“I was born in Budapest in 1929. The German occupation occurs in 1944. At that time, I’m 15 years old and living with my parents. I was their only daughter. We had to wear yellow star and move from apartment. We then lived in the so called SAFE HOUSES; the Sweedish government was looking over Jewish people. We had to leave everything behind and move to another place.
Die Unterschrift … ist wirklich da, ziemlich gut lesbar. R. Wallenberg. Ich habe diesen Namen nie gehort. Und werde vermutlich auch nichts mehr uber ihn horen. Vielleicht werde ich nie erfahren, wer er ist, woher und weshalb er gekommen ist und wie sein Schicksal verlaufen…
When Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest, Per Anger had already been in action in the office disposed in a villa rented by the Swedish Embassy in 2, Minerva street.It is obvious that Wallenberg located his headquarters and started organizing his activity there too. The staff, which was yet relatively small in number, assembled in the second half of July, and had an initiative and leading role in both making the Schutzpasses and administratively organizing as well carrying out the Activity. We remember the members below with comparative accuracy (the order of the list means role-hierarchy in the same time): Hugó Wohl, Dr. Pál Hegedűs, Vilmos Forgács, Dr. Ottó Fleischman, István Engelman, Imre Terner, Iván Székely.
Office-clerk of the secretariat: countess Erzsébet Nákó, Mrs. Falk Lászlóné, Mariann Bach, Hedda Kátai, Lilla Boros, Tibor Vándor, Pál Forgács.
Supposedly, besides the above listed people, others also played an important role, but might be missing from the list due to their secondary importance or a lapse of memory.
The Schutzpass-action leaked out among the threatened Jewry of Budapest, partly as a consequence of the „mole-news” spreading surprisingly fast. When recalling that period of time we shall take into account the fact that the period from the desarming of the Baky-Endre gendarme coup up to the arrow-cross putsch (thus from 20th July to 15th October) was a relatively easier period for the Jewry of Budapest settled in houses, marked with the yellow star. Street raids, leading to deportation had ceased, the limitations to agression to street were taken less severely. Some people took off the yellow star, were circulating without them, and were less afraid of the consequences.
(John Bradford 1510-1555, English Protestant martyr)
He was the modern St. George who saved thousands of people, fighting the ferocious occupying power, his only arms being sagacity temerity and wit, motivated by compassion for the persecuted, the tortured, while he himself becoming the victim of another totalitarian power.
I close my eyes and try to remember when it was I saw him for the last time. It was around 16th January 1945. Budapest was liberated – or occupied, depending on people’s ideology – by the Soviet troops. We were a small group of the Swedish Special Mission employees, staying at the vaults of the former British Embassy and the National Bank and were supposed to spend the night in the air raid shelter. It was probably too dangerous to go home in the evening. Somewhere in the building there must have been a burst pipe, water was rising always higher and we were moving up from one wooden shelf to a higher one, wondering if, having survived the German occupation and the Szalasy Arrow Cross government, are we now going to be drowned or only frozen to death? But our Guardian Angels saved us, the water stopped and we fell into an exhausted sleep.
Next morning with bleary eyes we said goodbye to Wallenberg who came by for a short visit prior to his going to Debrecen where he was to meet the Provisory Hungarian Government. We never saw him again. The Swedish Mission was rounded up; their task of saving the remaining Jewish population of Budapest was accomplished as far as was humanly possible.
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003
After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen “enemy national” relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.
Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators.
Bush’s partners in the secret web of Thyssen-controlled ventures included former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman and his younger brother, E. Roland Harriman. Their quarter-century of Nazi financial transactions, from 1924-1951, were conducted by the New York private banking firm, Brown Brothers Harriman.
The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Governtment Offices of Sweden, 103 33 Stockholm, 08-405 10 00 A printout from www.sweden.gov.se
Press release 04 March 2003
Ministry for Foreign Affairs
Today the Commission of inquiry into the actions of the Swedish foreign policy leadership in the Raoul Wallenberg case has presented its report “A failure of diplomacy” (UD 2001:03) to the Minister for Foreign Affairs Anna Lindh.
The Commission’s assignment was to investigate and evaluate the actions of the Swedish foreign policy leadership in the Wallenberg case. Its purpose was to clarify whether the leadership of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs had taken advantage of all the opportunities that had emerged over the course of the years to shed light on the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.
2003 Statens Offentliga Utredningar: « Ett Diplomatisk misslyckande », 2003 A Failure of Diplomacy, Jan Eliasson Ett politisk misslyckande 2002 Themes for Research on RW 2001 The Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson excuses to the family 2000 The report of the Swedish-Russian…
Sammanfattning Regeringen bemyndigade genom beslut den 18 oktober 2001 chefen för Utrikesdepartementet att tillkalla en kommission med uppgift att utreda och värdera hur den svenska utrikesledningen har agerat i Wallenbergärendet (dir. 2001:71). Ladda ner Missiv till och med kapitel 5…
Regeringens Wallenbergutredare kräver besked om nedtystade försvinnanden:
Minst tre hittills okända svenskar har försvunnit i fångläger i dåvarande Sovjet. Svenska myndigheter och regeringar har lämnat samtliga fall utan åtgärd. Minst fyra vittnen har träffat svenskarna, men i Sverige har försvinnandena tystats ner. Dessa uppgifter redovisas på DN Debatt av regeringens egen Wallenbergutredare Susan Ellen Mesinai…
Förord Jag vill inledningsvis rikta ett varmt tack för värdefullt bistånd i mitt utredningsarbete samt uppmuntrande och konstruktiv kritik till ordf i UD:s referensgrupp för stöd till oberoende Raoul Wallenberg-forskning, prof Krister Wahlbäck jämte övriga ordinarie medlemmar av gruppen, prof Karl Molin…