The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II Read online

  Table of Contents

  OTHER BOOKS BY ALEX KERSHAW

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Part One - THE FINAL SOLUTION

  Chapter 1 - Wannsee

  Chapter 2 - On the Run

  Chapter 3 - Mauthausen

  Chapter 4 - The Last Refuge

  Part Two - DARKNESS AT NOON

  Chapter 5 - Escape from Auschwitz

  Chapter 6 - The Cruelest Summer

  Chapter 7 - The Swedish Pimpernel

  Chapter 8 - The Majestic Hotel

  Chapter 9 - Operation Panzerfaust

  Part Three - RED DANUBE

  Chapter 10 - The Arrow Cross

  Chapter 11 - The Road to Hegyeshalom

  Chapter 12 - Dinner with Eichmann

  Chapter 13 - December 1944

  Chapter 14 - The Inferno

  Part Four - THE COLD WAR

  Chapter 15 - Liberation

  Chapter 16 - The Fall

  Chapter 17 - Lost Hero

  Chapter 18 - Brave New Worlds

  Chapter 19 - Going After the “Master”

  Chapter 20 - The Wallenberg Mystery

  Chapter 21 - The Last Survivors

  Appendix

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright Page

  OTHER BOOKS BY ALEX KERSHAW

  The Bedford Boys

  The Longest Winter

  The Few

  Escape from the Deep

  Blood and Champagne

  Jack London

  FOR MY SISTERS

  Acknowledgments

  I’D FIRST LIKE TO THANK my agent, Derek Johns, for over eighteen years of great times. My editor, Bob Pigeon, was once more a true friend. Writers can’t ask for more. At Perseus, David Steinberger has also given great support for almost a decade. I am deeply grateful once more for superb production work by Christine Marra and Susan Pink, and for the jacket design by Alex Camlin. Thanks also to the finest publicist, Kate Burke. George Bishop kindly read the manuscript and Paul Sidey in London and his team were wonderfully encouraging and helpful from the start. Janos Beer at MIT in Boston very kindly gave fantastic testimony, read the manuscript and provided a very useful overview. Diane Blake in New York provided great leads. In Budapest, John Snowdon was again the best companion on assignment, and his photographs are always beautiful. He also joined me in Stockholm, where Ben Olander and his wife Toni provided the best two days of fun and exploration one could hope for. Nina Lagergren was also most generous with her time—she is one of Sweden’s greats. Another truly remarkable woman in Stockholm is Alice Breuer, who very kindly delved into a painful past, and I cannot thank her enough for her testimony. Alice is one of several other survivors of the Holocaust in honor of whom this book is written: Erwin Koranyi in Ottawa; Vera Goodkin in New Jersey; and Marianne Lowy in Palm Beach. These men and women, among the many thousands helped by Wallenberg, helped me to finally understand so very much and I am deeply grateful for their time and patience. This book clearly would not exist without them. Thanks finally to the Epriles, especially Tony for his company, friendship, and photos in Canada. And, last but not least, I am as ever very grateful for the support of my family on both sides of the Atlantic, especially that of my wife Robin and son Felix—my own angels of rescue.

  Part One

  THE FINAL SOLUTION

  1

  Wannsee

  IT WAS A SNOWY TUESDAY as the Mercedes staff cars pulled in, one after the other, wheels crunching the gravel on the driveway that led past a circular flower bed and to the entrance of a large, imposing villa at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin.1 Senior bureaucrats of the Third Reich, middle-aged SS officers, and Gestapo officials then stepped out of the cars and hurried inside. Around noon that day—January 20, 1942—they entered a large dining room, where they were soon seated at assigned places at a long table. Thirty-eight-year-old SS General Reinhard Heydrich was already waiting for his distinguished guests.

  As a general in the SS and chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Heydrich enjoyed enormous power in the Third Reich. He pulled all the levers of terror, being in charge of the Gestapo, the Nazi Security Service (SD) agency, and the Criminal Police (Kripo) agency. A musically gifted and well-educated former Catholic, he knew he could count on the obedience and win the cooperation of even the most recalcitrant of Hitler’s senior bureaucrats. To cross him was to risk fatal repercussions, which many of his enemies had discovered in the last decade as he had risen inexorably through the ranks of loyal and dedicated Nazis in the RSHA.2

  The meeting began as Heydrich, with his piercing blue eyes and aquiline nose, sat down in a leather chair. In all, fifteen men were at the conference, eight of whom had doctorates—not an uneducated group by any means.3 Also present was Heydrich’s fellow Austrian, the head of the Gestapo’s Section IVB for Jewish Affairs, thirty-six-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann. Among the assembled “popes” of the Third Reich, he looked like an attentive secretary, a junior clerk even. It was his job today to take the minutes—at a top secret meeting that would determine the fate of Europe’s eleven-million-odd Jews.

