December 25, 2018 • 43 mins
In Episode 40, Robert is joined by Anna Hossnieh to discuss one of his heroes, Raoul Wallenberg.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M was motherfucker's No, that's not how we're gonna start with.
That's so good. I'm Robert Evans. Hello, I your This
is the Behind the Bastard Show, the show where we
tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
people in all of history. Only today that's not what
we're doing. This is our special Christmas episode. Uh. And
(00:22):
I figured that in light of the holiday season, the
fact that, uh, it's the time of the year where
everybody tries to think about the better aspects of humankind,
we would do a little break from tradition here and
talk about someone who is not a bastard, but is
in fact a little bit of a hero of mine,
more than a little bit. My guest today is Ana Hosnia,
(00:43):
co host of the Ethnically Ambiguous podcast What did I
suk Up? She didn't even notice, Uh, what did you do?
That's totally fine. Yeah, who cares? At this point? Who cares?
He said? Most people go like Hasney, our hosts n
(01:04):
that's you were you were there, my friends. All right,
let's leave this all in, uh, Lawrence, Yeah, we're keeping
it in and this will be good because that way,
if any of our listeners meet you, they will know
how to approximately. How are you doing today, Anna, I
am good. You know I overslept this morning, um, which
is common for me on a nice Monday. Yeah. I
(01:25):
can't hop back that well into the work week after
a weekend. No, there's no hopping for I just got
off of a red eye from d C. So I am.
I am ruined. Right. Were you fighting the Good War? Yeah?
Kind of, yeah, I was. I was teaching baby cops
how to find Nazis on the internet. That is the
most youth thing I've ever heard in my life. Anna,
(01:45):
have you ever heard of a fellow named Raoul Wallenberg? No,
I'm you're about to. Uh. In a world so full
of evil, depthless greed, unspeakable cruelty, and uh that one
Arianna Grande music video that was kind of mean. Uh,
it can be easy to feel like there's no way
a single human being can make any kind of meaningful difference.
I feel like that a lot. I think it's pretty
(02:06):
common feeling in as we watch society spiral into oblivion.
You've got that Weinstein laugh going again, just kind of
bust into a cloud of dust. Yeah. Now, Raoul Wallenberg,
I feel is proof against this kind of hopeless feeling.
This is the story of a man who saved tens
of thousands of lives using nothing but paper and the
(02:28):
eternal power of lying. Uh Raul Wallenberg might be the
man from history I most admire, and so today as
sort of a Christmas present, or as a Yule present
if you're not into Christmas, or as a uh Satanist
Easter present. I think that's in December two. I don't
really know much. No, probably not. I just lied about that, um.
But in the world, I think this might also count.
(02:49):
We're recording this during Hanukah, but it's not going to
run during Hanukah. But you can consider it Hanakah present
as well if that is your desire. Any kind of present,
if you like presents, this this is a kind of
one of those for you. Chris MCCA, if you will,
Chris MCA Christmas, Chris MCA Satanist Easter. Right, let's talk
(03:10):
about Roel wallenberg story after this roll. Wallenberg's parents were
the science of two wealthy Swedish families. His father was
also named Roel Wallenberg and was a naval officer in
the Swedish Maybe. His mother, Maj Wizing, was the daughter
of a neurologist. They married in nineteen eleven, but Rule
contracted cancer a few months later and died three months
before the birth of the Sun who would carry on
(03:30):
his name. So, but he didn't go by the second
or junior, not because his dad was dead as ship.
So you don't got to do that if your dad dies,
so Swedish. So Donald, well, no, not gonna I'm gonna
do that. That's breaking the law again. So r Raoul
Wallenberg was born on August four, nineteen twelve, in Capsta, Sweden.
He spent his first few years living in boogie comfort
(03:52):
with his mother and his grandmother. Roe grew up in
about as much privilege as it's possible to grow up with.
His grandfather had been the Swedish ambassador to Japan, and
his uncle's were wealthy bankers, founders of the Inn Skilled,
a bank. He had kid who are bishops. His great
grandfather was a Jewish man who become the king's chief
financial advisor. Himself was not Jewish, but like he comes from,
you know, privilege. When you're you've get a relative who's
(04:14):
advising the king on where to invest money, you're anyone
who's got to ambassador. Uncle. Yeah, here we go, here
we go. Yeah yeah. I actually lived near the Saudi embassy,
and I can tell you those kids do not drive well.
Do you like ever like walk by and go who
If I'm feeling crazy today, maybe I'll go in there.
I mean again, we're really trying to get away from
(04:35):
talking about committing crimes on this podcast. Sorry, I can't
help myself. I will say it looks pretty fortified, like
you would have you would have trouble um next to
a really good shop for getting like desserts and stuff. Well,
I mean that makes sense, yeah, really really nice desserts
and coffee. Uh. Also a nice T shirt store next door?
(04:56):
And then where is it like in Koreatown area. No,
it's in like the West side. Uh oh yeah, I
didn't know that. Yes, most of the embassies are like
kind of that Wilsher Block, like some Saudi building, and
it's like this giant fortress looking thing in the middle
of like a shopping district. It's really weird. It's one
of those things. There's no signs. I didn't realize until later,
(05:16):
but there's all like regularly really nice cars with diplomatic
plates driving through and like usually driving like a bat
out of hell, because I mean I if I had
diplomatic plates, yeah I would lawless. Yeah I would never
drive sober. So okay. When Roll's mother remarried in nineteen
twelve he was six years old, his stepdad became the
administrator of the largest hospital in Sweden by all AC counts.
(05:38):
His childhood was a happy one. His mom and stepdad
gave him a great deal of freedom to roam around
and uh. He generally had an opportunity not a lot
of rich kids have, which is to kind of come
to their own conclusions about life. Role was particularly close
to his grandpa Gustav. Since Gustav spent his career as
a diplomat, he considered himself a citizen of the world
rather than just a Swite. He wanted his grandson Raoul
to grow up understanding the duty and oppligatetion that he
(06:00):
felt people owed each other. Raoul graduated from secondary school
in nineteen thirty. He spent nine months in mandatory military
service and then spent a year at the University of
Potier in France. By the time he was twenty, he
was fluent in English, German, Russian, and French sounds exhausting, right, Yeah, yeah,
I'm always over. I mean it's good. Yeah, well that's
(06:20):
always an interesting thing. Like American kids don't do that,
Like it was kind of an old timey, kind of
like European style to be like, I just learned all them.
There's no television exactly, there's no Twitter to distract me anyway.
I speak Chinese. Never going to go there because there's
no antibiotics. It's it's just a hobby. Uh. Role traveled
(06:43):
to the United States for college. He was an artist,
and he sought a career in architecture. Although he could
have afforded to have an Ivy League education, Role had
no interest in surrounding himself with a bunch of wealthy bricks.
His sister described him as an anti snob who loved
Charlie Chaplin, hot dogs, and sneakers. He went by the
nickname Rudy. He would not have fit in at Harvard
or Yale, but the University of Michigan proved to be
a perfect fit. It's nice. I heard it's nice. It's
(07:04):
like an an arbor area. It's an ann arbor area
and just during the winter. Most of what I know
about Michigan is that ann arbor is a place in
it M. That's very true. Alright, moving on. Uh. He
was popular at college. One classmate recalled that Rule was
a star who always thought to the essence of an issue.
He was full of energy, good humor, and generally a
good guy. Role refused to join a fraternity because, in
(07:26):
the words of a friend, he worried it would isolate
him from a certain strata of students. Wow, he really
is a good guy. If he's like, I'm sorry, fraternities
just aren't for me. It's gonna I just feel like
I don't want to hang around with rich people all
the time. He's like, I'm not trying to get sucked
into bro culture, you know, really trying to open my
eyes and trying to the world. Yeah. Yeah. During the holidays,
Wallenberg indulged in his passion hitchhiking. He wrote in a
(07:48):
letter to his grandpa that quote, when you travel like
a hobo, everything is different. You have to be on
the alert the whole time. You're in close contact with
new people every day. Hitchhiking gives you training in diplomacy. Intact,
this training would prove critical for what's going to come later.
Hitchhiking also gave Wallenberg experience in staying calm during moments
of tremendous danger during his second summer in America. What
just only a man could do that? Well, yeah, I mean, yes,
(08:10):
this is definitely I'm like, could I have been No,
I would have been murdered in my moments of diplomacy.
I mean yeah, yeah, I mean. And as it heads up,
this is a story of a guy who's born into
like about as much privilege as it's possible to be
born into, but who actually like deploys it really effectively,
which is part of why I like this story. So
during the second Summer in America, while he's hitching from
(08:31):
Chicago to ann Arbor, the East coast distances are always weird.
