Between May and July 1944, the Nazis deported 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.
Then a Swedish diplomat called Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest with a rucksack, a sleeping bag, and a plan: save as many as he could.
This episode is his story.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a Swedish man called Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:00:30] This is a story of war, neutrality, savagery, bravery, and a mission that should have been impossible.
[00:00:39] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:45] Many languages have some variant of the saying "you're either with us or against us".
[00:00:53] It's a rebuke of neutrality, a way of saying you can't just shrug your shoulders and say "I'm staying out of it".
[00:01:02] And this was especially true in the Europe of the late 1930s, a Europe where on one side there was Nazi Germany, united with Fascist Italy, and on the other the Allied coalition, initially consisting of the UK, France, and Poland.
[00:01:22] As the war continued, most European nations declared themselves allied to one side or the other.
[00:01:32] Some managed to remain neutral. Ireland, Portugal and Spain declared themselves neutral, or non-belligerent, and for the most part stayed out of the conflict.
[00:01:45] Switzerland, too, remained neutral. But Swiss neutrality rested on a slightly different foundation. It was mountainous, heavily armed, and had long cultivated an identity built around staying outside European wars. So even though it was much closer to the action, it managed to escape getting dragged into the conflict.
[00:02:13] And then there was Sweden.
[00:02:16] Like Switzerland, Sweden had a long tradition of neutrality.
[00:02:22] But unlike Ireland, Portugal, or Spain, Sweden was much closer to the theatre of war.
[00:02:31] And by the middle of 1940, it was surrounded.
[00:02:37] In the space of two months, both of its western neighbours had been swallowed up by Nazi Germany. Norway and Denmark were both under German control.
[00:02:50] To the east was Finland, which had fought the Soviet Union in the Winter War and would soon align itself with Germany against Moscow.
[00:03:02] The official Swedish policy was that of neutrality, but this would prove much harder in practice than it was in theory.
[00:03:13] Sweden continued to sell iron ore to Nazi Germany throughout the war — the raw material that fed the production of bullets, tanks, ships and bombs.
[00:03:26] Sweden let Nazi Germany move troops across its borders, first between Germany and Norway, and then more controversially, eastwards towards Russia as part of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
[00:03:44] And unlike most European countries, Sweden emerged from the war physically unscathed and in a relatively strong economic position, something that would help lay the foundations for the prosperity it enjoys today.
[00:04:01] So it is perfectly reasonable to argue that Sweden, in the 1940s, was not merely standing aside, but actively helping sustain the Nazi war machine. In other words, its neutrality came at a moral cost.
[00:04:21] There is one man, however, at whom such criticism cannot be raised.
[00:04:28] His name was Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:04:31] He came from the pre-eminent Swedish family, the Wallenbergs, or the Wallenbergs, to give them their Anglicised name.
[00:04:41] And it's hard to overstate quite how much power and influence the Wallenbergs had back then and still have today.
[00:04:51] They controlled the main bank in Sweden, and held major stakes in most major Swedish companies.
[00:04:59] But today we will not be talking about Raoul's business dealings, but something much more important, more lasting, and more human.
[00:05:11] He was born in 1912.
[00:05:13] He was a Wallenberg, so he grew up in the family's world of business and international commerce, but he wasn't directly in the line of succession.
[00:05:25] As such, his upbringing was slightly different to that of his cousins at the core of the family empire, who were being groomed for succession.
[00:05:36] He was sent to the United States to study architecture. He was already fluent in French and German, but his time in the US meant he could add English to this list.
[00:05:49] He was, by all accounts, charming and perceptive, comfortable in many worlds, but a little bit lost, directionless, after graduating from university and returning to Sweden.
[00:06:04] He found that his American architecture degree wasn't actually valid in Sweden, and so he drifted between jobs arranged by family members. One of these was in Haifa, which was then part of British Palestine, and it was here that he met a large number of German Jews who had fled the Nazis.
[00:06:28] This was in 1936, and although it would be several years before the persecution of Jews reached its peak, anti-Semitism was rampant, and there were an increasing number of anti-Jewish laws.
[00:06:46] The Wallenberg family is not Jewish, but Raoul Wallenberg had a Jewish great-great-grandfather, technically making him one-sixteenth Jewish.
[00:06:58] And he was, apparently, very proud of this heritage. At a time when many Jews were, perfectly understandably, trying to disguise their background, Raoul Wallenberg leaned into it.
[00:07:15] And he saw firsthand the persecution that Jews across Europe were increasingly facing.
[00:07:23] First, through business.
[00:07:26] He worked at a trading company in Stockholm, and saw that his boss — who was a Hungarian Jew — he was finding it harder and harder to move around in Europe. Hungary had passed anti-Jewish laws in 1938, and when Hungary officially allied with Nazi Germany in 1940, well, its policy towards its Jewish community looked increasingly like its newfound ally's.
[00:07:57] Wallenberg travelled a lot for his work — to Hungary, to France, and to Germany — and he became the 1940s equivalent of the sort of person who knows exactly how to get through security control in the quickest queue and without the metal detector ever going off.
[00:08:17] In his case, this meant paperwork — he knew which papers you needed, which stamps, which signatures. It might sound like a meaningless detail, but it would prove of vital importance later on.
[00:08:34] Now, the important thing to emphasise here is that Wallenberg was a businessman, a businessman of a neutral country, Sweden.
[00:08:44] But he knew about what was happening to European Jews, he had this sliver of Jewish ancestry himself, and he decided he was going to do something about it.
[00:08:58] In June 1944, he was introduced to a man named Iver Olsen, who was the Stockholm representative of the United States War Refugee Board, or the WRB for short. This was an agency created by President Roosevelt with a specific mandate: to use American resources and influence to rescue civilians from Nazi persecution.
[00:09:26] And the civilians who were being most heavily persecuted were the Jews.
[00:09:32] Olsen needed someone to go to Budapest. Someone who could work under diplomatic cover, who understood the terrain, who had the right combination of nerve and practicality for something very difficult in very dangerous circumstances.
[00:09:50] He chose Wallenberg.
[00:09:53] Now, Wallenberg negotiated his own terms before agreeing.
[00:09:58] He wanted real authority to operate independently, without being constrained by what the Swedish diplomatic mission in Budapest was comfortable with.
[00:10:08] He wanted money to bribe officials. He wanted freedom to do whatever it took. Carte blanche.
