Abstract
By the time the War Refugee Board was operational in early 1944, most of the European Jews had been exterminated. The largest remaining concentration of Jews, approximately eight hundred thousand, was in Hungary. Although anti-Semitic decrees were instituted in Hungary by the start of the war, none of the Jews had been murdered. Realizing that Hungary needed to be a buffer zone between Austria and the advancing Russian army invading from the south and east, as well as recognizing that Hungary’s remaining Jews were obstacles to the Nazi goal of making Europe Judenrein, the Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944. Immediately they set up a puppet government and installed General Döme Sztójay as prime minister. Coinciding with the invasion, Adolf Eichmann brought in his experienced murderers, including Dieter Wisliceny, Anton Brunner, Hermann Krumey, Theodore Dannecker, and Siegfried Seidl, to manage the deportations.
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Notes
Harvey Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, rev. ed. (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1995), 11.
John Bierman, Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 39.
Philip Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), 159.
David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 241. Although Wallenberg’s mission was funded by the United States, it was a Swedish, not an American, effort to help save Hungarian Jews.
Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 212.
Michael Nicholson and David Winner, Raoul Wallenberg: The Swedish Diplomat Who Saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazi Holocaust before Mysteriously Disappearing (Milwaukee: Gareth Stevens, 1989), 6.
In truth, a similar approach had already been taken in Budapest by the Swedish minister Carl Ivan Danielsson, who had issued six hundred provisional passports to Jews who had personal or financial ties to the Swedish government. Wallenberg went one step further by issuing protective passports for individuals who had no direct connection to Sweden. The Hungarians and Germans accepted these stipulations because they probably did not want to challenge Wallenberg’s authority emanating from a neutral country. See Arthur D. Morse, When Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Woodstock, N.Y: Overlook Press, 1998), 363–364.
See Bierman, Righteous Gentile, 83, 86. Two thousand is probably accurate, although several Holocaust historians place the number higher. For example, Arieh L. Bauminger claims that Wallenberg rescued twenty thousand Jews from the death marches. See Bauminger, Roll of Honour (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1970), 80.
Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, trans. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 648.
Nicholas Wenckheim, Image and Likeness, trans. Wanda Grabia (Hicksville, N.Y: Exposition Press, 1979), 13–14. All subsequent citations are from this edition and are included within parentheses in the text.
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© 2012 Gene A. Plunka
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Plunka, G.A. (2012). The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg: Nicholas Wenckheim’s Image and Likeness . In: Staging Holocaust Resistance. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000613_9
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