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The Wallenberg Affair and the Onset of the Cold War REVIEW ESSAY The Wallenberg Affair and the Onset of the Cold War ✣ Marvin W. Makinen Stefan Karner, ed., Auf den Spuren Wallenbergs. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2015. 200 pp. €24.90. This book contains revised versions of essays about Raoul Wallenberg orig- inally presented at a conference in mid-November 2012 at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, organized by Stefan Karner, the director of the Ludwig Boltzmann-Institut für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, in Graz, Austria. The con- ference was one of many events around the world that marked Wallenberg’s 100th birthday and was held with the intention of bringing together interna- tionally known researchers who have worked on the history of Wallenberg’s activities in the closing months of World War II in Budapest, as well as re- searchers who have tried to bring clarity to his fate in Soviet captivity. Karner is known for his historical research on Austrians who served in the German army during World War II and were arrested as prisoners-of-war in the So- viet Union and of Austrians arrested in Soviet-occupied Austria after World War II. The book consists of contributions written originally in English or in German, in addition to contributions prepared originally in Russian and then translated into German. Presentation of research reports either in English or in German may limit not only the general readership of the book but also that of many individuals who have maintained interest in the subject or have followed its development over many decades. Considering that some contri- butions were translated from Russian into German, it is surprising that the entire book was not published in one language, either English or German. The book contains fourteen articles divided into four sections entitled: (1) “Introductory Comments,” containing five essays; (2) “Biography and the Life of Wallenberg up to the Time of His Arrest,” containing two essays; (3) “Inquiries into the Imprisonment and Arrest of Raoul Wallenberg—The State of Research,” six essays; and (4) “Concluding Considerations,” contain- ing one essay written by Hans Magnusson of the Swedish Foreign Ministry, Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 2017, pp. 215–224, doi:10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 215 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021 Makinen who was chairman of the Swedish participants in the Swedish-Russian Work- ing Group that investigated the case from 1991 to 2001. Wallenberg grew up in Sweden and studied architecture at the University of Michigan. Later, while still a young man, he worked as the foreign trade representative and then a partner of the Central European Trading Company, directed by Kálmán Lauer, a Hungarian Jew who was instrumental in recom- mending Wallenberg to the U.S. ambassador to Sweden and Iver C. Olsen, the U.S. representative of the War Refugee Board in Stockholm, when they inquired about a suitable candidate to be assigned to the Swedish legation in Budapest to lead a humanitarian effort aimed at saving Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. Within a scant six months in Budapest, Wallenberg’s name became irrevocably linked to the Holocaust because his actions in the closing months of World War II, as Bengt Jangfeldt states in his essay in the book, “far ex- ceed . what one could expect even from the most idealistic, self-sacrificing person” (p. 34). However, in the most ironic and tragic turn of events imag- inable, the hero of the Holocaust became a victim of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War whose fate has never been determined. Key questions about his arrest and presumed death have remained unanswered for more than 70 years: (1) Why was he arrested on 17 January 1945 by Soviet military counterin- telligence forces in Hungary and taken to the notorious high-security prison of the Soviet Ministry of State Security (MGB) in the Lubyanka building in Moscow? (2) What was the basis of the accusations against him? (3) What were the conditions of his incarceration by the MGB? (4) When and how did he die? The passage of decades has failed to shed much light on these issues. In the 1990s the Russian members of the Swedish-Russian Working Group claimed that Wallenberg’s personal file as a prisoner “has not been found” and must have been destroyed at some point by the Soviet regime. The per- sonal file (lichnoe delo), which was generated for every individual incarcer- ated within the Soviet prison system, would ordinarily contain information that would help resolve at least some of the long-standing questions about Wallenberg. The fact that Wallenberg was officially arrested in 1945 on orders from Moscow—something that could not have happened without Iosif Stalin’s per- sonal approval—was not known until 1993, when Valerii Filipov of