  Eichmann had worked for several months to arrange this conference and had prepared a detailed agenda for the attendees. But now he was starting to feel the accumulated fatigue of so many months of hard work. And last night had been taxing indeed. He had traveled by staff car to Berlin, along dark and slushy roads, hundreds of miles from Theresienstadt, a so-called model camp used to fool international Red Cross inspectors into believing that the Nazis were not killing undesirables in vast numbers—the mentally handicapped, Gypsies, Poles, the list went on and on, growing with each year of Hitler’s tenure.

  Heydrich began the meeting by saying that the Fuhrer had entrusted him with a grave responsibility. He had been ordered to bring about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.4

  “Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution, the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East,” continued Heydrich. “Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.”5

  None of the men around the table was in any doubt what “treated accordingly” meant.

  Heydrich spoke for about an hour before opening up the meeting to questions. Several concerns were raised. When would the final solution begin? Should it not start with mass evacuations from the crowded, diseased ghettoes in Poland? How exactly would the millions be shipped to the so-called resettlement camps? Would there be allowances made for Jews working in key war industries who had irreplaceable skills?

  Some of the more zealous bureaucrats in attendance believed that half-Jews, though clearly not “real” Jews, should be killed too now that Eichmann’s department of Jewish Affairs had solved the problems of how to get rid of undesirables in vast numbers and dispose of the corpses. In the East, gassings of Russian POWs had been highly effective. And at Auschwitz, an amethyst-blue crystal called Cyclon B, produced by the German industrial giant I.G. Farben, had proved even
more deadly.6 Pellets reacted instantly when released into the air, producing hydrogen cyanide. In theory, there was now no limit to how many people the Nazis could exterminate.7

  It was after 1 p.m. Servants brought in refreshments. The attendees drank and ate and talked about finally ending the Jewish problem not just in Germany, but in all of Europe, including Britain and the Soviet Union, two enemy territories that would be finally subdued, all in good time, and from which all Jews would be deported as well. The meeting formally ended after ninety minutes, with Heydrich and the Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller being last to leave the large dining room. They asked the thorough Eichmann to share a drink with them. Soon the three men were beside a fire, warming themselves. Eichmann would never forget how honored he felt to be asked to join these two giants of the Third Reich for a celebratory tipple. “After the conference,” he remembered, “Heydrich, Muller, and little me sat cozily around a fireplace. I saw for the first time Heydrich smoking a cigar or cigarette, something I never saw; and he drank cognac, which I hadn’t seen for ages. Normally he didn’t drink alcohol.”8

  Heydrich might have appeared relaxed, but he was not about to make an elementary mistake that might come back to haunt him. He made sure Eichmann understood that he was not to write up the minutes verbatim. He wanted the discussion sanitized, placed in appropriately euphemistic language, so there would be no explicit mention of mass murder. As Eichmann recalled: “Certain over-plain talk and jargon expressions had to be rendered into office language by me.”9

  It had been a most satisfactory day, surely worth a toast or two. And so Eichmann, Heydrich, and Muller refilled their glasses with cognac and proceeded to get drunk.10 “After a while,” recalled Eichmann, “we got up on the chairs and drank a toast, then on the table and then round and round—on the chairs and on the table again. Heydrich taught it to us. It was an old north German custom . . . We sat around peacefully after our Wannsee Conference, not just talking shop but giving ourselves a rest after so many taxing hours.”11

  Eichmann had no qualms. “I felt something of the satisfaction of Pi-late, because I felt entirely innocent of any guilt. The leading figures of the Reich at the time had spoken at the Wannsee Conference, the ‘Popes’ had given their orders; it was up to me to obey, and that is what I bore in mind over the future years.”12

  Orders were orders. His oath of allegiance to Hitler, the Reich, and the SS brotherhood meant that he had to do what was necessary. He had been instructed, as had Heydrich, to deal once and for all with the Jewish problem. This seemingly bland and rather obtuse RSHA bureaucrat, Adolf Eichmann, would be the chief administrator of “the greatest single genocide in history.”13

  2

  On the Run

  THE HERMANS CAREFULLY picked off the six-inch-wide yellow stars of David on the left chest of their coats, making sure that no telltale yellow threads were visible—even the thinnest wisp of cotton might be spotted by a vigilant SS man or a collaborator. Twelve-year-old Vera Herman later remembered watching her mother remove the six-pointed stars of cadmium yellow: “Our lives literally hung on removing every one of those threads.”1

  The Hermans—father Emil, wife Margit, and their daughter, Vera—left their latest refuge, a house owned by Vera’s youngest uncle, a respected pharmacist, and in complete secrecy, terrified they would be stopped, they made their way quietly at dusk through the streets of Banska Bystrica to its railway station. Were they being watched? Had someone betrayed them to the SS? They could not be sure.

  Margit knew they had no choice but to leave. The Nazis were about to begin deporting the Jews who still lived in the small town in central Slovakia, some hundred miles due north of Budapest. The Hermans either stayed in Banska Bystrica “like sitting ducks” or they took a chance. Margit also knew that taking risks was not in her husband Emil’s nature. He was a precise, methodical doctor who had prided himself on careful and rigorous diagnosis. “If taking a chance had been his thing,” recalled Vera, “we would have been in the United States by then, because we were on the American quota. We had received our quota numbers. The only thing we couldn’t get was a valid passport.” Others might have tried to leave the country without one, but Vera’s father, a physician as well as a proud officer in the Czechoslovakian National Guard’s elite cavalry regiment, hadn’t wanted to break the law.

