Who is Raoul Wallenberg, the secret of whose death is still being hidden by the FSB. Ingrid Segerstend-Wiberg: from helping refugees to ending wars

The Russian service of Radio Liberty published a letter from independent researchers Vadim Birshtein and Susanne Berger about a qualitatively new turn in the Raoul Wallenberg case. Additional details of the case can be found in a conversation with one of the authors of the letter, Vadim Birshtein.

Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944 by issuing them so-called protection passports as Swedish citizens awaiting repatriation to their homeland. After the capture of Budapest by Soviet troops, he was arrested and transported to Moscow, where he was kept in the internal MGB prison on Lubyanka. Stockholm tried unsuccessfully for many years to find out the fate of the arrested man. In February 1957, Moscow officially informed the Swedish government that Wallenberg had died on July 17, 1947 in a cell in the Lubyanka prison from a myocardial infarction. In support of this version, the Soviet side presented a document - a report from the head of the medical unit of the internal prison of the MGB
Smoltsov addressed to the Minister of Internal Affairs Viktor Abakumov.

This version did not satisfy Wallenberg's high-ranking relatives. social status in Sweden. In 1990, Vadim Birshtein and the current chairman of the Memorial society, Arseny Roginsky, achieved access to some MGB-KGB archival funds. In April 1991, I, as editor international department Nezavisimaya Gazeta published an article by Vadim Birshtein, “The Mystery of Cell Number Seven,” which presented the preliminary results of the study and questioned the official Soviet version. Subsequently, Moscow and Stockholm agreed to continue work within the framework of a bilateral commission. However, in 2001, the commission concluded that the search had reached a dead end and ceased to exist.

Nevertheless Vadim Birshtein, who had since moved to New York, continued his research:

I was not a member of the Swedish commission. I was a member of the first commission to investigate the fate of Wallenberg, which worked in 1990-91. It all ended with the fact that when I found the document on Wallenberg's transfer and published the article, our work - mine and Roginsky - was completed at the request of the KGB, and I was not invited to the second commission. But I remained an independent researcher because I am working on a book about SMERSH.

First of all, the report of the head of the medical unit of the prison, Smoltsov, inspired doubts - not a single autograph was found in the Lubyanka archive with which the handwriting could be compared.

This report has always been considered an authentic document, points out Vadim Birshtein. “I always believed that it was not Smoltsov’s report itself, but the inscription on Smoltsov’s report - that the minister was reported and ordered to cremate the body without an autopsy - seemed suspicious. But after that there were examinations. The first is the official Swedish one: experts have come to the conclusion that the document is genuine. Then there was an examination by Memorial: Roginsky and several other representatives of the public were shown the original, and it turned out that this additional inscription was made in pencil, so it looks different.

- How did events develop after the bilateral commission dissolved itself?

Suzanne Berger invited me to write a letter with her about my doubts about the documents that were presented to the commission. The Swedish embassy agreed to hand over this letter to the leadership of the FSB archive. I wrote about what seemed unfinished and asked questions that the commission did not ask. Let's say the commission never demanded originals - it was satisfied not even with copies, but with copies of fragments of documents, a piece of a phrase or a piece of a line. I first demanded that copies of the pages be provided. Because when they say that there is a record about Wallenberg, but it is blacked out, then this means that the photocopy shows only this erased fragment, restored with the help of infrared rays or in some other way. I demanded that this line be presented at least as part of the page - so that one could judge its position on the page, so that record numbers could be seen, and so on. Step by step, all available documentation has been presented and I continue to request documents.

- Together with Wallenberg, his driver Vilmos Langfelder was held in the Lubyanka prison.

On the night of July 22-23, all of Wallenberg's and Langfelder's cellmates were summoned for some kind of interview or interrogation. In the testimony they gave in 1956 - those who survived - they stated that the conversation was about Wallenberg, and they were ordered not to mention this name. When Roginsky and I began our research in 1990, we especially tried to find information about this interrogation. And in several cases the fact of interrogation was confirmed. Since then, the question has been about what actually happened. It turned out that a certain nameless prisoner was also called in for interrogation or conversation...

All investigative cases in the SMERSH-MGB system for this period are unavailable,” explains Vadim Birshtein. “That’s why I asked a lot of questions about the investigative cases of those people in whom we were interested. And the FSB, having familiarized itself with the cases, answered our questions. They checked who else was being questioned that night and found that there were some more people that were being questioned that I didn't know about. As a result of this, one might say, joint work, a diagram was obtained that is presented in our message. It turns out that in addition to Langfelber's cellmates and his alleged cellmate Katona, a certain mysterious prisoner No. 7 was interrogated at the same time. What really happened during these interrogations or conversations is unknown, because they were not recorded. If prisoner number seven was Wallenberg, then this means that Wallenberg was alive for at least the next few days. As for me, I believe that after this interrogation he was killed, about which there is formal evidence. But they again require clarification, because the FSB provided very unclear documentary information about this.

- So the investigators ordered other prisoners to remain silent when Wallenberg was still alive?

- And this is not a myocardial infarction, not an accidental death - were they preparing to kill him?

Yes. There is a recording of a letter from Abakumov to Molotov, sent on July 17. The letter itself was never presented - neither by the KGB, nor the FSB, nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor anyone. This recording was previously seen as confirmation that Abakumov told Molotov that Wallenberg was gone, that he had died. Now it turns out - if we consider the letter in new system time coordinates - that Abakumov communicated to Molotov a plan for what was to happen to Wallenberg. There is a parallel here with the case of Isaiah Oggins. I immediately remember Abakumov’s letter to the government leadership, which contained a plan for political assassination. Apparently, this method was used quite widely, since Sudoplatov mentions four such murders. He himself participated, in particular, in the murder of Oggins. But it is quite obvious that there were and were planned much more.