the Rus- sian Ministry of Defense, who was a member of the Swedish-Russian Working Group, presented a copy of the telegram sent by the USSR’s deputy commis- sar of defense, Nikolai Bulganin, to the commanding officer of the Second Ukrainian Front of the Soviet Army in Debrecen, Hungary, ordering the ar- rest of Wallenberg and his transfer to Moscow. From 1945 to 1957 the Soviet government released several different statements concerning Wallenberg, each 216 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021 Review Essay generally contradicting the one issued previously, as Christoph Gann details in his essay, “Clues, ‘Witnesses,’ Contradictions: A Chronicle of the Search for Traces.” Two examples are worth mentioning. On 18 August 1947, in response to inquiries from the Swedish Foreign Ministry, Soviet Deputy For- eign Minister Andrei Vyshinskii sent a personal note to the Swedish ambas- sador stating that Wallenberg was not in the Soviet Union and that he was unknown to Soviet authorities. Vyshinskii made these claims even though he was fully aware of Wallenberg’s imprisonment by the MGB. On 6 February 1957, after the Swedish Foreign Ministry presented to the Soviet government a “White Book” consisting of notarized, evidentiary state- ments by former German and Italian prisoners-of-war describing their knowl- edge of Wallenberg’s incarceration in the Lubyanka and Lefortovo Prisons in Moscow, Soviet First Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (who became foreign minister a week later) presented a communiqué to the Swedish em- bassy with a letter allegedly written on 17 July 1947 by Aleksandr L. Smoltsov, director of the medical clinic of the Lubyanka Prison, to the Minister of State Security, Viktor Abakumov, claiming that “the prisoner Walenberg [sic]... had died the previous night, presumably as a result of a myocardial infarct.” The Soviet government, which never veered from this explanation of Wallen- berg’s fate, offered no confirming evidence or description of the circumstances and provided no explanation of how and in which files this single one-page document was found, supposedly detached from other documents pertinent to Wallenberg’s case (ordinarily it would have been a part of his personal file). Since 1991 the Russian government has provided no additional information that might help answer the four key questions about Wallenberg’s fate. In evaluating the essays collected in Karner’s book, I focus on whether they bring us closer to having solid, verifiable evidence about the four ques- tions mentioned above. I have also sought to determine whether relevant doc- uments might still be found and whether additional sustained research could help shed conclusive light on Wallenberg’s fate. Nikita Petrov of Memorial, the first grassroots human rights organization to arise in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, is an expert on the Soviet-era state security organs. He examines the Soviet penal system as a political tool of repression in his essay “What Do We Truly Know about Wallenberg’s Fate?” Petrov tacitly accepts the Smoltsov Report as a statement of the time of Wal- lenberg’s death, albeit a document that does not necessarily reflect the manner of death, such as “assisted” or “violent” death,” as has been suggested by nu- merous Russian officials, particularly those knowledgeable about the methods used by Soviet security forces. Soviet law at the time required that when pris- oners died in unusual or unexpected circumstances, an autopsy had to be 217 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021 Makinen performed. Because the Smoltsov report contains a handwritten note in the margin indicating that Abakumov had ordered the body cremated without an autopsy, Petrov maintains that Abakumov must have wanted to cover up the true cause of death. Petrov also points out that the death on 15 October 1947 of Willy Rödel, the former secretary of the German legation in Bucharest and the last docu- mented cellmate of Wallenberg, could not have been “natural” because an autopsy was performed, the report of which was summarized by the Swedish- Russian Working Group. Rödel is inextricably linked to the case of Wallenberg insofar as they were kept together as cellmates both in the Lefortovo Prison and in the Lubyanka Prison up to the time of Wallenberg’s disappearance. Furthermore, Petrov suggests that Rödel’s death was attributable to poisoning by ricin. The manner of Rödel’s death is not inconsistent with ricin poisoning, but Petrov’s reason for concluding death by ricin injection is that he found in Rödel’s file a note indicating that the file was transferred in 1954 from the USSR General Prosecutor to the Committee of State Security (KGB, the suc- cessor to the MGB) in connection with a list of “Liquidated: Rödel, Schluga, the Uzhgorod Affair,” the last of which refers to the assassination of Bishop Fedor Romza of Uzhgorod.
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