Like when I was in d C. I would go
through like two or three states in a day, just
like get lunch. And it's like, actually when I people
doing it. Once when I was in Chicago, I took
the train to ann Arbor for the day, it's not
it's lunacy. I grew up in Texas and then I
moved to California, So I'm used to a state being
a thing that like you gotta really you gotta want it.
(08:53):
The East Coast is nonsense. Uh and I don't care
who knows it except for Pittsburgh fish East coast city
of this podcast. Okay, yeah, I don't know why. That's
where movie theaters started. Really yep, well then there you go. Um. So,
during his second summer in America, this paragraphs taking as
(09:14):
a while. While hitching from Chicago han Arbor, Wallenberg was
picked up by a suspicious looking group before young men.
He later recalled that he quote started to work my
poverty into the conversation in order to convince them that
he wasn't worse robbing. This did not succeed. One of
the men jammed a revolver in Wallenberg's face and demanded
all of his money. He stayed calm. In fact, he
later reported that during the robbery, he realized his robbers
(09:35):
were quote the ones who were frightened. Maybe because I
was so calm. I really didn't feel any fear the
whole time. It was more like an adventure. Um. He
was robbed and tossed in a ditch, but even this
didn't cause him to give up pitchhiking in the world.
I understand, you know, they didn't, you know, they had
to Yeah, they were robbing me. It's whatever. I feel
bad that they were so scared. I was fine with it. Uh.
(09:58):
He took this as a war to carry less cash
and quote, try to become more devious, which is good
advice in general in life. Yeah, he's like, I learned
from everything. Yeah, he's he's really that kind of guy.
This is a learning opportunity. Yeah. Rao came to love
the United States and he had a difficult time leaving
(10:19):
the country after February nineteen thirty five, when he completed
his BA in architecture. Believe he did because the world
was beckoning to him. Roll next spent six months in
South Africa and then a year in Palestine as a
banker's apprentice. It was there that he first came face
to face with the consequences of Nazi racial policy. Palestine
in the late thirties was flooded with Jewish refugees from Germany,
men women who had been bankrupted by the Nuremberg Laws
(10:41):
and forced to flee for their lives. One of Wallenberg's
biographers believes that the conversations he had with Jewish refugees
left him permanently changed. He felt as if he had
to do something. I want to note that as soon
as I said Nuremberg laws, the dog barked again. She
doesn't care for it. No, she does not like Nazism.
It's a good dog. It's a good dog. She's continuing
(11:01):
to grow. Oh, somebody's delivering something, possibly a Nazi, every
time she hears that word. In nineteen thirty seven, Rolls,
grandfather and mentor, Gustav died. Roles next four years were difficult,
or at least they were rich get difficult. He started
two businesses, both of which failed, but he had family money,
(11:21):
so these failures were more like hits to his pride
than financial disasters. It is possible that some of his
failure had to do with his inability to really focus
on commerce. As the Third Reich War on and the
Second World War sparked off, Rae grew more and more
concerned for the Jews of Germany and of Europe. For
a long while, his ability to help was limited to
providing food aid to a family of refugees who had
fled to Sweden. But in nineteen forty one, with Hitler
(11:42):
at the height of his murderous power, Roles uncle Jacob
introduced him to a man named Kalman Lauer now Lauer
was a Hungarian businessman who had interests across Central Europe.
Since Lara was Jewish, Nazi domination of Central Europe made
it almost impossible for him to you know, travel, do
not get killed. Exist. He's a rough time to exist
if you were a Jewish guy in Central Europe. So
(12:05):
Lower's business was essentially like an exotic food import company,
and he put Wallenberg in charge of the company's European operations.
Because Wallenberg looked like the whitest dude ever. Well, they're
a picture of him up on the site. I don't
have one on this document because I am cracked out.
Oh boy, I can see the literal red eye. Yeah, yeah, Oh,
(12:25):
Sophie has pulled one up. Oh he had like male
pattern baldness. He's so cool. He's just a normal guy,
just a normal guy. If you were central casting white man,
you would pick Rao Wallaberg. Very normal looking dude. So
Wallenberg is now in charge of this company's European operations,
and he starts spending a lot of time in Budapest,
which is kind of where they're centered. He fell in
(12:45):
love with the city, which is an easy thing to
do hud beautiful beauty. One of the prettiest cities to
see from water that I've ever ye lovely place. Now.
Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany at the time.
Hungarians have kind of a history of being on the
wrong side of any given conflict ideologically, but especially fried food.
Oh my god, oh man, I had some of the best.
(13:10):
It was a brick of bacon, like the size of
an actual building brick that was all like the consistency
of a cheetoh all the way through. It was so fried,
so good, so good at fried food, and Hungary pretty
good at beer, but on the wrong side of your diet. Well, yeah,
fried bacon in World War two and of World War One,
(13:32):
one day, you know, one day, a lot of rough
decisions made me tieth century just fry it. They've benefited
the most from like Germany, just because of how nobody
thinks about what the Hungarians did during that war anymore,
because like they're right next to Germany, and oh boy,
got washed away by all that, by all the German behavior.
I guess we just let them take the blame for
(13:53):
this one and start walk away whistling. Well, no one
saw us. We were really there. They were definitely there. Yeah,
Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany. It's soldiers fought
and died in Russia alongside the men of the Rmacht,
but it was not officially part of the Third Reich.
Hungarian Jews were forced to wear yellow stars wherever they went,
just like German Jews um, but they were not sent
(14:15):
to concentration camps, at least not initially. Admiral Miklos Horthy,
Hungary's leader, was not a good guy, but he was
a better dude to having charge than say Hitler if
you happen to be Jewish, which is a low bar,
very low bar. But he was not Hitler. So by
early nineteen four, hungary seven hundred Thousandish Jews were probably
(14:35):
the most intact Jewish community in Europe. With the war
turning against them, the Nazi high command decided in essence
that if they couldn't win the war against the Allies,
they might at least win their war against the Jews,
which is very much how they viewed it now. Admiral
Harthy was not a total fool. It had become clear
as a bell by nineteen forty four that Germans were
not going to win this war. He tried to pull
his country out of the war and out of its
(14:56):
alliance with Germany. But Hitler was like, n Hitler, I'm Hitler.
You may have heard of me. Yeah, yeah, we've both
heard of Hitler. We've all heard of Hitler. The Vermacht
occupied Hungary on March nineteenth, and Horthy was basically ordered
to put a bunch of Hungarian Nazi types in charge
of the country. So he wasn't removed from power at
(15:17):
this point, but he was told, like, you didn't do
a nothing, dog, and you better throw some people that
we like in charge. So once the Nazis were in charge,
the Nazis did what Nazis do, exterminate Jewish people. By
July they had deported around four hundred and forty thousand Jews,
and this was the rapidest deportation and elimination of a
Jewish population Europe. But then a couple of weeks they
(15:38):
deported like four hundred something thousand people, most of them
wound up in Auschwitz, were three hundred and twenty thousand
of them were exterminated upon arrival. Inter The US government
kind of belatedly took a couple of years a million deaths.
But while up until this point the United States is
a reaction to the Holocaust could best be described as
piss poor, the Roosevelt administration finally decided to do something
(16:01):
about this thing. We don't have a word for yet
because the word genocide wasn't point until after this point,
but they decided to do something. Murder, murder, rampage, yeah, yeah.
They sent a guy named Iver Olsen to Stockholm as
the official representative of the War Refugee Board or w RB. Now.
Olsen's task was to find someone who could speak both
(16:21):
Hungarian and German and was willing to travel into one
of the deadliest parts of the world as the Reichs
slowly collapsed and try to rescue Jews from Hitler's death machine.
Olsen met Kalman Lauer, and Lauer recommended his friend Raoul
Wallenberg for the job. Wallenberg instantly agreed. He traveled to
Budapest in July ninety four as officially the secretary for
the Swedish Embassy in Budapest. So we're going to talk
(16:42):
about what he did in Budapest. But first, do you
like products? Are you a fan of services? Well, that's
what we're that's about ends and we're back. We're talking
(17:03):
about not a bastard today, the opposite of a bastard hero.