* * *
It should be clarified: Lieutenant General Pavel Sudoplatov is the head of a special department of the MGB, which after the war was engaged in the liquidation of enemies of Soviet power with the sanction of the country's top leadership. Isaiah Oggins is a US citizen recruited by the OGPU and subsequently arrested. In connection with Washington's persistent attempts to find out the fate of Oggins, Abakumov sent a top secret note to Stalin and Molotov in May 1947, in which he proposed:

“The USSR MGB considers it necessary to liquidate Oggins Isaiah, informing the Americans that Oggins, after a meeting with representatives of the American embassy in June 1943, was returned to the place of serving his sentence in Norilsk and there, in 1946, died in a hospital as a result of an exacerbation of spinal tuberculosis.” .

Based on materials from Irina Lagunina’s program

“Righteous Among the Nations” - this is the title that was posthumously awarded in 1963 to the Swedish diplomat, who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, and himself died in a Soviet prison under unclear circumstances.

This man's name is Wallenberg Raoul Gustav, and he deserves to be more people knew about his feat, which is an example of true humanism.

Raoul Wallenberg: family

The future diplomat was born in 1912 in the Swedish city of Kappsta, near Stockholm. The boy never saw his father, since naval officer Raoul Oscar Wallenberg died of cancer 3 months before the birth of his heir. Thus, his mother, May Wallenberg, was involved in his upbringing.

Raoul Gustav's paternal family was famous in Sweden, and many Swedish financiers and diplomats came from it. In particular, at the time of the boy’s birth, his grandfather, Gustav Wallenberg, was his country’s ambassador to Japan.

At the same time, on his mother's side, Raoul was a descendant of a jeweler named Bendix, who is considered one of the founders of the Jewish community in Sweden. True, Wallenberg’s ancestor at one time converted to Lutheranism, so all his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were Christians.

In 1918, Mai Wiesing Wallenberg remarried Fredrik von Dardel, an official at the Swedish Ministry of Health. This marriage produced a daughter, Nina, and a son, Guy von Dardel, who later became a nuclear physicist. Raul was lucky with his stepfather, since he treated him exactly the same as his own children.

Education

The boy's upbringing was mainly done by his grandfather. First he was sent to military courses, and then to France. As a result, by the time he entered the University of Michigan in 1931, the young man spoke several languages. There he studied architecture and upon completion received a medal for excellent studies.

Business

Although Raoul Wallenberg's family did not need funds and borrowed high position in Swedish society, in 1933 he sought to earn his own living. So, as a student, he went to Chicago, where he worked in the pavilion of the Chicago World's Fair.

Having received his diploma, in 1935 Raoul Wallenberg returned to Stockholm and took part in a swimming pool design competition, taking second place.

Then, in order not to upset his grandfather, who dreamed of seeing Raoul as a successful banker, he decided to get practical experience in commerce and went to Cape Town, where he joined a large company selling building materials. At the end of the internship, he received a brilliant reference from the owner of the company, which greatly pleased Gustav Wallenberg, who at that time was the Swedish Ambassador to Turkey.

The grandfather found his beloved grandson a new prestigious job at the Dutch Bank in Haifa. There Raoul Wallenberg met young Jews. They fled from Nazi Germany and talked about the persecution they suffered there. This meeting made the hero of our story realize his genetic connection with the Jewish people and played important role in his future destiny.

Raoul Wallenberg: biography (1937-1944)

The Great Depression in Sweden was not best time to earn a living as an architect, so the young man decided to start his own business and made a deal with a German Jew. The enterprise failed, and in order not to be left without work, Raoul turned to his uncle Jacob, who got his nephew a job in the Central European Union owned by the Jew Kalman Lauer. trading company. A few months later, Wallenberg Raoul was already a partner of the owner of the company and one of its directors. During this period, he often traveled around Europe and was horrified by what he saw in Germany and in countries occupied by the Nazis.

Diplomatic career

Since in those years in Sweden everyone knew which family the young Wallenberg came from (a dynasty of diplomats), in July 1944 Raoul was appointed first secretary of his country's diplomatic mission in Budapest. There he found a way to help local Jews who were facing death: he issued them Swedish “protection passports”, which gave the holders the status of Swedish citizens awaiting repatriation to their homeland.

In addition, he managed to convince some Wehrmacht generals to prevent the implementation of the orders of his command to remove the population of the Budapest ghetto. Thus, he was able to save the lives of the Jews, who were going to be destroyed before the arrival of the Red Army. After the war, it was estimated that as a result of his actions, about 100 thousand people were saved. Suffice it to say that only in Budapest Soviet soldiers They met 97 thousand Jews, while out of all 800 thousand Hungarian Jews, only 204 thousand survived. Thus, almost half of them owed their salvation to the Swedish diplomat.

Wallenberg's fate after the liberation of Hungary from the Nazis

According to some experts, she conducted surveillance during most of Wallenberg's stay in Budapest. As for his future fate after the arrival of the Red Army, various versions were voiced in the world press.

According to one of them, at the beginning of 1945, he and his personal driver V. Langfelder were detained by a Soviet patrol in the building of the International Red Cross (according to another version, he was arrested by the NKVD at his apartment). From there the diplomat was sent to R. Ya. Malinovsky, who at that time commanded the 2nd Ukrainian Front, since he intended to tell him some secret information. There is also an opinion that he was detained by SMERSH officers who decided that Raoul Wallenberg was a spy. The basis for such suspicions could be the presence large quantity gold and money in his car, which could be mistaken for treasure looted by the Nazis, when in fact they were left to the diplomat for safekeeping by rescued Jews. Be that as it may, there are no surviving documents indicating the seizure of large sums of money and jewelry from Raoul Wallenberg, or an inventory of them.