[00:10:15] The Swedish government agreed.
[00:10:19] He was appointed First Secretary of the Swedish legation in Budapest, which gave him diplomatic cover and the authority of a Swedish passport.
[00:10:30] In early 1944, he packed a rucksack, a sleeping bag, and a revolver, and set off for Hungary. Budapest, to be precise, one of the last great concentrations of Jews still alive in Nazi-dominated Europe.
[00:10:47] Wallenberg was thirty-one years old, and he had never been asked to do anything like this before.
[00:10:56] Now, to understand what Wallenberg was walking into, we need to understand what had already happened in Hungary in the weeks before he arrived.
[00:11:07] Hungary had gone over to the Axis powers in 1940, but when the war turned for Nazi Germany, Hungary had started to secretly negotiate with the Allies.
[00:11:21] When Hitler found out about this, in early 1944, he ordered the invasion of Hungary. It was largely peaceful, and barely a shot was fired, but the relevance for our story is that by March of 1944, Hungary was under German occupation.
[00:11:44] And Hungary had a relatively large Jewish population, some 700,000, half of which lived in Budapest, the capital. And Hungary's Jewish community had been persecuted, stripped of rights, and forced into labour brigades, but, importantly, most had survived; the deportations to the death camps had not yet begun.
[00:12:12] However, among the first Nazi officials to arrive in occupied Hungary was Adolf Eichmann.
[00:12:20] He was one of the key architects of the holocaust, the Nazi official responsible for overseeing deportations across occupied Europe. He arrived in Budapest in March 1944 and set up his office in a large downtown hotel. He moved with terrifying and extraordinary speed.
[00:12:45] Between the 15th of May and the 9th of July 1944, approximately 437,000 Hungarian Jews were packed onto trains and sent north. Almost all of them went to Auschwitz, where most were killed as soon as they arrived.
[00:13:08] Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on the 9th of July 1944.
[00:13:14] Two days earlier, Hungary’s regent, Miklós Horthy, had suspended the deportations under immense international pressure, including a personal letter from the Swedish king.
[00:13:27] So when Wallenberg reached the Swedish legation, the trains had just stopped.
[00:13:35] But there were still around 200,000 Jews remaining in Budapest.
[00:13:42] And as to whether the deportations would resume, nobody knew.
[00:13:48] Eichmann was still in the city.
[00:13:50] The Arrow Cross, Hungary's fascist party, was pushing hard for deportations to continue.
[00:13:58] The situation was unstable, the threat immediate, and the margin for error was very small.
[00:14:07] And Wallenberg arrived with a tool that looked, at first glance, completely inadequate compared to the scale of the task ahead of him: a protective passport.
[00:14:20] The Schutzpass, as it came to be known, was a formally printed document in the blue and yellow colours of the Swedish flag, stamped with Sweden’s triple-crown seal, declaring the bearer to be under Swedish protection and awaiting repatriation to Sweden.
[00:14:39] In theory, this was shaky. These were not fully legal documents. They had no firm basis in international law, and Sweden had no clear legal right to extend this kind of protection to Hungarian Jews.
[00:14:58] In practice, however, the document often worked. It looked official, it came from a neutral state, and in the confusion and uncertainty of late 1944, that was often enough to make Hungarian or German officials hesitate.
[00:15:19] Now, these papers were not simply handed out at random. Jews in Budapest tried to obtain them through the Swedish mission and the wider rescue network forming around it, and those who secured one could then claim to be under Swedish protection.
[00:15:37] The Swedish foreign ministry had originally approved 1,500 protective passes. Wallenberg pushed, improvised, and bribed where necessary, and the number rose dramatically, with some estimates putting it at around 15,000.
[00:15:57] But the Schutzpass was only part of the system.
[00:16:01] Wallenberg also took over more than thirty buildings across Budapest, flew Swedish flags above them, and declared them to be under Swedish protection. These became refuge houses: overcrowded, makeshift safe houses for Jews who had received Swedish papers, or who were trying to come under Swedish protection.
[00:16:27] The legal basis for these houses was flimsy, just as it was for the Schutzpass itself. But once again, the appearance of Swedish authority often bought time, and sometimes that was the difference between life and death.
[00:16:45] And for a few brief months, that fragile system held.
[00:16:50] But in October 1944, whatever fragile stability remained collapsed.
[00:16:58] The regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy, was removed from power and the Arrow Cross took control of Budapest.
[00:17:08] The situation became considerably more dangerous.
[00:17:11] The Arrow Cross was a Hungarian fascist party with a particular streak of vicious antisemitism, and they were not interested in diplomatic niceties.
[00:17:25] Within days of taking power, they had begun executing Jews on the banks of the Danube, shooting them and throwing them into the river.
[00:17:35] This was the moment when Wallenberg’s work became even more dangerous, and even more direct.
[00:17:43] He was no longer simply issuing papers from behind a desk or moving people into protected houses. He was now confronting the aggressors in real time.
[00:17:55] He showed up wherever Jews were being rounded up and driven away. He handed out Schutzpasses, argued with guards, and demanded the release of anyone he could plausibly claim was under Swedish protection.
[00:18:10] When deportation convoys were assembled at the city’s railway stations, Wallenberg would appear in person.
[00:18:18] He produced lists, cited his authority, and spoke with the calm certainty of someone who expected to be obeyed. Much of it was bluff. But the bluff worked.
[00:18:34] He could not save everyone. But every person he did save was one less passenger on the train to Auschwitz.
[00:18:44] And under the Arrow Cross, the persecution had become even more brutal.
[00:18:50] Jews were being forced on death marches, forced to walk westward toward the Austrian border, in winter, with no food and no shelter.
[00:19:03] Wallenberg followed the marches.
[00:19:05] He walked along the columns, handing out Schutzpasses to people who had nothing. He argued for their release at gunpoint. More than once, he even ran alongside moving trains, passing documents through the windows to those already inside and pulling them out before the train could get away.
[00:19:27] He had been in Budapest for only six months.
[00:19:31] In that time, his operation had grown from one man with a rucksack into a network with hundreds of staff, a fleet of vehicles, thirty-two protected buildings, and a logistics operation that was feeding, sheltering, and documenting tens of thousands of people.
[00:19:52] And by mid-January 1945, it looked as if this extraordinary mission might be nearing its end. Soviet forces were fighting their way through the streets of Budapest. The Nazis were on the back foot.