Uh And yeah, So when we last left off, Wallenberg
had just sort of made it to Budapest as a
secretary with the Swedish embassy. But that job title was
essentially nonsense. Wallenberg had a pretty open sort of mandate
to just try to save people's lives, and they've given
him just a job, so that he was technically attached
(17:25):
to the embassy, right and but was he almost just
like on a secret mission. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what
was happening. Uh So, Wallenberg's one condition for taking this
job was that he have full permission to do his
work without contacting the ambassador or any other government officials
for permission about anything. Basically, he was like, I want
to be a loose cannon diplomat. He doesn't have to
play by anybody's rules but his own. And this rarely
(17:47):
happens in government. But they were like, sure, kind of
a weird time. It is a weird time. Why not,
ye can't make the situation worse. Have you guys seen
what's happening out there? Late July? The only intact Jewish
community left in Hungary was the Jewish ghetto in Budapest. Now,
before the Nazis could depourt and exterminate all of them too,
(18:08):
Admiral Horthy ordered a halt to the deportations, and again
not because he was a great guy, but because he
was like, they're definitely going to lose the war, and
I want to be the guy who tried to stop
the mass murdering, so maybe I don't get hung Yeah, yeah,
he's an opportunist. He's an opportunist. I mean, you get
credit for trying to stop the Nazis from killing Jewish people,
for sure, glad he did that. But again, Horthy's a
(18:30):
complicated figure in expe, we'll say that. So his his
halt held for a few months, but it was clear
to everyone that eventually the Nazis were going to push
back again, because it's kind of what Nazis do. Wallenberg
began to focus his efforts on protecting the Jews and
his care from being arrested or attacked in the hopes
that the Jewish community in Budapest would just be able
to sort of wait out the end of the war.
So he was kind of playing for time. Raoul opened
a diplomatic office in Budapest. He hired four hundred Jewish
(18:52):
people to staff it. He didn't pay them because he
didn't we have the money to do that. But that
wasn't the point. As embassy employees, these Jews would be
protected against deep pitation. Wallenberg ordered his men to remove
their yellow stars. He told them, you are now under
Swedish diplomatic protection. So this remains the only truly justified
example of an unpaid internship in history. Yeah. Yeah, so
(19:13):
it was done well once. Let's just say this is
gonna save your life. Let's just say you work without
pay and so that we you can't get deported. That's
that's cool with everybody. Yeah. His next move was to
start issuing a new type of Swedish passport, shoots pass.
The government gave him the authority to print fiftud of
these passes, and he lobbied to increase that number to
forty and eventually just started printing the Mountain hand them
(19:35):
ount like hotcakes without permission. Yeah. Wallenberg designed these protective
passes himself, because again he was an artist. He knew
German and Hungarian fascists, like all fascists were unduly impressed
by colorful government documents with impressive symbols on them, Wallenberg
printed his protective passes and yellow and blue with a
garish coat of arms that included the three crowns of
Sweden in the middle. They were covered with stamps and signatures,
(19:55):
all of which were just nonsense. Just he just knew
that it made it look more legit. But like, whoa
on this motherfucker. Alright, alright, I guess we're not committing
genocide today. Did you see the stamps. It's just really
ridiculous that it worked, because the Shoots pass was more
(20:15):
or less alive. But it was a lie that worked.
By the end of the war, it's possible that he
issued as many as twenty thousand of them, which means
twenty human lives were saved by what was, in essence
a really good set of doodles in bullshit. But it worked.
Oscar Schindler, for some comparison, saved around human lives, which
is obviously still an immense, almost unthinkable act of heroism.
But I'm just trying to point out the titanic scale
(20:36):
of what Walllomberg accomplished, because he's just getting started at
this point. So one of the reasons Walllomberg was so
successful is that he had grasped an incredibly important truth
about law and government, which is that neither of those
things are real in any meaningful way outside of the
heads of the people that live within them. The only
thing that matters is the belief. If people believe something
is official, if they believe you speak with the might
of the government, and they'll get in trouble for disobeying you,
(20:59):
well then you can make them you almost anything. In
other words, Wallenberg took advantage of the Nazi tendency to
just follow orders and used it to save lives rather
than in them. Now uh, the War Refugee Board in
Swedish government provided Wallenberg with enough funds to rent thirty
two buildings. He declared them extra territorial buildings, which was
again not a thing. Uh. He told everyone that these
(21:19):
buildings were legally covered by Swedish diplomatic community, and he
told this lie so forcefully that it wasn't questioned. The
buildings he rented were built to hold less than five
thousand people, but Wallenberg, being a pretty decent architect, remodeled
them and was able to fit thirty five thousand Jews inside. Yeah.
He also operated a soup kitchen and a hospital for
the people in Budapest Jewish ghetto. Uh yeah, he's he's
(21:39):
hitting with all steam here. A couple of months into
the job. At this point, on October, the Hungarian Arrow
Cross movement ceased power into posed Admiral Horthy. Now the
Arrow Cross was essentially just a Hungarian Nazis you know. Um.
They were backed by the Germans and acted as an
even more puppety puppet government than the last one had been.
The deportations resumed, Wallenberg instantly began confronting trains filled with
(22:03):
Jews before they could depart for their journey to Auschwitz.
Sandor Arda, a driver for Wallenberg and member of the
Jewish Underground, later recalled one such instance quote he climbed
up on the roof of the train and began handing
in protective passes through the doors, which were not yet sealed.
He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down.
Then the Arrow crossmen began shooting and shouting at him
to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing
(22:25):
out passports into the hands that were reaching out for them.
I believe the arrow crossmen deliberately aimed over his head,
as not one shot hit him, which would have been
impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because
they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had
handed over the last of the passports, he ordered all
those who had one to leave the train and walked
to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in
Swedish colors. I don't remember exactly how many, but he
(22:46):
saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and arrow
Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it.
You would regularly stop trains and just shout at SS
we even when he didn't have passports, would just brate
the SS guys in charge of the crowd to let
whole car loads of people off. Yeah this is There
was nothing backing him up. He was just going out
there and being like, these are Swedish citizens, no proof,
(23:08):
just like just a really good liar and really good
at bullshitting and pretending. He has the force of the
power of confidence. It's the power of being a tall
white guy. But he's like fake it till you make it,
fake it till you a vertigenicide yeah. Now Nazis being Nazis,
they did push back against Wallenburg safe houses. On Christmas Eve,
(23:31):
a bunch of Nazis raided one of Wallenburg safe houses
and they took hundreds of people out in the middle
of the night and marched them to the Danube. The
Nazis tied three people together at a time, shot the
person in the middle, and then would let the corpse
pull the other two down under the freezing river. This
was too safe, bullets, Germans, you know they're Nazis. Uh.
(23:52):
Wallenberg found out what was going on and he rounded
up volunteers from his staff, people who could swim, and
together they jumped into the river and fished out as
many survivors as they could find, saving fifty or sixty
people that night. Now they the Arrow Cross had even
less respect for due process than the last regime it had.
They took to hunting down and murdering Jews in the street,
so Wallenberg had to ramp up his rescue operations in
(24:13):
order to cope. He found aryan looking young Jewish men
and he put them in Erroo Cross uniforms and had
them guard as safe houses. He started issuing protective papers
to everyone and just ignored the fact that the Swedish
government hadn't actually given them the power to do that.
When it's funding ranlow, Wallenberg turned to blackmailing local officials
and businessmen and committing other petty crimes in order to
finance his rescue operations. At this point, why why not
(24:33):
fuck it? The world's ending. Yeah yeah. The arrow Cross
responded by declaring Wallenberg's protective passports to being no longer valid.
Wallenburg protested to the government and somehow managed to get
them reinstated, but at the end of the day, Aikman
and the Nazis who really ran things in Hungary now
were committed to wiping out the last of that country's Jews.
By the winter of nineteen four, the Russians had advanced
enough that the Germans could no longer send Jews to
(24:55):
Auschwitz on trains. This didn't present a major problem for
a guy like Aichman, because he's still had the option
of just forcing the prisoners to go on a one
d and twenty five mile death march without food or sleep,
which you know, pretty much kills the same amount of
people as against Chamber and the European Winter uh tens
of thousands of Jews were sent off on an enormous
force march to their doom. Wallenberg gathered up trucks, food
(25:16):
and medical supplies. He traveled along the road of march
and handed them out, trying to give the marchers the
best odds of survival possible, and when he could, he
attempted to abduct some of them. Here's a quote from
the book Wallenberg by Katie Martin. You there, the Swede
pointed to an astonished man waiting for his turn to
be handed over to the executioner. Give me your Swedish
passport and getting that line, he barked, and you get
behind him. I know I issued you a passport. Walloenberg
(25:37):
continued moving fast, talking loud, hoping the authority in his
voice would somewhat rub off on these defeated people. The
Jews finally caught on. They started groping in pockets for
bits of identification. A driver's license or birth certificates seemed
to do the trick. The Swede was grabbing them so
fast the Nazis, who couldn't read Hungarian anyway, didn't seem
to be checking faster. Wallenberg's eyes urged them faster. Before
the game is up In minutes, he had several hundred
(25:58):
people in his convoy. International Red Cross trucks there at
Wallenburg's behest arrived and the Jews clambered on. Wallenberg jumped
into his own car. He leaned out of the car
window and whispered, I am sorry to the people he
was leaving behind. I am trying to take the youngest
ones first, he explained, I want to save a nation. Wow, yeah,
that's wild. This is an act of pure balls. Wallenberg
had no legal basis for what he was doing, but
(26:19):
he knew something important about fascists, which is that they
respond to confident leadership. It's kind of their only thing.