It has been proven that on March 8, 1945, Radio Kossuth, which was under Soviet control, broadcast a message that a Swedish diplomat with the same name had died during the fighting in Budapest.

In the USSR

To find out what happened next to Raoul Wallenberg, researchers were forced to collect facts bit by bit. So, they managed to find out that he was transported to Moscow, where he was placed in the Lubyanka prison. German prisoners who were there during the same period testified that they communicated with him through the “prison telegraph” until 1947, after which he was probably sent somewhere.

After the disappearance of its diplomat in Budapest, Sweden made several inquiries about his fate, but Soviet authorities reported that they did not know where Raoul Wallenberg was. Moreover, in August 1947, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs A. Ya. Vyshinsky officially stated that there was no Swedish diplomat in the USSR. However, in 1957, the Soviet side was forced to admit that Raoul Wallenberg (see photo above) was arrested in Budapest, taken to Moscow and died of a heart attack in July 1947.

At the same time, a note from Vyshinsky to V. M. Molotov (dated May 1947) was discovered in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which he asks to oblige Abakumov to provide a certificate on the Wallenberg case and proposals for his liquidation. Later, the deputy minister himself addresses the country’s Minister of State Security in writing and demands a specific answer to prepare the USSR’s response to the Swedish side’s appeal.

Investigations into the Wallenberg case after the collapse of the USSR

At the end of 2000, on the basis of the Russian Federation Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims political repression"The Prosecutor General's Office made a corresponding decision in the case of the Swedish diplomat R. Wallenberg and V. Langfelder. In conclusion, it was said that in January 1945, these persons, being employees of the Swedish mission in the Hungarian capital, and Wallenberg, among other things, also possessing them, were arrested and kept until their deaths in USSR prisons.

This document was criticized because documents concerning, for example, the reasons for the detention of Wallenberg and Langfelder were not presented to the public.

Research by foreign scientists

In 2010, studies by American historians S. Berger and V. Birshtein were published, in which it was suggested that the version regarding the death of Raoul Wallenberg on July 17, 1947 was false. In the Central Archives of the FSB they found a document stating that 6 days after the indicated date, the head of the 4th department of the 3rd Main Directorate of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR ( military counterintelligence) interrogated “prisoner number 7” for several hours, and then Sandor Katona and Vilmos Langfelder. Since the last two were associated with Wallenberg, scientists assumed that it was his name that was encrypted.

Memory

The Jewish people appreciated everything that Raoul Wallenberg did for their sons during the Holocaust.

A monument to this selfless humanist is located in Moscow. In addition, there are monuments in memory of him in 29 cities on the planet.

In 1981, one of the Hungarian Jews rescued by a diplomat who later emigrated to the United States and became a congressman there initiated the awarding of the title of honorary citizen of that country to Wallenberg. Since then, August 5 has been recognized as his memorial day in the United States.

As already mentioned, in 1963, the Israeli Yad Vashem Institute awarded Raoul Gustav Wallenberg honorary title Righteous Among the Nations, who, in addition to him, was awarded to the German businessman Oskar Schindler, the Polish participant of the Resistance Movement - the fearless Irene Sendler, Wehrmacht officer Wilhelm Hosenfeld, Armenian emigrants who once themselves escaped from genocide in Turkey, the Dilsizans, 197 Russians who are under occupation Jews were hidden in their homes, and representatives of about 5 dozen other nations. A total of 26,119 people for whom the pain of their neighbor was not a stranger.

Family

Wallenberg's mother and stepfather devoted their entire lives to searching for the missing Raoul. They even ordered his half-brother and sister to consider the diplomat alive until the year 2000. Their work was continued by their grandchildren, who also tried to find out how Wallenberg died.

Kofi Annan's wife, Nana Lagergren, Raoul's niece, became a famous fighter against the problems of the millennium and continued the humanistic traditions of her family, the founders of which were her uncle. She also focuses on the problems of children who cannot receive an education due to the poverty of their families. At the same time, there is an opinion that during the genocide in Rwanda, her husband showed himself completely different from Raoul Wallenberg: Kofi Annan initiated the recall of UN peacekeepers from this country, where ethnic conflict, which had disastrous consequences for the Tutsi people.

Now you know who Raoul Wallenberg was, whose biography to this day contains many blank spots. This diplomat from Sweden went down in history as a man who saved thousands of lives, but could not avoid death in prison, where he was sent without trial.

“He climbed onto the roof of the carriage and began pushing security passports into the still unsealed doors. He did not pay attention to the German orders to go down. Then the Arrow Cross people started shooting at him and screaming at him to get out. He did not pay attention to them, and calmly continued to distribute passports into the hands that were reaching for them. I think the Arrow Cross people deliberately aimed over his head because not a single bullet hit him, otherwise this simply could not have happened. I think they did this because they were impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg handed out the last passports, he ordered everyone who had received them to get off the train and go to a line of cars parked nearby - cars in the colors of the Swedish flag. I don't remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens of people from that train, and the Germans and Arrow Cross were so stunned that they let him get away."

(From the memoirs of Sandor Ardai, one of the drivers who worked for Wallenberg)

Arrest

On January 17, 1945, Raoul Wallenberg was invited to the headquarters of Marshal Malinovsky in Debrecen. “I’m going to Malinovsky... I don’t know yet, as a guest or a prisoner” - this last words Wallenberg, about which we know for certain.