[00:20:10] Wallenberg seems to have believed the Soviets would be natural allies.
[00:20:16] They were, after all, fighting Nazi Germany. By that logic, they should have been allies.
[00:20:24] So, he had a plan: to travel to meet Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet commander, and negotiate the protection of Budapest's surviving Jewish community.
[00:20:38] He told colleagues he would be back in a week.
[00:20:42] On the 17th of January 1945, he set out for Soviet headquarters with his driver, Vilmos Langfelder.
[00:20:52] He was arrested almost immediately by agents from SMERSH, the Soviet military counterintelligence service. The stated reason was suspicion of espionage. Within days, he and his driver had been taken to Moscow and disappeared into the Soviet prison system.
[00:21:15] And I'm sorry to say that if you are hoping for a happy ending to this story, for Wallenberg at least, there is none.
[00:21:24] Nobody who knew him saw him again.
[00:21:28] And for twelve years, the Soviet government denied any knowledge of Wallenberg's whereabouts. He had simply vanished, as far as Moscow was concerned.
[00:21:40] During those years, his mother and stepfather wrote letters, lobbied officials, and refused to accept that he was gone. There were reported sightings from survivors of the Soviet camp system: Wallenberg in Lubyanka, Wallenberg in a camp in Siberia, even Wallenberg alive and asking to send word to Sweden. The Swedish government collected these reports but, by and large, sat on them, fearful of upsetting the relationship with the Soviet Union.
[00:22:17] Then, in 1957, the Soviets produced a document. It was signed by a Lubyanka prison doctor named Smoltsov, and it claimed that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack on the 17th of July 1947.
[00:22:35] The document was suspicious from the start. Smoltsov's own report used the phrase "seems to be" to describe the cause of death. The security chief had ordered that no autopsy be performed and that the body be cremated. And a Lubyanka prison log showed that a mysterious "Prisoner No. 7" had been questioned on the 23rd of July 1947, six days after the date of Wallenberg's supposed death.
[00:23:11] Over the following decades, various Soviet-era documents emerged suggesting that Wallenberg had been interrogated well into 1947, and possibly beyond. The KGB files on the case have never been fully opened.
[00:23:29] In 2016, the diaries of a man named Ivan Serov, a former KGB director, were published. Serov's entry on the Wallenberg case was unambiguous.
[00:23:42] "I have no doubts," he wrote, "that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947."
[00:23:50] And it wouldn't be until 2016, when Raoul Wallenberg would have been 104 years old, that he was officially declared dead by the Swedish Tax Agency.
[00:24:04] In terms of his impact, well, the estimates of how many lives he saved directly through the Schutzpass range from seven thousand to ten thousand.
[00:24:16] But his broader impact was almost certainly greater than that.
[00:24:21] When Soviet forces liberated Budapest in February 1945, around a hundred thousand Jews were still alive in the city.
[00:24:31] Had Eichmann succeeded in finishing the job he had begun in the spring and summer of 1944, that number would have been vastly lower, perhaps close to zero.
[00:24:43] The consensus among historians is that Wallenberg, together with the other neutral diplomats working alongside him, was one of the principal reasons so many survived.
[00:24:55] So, on one level, this is a story of heroism and bravery.
[00:25:01] Raoul Wallenberg chose to go somewhere very dangerous, did something very difficult, and as a direct result, a very large number of people who would otherwise have been killed were not.
[00:25:15] But heroism is not the whole story.
[00:25:19] The same family whose bank helped Germany finance the war, and whose company supplied ball bearings to the Nazi war machine into late 1944, also produced Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:25:34] And the same country that allowed hundreds of thousands of German soldiers across its railways, that sold iron ore to Germany throughout the war, also sent Wallenberg to Budapest.
[00:25:48] And this is not a story with a clean ending. The full KGB files have never been opened. What exactly happened in Lubyanka in 1947 remains, officially, unconfirmed.
[00:26:03] But the legacy of Raoul Wallenberg is unmistakable. It's impossible to calculate the true number of people who owe their existence to what he did in Budapest — the thousands he saved, the children born to them, and the generations that followed — but it surely runs into the hundreds of thousands.
[00:26:25] It is certainly not without justification that he is remembered as the Angel of Budapest.
[00:26:32] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:26:37] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:26:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:26:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a Swedish man called Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:00:30] This is a story of war, neutrality, savagery, bravery, and a mission that should have been impossible.
[00:00:39] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:45] Many languages have some variant of the saying "you're either with us or against us".
[00:00:53] It's a rebuke of neutrality, a way of saying you can't just shrug your shoulders and say "I'm staying out of it".
[00:01:02] And this was especially true in the Europe of the late 1930s, a Europe where on one side there was Nazi Germany, united with Fascist Italy, and on the other the Allied coalition, initially consisting of the UK, France, and Poland.
[00:01:22] As the war continued, most European nations declared themselves allied to one side or the other.
[00:01:32] Some managed to remain neutral. Ireland, Portugal and Spain declared themselves neutral, or non-belligerent, and for the most part stayed out of the conflict.
[00:01:45] Switzerland, too, remained neutral. But Swiss neutrality rested on a slightly different foundation. It was mountainous, heavily armed, and had long cultivated an identity built around staying outside European wars. So even though it was much closer to the action, it managed to escape getting dragged into the conflict.
[00:02:13] And then there was Sweden.
[00:02:16] Like Switzerland, Sweden had a long tradition of neutrality.
[00:02:22] But unlike Ireland, Portugal, or Spain, Sweden was much closer to the theatre of war.
[00:02:31] And by the middle of 1940, it was surrounded.
[00:02:37] In the space of two months, both of its western neighbours had been swallowed up by Nazi Germany. Norway and Denmark were both under German control.
[00:02:50] To the east was Finland, which had fought the Soviet Union in the Winter War and would soon align itself with Germany against Moscow.
[00:03:02] The official Swedish policy was that of neutrality, but this would prove much harder in practice than it was in theory.
[00:03:13] Sweden continued to sell iron ore to Nazi Germany throughout the war — the raw material that fed the production of bullets, tanks, ships and bombs.
[00:03:26] Sweden let Nazi Germany move troops across its borders, first between Germany and Norway, and then more controversially, eastwards towards Russia as part of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
[00:03:44] And unlike most European countries, Sweden emerged from the war physically unscathed and in a relatively strong economic position, something that would help lay the foundations for the prosperity it enjoys today.
