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Today I honor and pay tribute to Raoul Wallenberg, someone I consider one of the greatest heroes in history. You're probably familiar with what he did for the Hungarian Jews in Budapest during World War II so I'll only present a condensed version here. For more details I commend you to The Blessed Google which has more than 25,000 references to him.

His story is something very close to my heart, having shared it exactly eleven years ago today from the pulpit while assisting at a Unitarian religious service entitled Courage.

He was born August 4, 1912, to one of the most famous families in Sweden. His family wanted him to become a banker in keeping with family tradition but he found that his interest lay more with architecture and trade and in 1935 received his BS in Architecture. With little demand for that profession at that time in Sweden, however, he ultimately wound up working in the banking business anyway at a Dutch bank located in Haifa later that year.

Which was where he became aware of the Nazi persecutions of the Jews in Germany, something that touched him very deeply. Which set him on the long path that ultimately led to his being appointed first secretary at the Swedish legation in Budapest in June of 1944 with the mission to start a rescue operation for the 230,000 Jews still left in that city. By the time he arrived on Sunday, July 9, more than 400,000 had already been deported to Adolf Eichmann's Final Solution concentration camps during the prior two months. Plans had been already been drawn up to eliminate all those who were left.

There's not enough space here to do justice to the full story of what happened subsequently, so again I urge you to access the Internet resources for this. In brief, this man, through his determination, imagination, bravery, quick thinking and compassion, successfully confronted absolute evil and was responsible for the rescue of approximately 100,000 Jews over the following six months. He accomplished this through superb organization along with unconventional means such as bribes and extortion threats to get results.

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Both photos courtesy of us-israel.org

The first thing he did upon arriving in Budapest was to design a special Swedish protective pass that told the Germans that the holder was under the protection of a neutral country. Although ultimately issued in quantities that would gain respect even from our Sir Printsalot, they were highly effective in doing their job since the design took full advantage of the Germans' weakness for flashy symbols, stamps and signatures.

On numerous occasions his car, with just him and his driver inside and both unarmed, would screech to a halt beside a railroad siding while the Jews were being loaded aboard the train. He'd jump out of the car, climb to the top of the boxcars and thrust handfuls of these passes inside, ignoring German orders to stop, ignoring the soldiers when they opened fire when he didn't stop. And he was never harmed - his courage was so admired by the soldiers they deliberately aimed too high.

He established a network of safe houses in the city which he declared Swedish territory and that flew the Swedish flag and which, in most cases, was respected by the Germans and their Hungarian allies, the Arrow Cross. Eventually there were thirty of these safe havens housing some 15,000 people.

He established an intelligence network throughout the city that instantly alerted him to life-or-death situations to give him the opportunity to intervene before it was too late.

In the second week of January, 1945, Eichmann ordered General August Schmidthuber, commander-in-chief for the German troops in Hungary, to massacre all of the remaining Jews in the larger (unprotected) ghetto. Wallenberg, who by then had had a price put on his head by the Germans, had Pa'l Szalay, a high-ranking police officer and an Arrow Cross member who was one of his bribed allies, deliver a note to the general which said that if the massacre was carried out, the general would be hunted down after the war was over, tried as a war criminal and hanged. At the last minute, because of this note, the general cancelled the order and there was no massacre with over 70,000 lives being saved as a result.

Two days later the Red Army entered the city and found 97,000 Jews still alive in Budapest's two Jewish ghettos. A total of 120,000 Jews had survived the Nazi extermination in Hungary.

On January 13 Raoul Wallenberg requested permision to visit the Soviet military headquarters in the city of Debrecen as Swedish chargé d'affaires for the Russian-liberated parts of Hungary.

On January 17, 1945, fifty-nine years ago today, after saying goodbye to his friends at the safe houses, Raoul Wallenberg and his driver, Vilmos Langfedler, left Budapest under Russian escort. He thought they would be back within eight days. Neither one of them ever returned.

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Updated January 17, 2004.
Updated August 4, 2004, with further information regarding the hero's possible fate.