In 1993, the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet published information from the military archives of the USSR, which was made public: Wallenberg was arrested on the personal order of the People's Commissar of Defense Nikolai Bulganin, transferred to Malinovsky's headquarters on the day of Wallenberg's disappearance. Ten years later it became known that Wallenberg may have been “turned in” to SMERSH by Vilmos Böhm, a Hungarian politician who worked for Soviet intelligence and shared with his curators his suspicions about Wallenberg’s connections with the intelligence services.

From Debrecen Wallenberg was sent by train to Moscow. On January 21, he was placed in a cell at the Lubyanka, which he was forced to share with Gustav Richter, the political attaché of the German embassy in Romania, Eichmann’s assistant responsible for “ final decision Jewish Question" in this country. On March 1, Richter was transferred from there and never saw Wallenberg again. During interrogation in Sweden in 1955, Richter said that Wallenberg was interrogated for an hour and a half on at least one occasion.

After arrest

Further fate Raoul Wallenberg is unknown. The USSR government first denied Wallenberg's kidnapping, then stated that he died of a heart attack.

There is documentary evidence that he was shot or killed lethal injection July 17, 1947. However, there is also indirect evidence that Wallenberg died much later, that he continued to be interrogated and that interrogations could last 16 hours. And some former prisoners claimed that they met him “in the zone” and in psychiatric clinics even in the 80s.

To this day, Raoul Wallenberg's relatives continue to seek Russian government revealing the truth about his death.

The motives that guided the Soviet leaders in making the decision to arrest Wallenberg are not precisely known. According to some reports, he was supposed to be exchanged for one of the Soviet defectors. It is possible that they wanted to turn him into an agent of Soviet influence in the Israeli direction. However, the main version is considered to be interest Soviet side to Wallenberg's connections with American intelligence, as well as to information about the German intelligence services that he may have possessed.

In 1996, the CIA declassified a number of documents related to Wallenberg, from which it follows that he, most likely, was not just a person who agreed to carry out a complex and dangerous mission to rescue Hungarian Jews, but also an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (which, of course, is not true). does not in any way detract from his merits).

Four years later, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office officially rehabilitated Wallenberg with the following wording: “Wallenberg and [his driver] Vilmos Langfelder in January 1945, being employees of the Swedish mission in Budapest, and Wallenberg, in addition, having diplomatic immunity of a neutral country that did not fight against the USSR , were detained and arrested under the guise of prisoners of war and were held long time until their death in Soviet prisons, suspected of spying for foreign intelligence services."

In 2012, FSB Lieutenant General Vasily Khristoforov said that data on Wallenberg had not been made public because his case had not yet been closed.

In 2016, the Swedish tax authorities officially declared Raoul Wallenberg dead, although the place and time of his death have not yet been established.

Memory

Monuments to Raoul Wallenberg are erected in many cities around the world. Wallenberg is an honorary citizen of Israel. Wallenberg was also given honorary citizenship of Canada and Hungary.

One of the Hungarian Jews saved by Wallenberg, American Congressman Tom Lantos, initiated the awarding of the title of honorary US citizen to him. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal "in recognition of his achievements and for his heroic actions during the Holocaust."

To “perpetuate the humanistic ideals and nonviolent courage of Raoul Wallenberg,” a committee in his name was created in America, which annually awards the Raoul Wallenberg Prize to people who realize these ideals.

The Israeli Institute of Catastrophe and Heroism Yad Vashem officially awarded Wallenberg the title of “Righteous Among the Nations.”

There is another version of the story of the rescue of the ghetto: the Spanish Consul General in Hungary Giorgio Perlaska, who personally saved over 5,200 Jews, accused Szelai of lying during trial, and argued that although Wallenberg saved thousands of people, the credit for saving the ghetto still did not belong to him. Perlaska said that he became aware of the Nazis' plans to burn the ghetto with all its inhabitants, and then he went to the basement of the Budapest City Hall, where the residence of Gabor Vajna, a staunch National Socialist who headed the Hungarian Ministry of Internal Affairs in the government of the Nazi Szalasi, the leader of the Arrow Cross, was located. . Perlasca began to intimidate Vaina with legal and economic measures against three thousand Hungarian citizens allegedly living in Spain, which his government would take if the ghetto was destroyed, and with the fact that two Latin American countries. In fact, Perlasca was bluffing, and there were much fewer Hungarians in Spain than he said, but Vaina believed him and the ghetto was not destroyed. On January 18, it was liberated by Soviet troops.

Nowadays it is difficult to hide something. Gradually, everything secret loses its mysterious flair.
Does this make it easier? Hardly. “Many knowledge - many sorrows” is true. But to live with closed eyes, deaf ears, a sleeping heart - is this life? Everything that comes affects you in one way or another. And if it awakens the heart and sharpens the mind, it means it didn’t come in vain.

"Ogonyok Magazine"
THE MYSTERY OF WALLENBERG
Fedor Lukyanov
A car with a driver, a Hungarian Langfelder, and accompanying documents signed by General Chernyshev, commandant of the Zuglo region, was waiting for him below. Finally, the diplomat reminded the embassy staff: serious valuables remain in his safe at the National Bank - diamonds and

Large sums of money that he received to save Jews. Wallenberg then got into the car blue and retreated towards the Ujpest region. Since that day, January 17, 1945, no one has seen the Swedish diplomat and his driver. A couple of weeks later he was already in Lubyanka.