They'll do whatever a loud and certain person tells him
to do. That's so cool, yeah, he just, Oh, this
is how naz fine. They just want a confident guy
to yell at. Yeah. Saving people grew to become an
(26:39):
all consuming obsession for Raoul. Before he traveled to Budapest,
he had confided in a friend that his nightmare would
be to return to Stockholm, knowing that he hadn't done
absolutely everything in his power to save as many Jews
as possible. So while he was in Budapest, Walloenberg slept
just four hours a night at most. He was constantly
in motion while he was awake. This was necessary because
the fascists were always moving. To Tommy laugh that, a
(27:00):
thirteen year old who lived in one of Wallenberg's safe
houses recalled this. One morning, a group of these Hungarian
fascists came into the house and said that all the
able bodied women must go with them. We knew what
this meant. My mother kissed me, and I cried, and
she cried. We knew we were parting forever. And she
left me there an orphan tall intents and purposes. Then
two or three hours later, to my amazement, my mother
returned with the other women. It seemed like a mirage,
(27:21):
a miracle. My mother was there, she was alive, and
she was hugging me and kissing me, and she said
one word Wallenberg. I knew who she meant, because Wallenberg
was a legend among the Jews. In a complete and
total hell in which we lived, there was a savior
angel somewhere moving around. After she had composed herself, my
mother told me they were being taken to the river
when a car arrived and outstepped Wallenberg, and they knew
immediately who it was, because there was only one such
(27:43):
person in the world. He went up to the Arrow
Cross leader and protested that the women were there under
his protection. They argued with him, but he must have
had incredible charisma, some great personal authority, because there was
absolutely nothing behind him, nothing to back him up. He
stood out there in the street, probably feeling the loneliest
man in the world, trying to pretend that there was
some behind him. They could have shot him then and
there in the street and nobody would have known about it. Instead,
(28:04):
they were lented and let the women go. Oh. He
just kept screaming at He just kept screaming at him
until he saved hundreds of people. Yeah, that's crazy, Jesus,
this man, this guy, right, he's hell of it. It's
almost like a folk hero. Wallenberg became famous among the
Nazis as well. Aikman called him juw Dog Wallenberg because
(28:26):
Nazis are not very creative at all. That doesn't sound
like ro ro Juel, like if if I'm trying to
do that, I'm just saying like there's other yea Aikman.
They harassed him regularly, and the Nazis even blew up
his car. At one point he took to sleeping in
different houses every night in order to avoid assassination. Dawnt.
(28:48):
The Soviet war machine was closing in on Budapest. There
were only a hundred thousand or so Jews left alive
in the Budapest ghetto. Aikeman ordered five D S. S.
Troops and even more Arrow Cross soldiers to ring the
ghetto and prepare for what would have been the largest
gun based massacre of World War two. Now, for a
little bit of historical perspective, the largest I think gun
based massacre of the war was the Bobby Yard massacre,
(29:10):
which I think was one been forty two with the
innsets grouping unit shot like thirty thou people when they
line a bunch of people up and then just yeah,
and they actually had they stopped doing that in favor
of the gas chambers because like so many of those
guys went up killing themselves and becoming alcohol excuse that
you just can't have people do that. It's hard, it's hard,
it's hard. Fu off off. Now. So yeah, that was
(29:32):
the plan, and these guys, you know, at this point
in nineteen forty five year an S. S. Trooper in Budapest.
Number one, you're probably were wounded fighting the Russians, which
is why you're in a place like Budapest. So these
were hard sons of bitches. Uh probably who would have
been you know, they would have had to be to
be capable of massacring a hundred thousand people. But that's
the situation that we're in in ninety five, and we
will talk about what happens next after somes and we're back. Boy, howdy,
(30:05):
I do love ads, boy howdy. So we were talking
about how the Nazis were going to massacre a hundred
thousand people by shooting them to death in the Budapest ghetto.
Oh the joy, the joy. We're talking about the ads. Yeah,
Now about Wallenberg coming to hopefully saved them at the
last second. Yep, yep ye. So Aikman had ordered this massacre,
but he was not there in person because he was
(30:27):
trying to escape Nazi Germany, which he did for a while.
So the task of murdering all these people went to
s S General August Schmidt Duber. Now Wallenberg caught onto
the plan and he went straight to schmid Duber's office.
He promised the man that if anything happened to the ghetto.
He would make it his business to ensure the general
was found personally responsible for the massacre and hanged for
crimes against humanity. This was pure bluff, but it worked.
(30:48):
Schmidt Duber called off the massacre. Look, man, I don't
want to have to get you hung. I don't want
to get you in trouble, buddy. It's like, what are
you talking about. He's like, you know you're gonna get
in trouble. I don't know. Let him go. I'll get
your trouble with some sort of international legal committee that
doesn't exist right now. The Soviets took Budapest later in January,
and that should have been the start of Wallenberg's happy ending,
(31:09):
but rules contact with the American government led the Soviets
to suspect he was some sort of spy because I
ever Olson, the guy who had hired him and worked
for the War refug Board, also worked for the oss
UM and well, the USSR was not nearly as anti
Semitic as the Nazis, and they're still pretty anti semitic.
And one of the things that you read about the
guys who found Wallenberg in there and why they found
(31:31):
him suspicious is they could not wrap their hands around
the idea of a guy doing everything that Wallenberg had
done just to save Jewish people. They're like, there's gotta
be he's gotta be some sort of a weird spy.
What's going on here? Yeah, there's no way this man
just has goodness of the heart. Yeah, there's the way
that man just wants to save human lives. So Rao
was arrested and we don't really know what happened to him.
(31:52):
The most likely story is that he died sometime in
the nineteen fifties in the KGB's infamous Lubyanka prison. Yeah,
it's fucked up right. The Swedes were so concerned with
having good relations with the USSR and staying neutral that
they took no effort to save the life of a
man who was a citizen of their country, a government employee,
and one of the greatest Swedish heroes ever born uh
In April of nineteen five, the U s State Department
(32:14):
even offered Sweden for help in asking the Russians about Wallenberg,
to like pressure them a little bit, and Sweden said no.
They didn't want to compromise their neutrality by trying to
save this guy's life. Uh. In nineteen forty six, after
intense public demand, the Swedish Foreign Minister and went to
Moscow to ask Joseph Stalin in essence what happened to Wallenberg.
And he did ask him that, but immediately afterwards he
said that he personally thought Wallenberg had probably died in
(32:36):
Budapest and basically gave Stalin an opening, and Stalin took
the opening and just didn't say this was untrue. So
that's the line the government went with for a while. Yeah,
you never give Stalin an opening. You never give Stalin
an opening, not j Staal. That's what he's gonna is
what he's gonna do. So in nineteen fifty seven, after
Stalin's death, the Soviet Union finally admitted that Wallenberg had
(32:56):
in fact survived the war. They said he died of
a heart attack in captivity in nineteen forty eight. This
remained the Russian government's official stance until well after the
end of the Cold War. We still don't really know
what happened to Raoul, although it's safe to say the
Russian government imprisoned, probably tortured in one way or the other,
definitely murdered him uh now at the end of World
War Two was a chaotic time. Estimates very wildly on
(33:17):
how many lives Wallomberg saved. The most common estimate is
a hundred thousand human beings, but it maybe several times
that many. Because his activities provided a blueprint several other
embassies used to rescue Jewish people as well. Wallomberg almost
certainly saved more lives than any other member of the
righteous among nations, which is sort of a title that
the Nation of Israel has awarded the non Jews who
(33:37):
saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Nobody saved more people
than Raoul Wallomberg. And in fact, a hundred thousand lives
is uh one six of the total number of Jews
dead in the Holocaust saved by one guy. Wow. Gideon Housner,
the man who prosecuted Adolf Aikman and later was the
chairman of Yad Vashan, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, said
(33:58):
this about Raoul Wallomberg. Here is a man who had
the choice of remaining in secure, neutral Sweden when Nazism
was ruling Europe. Instead, he left this haven and went
to what was then one of the most perilous places
in Europe, hungry and for what to save Jews. He
won his battle, and I feel that in this age
when there is so little to believe, in, so very
little on which our young people can pen their hopes
and ideals, he is a person to show to the
(34:19):
world who knows so little about him. This is why
I believe the story of Rold Wallenberg should be told
in his figure, in all its true proportions, projected into
human minds. M hm, that's that's the story. Merry Christmas.
