By Ingrid Carlberg
Maclehose Press, £30
Investigative journalist Ingrid Carlberg's biography of Raoul Wallenberg, the young Swedish diplomat who faced down the Gestapo and rescued Jews in Budapest during the murderous months of 1944 when Hungary came under Nazi occupation, follows quite closely on the heels of that by historian Bengt Jangfeldt.
Carlberg's approach is altogether more forensic and she has unearthed a staggering amount of detail. At last, we are made to understand the full reasons why the courageous Swede was arrested in January 1945 and brutally incarcerated for years as an "American spy" by the Soviets, who denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. He was finally executed by Stalin's secret police, the NKVD.
Wallenberg's rescue mission had been funded by the War Refugee Board, an agency of the US State Department, of which the Soviets were highly suspicious. This same agency had helped 30,000 Baltic citizens flee to Sweden when the Red Army invaded the Baltic states the same year. Predictably, the Soviets labelled those refugees as "fascistic elements". Add to this the fact that Wallenberg was a scion of Sweden's pre-eminent capitalist family - i.e. a "class enemy" - and his fate was as good as sealed. His arrest was ordered by Stalin, who, as Carlberg puts it: "saw spies everywhere, who himself had spies everywhere".
One of those spies was at the Swedish legation in Budapest, who reported to the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation, Smersh, that Wallenberg was extending protection to thousands with no connection to Sweden, including "fascists, secret agents for enemy nations and other counter-revolutionary elements". All patently untrue, but Smersh was expert in misrepresentation. For Stalin, the Cold War began before the hot war was over and this perverted picture fitted his paranoid imaginings.
Wallenberg's commitment overrode his colleagues' warnings
The truth was that Wallenberg, at daily risk to his own life, gave Swedish protective documents to Jewish men, women and children with tenuous or no connection to Sweden, in order to save them from deportation to Auschwitz. Not many people personally took on Eichmann and his Final Solution. Wallenberg did, and he won. When the Red Army entered Budapest, he eagerly sought out the Soviet authorities in order present his plan for post-war aid and restitution to Hungary's surviving Jewish population. Carlberg shows that he was rather naïve and too trusting of the Russians. His self-confidence and commitment to his cause overrode the warnings of colleagues at the Swedish legation. If he'd stayed with them, he would probably have survived. But isolated, he was easily spirited away.
Murder followed by cover-up was the order of the day during the Stalinist terror years. How tragic that, under Putin, things seem to be much the same. Alexander Litvinenko, politician Boris Nemtsov, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky - the list goes on. It's true that those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. The problem is, they just don't care.