Secret mission
32-year-old Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944. Hungary was already occupied by the Germans: Hitler did not trust the “friendly regime” of Admiral Horthy, who, as the front approached the Hungarian borders, was increasingly looking for ways out of the war. Hitler was aware: on the night of March 18, 1944, 11 German divisions occupied the country in 12 hours, and power passed to Governor Wesenmeyer, who gave orders on the composition of the new government. An orgy began: arrests, robberies, deportations of Hungarian Jews, whose community was one of the largest in Europe (about 700 thousand). Trainloads of prisoners were sent to concentration camps in Germany and Austria - thousands of people a day in cattle cars.

Actually, Wallenberg’s arrival in Budapest was connected precisely with this. Much is known about his activities to save Hungarian Jews, but until recently few people understood why a graduate of the University of Michigan in the USA with a degree in civil engineering, the son richest family Swedish industrialists arrived with a diplomatic passport in front-line Budapest. This became clear recently when intelligence archives were declassified in the United States: Wallenberg had a secret mission.

It all started with chance meeting in Stockholm: in the elevator of one of the offices in May 1944, the Hungarian Jew Kalman Lauer, the head of a small export-import company, and Iver Olsen, an American intelligence officer who worked as a financial specialist at the US Embassy, ​​crossed paths. Olsen asked Lauer to find “some strong Swede” who would agree to go to Budapest to save Jews. Lauer suggested his collaborator Raoul Wallenberg, who had already been to Budapest more than once. Olsen and Wallenberg met and liked each other. The officer was impressed that Wallenberg was a staunch anti-fascist and had sympathy for the United States. In addition, he spoke five languages, including German, and wanted to prove himself in big deal.

True, the biography was alarming: the Wallenberg family was involved in the supply of steel and bearings for the Wehrmacht. But Olsen managed to convince his colleagues. As follows from the documents, President Roosevelt himself approved Wallenberg’s candidacy for the Budapest mission. The task included not only saving Jews, but also establishing connections with anti-fascists and collecting information. This did not mean that Wallenberg became a career intelligence officer. Yes, this was not required.

The Swedish Foreign Ministry assigned Wallenberg to the post of secretary of the embassy in Budapest without any problems (Stockholm tried to soften the Americans who demanded an end to trade with Germany). Wallenberg had to work using money from the War Refugee Council (WRB), created by order of Roosevelt in January 1944: the Council was funded by Jewish organizations and was in close contact with intelligence. Serious means - currency ($225 thousand) and diamonds - greatly facilitated the Swede's mission. He simply bought many officials of the occupation and Hungarian administration for cash. As Olsen reported to Washington, Wallenberg was in such a hurry to begin the mission that he rushed off on the road with only a backpack and a revolver, without waiting for instructions.

Money and diamonds did the impossible: Wallenberg declared entire houses in the ghetto “protected” by the Swedish crown. In six months, at least 20 thousand Jews were saved

Life in exchange for soap
Alas, by the time Wallenberg arrived, most of the Jews had been exterminated. The SS Sonderkommando of Adolf Eichmann, sent to “solve the Jewish question,” systematically scoured the cities and villages. They were helped by 20 thousand Hungarian gendarmes. By July 9, 1944, when the Swede appeared in Hungary, 434,352 Jews had been taken from the country. Over 200 thousand more remained in “work camps” and metropolitan ghettos.

At first, Wallenberg's task was modest: to organize the departure of at least 300-400 Jews to Sweden or Palestine. Gradually he felt weak points authorities - fear and money. The Red Army was inexorably advancing towards the Hungarian border, and this made the diplomat's arguments more convincing.

By the way, Raoul was not the first: saving Jews in Budapest in different times Up to 30 groups were involved. The first, perhaps, was the group of the Transylvanian leader of the Zionist movement, Regé Kastner, which negotiated with Himmler’s people about the ransom of ghetto prisoners, since the Germans, immediately after the occupation of Hungary, asked the Jewish community for $2 million to cancel the deportations. A little later, Eichmann offered to exchange the lives of a million Hungarian Jews for 10 thousand trucks, 2 million bars of soap, 800 tons of coffee and 200 tons of tea. Negotiations on this matter with the participation of Himmler’s people and representatives of international Jewish circles began in Budapest in May. They lasted until July 1944, although the Germans had already begun deportations.

Kastner achieved a lot. A ransom of 5 million Swiss francs saved at least 15 thousand prisoners - several trains that did not reach Auschwitz. There is evidence that for this money, neutral Sweden supplied Germany with a large batch of trucks from the Scania-Wabny plant (it was controlled by the Wallenberg family). But Raoul himself acted differently.

The Swede managed, under the noses of the Germans, to negotiate with the Hungarians to issue ghetto residents 1,500 “Schütz passports” - unofficial “Swedish passports” invented by him, which gave the owners a kind of “safe-conduct”. It was believed that he managed to increase the number of passports to 4,500, although in fact three times more were issued. Wallenberg's staff eventually grew to dozens of people who, day and night, printed and distributed life-saving passports on yellow paper with blue Swedish coats of arms.

The embassies of Switzerland, Spain and Portugal, as well as the Vatican mission, began to work in Budapest using the same methodology. Wallenberg managed to put the “rescue mechanism” into operation: money and diamonds did the impossible. Entire houses in the ghetto were declared by him to be “protected” by the Swedish crown. During the six-month mission, Wallenberg managed to save at least 20 thousand people.

At the same time, Wallenberg also carried out instructions from his boss Kalman Lauer. Their character is evidenced by Lauer’s letter dated October 28, 1944, in which the boss asked to find a fruit preservation specialist and baker in Budapest. In another letter, Lauer instructs Raoul to conduct a deal to purchase foie gras and tomato paste. It is curious that Lauer also informed Wallenberg about his negotiations with the Soviet trade mission in Stockholm and recommended that “if he does not manage to escape from Budapest in time, return home via Moscow to settle some matters there.” In the letter, Lauer promised to come to Moscow himself when Wallenberg was there. Is this why the Swede so easily joined the headquarters of the Soviet troops in January 1945?

