Tomorrow, Aug. 4, 2012, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg, an iconic figure to the Jewish and Swedish communities, and to all mankind. The U.S. Congress made Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the United States in 1981, the second person to be so honored, after Winston Churchill.
Why is this man so important to us? What can we learn today from the story of his humanitarian mission to Hungary in the waning months of World War II?
The events that led to Wallenberg's rescue mission began in 1943, when a young Jewish activist in New York, Peter Bergson (real name: Hillel Kook), led an effort to mobilize public opinion and pressure the Roosevelt administration to end the Holocaust and take steps to rescue Jews from the Nazi genocide. Newspaper advertisements were supplemented by protest rallies. Bergson managed to rally support from political leaders on both sides of the aisle, as well as from many public figures.
In addition to Bergson's work to bring public attention to the unfolding of the Holocaust, it was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and undersecretaries Randolph Paul and Minneapolis-born John Pehle who visited the White House for a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Sunday, Jan. 16, 1944.
Morgenthau handed FDR his "Personal Report to the President," formerly titled: "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews." It was a white paper exposing the anti-Semitism and obstructionism at the State Department in connection with the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust.
These efforts, and those by others, caused Roosevelt, finally, a few days later, to create the War Refugee Board. He authorized the board to launch an effort to rescue European Jews. By then, practically the last surviving Jews of significant number in Nazi-occupied Europe were the Jews of Budapest. Into this setting stepped Raoul Wallenberg.
Why Wallenberg? He had studied architecture at the University of Michigan in the 1930s, only to learn upon return that his degree did not qualify him to work in that profession in Sweden. Between 1935 and 1936, he was a bank officer in Haifa, where he met Jews who had fled Hitler's Germany. Their stories made a lasting impact upon him.
He later took a position with an import-export company owned by Koloman Lauer, a Hungarian Jew. In this role Wallenberg could travel to German-held France and to Germany. These experiences and his well-developed linguistic skills gave him insights into German bureaucracy that would inform his subsequent mission to Hungary.