[00:04:01] So it is perfectly reasonable to argue that Sweden, in the 1940s, was not merely standing aside, but actively helping sustain the Nazi war machine. In other words, its neutrality came at a moral cost.
[00:04:21] There is one man, however, at whom such criticism cannot be raised.
[00:04:28] His name was Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:04:31] He came from the pre-eminent Swedish family, the Wallenbergs, or the Wallenbergs, to give them their Anglicised name.
[00:04:41] And it's hard to overstate quite how much power and influence the Wallenbergs had back then and still have today.
[00:04:51] They controlled the main bank in Sweden, and held major stakes in most major Swedish companies.
[00:04:59] But today we will not be talking about Raoul's business dealings, but something much more important, more lasting, and more human.
[00:05:11] He was born in 1912.
[00:05:13] He was a Wallenberg, so he grew up in the family's world of business and international commerce, but he wasn't directly in the line of succession.
[00:05:25] As such, his upbringing was slightly different to that of his cousins at the core of the family empire, who were being groomed for succession.
[00:05:36] He was sent to the United States to study architecture. He was already fluent in French and German, but his time in the US meant he could add English to this list.
[00:05:49] He was, by all accounts, charming and perceptive, comfortable in many worlds, but a little bit lost, directionless, after graduating from university and returning to Sweden.
[00:06:04] He found that his American architecture degree wasn't actually valid in Sweden, and so he drifted between jobs arranged by family members. One of these was in Haifa, which was then part of British Palestine, and it was here that he met a large number of German Jews who had fled the Nazis.
[00:06:28] This was in 1936, and although it would be several years before the persecution of Jews reached its peak, anti-Semitism was rampant, and there were an increasing number of anti-Jewish laws.
[00:06:46] The Wallenberg family is not Jewish, but Raoul Wallenberg had a Jewish great-great-grandfather, technically making him one-sixteenth Jewish.
[00:06:58] And he was, apparently, very proud of this heritage. At a time when many Jews were, perfectly understandably, trying to disguise their background, Raoul Wallenberg leaned into it.
[00:07:15] And he saw firsthand the persecution that Jews across Europe were increasingly facing.
[00:07:23] First, through business.
[00:07:26] He worked at a trading company in Stockholm, and saw that his boss — who was a Hungarian Jew — he was finding it harder and harder to move around in Europe. Hungary had passed anti-Jewish laws in 1938, and when Hungary officially allied with Nazi Germany in 1940, well, its policy towards its Jewish community looked increasingly like its newfound ally's.
[00:07:57] Wallenberg travelled a lot for his work — to Hungary, to France, and to Germany — and he became the 1940s equivalent of the sort of person who knows exactly how to get through security control in the quickest queue and without the metal detector ever going off.
[00:08:17] In his case, this meant paperwork — he knew which papers you needed, which stamps, which signatures. It might sound like a meaningless detail, but it would prove of vital importance later on.
[00:08:34] Now, the important thing to emphasise here is that Wallenberg was a businessman, a businessman of a neutral country, Sweden.
[00:08:44] But he knew about what was happening to European Jews, he had this sliver of Jewish ancestry himself, and he decided he was going to do something about it.
[00:08:58] In June 1944, he was introduced to a man named Iver Olsen, who was the Stockholm representative of the United States War Refugee Board, or the WRB for short. This was an agency created by President Roosevelt with a specific mandate: to use American resources and influence to rescue civilians from Nazi persecution.
[00:09:26] And the civilians who were being most heavily persecuted were the Jews.
[00:09:32] Olsen needed someone to go to Budapest. Someone who could work under diplomatic cover, who understood the terrain, who had the right combination of nerve and practicality for something very difficult in very dangerous circumstances.
[00:09:50] He chose Wallenberg.
[00:09:53] Now, Wallenberg negotiated his own terms before agreeing.
[00:09:58] He wanted real authority to operate independently, without being constrained by what the Swedish diplomatic mission in Budapest was comfortable with.
[00:10:08] He wanted money to bribe officials. He wanted freedom to do whatever it took. Carte blanche.
[00:10:15] The Swedish government agreed.
[00:10:19] He was appointed First Secretary of the Swedish legation in Budapest, which gave him diplomatic cover and the authority of a Swedish passport.
[00:10:30] In early 1944, he packed a rucksack, a sleeping bag, and a revolver, and set off for Hungary. Budapest, to be precise, one of the last great concentrations of Jews still alive in Nazi-dominated Europe.
[00:10:47] Wallenberg was thirty-one years old, and he had never been asked to do anything like this before.
[00:10:56] Now, to understand what Wallenberg was walking into, we need to understand what had already happened in Hungary in the weeks before he arrived.
[00:11:07] Hungary had gone over to the Axis powers in 1940, but when the war turned for Nazi Germany, Hungary had started to secretly negotiate with the Allies.
[00:11:21] When Hitler found out about this, in early 1944, he ordered the invasion of Hungary. It was largely peaceful, and barely a shot was fired, but the relevance for our story is that by March of 1944, Hungary was under German occupation.
[00:11:44] And Hungary had a relatively large Jewish population, some 700,000, half of which lived in Budapest, the capital. And Hungary's Jewish community had been persecuted, stripped of rights, and forced into labour brigades, but, importantly, most had survived; the deportations to the death camps had not yet begun.
[00:12:12] However, among the first Nazi officials to arrive in occupied Hungary was Adolf Eichmann.
[00:12:20] He was one of the key architects of the holocaust, the Nazi official responsible for overseeing deportations across occupied Europe. He arrived in Budapest in March 1944 and set up his office in a large downtown hotel. He moved with terrifying and extraordinary speed.
[00:12:45] Between the 15th of May and the 9th of July 1944, approximately 437,000 Hungarian Jews were packed onto trains and sent north. Almost all of them went to Auschwitz, where most were killed as soon as they arrived.
[00:13:08] Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on the 9th of July 1944.
[00:13:14] Two days earlier, Hungary’s regent, Miklós Horthy, had suspended the deportations under immense international pressure, including a personal letter from the Swedish king.
[00:13:27] So when Wallenberg reached the Swedish legation, the trains had just stopped.
[00:13:35] But there were still around 200,000 Jews remaining in Budapest.