Duel with Eichmann
Of course, the Germans also paid attention to the energetic diplomat. In November 1944, after the Hungarian “national leader” Ferenc Szalasi came to power, he resumed deportations from new strength, Adolf Eichmann, in front of witnesses, stated that the Swiss consul Lutz, the Swede Wallenberg and the Red Cross officials should be held accountable for “abuses with Schutz passports, for all this disgusting”... Following this, a meeting between Wallenberg and Eichmann took place.

Raoul's colleague, former attache of the Swedish embassy Lars Gustafson Berg, told about it. According to him, Wallenberg himself invited the SS chief to dinner to see who he was dealing with. The same curiosity motivated Eichmann: he accepted the invitation. Wallenberg turned to Berg for help - to help receive the guest. So Berg witnessed a historical meeting.

At first everything went quietly and peacefully: wine, snacks, conversation. When they moved into the living room and served coffee, Wallenberg opened the curtains on the windows and the dark sky was illuminated by flashes of Russian artillery: the Red Army was completing the encirclement of Budapest. The impression, according to Berg, was stunning, and Raoul started talking about the imminent end of the war, predicting complete defeat for the Germans. Berg believes that Wallenberg wanted to warn Eichmann: it was better to stop the deportations. The indignation of the SS chief knew no bounds: to criticize the Fuhrer, and even in an occupied city?

Yes, Mr. Wallenberg, you are right,” Eichmann answered through clenched teeth. “I never believed in Nazism, but it gave me power.” Of course, they will no longer bring me wine and women by plane from Paris, the Russians will take away my horses, dogs and apartments, and I, an SS officer, will be shot on the spot. However, I warn you: I have enough time and strength to stop you...

Soon, a heavy German truck on one of the streets crushed the car of a Swedish diplomat, who, however, was not inside. As for the chief of the SS in Hungary, he fled in December 1944 to Latin America, where he was kidnapped by Israeli special forces in 1961: Eichmann was executed when he was already in the Promised Land.

Wallenberg's fate repeated that of former Hungarian Prime Minister Bethlen. Both came forward Soviet troops, both ended up in Lubyanka, both died “from cardiac arrest”

Wallenberg's prison card, which was registered on him in the Internal Prison of the NKGB of the USSR and emerged from the secret archives only in 1991, indicates the date of arrest: January 19, 1945. There is an empty space in the “nature of the crime” column. This means that the Swede was arrested the day after Malinovsky's arrival at headquarters. SMERSH officers immediately took care of him.

Wallenberg was not the only foreign diplomat in Budapest to be arrested by Soviet counterintelligence. The Swiss envoy Feller Harald was taken into custody (released a year later), ex-Hungarian Prime Minister Istvan Bethlen, who was trying to conclude separate peace with allies. In those days SMERSH in the countries Eastern Europe According to some reports, up to 30 diplomats were arrested. This was done with the aim of later exchanging them for the right people in the West.

Today we can say with confidence: Wallenberg came to the attention of Soviet counterintelligence long before January 1945. As it turned out recently, the Russian emigrant Count Tolstoy-Kutuzov, a descendant of two famous families from among the first wave of emigrants, who worked at the Swedish embassy at the same time as Wallenberg, was an agent of Soviet intelligence and could not help but know about the Swede’s connections with the US intelligence services.

One of the top leaders of Soviet intelligence of those years, Pavel Sudoplatov, in his memoirs “Intelligence and the Kremlin” admits: “our agent Kutuzov” participated in the development of Wallenberg, who was suspected of contacts with American, British and even German intelligence. Allegedly, several meetings between Wallenberg and the chief of German intelligence, Schellenberg, were recorded. This fact has not been confirmed, but Raul’s contacts with confidant Himmler - Kurt Becher, who, on behalf of his boss, was looking for contacts with the allies in Budapest on the subject of a separate peace. It is possible that the Americans recent months During the war, through the Swede Wallenberg, they tried to establish contacts with the German leadership.

The special “Wallenberg Commission,” which studied the circumstances of the Swede’s disappearance, in one of its last reports devoted an entire chapter to Count Tolstoy-Kutuzov as a person who could inform Moscow about Wallenberg’s connections. The history of its “implementation” is interesting. Count Tolstoy-Kutuzov, according to Sudoplatov, was recruited back in 1920, when he lived in Brussels, having escaped execution in Russia in 1918. Arriving in Hungary in 1940, he began working as a language teacher in aristocratic families and made connections with Russian emigrants, who soon elected him chairman of their club.

In this capacity, the count met the Swedish ambassador Danielsson. The Bethlen family became his close friends, especially Countess Rosa Bethlen, sister-in-law of the ruler of Hungary, Miklos Horthy (Tolstoy-Kutuzov himself writes about this in his memoirs published in Germany). In a word, "agent Kutuzov" could receive important information from the highest Hungarian leadership. The Hungarians allegedly suspected something, but this did not stop the agent in the summer of 1944 - after the occupation of the country by the Germans - from getting a job at the Swedish Embassy, ​​where he was assigned to deal with Soviet prisoners of war. At the same time, Wallenberg came to the embassy, ​​all of whose activities took place before the eyes of Tolstoy-Kutuzov.

