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 originally 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 conference 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 researchers 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 contributions 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,” containing one essay written by Hans Magnusson of the Swedish Foreign Ministry,

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 counterintelligence 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 personal file (lichnoe delo), which was generated for every individual incarcerated 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 personal 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 arrest 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 ambassador 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 statements by former German and Italian prisoners-of-war describing their knowledge 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 questions mentioned above. I have also sought to determine whether relevant documents 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 numerous Russian officials, particularly those knowledgeable about the methods used by Soviet security forces. Soviet law at the time required that when prisoners 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 successor 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. Bishop Romza’s death was orchestrated by Pavel Sudoplatov, the notorious chief of “special tasks” who also oversaw the assassination of Leon Trotsky, and Grigorii Mairanovskii, the long-time head of a toxicology laboratory in which poisons were prepared for use by Soviet military counterintelligence agents. Petrov points out that a book published in 2012 by two former KGB historians states that Rödel died of a “heart attack” en route to the Krasnoyarsk prisoner-of-war camp, an approximate 30-minute journey by automobile, and the opposite of what is indicated in the autopsy report: “paralysis” of the heart resulting from arteriosclerosis.1 This is hardly a valid medical diagnosis that could be made at autopsy. Vasilii Khristoforov, who until late 2016 headed the Central Archive of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor agency to the So- viet KGB, offers a broad historical account of conditions in Budapest that Soviet troops encountered when they took on the Wehrmacht there. Approxi- mately 80,000 Soviet troops and 85,000 German soldiers perished in the Bat- tle for Budapest. Khristoforov also describes how Soviet soldiers came upon Wallenberg and his assistant, Vilmos Langfelder, in the basement of a building at 16 Benczur Street. Khristoforov adds details about the sending of the

1. V. G. Makarov and V. S. Khristoforov, Oberführer S. A. Willy Rödel, Dokumenty iz Arkhivov FSB Rossii (Moscow: AIRO, 2012).

218

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021 Review Essay

telegram by Bulganin to arrest Wallenberg and reports that the officer accom- panying Wallenberg to Moscow was “a de facto guard” and that Wallenberg was listed as a “prisoner-of-war” as he was processed into the Lubyanka on 6 February 1945. (A copy of the registration card presented by the Soviet government in October 1989 to Wallenberg’s maternal half-brother and half- sister, the late Guy F. von Dardel and Nina Lagergren, indicates that Wal- lenberg was also listed on the card as a diplomat of the Swedish legation in Budapest, a status that should have conferred diplomatic immunity on him under international conventions.) In a puzzling statement, Khristoforov contends that the reason nothing was entered in the space for “Type of Crime” on Wallenberg’s registration card is that “even experienced interrogators could find no punishable offense by which one could charge Raoul Wallenberg” (p. 57). This statement is either specious or based on information from documents pertaining to Wal- lenberg that have not hitherto been revealed or perhaps even from Wallen- berg’s personal file, which Russian members of the Swedish-Russian Working Group claimed was destroyed. Khristoforov recounts further historical details about the political atmosphere in Stockholm when the diplomatic corps from Budapest returned to Sweden—via Moscow because the Swedish government had earlier requested their protection by the Soviet Army. According to Khristoforov, reports in Swedish newspapers and petitions given to the So- viet legation in Stockholm “to return Wallenberg” were viewed as “provoca- tions.” In addition, he writes that on 6 May 1947 the Stockholm newspaper Morgon Tidningen disclosed that in Budapest “the Russian soldiers stormed the Swedish diplomatic group and committed robbery during which some of the female kitchen personnel were raped” (p. 58). According to Khristoforov, the Soviet legation staff disparaged this report as a provocation by the Swedish ambassador to Hungary, who had just returned to Sweden. There is no doubt, however, that the acts attributed to Soviet soldiers by Swedish newspapers at the time did occur. Nonetheless, illuminating statements by Khristoforov suggest that more information about Wallenberg may eventually be revealed by the Russian government. Khristoforov writes (p. 72): “The most important [questions], up to now, to a large extent are the unresolved aspects: Exactly why did the Soviet intelligence services need Wallenberg? What were the conditions of his incarceration in Soviet prisons? What were the reasons for his death and exactly when did he die?” The fact that Khristoforov asks this last question—when did Wallenberg die?—indicates he does not accept the “official” death date, which the Soviet and now the Russian government have adamantly claimed as the truth. In a coda attached after the conclusion of the conference, Karner