[00:13:42] And as to whether the deportations would resume, nobody knew.
[00:13:48] Eichmann was still in the city.
[00:13:50] The Arrow Cross, Hungary's fascist party, was pushing hard for deportations to continue.
[00:13:58] The situation was unstable, the threat immediate, and the margin for error was very small.
[00:14:07] And Wallenberg arrived with a tool that looked, at first glance, completely inadequate compared to the scale of the task ahead of him: a protective passport.
[00:14:20] The Schutzpass, as it came to be known, was a formally printed document in the blue and yellow colours of the Swedish flag, stamped with Sweden’s triple-crown seal, declaring the bearer to be under Swedish protection and awaiting repatriation to Sweden.
[00:14:39] In theory, this was shaky. These were not fully legal documents. They had no firm basis in international law, and Sweden had no clear legal right to extend this kind of protection to Hungarian Jews.
[00:14:58] In practice, however, the document often worked. It looked official, it came from a neutral state, and in the confusion and uncertainty of late 1944, that was often enough to make Hungarian or German officials hesitate.
[00:15:19] Now, these papers were not simply handed out at random. Jews in Budapest tried to obtain them through the Swedish mission and the wider rescue network forming around it, and those who secured one could then claim to be under Swedish protection.
[00:15:37] The Swedish foreign ministry had originally approved 1,500 protective passes. Wallenberg pushed, improvised, and bribed where necessary, and the number rose dramatically, with some estimates putting it at around 15,000.
[00:15:57] But the Schutzpass was only part of the system.
[00:16:01] Wallenberg also took over more than thirty buildings across Budapest, flew Swedish flags above them, and declared them to be under Swedish protection. These became refuge houses: overcrowded, makeshift safe houses for Jews who had received Swedish papers, or who were trying to come under Swedish protection.
[00:16:27] The legal basis for these houses was flimsy, just as it was for the Schutzpass itself. But once again, the appearance of Swedish authority often bought time, and sometimes that was the difference between life and death.
[00:16:45] And for a few brief months, that fragile system held.
[00:16:50] But in October 1944, whatever fragile stability remained collapsed.
[00:16:58] The regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy, was removed from power and the Arrow Cross took control of Budapest.
[00:17:08] The situation became considerably more dangerous.
[00:17:11] The Arrow Cross was a Hungarian fascist party with a particular streak of vicious antisemitism, and they were not interested in diplomatic niceties.
[00:17:25] Within days of taking power, they had begun executing Jews on the banks of the Danube, shooting them and throwing them into the river.
[00:17:35] This was the moment when Wallenberg’s work became even more dangerous, and even more direct.
[00:17:43] He was no longer simply issuing papers from behind a desk or moving people into protected houses. He was now confronting the aggressors in real time.
[00:17:55] He showed up wherever Jews were being rounded up and driven away. He handed out Schutzpasses, argued with guards, and demanded the release of anyone he could plausibly claim was under Swedish protection.
[00:18:10] When deportation convoys were assembled at the city’s railway stations, Wallenberg would appear in person.
[00:18:18] He produced lists, cited his authority, and spoke with the calm certainty of someone who expected to be obeyed. Much of it was bluff. But the bluff worked.
[00:18:34] He could not save everyone. But every person he did save was one less passenger on the train to Auschwitz.
[00:18:44] And under the Arrow Cross, the persecution had become even more brutal.
[00:18:50] Jews were being forced on death marches, forced to walk westward toward the Austrian border, in winter, with no food and no shelter.
[00:19:03] Wallenberg followed the marches.
[00:19:05] He walked along the columns, handing out Schutzpasses to people who had nothing. He argued for their release at gunpoint. More than once, he even ran alongside moving trains, passing documents through the windows to those already inside and pulling them out before the train could get away.
[00:19:27] He had been in Budapest for only six months.
[00:19:31] In that time, his operation had grown from one man with a rucksack into a network with hundreds of staff, a fleet of vehicles, thirty-two protected buildings, and a logistics operation that was feeding, sheltering, and documenting tens of thousands of people.
[00:19:52] And by mid-January 1945, it looked as if this extraordinary mission might be nearing its end. Soviet forces were fighting their way through the streets of Budapest. The Nazis were on the back foot.
[00:20:10] Wallenberg seems to have believed the Soviets would be natural allies.
[00:20:16] They were, after all, fighting Nazi Germany. By that logic, they should have been allies.
[00:20:24] So, he had a plan: to travel to meet Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet commander, and negotiate the protection of Budapest's surviving Jewish community.
[00:20:38] He told colleagues he would be back in a week.
[00:20:42] On the 17th of January 1945, he set out for Soviet headquarters with his driver, Vilmos Langfelder.
[00:20:52] He was arrested almost immediately by agents from SMERSH, the Soviet military counterintelligence service. The stated reason was suspicion of espionage. Within days, he and his driver had been taken to Moscow and disappeared into the Soviet prison system.
[00:21:15] And I'm sorry to say that if you are hoping for a happy ending to this story, for Wallenberg at least, there is none.
[00:21:24] Nobody who knew him saw him again.
[00:21:28] And for twelve years, the Soviet government denied any knowledge of Wallenberg's whereabouts. He had simply vanished, as far as Moscow was concerned.
[00:21:40] During those years, his mother and stepfather wrote letters, lobbied officials, and refused to accept that he was gone. There were reported sightings from survivors of the Soviet camp system: Wallenberg in Lubyanka, Wallenberg in a camp in Siberia, even Wallenberg alive and asking to send word to Sweden. The Swedish government collected these reports but, by and large, sat on them, fearful of upsetting the relationship with the Soviet Union.
[00:22:17] Then, in 1957, the Soviets produced a document. It was signed by a Lubyanka prison doctor named Smoltsov, and it claimed that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack on the 17th of July 1947.
[00:22:35] The document was suspicious from the start. Smoltsov's own report used the phrase "seems to be" to describe the cause of death. The security chief had ordered that no autopsy be performed and that the body be cremated. And a Lubyanka prison log showed that a mysterious "Prisoner No. 7" had been questioned on the 23rd of July 1947, six days after the date of Wallenberg's supposed death.
[00:23:11] Over the following decades, various Soviet-era documents emerged suggesting that Wallenberg had been interrogated well into 1947, and possibly beyond. The KGB files on the case have never been fully opened.