God damn the Russia always everything. Well, I mean, they
did beat the Nazis, but yeah, and they go and
(34:40):
take the one man who like basically was out. You're
screaming at Nazis until they were like, I don't know,
I'm confused. These voices allowed I guess like the Hungarian
Jewish community wound up, even though it survived later than
most of them were, being like one of the most
completely destroyed Jewish communities in all of Europe, and virtually
the only Hungarian Jews who survived did so because of
what burke, Oh my god, hundred thousand lives. Do you
(35:02):
think they tortured him just to find out who he
was working for and just wouldn't believe it, would you
know it could be this nice? Yeah that's crazy to me. Yeah, yeah,
just a man. What do you think happened to him?
I think he was probably thrown in a prison, tortured
for a little while, thrown into a prison. I think
it's very possible he did die up a heart attack.
He was on the thirty two when all this happened.
(35:22):
But you know, you torture somebody for a while and
you starved them, you know. So he started doing this
in his early thirty's, just thirty two when he got
the job thirty two. He's just like, well, you know, yeah,
a save some lives thirty two with his only professional
training and architecture, and just was like, all right, I'm
just gonna go lie until I've saved a hundred thousand
people and then did it. I imagine at thirty two,
(35:46):
I will still be doing nothing. Well what I like
about podcasting? Podcasting? Yeah, yeah, he's a Well that's why
he's a good person to, uh, to fill people's minds with,
especially on a show where we otherwise just talk about
reckless evil and the insane deadliness of human hate. This
guy who grew up and learned one of the most
(36:08):
important truths you can learn as a tall white guy,
which is that there's all it's a superpower. You know,
if you're a tall white guy and you just balls
your way into a situation with confidence, nan out of
ten people will listen to you. Night Nazis, Nazis. I
don't know, man, I mean, we're supposed to kill these people,
but look at how tall and white he is, and
(36:28):
he's got that paper with all the stamps on it.
I don't know. I guess, I guess we don't kill
these people. It's crazy. It's wild. Get all the train,
Get off the train, Get off the train. Look at
how tall this guys. Get off the train. Yeah, that's amazing.
That's an amazing story. Yeah, never heard of him. That's wild.
I don't even I am so upset with the USSR. Yeah,
(36:51):
it's pretty frustrating. Sweden. Yeah, God, that is so annoying.
It's like you just the man did so much. It's
so much in like five or six months, saved a thousand. Sorry,
we're neutral. Yeah, yeah, so be like Raoul Wallenberg, print
(37:13):
some fake passports and go save people. Speak loudly. Yeah,
be tall, do crime, save lives. Yellot fascist, yellot fat,
yell at fascists, but productively yellot fascists to get them
to be less fashion. Do you think that would work
with the alt right? If you just want to just
spoke loud, like guys, I don't know about this. It's
worth shop. I don't know. He's talking quite loud. And
(37:37):
waffle house, yeah, waffle house, yeah, yeah, and just give
them heart disease through waffle house. Just poison all the waffles. Yeah,
that's the Budapest way, fry everything. Oh yeah, I do
want to go back to Hungary. You need more. It's
(37:58):
actually quite cheap too, yeah, very inexpensive place. Yeah, I
recommend kind of a dictator in charge. Now, that part
is not great, isn't. Europe is just like us. They
go back and forth. The same thing with Poland it's
happening over there as well. Yeah. Yeah, people have some
fascism in charge. Forget how bad it went the last time,
and they're like, what if we try bad again? Yeah,
maybe not everyone will die this time. Yeah, Well we're
(38:20):
on a wave. We better hope. There's a couple of
Wallenberg's waiting in the wings getting their degrees in architecture
right now, learning how to use their power as tall,
balding white men to shout the world and do a
better place I hope. So I need someone to just
tell me where to go. I know. That's that's why
it works. Yeah. So this is a great story about
(38:42):
the power of lives and bullshit to save lives. I
love that part of it because I'm a big fan
aalizing bullshite. Great thing to be able to do. Anna
pluga bless You can listen to my podcast with sharene
Units called Ethnically Ambiguous on the House Stuff Works Network. Yeah,
you can follow me on Twitter, Anna host n. I
tweet about stuff. I retweet Robert every once a while.
(39:03):
Robert just posted a really crazy video how to get
out of like speaking of heroes, when you fall through ice. Yeah,
and he did it by falling through ice on the
video and then like calmly explaining the things that you
need to do to extricate yourself from that situation. It's incredible.
It's truly like well, and it teaches you these things.
(39:25):
There's a similarity in that video between what Wallenberg did,
which is that when the guy first falls in the ice.
You can hear in his voice that he's in a
pretty dire straight because it's shocking and and that's why
most people dies, that they panic in that moment of
extreme pain. And he walks you through that, like you
just have to breathe for a while and calm down
and realize the cold's not going to kill you right away.
You have time, it passes, You have time to think
(39:48):
through your actions and calmly and decisively extricate yourself in
the situation and in every dangerous situation I've ever been,
and that really is the key, is like, Okay, my
body is telling me to take certain actions right now,
but maybe I should think for just a second and
like figure out calmly, Like you almost never need to
take that sort of panic thrash response. It's all about
(40:10):
moving with purpose. And yeah, yeah it's great video. Yeah,
look it up somewhere. It's on your Twitter. Look up
guy falls through ice YouTube or my Twitter. Just today,
but I will have tweeted probably fifty times a rollback
form nonsense. Yeah, yeah, I don't even know what day
it is. So thanks for having me, Thanks for being
(40:31):
on Yep, you can buy a T shirt, you know,
I should, you should buy a T shirt, and you
listening should buy a T shirt from t Publix behind
the Bastard store phone cases as well, cocaine spoons. Sophie
is saying that they're they sell branded coke spoons now fantastic,
So Fleetwood Mac, if you're listening branded coketotes, branded coke tootes, yep. Absolutely,
(40:51):
Also Fleetwood Mac. We're really really aiming for that. Sweet
Fleetwood Mac immigrants sending to blow cocaine up your butt.
I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at
I right, Okay, you can find my book A Brief
History of Ice. It's a great Christmas gift, although this
will probably be running like the day before Christmas. But
you can buy a kindle book anytime. Amazon Prime man
(41:15):
speaking of gigantic evil machines that destroy the support the evils.
Oh god, this paper is even from Amazon. Why Amazon
selling paper? Do everything, Robert, There's nothing you can at
one point came through the hands of Amazon. Anyway, Amazon,
if you want to throw some ad rev oar No boy, No,
(41:38):
by the way, my home generates misery made by Amazon.
Wait what yeah, I live in a Prime home. No,
you're lying. It's not it's coming. Oh no, I mean
I'm sure we will all live in Prime homes. Yeah.
I live in the Prime apartment complex. There's no bathrooms,
there's a hole in the wall. You have to deliver
(42:00):
three packages every morning. Part of your ready to just
start working Amazon. Amazon has started to do this thing
where like they just have random people delivering stuff. They
do they're not good at They just show up in
random cars. Just see packages lying everywhere now where. It's like,
you guys don't know how to do this job. They
(42:20):
really they it's third party all the way. They just
are like, yeah, you can do it. Half of them
don't deliver your packages. You're like, why do you have
this job? But random people just did everything for nothing,
and that's how our company works. And I get a
billion dollars a day. That's the Jeff Bezos planned. He's
another guy just was like talking very loudly, and we're
(42:41):
all like, yeah, that's why I have so much respect
for the one guy who doesn't use that power for evil.
Rou Wallenberg, so he was in charge of Amazon. Probably
just be a company dedicated to saving Syrian refugees. Amazon Prime,
you just literally get we just ship them out of
the country. You're just delivered to your house, and just
(43:01):
take care of them, help them started your life. Yeah. Yeah,
if you're listening Amazon, that's what you should be doing
to the Greek the islands in Greece. I will stop
talking smack if you just start shipping people out of country.
Cameroon too, can maybe use it. Ugly stuff going on
there anyway, anywhere anywhere where there's some serious strife with
(43:22):
the people Honduras. Ship people out of there. Send them
to Ohio. No, that seemed to mean to them. Send
them to Michigan. Yeah, Rollenberg would appreciate that. Yeah, Michigan,
nice place, beautiful, beautiful. All right, Well, this has been
the episode Mary Holidays. Enjoy your winter times, eat egg nog,
(43:49):
fight Nazis. I love about you.
