion point came on 19 April 1936, when Palestinian Arabs set fire to Jewish villages and ambushed hundreds of Jewish settlers.
From the outset of their Palestinian mandate, British policy had been to divide and rule. It was the same tactic they took in India, playing Hindus against Moslems, and the one the Habsburgs had
used with the peoples of Galicia and the Balkans. In an effort to keep the balance of power and control the Suez Canal, their lifeline to India and their Asian colonies, the British insisted after
the 1936 riots that Palestine could not absorb large numbers of immigrants. Now the desk undertakers took control. Entry requirements were tightened: a prelude to 1939’s shameful ‘White
Paper’ limiting Jewish immigration to 1500 a month for the next five years – while the Holocaust raged hottest! – and shutting it off entirely from 1944 on ‘unless the Arabs
of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it.’
In relatively peaceful Haifa in 1936, Raoul Wallenberg roomed for a while in a kosher boarding house with one of the early Displaced Persons, Ariel Kahane, a Berliner with architectural
training. They talked late into the night about villas and public buildings. Kahane, who went on to become a notable Israeli town planner, would later recall: ‘He was a princeling and I was
at the nadir of my career. I was possibly the poorest architect of the time and he probably the richest, but we talked on completely equal terms.’
If anything, Raoul Wallenberg might have envied Kahane, for the penniless German had every opportunity while the wealthy Swede felt hemmed in by his background and profession. After three months
‘engaged in routine work’ at the foreign exchange desk of the Holland Bank in Haifa, he wrote to his grandfather:
I am not made to be a banker. There is something about the profession that is too calm, cynical, and cold for me. I think that my talents lie elsewhere. I want to do
something more positive than sit behind a desk all day saying no to people.
In closing, he reiterated his passion for architecture – if only there were buildings to build in pre-war Sweden!
Upon his return to Stockholm in 1937, he applied for jobs with architectural firms and submitted plans and designs – all to no avail. By early autumn of 1938, when architect Simon
Wiesenthal, twenty-nine, was building his last houses in Lwów, Raoul Wallenberg, twenty-six, had yet to receive his first commission.
It was around that time that he met the actress Viveca Lindfors, then sixteen or seventeen, at a family party. Though they danced so far apart that another couple could easily have danced
between them, Lindfors recalled in a 1980 interview that afterwards ‘he invited me up to his grandfather’s office – I thought to make love to me. But he spoke to me in an intense
voice, very low, almost a whisper, of the terrible things that were being done to the Jews of Germany. I just didn’t understand what he was talking about. I thought he was trying to win my
sympathy or something. I was just a dumb girl at the time and I had a cold Swedish soul. I wasn’t ready to appreciate a man like that.’
Other cold Swedish souls were warning against a ‘Jewish invasion’ of German refugees who would take jobs away from Swedes. When Stockholm University invited nine notable Jewish
professors banned from teaching in Germany, the medical students demonstrated against them. In this behaviour, Sweden was hardly unique so much as symptomatic of the world’s indifference to
the plight of the Jews. The American Medical Association recommended that only US citizens be permitted to practise – which meant a five-year wait. The British Medical Association threatened
a strike to keep ‘the country [from being] inundated with émigrés’ after Hitler annexed Austria. Even socialist doctors, at the 1938 conference of their Medical
Practitioners union, warned of ‘the dilution of our industry’ with non-members, but they were outdone by Tories typified by this editorial in Lord Beaverbrook’s
Sunday
Express
:
Just now, there is a big influx of foreign Jews into Britain. They are over-running the country. They are trying to enter the medical profession in great numbers. They wish
to practise as dentists. Worst of all, many of them are holding themselves out to the public as psychoanalysts. A psychoanalyst needs no medical training, but arrogates to himself the functions
of a doctor. And
he often obtains an ascendancy over a patient of which he makes base use if he is a bad man.
Among these sinister figures was the father of psychoanalysis, Dr Sigmund Freud himself, who arrived in London that June and died fifteen months later.