[00:23:29] In 2016, the diaries of a man named Ivan Serov, a former KGB director, were published. Serov's entry on the Wallenberg case was unambiguous.
[00:23:42] "I have no doubts," he wrote, "that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947."
[00:23:50] And it wouldn't be until 2016, when Raoul Wallenberg would have been 104 years old, that he was officially declared dead by the Swedish Tax Agency.
[00:24:04] In terms of his impact, well, the estimates of how many lives he saved directly through the Schutzpass range from seven thousand to ten thousand.
[00:24:16] But his broader impact was almost certainly greater than that.
[00:24:21] When Soviet forces liberated Budapest in February 1945, around a hundred thousand Jews were still alive in the city.
[00:24:31] Had Eichmann succeeded in finishing the job he had begun in the spring and summer of 1944, that number would have been vastly lower, perhaps close to zero.
[00:24:43] The consensus among historians is that Wallenberg, together with the other neutral diplomats working alongside him, was one of the principal reasons so many survived.
[00:24:55] So, on one level, this is a story of heroism and bravery.
[00:25:01] Raoul Wallenberg chose to go somewhere very dangerous, did something very difficult, and as a direct result, a very large number of people who would otherwise have been killed were not.
[00:25:15] But heroism is not the whole story.
[00:25:19] The same family whose bank helped Germany finance the war, and whose company supplied ball bearings to the Nazi war machine into late 1944, also produced Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:25:34] And the same country that allowed hundreds of thousands of German soldiers across its railways, that sold iron ore to Germany throughout the war, also sent Wallenberg to Budapest.
[00:25:48] And this is not a story with a clean ending. The full KGB files have never been opened. What exactly happened in Lubyanka in 1947 remains, officially, unconfirmed.
[00:26:03] But the legacy of Raoul Wallenberg is unmistakable. It's impossible to calculate the true number of people who owe their existence to what he did in Budapest — the thousands he saved, the children born to them, and the generations that followed — but it surely runs into the hundreds of thousands.
[00:26:25] It is certainly not without justification that he is remembered as the Angel of Budapest.
[00:26:32] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:26:37] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:26:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:26:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a Swedish man called Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:00:30] This is a story of war, neutrality, savagery, bravery, and a mission that should have been impossible.
[00:00:39] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:45] Many languages have some variant of the saying "you're either with us or against us".
[00:00:53] It's a rebuke of neutrality, a way of saying you can't just shrug your shoulders and say "I'm staying out of it".
[00:01:02] And this was especially true in the Europe of the late 1930s, a Europe where on one side there was Nazi Germany, united with Fascist Italy, and on the other the Allied coalition, initially consisting of the UK, France, and Poland.
[00:01:22] As the war continued, most European nations declared themselves allied to one side or the other.
[00:01:32] Some managed to remain neutral. Ireland, Portugal and Spain declared themselves neutral, or non-belligerent, and for the most part stayed out of the conflict.
[00:01:45] Switzerland, too, remained neutral. But Swiss neutrality rested on a slightly different foundation. It was mountainous, heavily armed, and had long cultivated an identity built around staying outside European wars. So even though it was much closer to the action, it managed to escape getting dragged into the conflict.
[00:02:13] And then there was Sweden.
[00:02:16] Like Switzerland, Sweden had a long tradition of neutrality.
[00:02:22] But unlike Ireland, Portugal, or Spain, Sweden was much closer to the theatre of war.
[00:02:31] And by the middle of 1940, it was surrounded.
[00:02:37] In the space of two months, both of its western neighbours had been swallowed up by Nazi Germany. Norway and Denmark were both under German control.
[00:02:50] To the east was Finland, which had fought the Soviet Union in the Winter War and would soon align itself with Germany against Moscow.
[00:03:02] The official Swedish policy was that of neutrality, but this would prove much harder in practice than it was in theory.
[00:03:13] Sweden continued to sell iron ore to Nazi Germany throughout the war — the raw material that fed the production of bullets, tanks, ships and bombs.
[00:03:26] Sweden let Nazi Germany move troops across its borders, first between Germany and Norway, and then more controversially, eastwards towards Russia as part of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
[00:03:44] And unlike most European countries, Sweden emerged from the war physically unscathed and in a relatively strong economic position, something that would help lay the foundations for the prosperity it enjoys today.
[00:04:01] So it is perfectly reasonable to argue that Sweden, in the 1940s, was not merely standing aside, but actively helping sustain the Nazi war machine. In other words, its neutrality came at a moral cost.
[00:04:21] There is one man, however, at whom such criticism cannot be raised.
[00:04:28] His name was Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:04:31] He came from the pre-eminent Swedish family, the Wallenbergs, or the Wallenbergs, to give them their Anglicised name.
[00:04:41] And it's hard to overstate quite how much power and influence the Wallenbergs had back then and still have today.
[00:04:51] They controlled the main bank in Sweden, and held major stakes in most major Swedish companies.
[00:04:59] But today we will not be talking about Raoul's business dealings, but something much more important, more lasting, and more human.
[00:05:11] He was born in 1912.
[00:05:13] He was a Wallenberg, so he grew up in the family's world of business and international commerce, but he wasn't directly in the line of succession.
[00:05:25] As such, his upbringing was slightly different to that of his cousins at the core of the family empire, who were being groomed for succession.
[00:05:36] He was sent to the United States to study architecture. He was already fluent in French and German, but his time in the US meant he could add English to this list.
[00:05:49] He was, by all accounts, charming and perceptive, comfortable in many worlds, but a little bit lost, directionless, after graduating from university and returning to Sweden.
[00:06:04] He found that his American architecture degree wasn't actually valid in Sweden, and so he drifted between jobs arranged by family members. One of these was in Haifa, which was then part of British Palestine, and it was here that he met a large number of German Jews who had fled the Nazis.
[00:06:28] This was in 1936, and although it would be several years before the persecution of Jews reached its peak, anti-Semitism was rampant, and there were an increasing number of anti-Jewish laws.
[00:06:46] The Wallenberg family is not Jewish, but Raoul Wallenberg had a Jewish great-great-grandfather, technically making him one-sixteenth Jewish.
[00:06:58] And he was, apparently, very proud of this heritage. At a time when many Jews were, perfectly understandably, trying to disguise their background, Raoul Wallenberg leaned into it.