M was motherfucker's No, that's not how we're gonna start with.
That's so good. I'm Robert Evans. Hello, I your This
is the Behind the Bastard Show, the show where we
tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
people in all of history. Only today that's not what
we're doing. This is our special Christmas episode. Uh. And
(00:22):
I figured that in light of the holiday season, the
fact that, uh, it's the time of the year where
everybody tries to think about the better aspects of humankind,
we would do a little break from tradition here and
talk about someone who is not a bastard, but is
in fact a little bit of a hero of mine,
more than a little bit. My guest today is Ana Hosnia,
(00:43):
co host of the Ethnically Ambiguous podcast What did I
suk Up? She didn't even notice, Uh, what did you do?
That's totally fine. Yeah, who cares? At this point? Who cares?
He said? Most people go like Hasney, our hosts n
(01:04):
that's you were you were there, my friends. All right,
let's leave this all in, uh, Lawrence, Yeah, we're keeping
it in and this will be good because that way,
if any of our listeners meet you, they will know
how to approximately. How are you doing today, Anna, I
am good. You know I overslept this morning, um, which
is common for me on a nice Monday. Yeah. I
(01:25):
can't hop back that well into the work week after
a weekend. No, there's no hopping for I just got
off of a red eye from d C. So I am.
I am ruined. Right. Were you fighting the Good War? Yeah?
Kind of, yeah, I was. I was teaching baby cops
how to find Nazis on the internet. That is the
most youth thing I've ever heard in my life. Anna,
(01:45):
have you ever heard of a fellow named Raoul Wallenberg? No,
I'm you're about to. Uh. In a world so full
of evil, depthless greed, unspeakable cruelty, and uh that one
Arianna Grande music video that was kind of mean. Uh,
it can be easy to feel like there's no way
a single human being can make any kind of meaningful difference.
I feel like that a lot. I think it's pretty
(02:06):
common feeling in as we watch society spiral into oblivion.
You've got that Weinstein laugh going again, just kind of
bust into a cloud of dust. Yeah. Now, Raoul Wallenberg,
I feel is proof against this kind of hopeless feeling.
This is the story of a man who saved tens
of thousands of lives using nothing but paper and the
(02:28):
eternal power of lying. Uh Raul Wallenberg might be the
man from history I most admire, and so today as
sort of a Christmas present, or as a Yule present
if you're not into Christmas, or as a uh Satanist
Easter present. I think that's in December two. I don't
really know much. No, probably not. I just lied about that, um.
But in the world, I think this might also count.
(02:49):
We're recording this during Hanukah, but it's not going to
run during Hanukah. But you can consider it Hanakah present
as well if that is your desire. Any kind of present,
if you like presents, this this is a kind of
one of those for you. Chris MCCA, if you will,
Chris MCA Christmas, Chris MCA Satanist Easter. Right, let's talk
(03:10):
about Roel wallenberg story after this roll. Wallenberg's parents were
the science of two wealthy Swedish families. His father was
also named Roel Wallenberg and was a naval officer in
the Swedish Maybe. His mother, Maj Wizing, was the daughter
of a neurologist. They married in nineteen eleven, but Rule
contracted cancer a few months later and died three months
before the birth of the Sun who would carry on
(03:30):
his name. So, but he didn't go by the second
or junior, not because his dad was dead as ship.
So you don't got to do that if your dad dies,
so Swedish. So Donald, well, no, not gonna I'm gonna
do that. That's breaking the law again. So r Raoul
Wallenberg was born on August four, nineteen twelve, in Capsta, Sweden.
He spent his first few years living in boogie comfort
(03:52):
with his mother and his grandmother. Roe grew up in
about as much privilege as it's possible to grow up with.
His grandfather had been the Swedish ambassador to Japan, and
his uncle's were wealthy bankers, founders of the Inn Skilled,
a bank. He had kid who are bishops. His great
grandfather was a Jewish man who become the king's chief
financial advisor. Himself was not Jewish, but like he comes from,
you know, privilege. When you're you've get a relative who's
(04:14):
advising the king on where to invest money, you're anyone
who's got to ambassador. Uncle. Yeah, here we go, here
we go. Yeah yeah. I actually lived near the Saudi embassy,
and I can tell you those kids do not drive well.
Do you like ever like walk by and go who
If I'm feeling crazy today, maybe I'll go in there.
I mean again, we're really trying to get away from
(04:35):
talking about committing crimes on this podcast. Sorry, I can't
help myself. I will say it looks pretty fortified, like
you would have you would have trouble um next to
a really good shop for getting like desserts and stuff. Well,
I mean that makes sense, yeah, really really nice desserts
and coffee. Uh. Also a nice T shirt store next door?
(04:56):
And then where is it like in Koreatown area. No,
it's in like the West side. Uh oh yeah, I
didn't know that. Yes, most of the embassies are like
kind of that Wilsher Block, like some Saudi building, and
it's like this giant fortress looking thing in the middle
of like a shopping district. It's really weird. It's one
of those things. There's no signs. I didn't realize until later,
(05:16):
but there's all like regularly really nice cars with diplomatic
plates driving through and like usually driving like a bat
out of hell, because I mean I if I had
diplomatic plates, yeah I would lawless. Yeah I would never
drive sober. So okay. When Roll's mother remarried in nineteen
twelve he was six years old, his stepdad became the
administrator of the largest hospital in Sweden by all AC counts.
(05:38):
His childhood was a happy one. His mom and stepdad
gave him a great deal of freedom to roam around
and uh. He generally had an opportunity not a lot
of rich kids have, which is to kind of come
to their own conclusions about life. Role was particularly close
to his grandpa Gustav. Since Gustav spent his career as
a diplomat, he considered himself a citizen of the world
rather than just a Swite. He wanted his grandson Raoul
to grow up understanding the duty and oppligatetion that he
(06:00):
felt people owed each other. Raoul graduated from secondary school
in nineteen thirty. He spent nine months in mandatory military
service and then spent a year at the University of
Potier in France. By the time he was twenty, he
was fluent in English, German, Russian, and French sounds exhausting, right, Yeah, yeah,
I'm always over. I mean it's good. Yeah, well that's
(06:20):
always an interesting thing. Like American kids don't do that,
Like it was kind of an old timey, kind of
like European style to be like, I just learned all them.
There's no television exactly, there's no Twitter to distract me anyway.
I speak Chinese. Never going to go there because there's
no antibiotics. It's it's just a hobby. Uh. Role traveled
(06:43):
to the United States for college. He was an artist,
and he sought a career in architecture. Although he could
have afforded to have an Ivy League education, Role had
no interest in surrounding himself with a bunch of wealthy bricks.
His sister described him as an anti snob who loved
Charlie Chaplin, hot dogs, and sneakers. He went by the
nickname Rudy. He would not have fit in at Harvard
or Yale, but the University of Michigan proved to be
a perfect fit. It's nice. I heard it's nice. It's
(07:04):
like an an arbor area. It's an ann arbor area
and just during the winter. Most of what I know
about Michigan is that ann arbor is a place in
it M. That's very true. Alright, moving on. Uh. He
was popular at college. One classmate recalled that Rule was
a star who always thought to the essence of an issue.
He was full of energy, good humor, and generally a
good guy. Role refused to join a fraternity because, in
(07:26):
the words of a friend, he worried it would isolate
him from a certain strata of students. Wow, he really
is a good guy. If he's like, I'm sorry, fraternities
just aren't for me. It's gonna I just feel like
I don't want to hang around with rich people all
the time. He's like, I'm not trying to get sucked
into bro culture, you know, really trying to open my
eyes and trying to the world. Yeah. Yeah. During the holidays,
Wallenberg indulged in his passion hitchhiking. He wrote in a
(07:48):
letter to his grandpa that quote, when you travel like
a hobo, everything is different. You have to be on
the alert the whole time. You're in close contact with
new people every day. Hitchhiking gives you training in diplomacy. Intact,
this training would prove critical for what's going to come later.
Hitchhiking also gave Wallenberg experience in staying calm during moments
of tremendous danger during his second summer in America. What
just only a man could do that? Well, yeah, I mean, yes,
(08:10):
this is definitely I'm like, could I have been No,
I would have been murdered in my moments of diplomacy.
I mean yeah, yeah, I mean. And as it heads up,
this is a story of a guy who's born into
like about as much privilege as it's possible to be
born into, but who actually like deploys it really effectively,
which is part of why I like this story. So
during the second Summer in America, while he's hitching from
(08:31):
Chicago to ann Arbor, the East coast distances are always weird.