219

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021 Makinen

writes that “on 14 November 2012, in Vienna...VasiliiKhristoforov... declared that he can neither confirm nor disprove the death date [of 17 July 1947] attributed by the Soviet authorities [to Wallenberg].” Karner adds: “This is the first official departure of Moscow from the official death date of 17 July 1947 for Wallenberg. It is a substantial step forward and an important result of the conference” (p. 20). Christoph Gann, a judge in Meiningen, Germany, and author of the book Raoul Wallenberg: So viele Menschen retten wie möglich (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), provides a detailed accounting of the numerous contradictory statements issued by the Soviet and Russian governments from 1945 to the present concerning Wallenberg. He also discusses the case of Herta Voigt, a German woman who, as a prisoner in the Soviet-occupied sector of Germany, was transferred to Moscow, where she was incarcerated in a solitary cell on the top floor of the Lubyanka Prison. The exact date of her transfer is unclear, but we know for sure that it did not occur until after she received a death sentence on 21 July 1947, while still in Soviet-occupied Germany. Hence, she did not arrive at the Lubyanka until well after 17 July 1947 (the official date of Wal- lenberg’s death). Her story was that she, as the only incarcerated woman on the top floor of the prison, had to clean the corridor floor. During this work, while she was singing a German song, a prisoner said to her (presumably through the door to his cell), “Slowly, go slowly. My name is Raoul Wallen- berg” (p. 104). She realized that the prisoner was being held two cells away from her. She looked through the “peep hole” in the door to his cell and saw a miserable-looking man. A few weeks later he was taken away, at which time he said to her, “Hopefully they will shoot accurately” (p. 104). Voigt’s death sentence was later reduced to a 15-year sentence, and in October 1955 she was released and returned to East Germany. The following year, she escaped to West Germany. She contacted the Swedish consulate in Frankfurt am Main, but the diplomats there had no interest in her witness statement, even though, as Gann points out, she was highly credible. The consulate’s indifference was, unfortunately, all too typical of the way the Swedish government has dealt with reports given by former prisoners. Susanne Berger emphasizes in her essay, “Missed Opportunities? The Swedish Handling of the Raoul Wallenberg Case,” that any discussion of the “failures” of the Swedish government to seek clarification of Wallenberg’s case must be viewed against the actions of Soviet authorities in (1) illegally arrest- ing Raoul Wallenberg and taking him to Moscow and (2) continuing to keep him imprisoned without explanation. Even though Soviet (and now Russian) officials have always had the ultimate responsibility to come forth with the truth, Berger highlights numerous occasions when Swedish officials, far from

220

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021 Review Essay

seeking to resolve Wallenberg’s case, had “no passion for the truth,” in the words of von Dardel, Wallenberg’s maternal half-brother. Passivity, dismissal of witness statements (or not taking them seriously), and a failure to connect information provided by witnesses to previous testimony—these are among the gravest shortcomings of the Swedish Foreign Ministry’s handling of the case. Equally perplexing is the passivity of the bankers Marcus Wallenberg and Jacob Wallenberg, who, despite being in command of a vast financial empire with good ties to Soviet authorities, made no effort on behalf of a relative whom they knew well. Characteristic of the Swedish government’s approach, as Berger shows, was its failure to follow up on important developments such as the Svartz-Myasnikov discussions. Even when Swedish officials had good reason to believe that documents concerning individuals with direct connections to the Wallenberg case existed (e.g., after the publication of the Makarov-Khristoforov book about Willy Rödel), they did not challenge the statements of the Russian members of the Swedish-Russian Working Group, who insisted that no further documentation had turned up. With respect to the authenticity of the Smoltsov report, Berger notes, both in her own essay and in another she coauthored with Vadim Birstein, that Smoltsov was apparently on a medical leave of absence in the summer of 1947. Hence, the statement in the report that Abakumov ordered Smoltsov to “watch over the prisoner ‘Walenberg’ [sic]” is dubious. Russian officials have not yet explained this discrepancy. Berger recounts how in 2009 she and Birstein received information from FSB archivists about an unidentified “Prisoner No. 7” who had been interrogated on 22 and 23 July 1947, together with other prisoners directly connected with the Wallenberg case. She maintains that “Prisoner No. 7” was most likely Wallenberg. Although Russian authorities have not provided access to the interrogation register from that time, Berger’s findings cast further doubt on the notion that Wallenberg died on 17 July 1947. An essay by Johan Matz of the University of Uppsala, “Analogical Reason- ing and the Diplomacy of the Raoul Wallenberg Case 1945–47” was originally published in The International History Review in 2014. His conclusion is that Soviet and Swedish diplomats ascribed meaning and purpose of “the other” from an array of Swedish-Soviet disputes arising over that period because of a lack of authoritative guidance (as assumed by Matz) from their respective superiors. Matz analyzes shifts in communications between the Soviet and Swedish Foreign Ministries in 1945–1947, separating them into three phases: (1) Soviet unwillingness to make any statement about Wallenberg; (2) Soviet efforts to link Wallenberg to other matters (e.g., a 14-year-old Soviet girl who fled to Sweden, a defected Soviet sailor, Baltic refugees arriving in Sweden);