[00:07:15] And he saw firsthand the persecution that Jews across Europe were increasingly facing.
[00:07:23] First, through business.
[00:07:26] He worked at a trading company in Stockholm, and saw that his boss — who was a Hungarian Jew — he was finding it harder and harder to move around in Europe. Hungary had passed anti-Jewish laws in 1938, and when Hungary officially allied with Nazi Germany in 1940, well, its policy towards its Jewish community looked increasingly like its newfound ally's.
[00:07:57] Wallenberg travelled a lot for his work — to Hungary, to France, and to Germany — and he became the 1940s equivalent of the sort of person who knows exactly how to get through security control in the quickest queue and without the metal detector ever going off.
[00:08:17] In his case, this meant paperwork — he knew which papers you needed, which stamps, which signatures. It might sound like a meaningless detail, but it would prove of vital importance later on.
[00:08:34] Now, the important thing to emphasise here is that Wallenberg was a businessman, a businessman of a neutral country, Sweden.
[00:08:44] But he knew about what was happening to European Jews, he had this sliver of Jewish ancestry himself, and he decided he was going to do something about it.
[00:08:58] In June 1944, he was introduced to a man named Iver Olsen, who was the Stockholm representative of the United States War Refugee Board, or the WRB for short. This was an agency created by President Roosevelt with a specific mandate: to use American resources and influence to rescue civilians from Nazi persecution.
[00:09:26] And the civilians who were being most heavily persecuted were the Jews.
[00:09:32] Olsen needed someone to go to Budapest. Someone who could work under diplomatic cover, who understood the terrain, who had the right combination of nerve and practicality for something very difficult in very dangerous circumstances.
[00:09:50] He chose Wallenberg.
[00:09:53] Now, Wallenberg negotiated his own terms before agreeing.
[00:09:58] He wanted real authority to operate independently, without being constrained by what the Swedish diplomatic mission in Budapest was comfortable with.
[00:10:08] He wanted money to bribe officials. He wanted freedom to do whatever it took. Carte blanche.
[00:10:15] The Swedish government agreed.
[00:10:19] He was appointed First Secretary of the Swedish legation in Budapest, which gave him diplomatic cover and the authority of a Swedish passport.
[00:10:30] In early 1944, he packed a rucksack, a sleeping bag, and a revolver, and set off for Hungary. Budapest, to be precise, one of the last great concentrations of Jews still alive in Nazi-dominated Europe.
[00:10:47] Wallenberg was thirty-one years old, and he had never been asked to do anything like this before.
[00:10:56] Now, to understand what Wallenberg was walking into, we need to understand what had already happened in Hungary in the weeks before he arrived.
[00:11:07] Hungary had gone over to the Axis powers in 1940, but when the war turned for Nazi Germany, Hungary had started to secretly negotiate with the Allies.
[00:11:21] When Hitler found out about this, in early 1944, he ordered the invasion of Hungary. It was largely peaceful, and barely a shot was fired, but the relevance for our story is that by March of 1944, Hungary was under German occupation.
[00:11:44] And Hungary had a relatively large Jewish population, some 700,000, half of which lived in Budapest, the capital. And Hungary's Jewish community had been persecuted, stripped of rights, and forced into labour brigades, but, importantly, most had survived; the deportations to the death camps had not yet begun.
[00:12:12] However, among the first Nazi officials to arrive in occupied Hungary was Adolf Eichmann.
[00:12:20] He was one of the key architects of the holocaust, the Nazi official responsible for overseeing deportations across occupied Europe. He arrived in Budapest in March 1944 and set up his office in a large downtown hotel. He moved with terrifying and extraordinary speed.
[00:12:45] Between the 15th of May and the 9th of July 1944, approximately 437,000 Hungarian Jews were packed onto trains and sent north. Almost all of them went to Auschwitz, where most were killed as soon as they arrived.
[00:13:08] Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on the 9th of July 1944.
[00:13:14] Two days earlier, Hungary’s regent, Miklós Horthy, had suspended the deportations under immense international pressure, including a personal letter from the Swedish king.
[00:13:27] So when Wallenberg reached the Swedish legation, the trains had just stopped.
[00:13:35] But there were still around 200,000 Jews remaining in Budapest.
[00:13:42] And as to whether the deportations would resume, nobody knew.
[00:13:48] Eichmann was still in the city.
[00:13:50] The Arrow Cross, Hungary's fascist party, was pushing hard for deportations to continue.
[00:13:58] The situation was unstable, the threat immediate, and the margin for error was very small.
[00:14:07] And Wallenberg arrived with a tool that looked, at first glance, completely inadequate compared to the scale of the task ahead of him: a protective passport.
[00:14:20] The Schutzpass, as it came to be known, was a formally printed document in the blue and yellow colours of the Swedish flag, stamped with Sweden’s triple-crown seal, declaring the bearer to be under Swedish protection and awaiting repatriation to Sweden.
[00:14:39] In theory, this was shaky. These were not fully legal documents. They had no firm basis in international law, and Sweden had no clear legal right to extend this kind of protection to Hungarian Jews.
[00:14:58] In practice, however, the document often worked. It looked official, it came from a neutral state, and in the confusion and uncertainty of late 1944, that was often enough to make Hungarian or German officials hesitate.
[00:15:19] Now, these papers were not simply handed out at random. Jews in Budapest tried to obtain them through the Swedish mission and the wider rescue network forming around it, and those who secured one could then claim to be under Swedish protection.
[00:15:37] The Swedish foreign ministry had originally approved 1,500 protective passes. Wallenberg pushed, improvised, and bribed where necessary, and the number rose dramatically, with some estimates putting it at around 15,000.
[00:15:57] But the Schutzpass was only part of the system.
[00:16:01] Wallenberg also took over more than thirty buildings across Budapest, flew Swedish flags above them, and declared them to be under Swedish protection. These became refuge houses: overcrowded, makeshift safe houses for Jews who had received Swedish papers, or who were trying to come under Swedish protection.
[00:16:27] The legal basis for these houses was flimsy, just as it was for the Schutzpass itself. But once again, the appearance of Swedish authority often bought time, and sometimes that was the difference between life and death.
[00:16:45] And for a few brief months, that fragile system held.
[00:16:50] But in October 1944, whatever fragile stability remained collapsed.
[00:16:58] The regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy, was removed from power and the Arrow Cross took control of Budapest.
