Carles Pérez-Desoy
Diplomat
On 17 January 1945, the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, known as “the hero with no weapons and no grave”, disappeared. He was the only diplomat that had not run away from Budapest faced with the advance of the Soviet troops. That day, Wallenberg moved to the locality of Debrecen to meet the soviet commander marshal Malinovski to discuss the future of the Jewish survivors in Hungary. Soviets suspected the diplomats of neutral countries and were afraid that Wallenberg was a North American spy. He was arrested and since then his death has been a mystery. He supposedly died on 17 July 1947 at Lubyanka’s basements, the headquarters of the KGB in Moscow: the same place where his diplomatic passport and his cigar case appeared in 1989.
Wallenberg, aged 32 years old, had arrived to Nyugati’s station in Budapest on Sunday 9 July 1944 to join the Swedish Embassy in Hungary after 30 hours travelling from Berlin in the former Orient Express, confiscated by the German. With the war lost, Germany sped up the “final solution” and Eichmann had ordered the deportation to Poland of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews.
He had received instructions to save the Jews from the deportation to extermination camps. But, how? Wallenberg, with an extraordinary combination of audacity and imagination, made an important contribution to the international law that has later had significant consequences: the use of institutions of diplomatic law with humanitarian objectives, for which they were never conceived.
In the first place, Wallenberg sought the protection of his diplomatic immunity to carry out his humanitarian work. This way, he would open a new path that now benefits, for example, civil servants of international bodies investigating violations of human rights in the world. On the other hand, the UN and the International Red Cross also promote initiatives –still emerging- to protect voluntary workers risking their life in wars and natural disasters.
His work as diplomat in Hungary allowed him saving tens of thousands of Jews of the Holocaust
His other great contribution was the innovative use of the inviolability of the Embassies to protect persecuted Jews, taking them to more than 30 buildings where the Swedish flag was waving. The formula of giving shelter to refugees in several Embassies of Madrid had already been used during the Spanish Civil War. But these gave asylum waiting for the authorities of the Republic to issue the corresponding safe-conduct so that the refugees could leave Spain to go to the country that had granted the political asylum.
It was not the case of Budapest in 1944, where the idea of asylum and the option of safe-conducts were excluded. The novelty introduced by Wallenberg was the creation of “safe heavens” de facto to take in people and save them from deportation and extermination taking advantage of the inviolability of the diplomatic quarters. An important and new nuance that has later been used in international treaties extrapolating this idea of inviolability to guarantee the security of refugees in cases of armed conflict; or for the protection of cultural heritage in cases of war.
He barely spent half a year in Budapest, but Wallenberg’s initiative, supported by other neutral diplomats such as the Spanish Sanz Briz, the Nuncio Rota and the Swiss Lutz (all of them recognized by the Museum of the Holocaust as “Righteous among the nations”), allowed saving one hundred thousand people.
Besides, Wallenberg also issued the famous “Schutz-Pass” (protected passports) –designed by him-, which turned persecuted Jews into assumed “Swedish citizens waiting for repatriation”. Although these were not legally valid –a piece of yellow paper with Sweden’s emblem-, the German and Hungarian authorities accepted them.
During the recent inauguration event of the exhibition “Más allá del deber” (Beyond duty) at the Palace of Santa Cruz, dedicated to the memory of Spanish diplomats that, as Wallenberg, dedicated their efforts to save Jews from extermination, the honorary president of the International Alliance for the Memory of the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer, said that “it is not possible to understand the Holocaust, without also explaining the points of light”, that as Wallenberg, at the darkest time of Humanity, risked their life setting an example of abnegation and altruism that will last forever. Today is the 70th anniversary of their disappearance.