Nazi Hunter (35 page)

‘The Swedish government does not do such things,’ Undén answered frostily, turning his attention to other matters. Soon after, Anger was granted a transfer.

Simon Wiesenthal concurs with Anger’s viewpoint: ‘There was another time when Sweden could have got Wallenberg back. The Swedish government could have exchanged him for Colonel Stig
Wennerstrom, the Swedish military attaché in Moscow who was spying for the Russians for fifteen years and had the rank of a general in the KGB. When the Swedes caught him in 1963, he was
sentenced to twenty years. That was before I was involved, but I have the feeling the Soviets would have given back Wallenberg for Wennerstrom. Naturally, it would have been up to Wennerstrom
whether he would go – because, when he was convicted, he didn’t lose his Swedish citizenship, just his freedom.’

For more than a decade, Raoul was lost from view while his mother and stepfather, his half-sister and half-brother, and a handful of his diplomatic colleagues, led by Per Anger, kept his cause
alive, despite Soviet denials that Wallenberg was ever on their soil. Undén and other desk undertakers in his Swedish Foreign Ministry rebuffed and even denounced them as people who wanted
‘to declare war on Russia’ for one man’s sake and endanger Sweden’s neutrality.

To his dying day, Söderblom would argue, as he did in 1980, that he was defending Sweden’s precarious neutrality in the Cold War by soft-pedalling Wallenberg in
his approaches to the Kremlin: ‘The political climate was such that I thought it unwise to provoke the Russians. The Soviet government had been very positive and friendly toward Sweden. I
therefore considered it inappropriate for me as ambassador to make unsuitable hints or innuendoes.’

While Söderblom’s defence might have looked good in the 1950s, it hardly held water in the 1980s, when Per Anger, not long after his retirement from diplomatic service as Swedish
Ambassador to Canada, contended that ‘a tremendous responsibility weighs upon the postwar Social Democratic governments . . . They have deliberately lain low and been unwilling to take any
action they feared might have serious consequences for our relations with the Soviet Union. Were they, at first, so anxious to preserve our neutrality in the Cold War then starting, that Wallenberg
was sacrificed on the altar of neutrality?’

In 1956, Prime Minister Erlander paid Sweden’s first official visit to Moscow since the Revolution of 1917. At a meeting in the Kremlin, Erlander presented the new Soviet leader, Nikita
Khrushchev, with the testimony of more than a dozen witnesses to Wallenberg’s presence in Lubyanka and Lefortovo between 1945 and 1947 along with a strongly worded request that his fate be
investigated. The hope was that a reformed regime might not only blame a miscarriage of justice upon the excesses of its Stalinist predecessors, but seek to make amends.

Only half this hope was fulfilled ten months later. On 6 February 1957, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (later Foreign Minister and President) reported to the Swedish Ambassador in Moscow
that Soviet authorities had made a ‘thorough investigation’ of the Wallenberg case and, while ‘none of these efforts provided the smallest indication that Raoul Wallenberg had
spent time in the Soviet Union . . . in the course of their research, the Soviet authorities had the occasion to examine the files of prison infirmaries. They discovered in Lubyanka a handwritten
report which may refer to Wallenberg. The report is addressed to [V. S.] Abakumov, Minister for State Security, from A L. Smoltsov, the head of the prison hospital service. It is dated July 17,
1947: “I am writing to inform you that the prisoner Walenberg [
sic
], known to you, died suddenly in his
cell last night. He was apparently the victim of a
myocardiac infarctus. In view of your instructions to me to supervise Walenberg personally, I ask you to let me know who should conduct the autopsy to ascertain the cause of death.”

‘The same report contains a second manuscript note from Smoltsov: “Informed the minister personally. Order given to cremate the body without autopsy. 17 July 1947.”’

Gromyko’s memorandum went on to add that no further information, documentation, or testimony had been found: ‘Smoltsov died on May 7, 1953. The above-mentioned facts lead one to
conclude that Wallenberg died in July 1947. Evidently he was arrested, like many others, by the Russian Army in the area of fighting. That he was later detained in prison and that false information
was given about him to the Foreign Ministry by the Chief of State Security over a number of years is one aspect of the criminal activity of Abakumov. As is well known, the latter was sentenced by
the Supreme Court of Justice and executed for serious crimes.

‘The Soviet Union expresses its sincere regret in relation to these circumstances and assures the government of the Kingdom of Sweden and the family of Raoul Wallenberg of its profound
sympathy.’

Neither his family nor his government could accept Raoul’s suffering a convenient heart arrest at thirty-four, just a few months after the last witnesses had him leaving Lefortovo for the
gulag. Sweden later condemned the ‘autocratic manner’ in which the Soviet security police made ‘a diplomat of a neutral country a prisoner’ and kept him in jail. The
official Swedish reply added, ‘Expressing its regrets, the Soviet government has admitted its responsibility’, and went on to reserve judgement, indicating that, to his fellow Swedes,
Wallenberg was still alive until proven dead.

In the next three years, their faith was rewarded by testimony from four veterans of the gulag – a Swiss, an Austrian, and two Germans – placing Wallenberg in Vladimir Prison, 150
miles east of Moscow, between 1953 and 1959.

The Swiss prisoner had never seen Wallenberg, but had conversed with him in 1954 by tapping on walls. One day, Raoul had tapped: ‘When you are freed, report to a Swedish consulate or
legation. I am not allowed to write or receive letters.’