[00:17:08] The situation became considerably more dangerous.
[00:17:11] The Arrow Cross was a Hungarian fascist party with a particular streak of vicious antisemitism, and they were not interested in diplomatic niceties.
[00:17:25] Within days of taking power, they had begun executing Jews on the banks of the Danube, shooting them and throwing them into the river.
[00:17:35] This was the moment when Wallenberg’s work became even more dangerous, and even more direct.
[00:17:43] He was no longer simply issuing papers from behind a desk or moving people into protected houses. He was now confronting the aggressors in real time.
[00:17:55] He showed up wherever Jews were being rounded up and driven away. He handed out Schutzpasses, argued with guards, and demanded the release of anyone he could plausibly claim was under Swedish protection.
[00:18:10] When deportation convoys were assembled at the city’s railway stations, Wallenberg would appear in person.
[00:18:18] He produced lists, cited his authority, and spoke with the calm certainty of someone who expected to be obeyed. Much of it was bluff. But the bluff worked.
[00:18:34] He could not save everyone. But every person he did save was one less passenger on the train to Auschwitz.
[00:18:44] And under the Arrow Cross, the persecution had become even more brutal.
[00:18:50] Jews were being forced on death marches, forced to walk westward toward the Austrian border, in winter, with no food and no shelter.
[00:19:03] Wallenberg followed the marches.
[00:19:05] He walked along the columns, handing out Schutzpasses to people who had nothing. He argued for their release at gunpoint. More than once, he even ran alongside moving trains, passing documents through the windows to those already inside and pulling them out before the train could get away.
[00:19:27] He had been in Budapest for only six months.
[00:19:31] In that time, his operation had grown from one man with a rucksack into a network with hundreds of staff, a fleet of vehicles, thirty-two protected buildings, and a logistics operation that was feeding, sheltering, and documenting tens of thousands of people.
[00:19:52] And by mid-January 1945, it looked as if this extraordinary mission might be nearing its end. Soviet forces were fighting their way through the streets of Budapest. The Nazis were on the back foot.
[00:20:10] Wallenberg seems to have believed the Soviets would be natural allies.
[00:20:16] They were, after all, fighting Nazi Germany. By that logic, they should have been allies.
[00:20:24] So, he had a plan: to travel to meet Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet commander, and negotiate the protection of Budapest's surviving Jewish community.
[00:20:38] He told colleagues he would be back in a week.
[00:20:42] On the 17th of January 1945, he set out for Soviet headquarters with his driver, Vilmos Langfelder.
[00:20:52] He was arrested almost immediately by agents from SMERSH, the Soviet military counterintelligence service. The stated reason was suspicion of espionage. Within days, he and his driver had been taken to Moscow and disappeared into the Soviet prison system.
[00:21:15] And I'm sorry to say that if you are hoping for a happy ending to this story, for Wallenberg at least, there is none.
[00:21:24] Nobody who knew him saw him again.
[00:21:28] And for twelve years, the Soviet government denied any knowledge of Wallenberg's whereabouts. He had simply vanished, as far as Moscow was concerned.
[00:21:40] During those years, his mother and stepfather wrote letters, lobbied officials, and refused to accept that he was gone. There were reported sightings from survivors of the Soviet camp system: Wallenberg in Lubyanka, Wallenberg in a camp in Siberia, even Wallenberg alive and asking to send word to Sweden. The Swedish government collected these reports but, by and large, sat on them, fearful of upsetting the relationship with the Soviet Union.
[00:22:17] Then, in 1957, the Soviets produced a document. It was signed by a Lubyanka prison doctor named Smoltsov, and it claimed that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack on the 17th of July 1947.
[00:22:35] The document was suspicious from the start. Smoltsov's own report used the phrase "seems to be" to describe the cause of death. The security chief had ordered that no autopsy be performed and that the body be cremated. And a Lubyanka prison log showed that a mysterious "Prisoner No. 7" had been questioned on the 23rd of July 1947, six days after the date of Wallenberg's supposed death.
[00:23:11] Over the following decades, various Soviet-era documents emerged suggesting that Wallenberg had been interrogated well into 1947, and possibly beyond. The KGB files on the case have never been fully opened.
[00:23:29] In 2016, the diaries of a man named Ivan Serov, a former KGB director, were published. Serov's entry on the Wallenberg case was unambiguous.
[00:23:42] "I have no doubts," he wrote, "that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947."
[00:23:50] And it wouldn't be until 2016, when Raoul Wallenberg would have been 104 years old, that he was officially declared dead by the Swedish Tax Agency.
[00:24:04] In terms of his impact, well, the estimates of how many lives he saved directly through the Schutzpass range from seven thousand to ten thousand.
[00:24:16] But his broader impact was almost certainly greater than that.
[00:24:21] When Soviet forces liberated Budapest in February 1945, around a hundred thousand Jews were still alive in the city.
[00:24:31] Had Eichmann succeeded in finishing the job he had begun in the spring and summer of 1944, that number would have been vastly lower, perhaps close to zero.
[00:24:43] The consensus among historians is that Wallenberg, together with the other neutral diplomats working alongside him, was one of the principal reasons so many survived.
[00:24:55] So, on one level, this is a story of heroism and bravery.
[00:25:01] Raoul Wallenberg chose to go somewhere very dangerous, did something very difficult, and as a direct result, a very large number of people who would otherwise have been killed were not.
[00:25:15] But heroism is not the whole story.
[00:25:19] The same family whose bank helped Germany finance the war, and whose company supplied ball bearings to the Nazi war machine into late 1944, also produced Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:25:34] And the same country that allowed hundreds of thousands of German soldiers across its railways, that sold iron ore to Germany throughout the war, also sent Wallenberg to Budapest.
[00:25:48] And this is not a story with a clean ending. The full KGB files have never been opened. What exactly happened in Lubyanka in 1947 remains, officially, unconfirmed.
[00:26:03] But the legacy of Raoul Wallenberg is unmistakable. It's impossible to calculate the true number of people who owe their existence to what he did in Budapest — the thousands he saved, the children born to them, and the generations that followed — but it surely runs into the hundreds of thousands.
[00:26:25] It is certainly not without justification that he is remembered as the Angel of Budapest.
[00:26:32] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Raoul Wallenberg.
[00:26:37] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:26:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:26:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