Like when I was in d C. I would go
through like two or three states in a day, just
like get lunch. And it's like, actually when I people
doing it. Once when I was in Chicago, I took
the train to ann Arbor for the day, it's not
it's lunacy. I grew up in Texas and then I
moved to California, So I'm used to a state being
a thing that like you gotta really you gotta want it.
(08:53):
The East Coast is nonsense. Uh and I don't care
who knows it except for Pittsburgh fish East coast city
of this podcast. Okay, yeah, I don't know why. That's
where movie theaters started. Really yep, well then there you go. Um. So,
during his second summer in America, this paragraphs taking as
(09:14):
a while. While hitching from Chicago han Arbor, Wallenberg was
picked up by a suspicious looking group before young men.
He later recalled that he quote started to work my
poverty into the conversation in order to convince them that
he wasn't worse robbing. This did not succeed. One of
the men jammed a revolver in Wallenberg's face and demanded
all of his money. He stayed calm. In fact, he
later reported that during the robbery, he realized his robbers
(09:35):
were quote the ones who were frightened. Maybe because I
was so calm. I really didn't feel any fear the
whole time. It was more like an adventure. Um. He
was robbed and tossed in a ditch, but even this
didn't cause him to give up pitchhiking in the world.
I understand, you know, they didn't, you know, they had
to Yeah, they were robbing me. It's whatever. I feel
bad that they were so scared. I was fine with it. Uh.
(09:58):
He took this as a war to carry less cash
and quote, try to become more devious, which is good
advice in general in life. Yeah, he's like, I learned
from everything. Yeah, he's he's really that kind of guy.
This is a learning opportunity. Yeah. Rao came to love
the United States and he had a difficult time leaving
(10:19):
the country after February nineteen thirty five, when he completed
his BA in architecture. Believe he did because the world
was beckoning to him. Roll next spent six months in
South Africa and then a year in Palestine as a
banker's apprentice. It was there that he first came face
to face with the consequences of Nazi racial policy. Palestine
in the late thirties was flooded with Jewish refugees from Germany,
men women who had been bankrupted by the Nuremberg Laws
(10:41):
and forced to flee for their lives. One of Wallenberg's
biographers believes that the conversations he had with Jewish refugees
left him permanently changed. He felt as if he had
to do something. I want to note that as soon
as I said Nuremberg laws, the dog barked again. She
doesn't care for it. No, she does not like Nazism.
It's a good dog. It's a good dog. She's continuing
(11:01):
to grow. Oh, somebody's delivering something, possibly a Nazi, every
time she hears that word. In nineteen thirty seven, Rolls,
grandfather and mentor, Gustav died. Roles next four years were difficult,
or at least they were rich get difficult. He started
two businesses, both of which failed, but he had family money,
(11:21):
so these failures were more like hits to his pride
than financial disasters. It is possible that some of his
failure had to do with his inability to really focus
on commerce. As the Third Reich War on and the
Second World War sparked off, Rae grew more and more
concerned for the Jews of Germany and of Europe. For
a long while, his ability to help was limited to
providing food aid to a family of refugees who had
fled to Sweden. But in nineteen forty one, with Hitler
(11:42):
at the height of his murderous power, Roles uncle Jacob
introduced him to a man named Kalman Lauer now Lauer
was a Hungarian businessman who had interests across Central Europe.
Since Lara was Jewish, Nazi domination of Central Europe made
it almost impossible for him to you know, travel, do
not get killed. Exist. He's a rough time to exist
if you were a Jewish guy in Central Europe. So
(12:05):
Lower's business was essentially like an exotic food import company,
and he put Wallenberg in charge of the company's European operations.
Because Wallenberg looked like the whitest dude ever. Well, they're
a picture of him up on the site. I don't
have one on this document because I am cracked out.
Oh boy, I can see the literal red eye. Yeah, yeah, Oh,
(12:25):
Sophie has pulled one up. Oh he had like male
pattern baldness. He's so cool. He's just a normal guy,
just a normal guy. If you were central casting white man,
you would pick Rao Wallaberg. Very normal looking dude. So
Wallenberg is now in charge of this company's European operations,
and he starts spending a lot of time in Budapest,
which is kind of where they're centered. He fell in
(12:45):
love with the city, which is an easy thing to
do hud beautiful beauty. One of the prettiest cities to
see from water that I've ever ye lovely place. Now.
Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany at the time.
Hungarians have kind of a history of being on the
wrong side of any given conflict ideologically, but especially fried food.
Oh my god, oh man, I had some of the best.
(13:10):
It was a brick of bacon, like the size of
an actual building brick that was all like the consistency
of a cheetoh all the way through. It was so fried,
so good, so good at fried food, and Hungary pretty
good at beer, but on the wrong side of your diet. Well, yeah,
fried bacon in World War two and of World War One,
(13:32):
one day, you know, one day, a lot of rough
decisions made me tieth century just fry it. They've benefited
the most from like Germany, just because of how nobody
thinks about what the Hungarians did during that war anymore,
because like they're right next to Germany, and oh boy,
got washed away by all that, by all the German behavior.
I guess we just let them take the blame for
(13:53):
this one and start walk away whistling. Well, no one
saw us. We were really there. They were definitely there. Yeah,
Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany. It's soldiers fought
and died in Russia alongside the men of the Rmacht,
but it was not officially part of the Third Reich.
Hungarian Jews were forced to wear yellow stars wherever they went,
just like German Jews um, but they were not sent
(14:15):
to concentration camps, at least not initially. Admiral Miklos Horthy,
Hungary's leader, was not a good guy, but he was
a better dude to having charge than say Hitler if
you happen to be Jewish, which is a low bar,
very low bar. But he was not Hitler. So by
early nineteen four, hungary seven hundred Thousandish Jews were probably
(14:35):
the most intact Jewish community in Europe. With the war
turning against them, the Nazi high command decided in essence
that if they couldn't win the war against the Allies,
they might at least win their war against the Jews,
which is very much how they viewed it now. Admiral
Harthy was not a total fool. It had become clear
as a bell by nineteen forty four that Germans were
not going to win this war. He tried to pull
his country out of the war and out of its
(14:56):
alliance with Germany. But Hitler was like, n Hitler, I'm Hitler.
You may have heard of me. Yeah, yeah, we've both
heard of Hitler. We've all heard of Hitler. The Vermacht
occupied Hungary on March nineteenth, and Horthy was basically ordered
to put a bunch of Hungarian Nazi types in charge
of the country. So he wasn't removed from power at
(15:17):
this point, but he was told, like, you didn't do
a nothing, dog, and you better throw some people that
we like in charge. So once the Nazis were in charge,
the Nazis did what Nazis do, exterminate Jewish people. By
July they had deported around four hundred and forty thousand Jews,
and this was the rapidest deportation and elimination of a
Jewish population Europe. But then a couple of weeks they
(15:38):
deported like four hundred something thousand people, most of them
wound up in Auschwitz, were three hundred and twenty thousand
of them were exterminated upon arrival. Inter The US government
kind of belatedly took a couple of years a million deaths.
But while up until this point the United States is
a reaction to the Holocaust could best be described as
piss poor, the Roosevelt administration finally decided to do something
(16:01):
about this thing. We don't have a word for yet
because the word genocide wasn't point until after this point,
but they decided to do something. Murder, murder, rampage, yeah, yeah.
They sent a guy named Iver Olsen to Stockholm as
the official representative of the War Refugee Board or w RB. Now.
Olsen's task was to find someone who could speak both
(16:21):
Hungarian and German and was willing to travel into one
of the deadliest parts of the world as the Reichs
slowly collapsed and try to rescue Jews from Hitler's death machine.
Olsen met Kalman Lauer, and Lauer recommended his friend Raoul
Wallenberg for the job. Wallenberg instantly agreed. He traveled to
Budapest in July ninety four as officially the secretary for
the Swedish Embassy in Budapest. So we're going to talk
(16:42):
about what he did in Budapest. But first, do you
like products? Are you a fan of services? Well, that's
what we're that's about ends and we're back. We're talking
(17:03):
about not a bastard today, the opposite of a bastard hero.