Events develop even more strangely after the arrival of the Red Army: the condemned count is not arrested, but is appointed responsible for communications Soviet command with the embassies of neutral countries. True, at the beginning of 1951, as Tolstoy-Kutuzov writes in his memoirs, he was “exiled” from the country, but also strangely: not to the east, but to Paris, in a 1st class carriage. The “red count” eventually settled in Dublin, where he died in 1982. They say that the day after his death, seven people from Soviet embassy. We searched everything from the basement to the attic. What they were looking for, what they found - a mystery that, perhaps, would dot the i’s both in the “Wallenberg case” and in the history of the struggle for a “separate peace”, for which Hungary became a testing ground.

Be that as it may, in the winter of 1945 in Moscow they immediately realized which bird was caught in the net. Everyone was informed about Wallenberg's arrest Soviet leadership. Suffice it to say that the order to arrest the diplomat, who has immunity status, was signed by Bulganin, Stalin’s deputy at the People’s Commissariat of Defense. Of course, other members of management were aware.

Death on Lubyanka

At first it didn't really look like an arrest. Wallenberg was placed in a special unit of the internal prison at Lubyanka, where especially important persons were kept, who were persuaded to cooperate, and if they refused, they were liquidated. The atmosphere was reminiscent of a hotel, food was brought from restaurants. According to rumors, Stalin personally approved the menu: he allegedly added black caviar to the diplomat’s diet.

At first, the Kremlin did not deny that Wallenberg was in Moscow. In response to a request from the Swedish side in February 1945, Ambassador Alexandra Kollontai informed the diplomat’s mother that her son was safe and protected Soviet Union. However, after all types of requests (in addition to eight notes from the Swedish Foreign Ministry, there was, for example, a personal message to Stalin from Albert Einstein), the answer was silence. The attempt to involve US President Truman also failed.

All this time, Wallenberg's interrogations continued. Today we can only guess in what directions the work went: the interrogation protocols were declared destroyed. Maybe they will be found, as, for example, key documents on Katyn case, but I dare say not soon.

There are actually two reasons. Firstly, the "Budapest Swede" with his extensive connections was a valuable source of information. The recruitment of such valuable personnel promised Soviet intelligence access to new frontiers in the beginning confrontation with the Americans. Well, if Wallenberg really conducted behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Germans on behalf of the Americans, then he became an important witness.

Secondly, SMERSH quickly realized that through Wallenberg they could reach Swedish banks and Jewish financial circles in the USA. At first after the war, Stalin seriously thought about attracting foreign capital to restore the economy of the USSR. In the same vein, there was talk about the creation of a Jewish republic in Crimea.

It is worth adding that Moscow already had similar experience working with the Swedes. In 1942, at the height of the war, with the help of the Swedish actor and satirist Karl Gerhard (according to some sources, an agent), Moscow managed to negotiate an important deal: to obtain high-quality Swedish steel for aircraft construction in exchange for platinum. The bank through which the transaction took place belonged to the Wallenberg family, and Karl Gerhard was friends with Raoul's uncle, Marcus. And even now, after the war, Moscow began negotiations with Stockholm on a huge loan for the purchase of machine tools, steam locomotives, and trawlers. The knot was pulled even tighter by the intrigue with the post-war structure of Finland, where the Wallenbergs had financial interests.

In a word, Lubyanka had big plans for Raoul Wallenberg. But, apparently, the stubborn Swede “did not want to understand” what was required of him, and time passed. In October 1946, a Soviet-Swedish loan agreement was signed on fabulous terms for that time: presumably, the uncertainty factor with the Wallenberg offspring played a role. Besides it's over Nuremberg trial- as a witness to the secret games of the Americans with the Germans, Wallenberg was no longer needed. By the summer of 1947, Sudoplatov admits, the “Wallenberg case” had reached a dead end.
The advanced units of the 2nd Ukrainian reached the Hungarian capital on December 20, 1944. The bloody battles for Budapest were in full swing when a young man, 1st Secretary of the Embassy of neutral Sweden, Raoul Wallenberg, appeared at the Red Cross office at 16 Benzur Street.

The Swede explained: the Russians would most likely liberate this area first, and then he would quickly be able to personally contact Commander Malinovsky to provide him with important information about the Jewish ghetto on the banks of the Danube. Wallenberg was in a hurry: according to his information, the Nazis were preparing complete extermination.

He was not mistaken: Lieutenant Dmitry Demchinkov, who liberated the Red Cross building on January 13, immediately provided Wallenberg with security. Already on the 14th, Raul appeared at the mission in a Soviet car and said that he was going to Debrecen, where Malinovsky’s headquarters and the Hungarian Provisional Government were located. Two days later, when Soviet units liberated Pest, Wallenberg showed up with a backpack on his shoulders at the Swedish embassy with the news that they had managed to save most of ghetto prisoners. Now he goes to Debrecen with peace of mind.
On the other hand, releasing a witness who had been through the main prison of the regime meant complete self-exposure in a situation that had already begun cold war from the USA. Therefore, the version of Wallenberg’s poisoning, alas, today seems the most plausible. The special “Laboratory X”, operating next to Lubyanka, had already worked out poisons, the characteristic signs of which were sudden cardiac arrest or heart attack. Let us recall that it was Smoltsov, the head of the medical service of the internal prison at Lubyanka, who diagnosed 35-year-old Wallenberg with a heart attack - according to documents, on July 17, 1947.

The body was ordered cremated without an autopsy. The most ominous thing is that shortly before this, in a memo addressed to Molotov, Prosecutor General Vyshinsky wrote: “Since the Wallenberg case continues to remain without progress, I ask you to oblige Comrade Abakumov (head of the MGB - “O”) to provide a certificate on the merits of the case and proposals for its liquidation." It must be understood that it was proposed to liquidate not only the “business”, but also the person himself.