221

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021 Makinen

and (3) Soviet speculation about Wallenberg’s possible demise as a result of the war in Hungary, ending with the note by Vyshinskii suggesting that Wal- lenberg may have died during the Battle for Budapest or may have been taken prisoner by the fascist Hungarian Arrow-Cross. Matz’s essay is peppered with information obtained from newly declassified documents released by the Russian Foreign Ministry archive, including encrypted communications between Moscow and the Soviet mission in Stock- holm, as well as from documents in the Swedish Foreign Ministry archive. Matz points out that although the Russian Foreign Ministry agreed to release these encrypted cables, other items under the jurisdiction of the Russian Min- istry of Defense from the same period have not been declassified. Nonethe- less, a book published in 2010 featured hitherto highly classified Soviet foreign intelligence reports containing details about Baltic refugees in Sweden in which an associate of Wallenberg, Iver C. Olson, who was the representative to the War Refugee Board in Stockholm, figures prominently because of his role facilitating a mass exodus of the refugees.2 As in the case of the Makarov-Khristoforov book about Rödel, the collections from which these foreign intelligence documents come might yield further information about Wallenberg. In a detailed analytical essay titled “The Fate of Raoul Wallenberg—Gaps in Our Knowledge,” Birstein and Berger discuss the gaps in the materials provided by the Russian members of the Swedish-Russian Working Group to the Swedish representatives and explain why the fundamental questions about the reasons for Wallenberg’s arrest and his fate in Soviet captivity will never be resolved unless more documentation is released from the Russian archives. Surveying the research that has been completed and that still needs to be completed to elucidate Wallenberg’s case, Birstein and Berger compile a dossier of the information and documents that are known or were presented to the Swedish-Russian Working Group and offer a detailed list of what re- mains unanswered. In many cases they have made specific requests to the FSB archivists for answers, copies of documents, or explanations, but they are still awaiting replies. They paint a vivid picture of the difficult, frustrating conditions that hinder progress because of the intransigence of Russian archivists who are undoubtedly working under tight constraints imposed by higher authorities. The Birstein-Berger essay provides an illuminating tabulation of the archives, topics, and documents that need to be investigated as the most likely

2. Lev F. Sotskov, Pribaltika i geopolitika 1933–1945: Rassekrechennye dokumenty Sluzhby vneshnei razvedki Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow: Ripol klassik, 2010).

222

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021 Review Essay

productive path to resolving the unanswered questions about Wallenberg’s arrest and fate. They suggest that a committee of independent professional historians and archivists should be formed and given free access to these materials and that Sweden and other countries should direct official petitions to Russia to provide the independent investigators with free access to relevant documents whenever Russian authorities refuse to cooperate. Because of the piecemeal manner in which Russian intelligence agencies have released information and documents, one cannot know whether they have disclosed everything available, whether they have released only materials that support their interpretations, or whether they have held back materials that would provide much fuller answers. Only through unhindered access to all the relevant archives will a group of independent investigators be able to shed full light on the details of Wallenberg’s fate. In an essay titled “The Search for Raoul Wallenberg: A Personal View,” Hans Magnusson, who was Swedish co-chair of the Swedish-Russian Working Group and more recently a senior diplomat for the Swedish Foreign Ministry, summarizes some of the developments in the search for Wallenberg and highlights the main accomplishments of the research carried out by members of the Swedish-Russian Working Group.3 From years of experience working on Wallenberg’s case, Magnusson states with respect to the potential for progress to uncover the truth, the same tedious and slow patterns of request and response between researchers and Russian authorities cannot continue if the Wallenberg case is to move forward significantly. Regardless of the time it will take to achieve its goals, it is necessary to press continuously for greater and more direct access to key Soviet archival collections. (p. 186) Magnusson astutely points out that a top priority should be to amend the 1993 ruling of the Russian Constitutional Court that placed a 30-year limit on classification of documents and 50 years on intelligence-related materials so that it applies to all documents produced before the ruling was made. Even after reading the essays in this 200-page book, I find it hard to conceive of a government operating through assassins to murder individuals who thought differently or were “simply in the way,” ignoring international law and covenants, sentencing individuals in absentia without the right to defense and representation, and imprisoning such a large number of people in prisons, labor camps, and forced resettlement areas that the number rose to

3. Raoul Wallenberg: Report of the Swedish-Russian Working Group, No. UD 00.20 (Stockholm: Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2000).

223

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021 Makinen

approximately 10 percent of the population by the time Stalin died. Petrov at the end of his essay describes the situation with stark clarity: We are witnessing the eternal conﬂict between a nation of people who wish to know the truth and a state that actually covers up the truth. . . . One has the impression that we are dealing not with a civilized state but with a notorious criminal who only under the pressure of undeniable and incontrovertible evidence is ready to make concessions and thereby reveal a few facts. (p. 116) In the West we have little difﬁculty associating such acts with the Soviet regime (and indeed with the Russian government under Vladimir Putin), but what stance should we take toward the Swedish government? As Berger writes, “The political sensitivity . . . the uncertainties surrounding Wallenberg’s mission . . . as well as the chaotic conditions of the immediate postwar period alone cannot account for Sweden’s extreme passivity” (p. 75).

224

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00760 by guest on 30 September 2021