As the war widened and Hitler kept winning, Raoul’s range expanded from Berlin and Budapest to all the other places his Hungarian Jewish partner in an import/export firm,
Kalman, Lauer, could no longer visit: occupied Paris and Vichy France, Norway and Denmark, Belgium and Holland. Wherever he went, Wallenberg saw shame, fear, and an indifference that seared his
sensitive soul. But he also learned, in negotiating sales and licences, that one could do business with Hitler’s henchmen, for not far behind the sinister spout of ideology lay the saving
vices of greed and corruption. Plus an awe of authority that could be exploited to intimidate even killers running amok.
18
‘I came to save a nation’The Moscow Declaration issued by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in the autumn of 1943 was the first joint statement by the Allies to address the issue of postwar retribution
for Nazi atrocities:
Germans who take part in the wholesale shooting of Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian, or Norwegian hostages or of Cretan peasants, or who have
shared in slaughters inflicted on the people of Poland or in the territories of the Soviet Union which are now being swept clear of the enemy, will know that they will be brought back to the
scene of their crimes and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.
But there was no mention of the Jews. The desk undertakers were burying them even faster than the Nazis were obliterating them.
This omission outraged US Treasury Secretary Henry J. Morgenthau, who happened to be Jewish and suspected it was no accident. He asked three of his Protestant aides – Randolph Paul, John
Pehle, and Josiah E. DuBois Jnr – to prepare a secret eighteen-page report which bore the shocking tide ‘On the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews’. It was
a devastating wartime weapon of bureaucratic in-fighting: an inter-departmental attack on State Department officials who ‘have not only failed to use the Governmental machinery at their
disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this Governmental machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews.’
On 22 January 1944, six days after reading the Treasury Department report, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board (WRB), a special agency ‘to forestall the plot of
the
Nazis to exterminate the Jews and other persecuted minorities of Europe.’ Pehle was named director; DuBois, general counsel.
The WRB hit the ground running – by warning the Axis leaders and all Axis satellites that, after the war was won, the Allies would hold them accountable for their treatment of the Jews.
While the Nazi chiefs were already far beyond redemption, uneasy puppets twitched on their strings, for the Second World War’s outcome was no longer in doubt by the beginning of 1944.
The WRB’s first field representative – sent to non-aligned Turkey – was Ira A. Hirschmann, a New York department-store executive who had gone straight from the Evian conference
in 1938 to Vienna and stood as personal financial guarantor for importing two hundred Austrian refugees to the US. Based in Ankara for the WRB, Hirschmann quickly persuaded the Romanian government,
through its Turkish legation, to empty its concentration camps in Transnistria and return the 18,000 surviving Jews to their homes to fend for themselves. Since this wasn’t enough to protect
them from Eichmann or home-grown fascists, Hirschmann used funds from Jewish welfare organizations to pay Black Sea captains to activate their antiquated ships and ferry Jews from Constanza in
Romania to Istanbul. Between April and August of 1944, some 4000 Jews were evacuated in this way from the Balkans and transported from Turkey to Syria by train and then delivered to Palestine.
The War Refugee Board appealed to Pope Pius XII to exert his influence upon the devout Admiral Horthy, but the passive Pope waited a month before sending his personal plea. The WRB also urged
neutral nations to increase their legation staffs in Budapest. Its hope was that the presence of foreign observers might moderate Nazi brutality. This hope proved futile when only one neutral
showed sustained interest. That nation was Sweden. Thus was the door pried open to admit Raoul Wallenberg.
In the spring of 1944, as the noose narrowed around the necks of the Jews of Hungary, Raoul Wallenberg had offered to visit Budapest again to see what he could do for his
partner Kalman Lauer’s in-laws, still trapped there. Raoul had, however, been refused a visa. In early June, another opportunity presented itself when the War Refugee Board convinced Sweden
it should add a special representative for humanitarian affairs to its Budapest legation. In an
elevator, the WRB’s Stockholm representative, Iver C. Olsen, met Lauer,
who recommended Raoul for the job.