Instead of an afterword
Wallenberg's fate surprisingly repeated the fate of former Hungarian Prime Minister Istvan Bethlen. Both went out to meet the Soviet troops, both ended up in Lubyanka, both died “of cardiac arrest” - only Bethlen earlier, in October 1946...

Only in 1957, already under Khrushchev, the Soviet government, in a special “Gromyko Memorandum,” acknowledged the fact of the death of the Swedish prisoner of Lubyanka. However, the search for Wallenberg himself did not stop until the mid-1990s. Academician Sakharov searched for the Swede in Soviet camps. Under Gorbachev, who was personally asked about this by German Chancellor Kohl, the case was re-investigated under the supervision of Bakatin. The investigation confirmed the fact of death in prison.

Already under President Putin at the beginning of 2000 Home military prosecutor's office decided to rehabilitate Raoul Wallenberg and his driver Langfelder, although no one formally tried them. Finally, when he was chairman of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev handed over some of Wallenberg’s personal belongings to the Chief Rabbi of Russia, Berl Lazar, for the Holocaust museum being created in Moscow. Prior to this, personal belongings the deceased's family Wallenberg was handed over in the late 1980s by the deputy chairman of the Soviet Peace Committee, Radomir Bogdanov. I wonder how many more personal belongings of the Swede are stored in the archives of the secret services?

It would seem that it’s time to put an end to the Wallenberg case, but it doesn’t work out. The Americans seem to have declassified their archives, but the question remains: is that all? There is something in them that says nothing about Washington’s contacts through Wallenberg with the German leadership at the height of the war. Not all materials on this case were declassified by the Swedish authorities. Is it any wonder that all this gave rise to perhaps the most incredible version - that Wallenberg allegedly initially worked for Soviet intelligence, which “hooked” him back in the days of his “leftist youth”. Rumor has it that there are documents about this somewhere. In a word, in the “Wallenberg case” the time has come not for dots, but for monuments. The brightest of them appeared recently in Budapest in addition to two already existing ones. In memory of the deportations of Jews, which the Swedish diplomat prevented, shoes began to be left on the Danube embankment - as traces of the lives that Raoul Wallenberg tried, but could not save.
11.05.2010 14-38"

The memory of the Swedish after Raoul Wallenberg (1912-1947) is immortalized in the history of the Great Patriotic War. Monuments to him stand in many parts of the world: Stockholm, Moscow, New York, Budapest, Tel Aviv, etc. Wallenberg is responsible for tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews saved during the Holocaust. With such merits, the traces of the diplomat are lost somewhere in the dungeons of the KGB, and the file against him is stored in the archives of this organization. There are different versions about why Raoul Wallenberg was arrested in 1945 and how he could have ended his days.

Activities in Hungary

In July 1944, Wallenberg arrived in Hungary as secretary of the Swedish diplomatic mission. By this time, 400 thousand Jews had already been exterminated in the country. The Germans planned to liquidate another 200 thousand living in the capital of Hungary. The operation was led by Adolf Eichmann. Wallenberg was not a professional diplomat, but he could use his position to save persecuted Jews.

He gave them blue and yellow “protection passports” with the Swedish coat of arms on the cover. They could not be real passports of the Kingdom of Sweden, but they made an impression on the Germans. The so-called “Swedish houses” were also opened, in which Hungarian Jews were under the protection of Sweden. Thanks to all these activities launched by Wallenberg, many tens of thousands of representatives of the nation being destroyed by the fascists were saved.

Very often Wallenberg acted at his own risk, without having any authority to do so. So he protected the Jewish ghetto from the explosion and saved more than 100 thousand people in early 1945, threatening the commander of the operation, General Schmidthuber, with court after the war. Wallenberg had no further arguments. Nevertheless, it worked.

Wallenberg's arrest

Hungarian Jews greeted the arrival of USSR troops in Budapest with jubilation. They had no idea what fate awaited their savior Wallenberg. He was arrested on January 13. After this, traces of him are lost. On March 8 of the same year, Budapest radio announced that a Swedish diplomat had died in action during the Soviet offensive.

There are three versions of how the arrest could have happened. According to one of them, Raul was detained by a Red Cross patrol, and after that by Soviet counterintelligence. According to the second, he voluntarily came to the Soviet rifle division and demanded a meeting with her commander. According to the third version, SMERSH agents arrested the Swedish diplomat right at his home, in an apartment in Budapest.

The further fate of the savior of the Jews

According to some reports, a lot of gold was found in Wallenberg's car, entrusted to him by the Jews during the occupation of Budapest. These values ​​were not registered anywhere. After the ambassador's arrest they disappeared. Most likely, they “settled” in the pockets of the same counterintelligence officers.

Immediately after the war, Sweden made many inquiries to the USSR regarding the whereabouts of its subject. She was told that there was no such thing on the territory of the Land of Soviets. Only 10 years later Sweden received a different answer: Wallenberg was arrested as a spy and transported to Moscow. He died on July 17, 1947, allegedly from a heart attack.

Reasons for arrest

The arrest warrant signed by N.A. Bulganin does not say anything about the reasons why Raul was arrested in 1945. Everything was done with the mystery present in SMERSH. It was later proven that the Swedish diplomat ended up in prison at Lubyanka after this. Bulganin reported directly to Stalin and acted only in agreement with him.

According to the discovered documents, all of Wallenberg’s activities in Budapest were monitored during the war. It seemed suspicious to Soviet counterintelligence that Sweden was issuing those same “protection passports” to various “unverified persons.” SMERSH suspected that anti-Soviet spies were trying to hide from reprisals in this way.