  They waited nervously on a platform and boarded a train, just another family going into the country for a short break from the war, or so they hoped it appeared.2 It was a local milk train that seemed to stop at every telephone pole. Thankfully, they did not look stereotypically Jewish. They were fair-skinned, and Emil and Vera blue-eyed. Vera, in fact, looked more Aryan than Jewish, with her dark blonde hair, held in braids, which was the fashion for girls her age at the time. “We blended in,” she recalled. “We were all thin. My father was about five six, my mother, around five foot. I was tall for my age at five foot two. My mother and I wore little babushka scarves.”3

  Some time later, they got off at a small village. On the platform, they looked to their left, as they had been instructed. There, at the far end of the platform, stood a tall young man. They began to follow him, out of the station and into the country.4 Mercifully, they had not been stopped and asked for their papers. They approached a dilapidated farmhouse, more like a barn than a home, shared by three generations of a family and their small animals.5 It was around 11 p.m. when the young man placed a ladder against a wall. They could see an open window above. He told them to climb up the ladder and into the attic—their new hiding place.

  “Please be very careful,” said the young man. “Don’t move around too much because my mother-in-law is here, and she’s a Nazi sympathizer. If she finds out about you, you won’t be here very long.”6 The young man had not expected his mother-in-law to visit. He looked as disappointed as the Hermans as they climbed the ladder. Clearly, as with so many other collaborators in Nazi Europe, she wouldn’t think twice about reporting them and her own son-in-law to the Nazis.7

  FOR MORE THAN THREE YEARS, the Hermans had evaded capture in Nazi-occupied Europe, moving from one cramped attic to another, hiding in dark forests, hunched together in freezing crawl spaces and dank cellars, sometimes starving, never losing hope but always afraid. They had been on the run, a step ahead of the Nazis, since the fall of 1939. “My memory of that period,” recalled Vera, “was of constant fear, of total uncertainty.” There were times when she had wanted it all to end because it was just too much to be always so afraid.8

  In the spring and summer of 1942, the Hermans had hidden in the forests of the Tatra Mountains, and as winter approached they had found refuge in Banska Bystrica, where they had lived in an attic from December 1942 to April 1943 and then, until recently, in a cellar.9 Through it all, Vera had kept a diary in a small notebook. On the flyleaf of the notebook, she had jotted a refrain from a contemporary Hungarian ballad about the hardships of hiding: “Egyre konny, konny, konny; egyre menj, menj, menj; egyre fuss, fuss, fuss; pihenore sohse juss!” “Always tears, tears, tears; always flee, flee, flee; always run, run, run; but never find a respite!”10

  The bound notebook was all she had been able to save from her old schoolbag before she had left her expansive, tastefully decorated home in a luxury apartment building, with large stone balconies and marble stairways, in a small town in Czechoslovakia in 1939. She had begun writing in it in 1942, and had tried to make an entry in it every day. Jotting in it relieved the boredom of waiting for hours, sometimes days, hidden in one place or another. “The Hungarian ballad was something that I would hear when we were hiding out in the woods,” she recalled. “There was once a pub within hearing distance, and when the singing got loud and drinks got more plentiful, I heard it.”11

  In November 1943, the family’s luck, it seemed, had finally run out and they learned that they, along with other Jews known by the Nazis to be living in Banska Bystrica, would soon be deported. They had been betrayed to the authorities by a local collaborator. Befo
re the inevitable herding onto trains got under way, four men had arrived at their hiding place, part of a Jewish “property confiscation team” that included an SS officer who had made Vera’s father sign papers that meant they were stripped of everything of value that they owned. Thin and fragile Vera had wondered what these cruel men could possibly want from her parents. What could they confiscate? They had nothing material of value.

  The SS man with the confiscation team wore an immaculate uniform. His boots were so polished that Vera could see her reflection in them. He was handsome, the kind of young man who could easily have gone home, she thought, and taken off his black uniform and gotten down on the floor to play with his own children.12 But still he and the others took what they could, seizing a beautifully embroidered tablecloth that Vera’s mother had managed to save so that she could lay it down on the forest floor and use it for picnics, a brightly colored reminder of the lives they had lost. The team also tried to take a pair of boots, but Vera watched her mother hold onto them fiercely, and the men finally left with just the tablecloth and an old pair of shoes, all that the family possessed other than the clothes they were wearing.13

  A few days after this visit from the confiscation team, the Hermans had learned that the SS had kidnapped local Jewish women aged eighteen to twenty-five to be used as sex slaves on the Eastern Front. The SS simply banged on doors in the middle of the night and seized terrified, screaming women, pulling them from their parents’ and husbands’ arms. Vera knew two sisters who were taken. One was a newlywed. The other had been born with an inverted hip and limped but was considered too beautiful to be left behind.14