In early 1955, the Austrian prisoner had been put in Wallenberg’s cell by mistake. Wallenberg told him he’d been kept in solitary confinement for years and
implored him, upon his release, to tell any Swedish legation he’d met Raoul Wallenberg. If he couldn’t remember the name, ‘a Swede from Budapest’ would suffice. The next
day, a Soviet political officer had the Austrian removed and warned him never to tell anybody about his encounter with Wallenberg.

The two Germans told of meeting a Georgian prisoner named Simon Gogoberidse in Vladimir in 1956. Gogoberidse, an occasional cellmate of Wallenberg’s, said he was told by a prison official
around the time of Prime Minister Erlander’s 1956 visit: ‘They’ll have to look for a long time to find Wallenberg.’ Gogoberidse, an exiled Social Democrat who had been
kidnapped from Paris by the KGB, said Wallenberg was always made to share cells with Soviet citizens serving long sentences, not with foreigners, to minimize risk of his whereabouts reaching the
West.

Although Wallenberg was reported in remarkably good health (one witness later described him taking full advantage of his exercise periods, scooping up handfuls of snow and rubbing them into his
face, chest, and arms to warm up before systematically exercising his whole body in the narrow pen), he went on a hunger strike in 1959. When he became ill a few months later, he was taken to the
hospital wing of Moscow’s Butyrka prison, whose grim high wall stretches for two blocks and, says Solzhenitsyn, makes ‘the hearts of the Muscovites shiver when they see the steel maw of
its gates slide open.’ The earliest victim of the Cold War had slipped through a crack in history.

On March 29, 1971, Maj von Dardel wrote to Simon Wiesenthal in Austria. She told him she had read his 1967 memoir and had followed with fascination his unearthing of Eichmann and Stangl.
‘If you were able to find Eichmann,’ she wrote, ‘surely you could find my son.’ Her letter ended with ‘If before I die, I could embrace my own beloved son, this is all
I ask.’

Wiesenthal recalls: ‘She told me that nobody cared now, that the various Wallenberg Committees exist only on paper, that there is just a mother, a father, a sister and a brother working
for Wallenberg, and her son is a victim. I was going to Sweden soon, so first I sent her a letter saying I hadn’t known that nothing was working. I
never get involved
in things other people are already occupied with. When I visited Stockholm, I met her and her husband: a lovely, charming old couple with this one sadness in their life. She lost her composure only
once – when she told me she had been reading about Soviet mental hospitals – and then
she
apologized to
me
for
her
reaction: “Mr. Wiesenthal, you may
imagine my feelings as a mother to think that my son Raoul is in one of these hospitals and I cannot help him.” She gave me all their information and documents and I said to her: “I see
I must reopen the case and bring it to life.”’

‘I was very busy at the time, but I told myself: “The Nazi criminals can wait, but this case cannot.”’

‘Because he might still be alive?’ I ask him.

‘Yes,’ says Simon, ‘and because the murderers are living free, but he is not. And one other reason: We Jews have a long historic memory. Throughout our history, we record and
we remember not only the sins and crimes and atrocities against us, but all the people who have helped us in the worst of times. When I am looking for Wallenberg, not only am I doing for the Jews,
I am also doing for someone who did for the Jews.’

20

When Simon Wiesenthal entered the Raoul Wallenberg case a quarter of a century after his disappearance, he says there was ‘no organization – just the family force
– and no clamour.’ To generate clamour, Wiesenthal employed the same hit-and-miss publicity-seeking technique that would work with Gustav Wagner, who succeeded Franz Stangl as
commandant at Sobibor when Stangl moved up the extermination ladder to Treblinka, but would cost truth dearly in his quest for Dr Josef Mengele. This time, it worked extremely effectively in
bringing Wallenberg’s fate out of the gulag’s darkness into the angry glare of the public eye.

A few minutes before his next scheduled press conference, Wiesenthal approached a friendly journalist and asked him ‘to ask me what I am working on now. When he did, I answered that
“except for the Nazis, I am preoccupied with the Wallenberg case.” Well, ninety-five per cent of the journalists in that room had never heard of Raoul Wallenberg, so now I was telling
the whole story to the press. It got the case more publicity outside Sweden than it had in the past twenty-five years. Then I wrote articles about him for the Dutch press, in
Der Spiegel
,
in our annual report, which is distributed worldwide.’

In 1972, Moshe Leder, who had been Wiesenthal’s secretary for eighteen years, emigrated to Israel to head the Russian section of Israeli Radio. Wiesenthal asked Leder ‘at least once
a month in your Russian and Yiddish broadcasts to the Soviet Union, please to mention the name of Raoul Wallenberg. From time to time, somebody coming out of Russia may bring news or have a
reaction.’ Wiesenthal recognized that he would first have to prove that Wallenberg was alive
after
17 July 1947, the date on which Andrei
Gromyko (a decade
later) had pronounced Raoul dead, before he could hope to find him – dead or alive.

When the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christer Wickman, came to Austria later in 1972, Wiesenthal – who would hold a credential from the Foreign Press Association of Vienna for twenty-eight
years – attended his news conference as a journalist and asked him: ‘What is the latest about the fate of Wallenberg?’

‘As far as the Swedish government is concerned, the Wallenberg case is closed,’ Wickman replied bluntly.

Simon says he took this personally as ‘a slap in the face to me, so I said to him: “For me, it is not closed. And I am sure that, for what you are saying now so quickly and directly,
the Swedish people will never forgive you.”’ Simon realized then and there that the solution to the Wallenberg riddle would never come from Sweden.

Such confrontations, however, made headlines and news – and brought Wiesenthal a phone call in 1974 from his first important witness, a Viennese doctor named Menachem Meltzer, who began:
‘You have been talking and writing about a man with whom I met and spoke.’