Uh And yeah, So when we last left off, Wallenberg
had just sort of made it to Budapest as a
secretary with the Swedish embassy. But that job title was
essentially nonsense. Wallenberg had a pretty open sort of mandate
to just try to save people's lives, and they've given
him just a job, so that he was technically attached
(17:25):
to the embassy, right and but was he almost just
like on a secret mission. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what
was happening. Uh So, Wallenberg's one condition for taking this
job was that he have full permission to do his
work without contacting the ambassador or any other government officials
for permission about anything. Basically, he was like, I want
to be a loose cannon diplomat. He doesn't have to
play by anybody's rules but his own. And this rarely
(17:47):
happens in government. But they were like, sure, kind of
a weird time. It is a weird time. Why not,
ye can't make the situation worse. Have you guys seen
what's happening out there? Late July? The only intact Jewish
community left in Hungary was the Jewish ghetto in Budapest. Now,
before the Nazis could depourt and exterminate all of them too,
(18:08):
Admiral Horthy ordered a halt to the deportations, and again
not because he was a great guy, but because he
was like, they're definitely going to lose the war, and
I want to be the guy who tried to stop
the mass murdering, so maybe I don't get hung Yeah, yeah,
he's an opportunist. He's an opportunist. I mean, you get
credit for trying to stop the Nazis from killing Jewish people,
for sure, glad he did that. But again, Horthy's a
(18:30):
complicated figure in expe, we'll say that. So his his
halt held for a few months, but it was clear
to everyone that eventually the Nazis were going to push
back again, because it's kind of what Nazis do. Wallenberg
began to focus his efforts on protecting the Jews and
his care from being arrested or attacked in the hopes
that the Jewish community in Budapest would just be able
to sort of wait out the end of the war.
So he was kind of playing for time. Raoul opened
a diplomatic office in Budapest. He hired four hundred Jewish
(18:52):
people to staff it. He didn't pay them because he
didn't we have the money to do that. But that
wasn't the point. As embassy employees, these Jews would be
protected against deep pitation. Wallenberg ordered his men to remove
their yellow stars. He told them, you are now under
Swedish diplomatic protection. So this remains the only truly justified
example of an unpaid internship in history. Yeah. Yeah, so
(19:13):
it was done well once. Let's just say this is
gonna save your life. Let's just say you work without
pay and so that we you can't get deported. That's
that's cool with everybody. Yeah. His next move was to
start issuing a new type of Swedish passport, shoots pass.
The government gave him the authority to print fiftud of
these passes, and he lobbied to increase that number to
forty and eventually just started printing the Mountain hand them
(19:35):
ount like hotcakes without permission. Yeah. Wallenberg designed these protective
passes himself, because again he was an artist. He knew
German and Hungarian fascists, like all fascists were unduly impressed
by colorful government documents with impressive symbols on them, Wallenberg
printed his protective passes and yellow and blue with a
garish coat of arms that included the three crowns of
Sweden in the middle. They were covered with stamps and signatures,
(19:55):
all of which were just nonsense. Just he just knew
that it made it look more legit. But like, whoa
on this motherfucker. Alright, alright, I guess we're not committing
genocide today. Did you see the stamps. It's just really
ridiculous that it worked, because the Shoots pass was more
(20:15):
or less alive. But it was a lie that worked.
By the end of the war, it's possible that he
issued as many as twenty thousand of them, which means
twenty human lives were saved by what was, in essence
a really good set of doodles in bullshit. But it worked.
Oscar Schindler, for some comparison, saved around human lives, which
is obviously still an immense, almost unthinkable act of heroism.
But I'm just trying to point out the titanic scale
(20:36):
of what Walllomberg accomplished, because he's just getting started at
this point. So one of the reasons Walllomberg was so
successful is that he had grasped an incredibly important truth
about law and government, which is that neither of those
things are real in any meaningful way outside of the
heads of the people that live within them. The only
thing that matters is the belief. If people believe something
is official, if they believe you speak with the might
of the government, and they'll get in trouble for disobeying you,
(20:59):
well then you can make them you almost anything. In
other words, Wallenberg took advantage of the Nazi tendency to
just follow orders and used it to save lives rather
than in them. Now uh, the War Refugee Board in
Swedish government provided Wallenberg with enough funds to rent thirty
two buildings. He declared them extra territorial buildings, which was
again not a thing. Uh. He told everyone that these
(21:19):
buildings were legally covered by Swedish diplomatic community, and he
told this lie so forcefully that it wasn't questioned. The
buildings he rented were built to hold less than five
thousand people, but Wallenberg, being a pretty decent architect, remodeled
them and was able to fit thirty five thousand Jews inside. Yeah.
He also operated a soup kitchen and a hospital for
the people in Budapest Jewish ghetto. Uh yeah, he's he's
(21:39):
hitting with all steam here. A couple of months into
the job. At this point, on October, the Hungarian Arrow
Cross movement ceased power into posed Admiral Horthy. Now the
Arrow Cross was essentially just a Hungarian Nazis you know. Um.
They were backed by the Germans and acted as an
even more puppety puppet government than the last one had been.
The deportations resumed, Wallenberg instantly began confronting trains filled with
(22:03):
Jews before they could depart for their journey to Auschwitz.
Sandor Arda, a driver for Wallenberg and member of the
Jewish Underground, later recalled one such instance quote he climbed
up on the roof of the train and began handing
in protective passes through the doors, which were not yet sealed.
He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down.
Then the Arrow crossmen began shooting and shouting at him
to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing
(22:25):
out passports into the hands that were reaching out for them.
I believe the arrow crossmen deliberately aimed over his head,
as not one shot hit him, which would have been
impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because
they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had
handed over the last of the passports, he ordered all
those who had one to leave the train and walked
to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in
Swedish colors. I don't remember exactly how many, but he
(22:46):
saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and arrow
Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it.
You would regularly stop trains and just shout at SS
we even when he didn't have passports, would just brate
the SS guys in charge of the crowd to let
whole car loads of people off. Yeah this is There
was nothing backing him up. He was just going out
there and being like, these are Swedish citizens, no proof,
(23:08):
just like just a really good liar and really good
at bullshitting and pretending. He has the force of the
power of confidence. It's the power of being a tall
white guy. But he's like fake it till you make it,
fake it till you a vertigenicide yeah. Now Nazis being Nazis,
they did push back against Wallenburg safe houses. On Christmas Eve,
(23:31):
a bunch of Nazis raided one of Wallenburg safe houses
and they took hundreds of people out in the middle
of the night and marched them to the Danube. The
Nazis tied three people together at a time, shot the
person in the middle, and then would let the corpse
pull the other two down under the freezing river. This
was too safe, bullets, Germans, you know they're Nazis. Uh.
(23:52):
Wallenberg found out what was going on and he rounded
up volunteers from his staff, people who could swim, and
together they jumped into the river and fished out as
many survivors as they could find, saving fifty or sixty
people that night. Now they the Arrow Cross had even
less respect for due process than the last regime it had.
They took to hunting down and murdering Jews in the street,
so Wallenberg had to ramp up his rescue operations in
(24:13):
order to cope. He found aryan looking young Jewish men
and he put them in Erroo Cross uniforms and had
them guard as safe houses. He started issuing protective papers
to everyone and just ignored the fact that the Swedish
government hadn't actually given them the power to do that.
When it's funding ranlow, Wallenberg turned to blackmailing local officials
and businessmen and committing other petty crimes in order to
finance his rescue operations. At this point, why why not
(24:33):
fuck it? The world's ending. Yeah yeah. The arrow Cross
responded by declaring Wallenberg's protective passports to being no longer valid.
Wallenburg protested to the government and somehow managed to get
them reinstated, but at the end of the day, Aikman
and the Nazis who really ran things in Hungary now
were committed to wiping out the last of that country's Jews.
By the winter of nineteen four, the Russians had advanced
enough that the Germans could no longer send Jews to
(24:55):
Auschwitz on trains. This didn't present a major problem for
a guy like Aichman, because he's still had the option
of just forcing the prisoners to go on a one
d and twenty five mile death march without food or sleep,
which you know, pretty much kills the same amount of
people as against Chamber and the European Winter uh tens
of thousands of Jews were sent off on an enormous
force march to their doom. Wallenberg gathered up trucks, food
(25:16):
and medical supplies. He traveled along the road of march
and handed them out, trying to give the marchers the
best odds of survival possible, and when he could, he
attempted to abduct some of them. Here's a quote from
the book Wallenberg by Katie Martin. You there, the Swede
pointed to an astonished man waiting for his turn to
be handed over to the executioner. Give me your Swedish
passport and getting that line, he barked, and you get
behind him. I know I issued you a passport. Walloenberg
(25:37):
continued moving fast, talking loud, hoping the authority in his
voice would somewhat rub off on these defeated people. The
Jews finally caught on. They started groping in pockets for
bits of identification. A driver's license or birth certificates seemed
to do the trick. The Swede was grabbing them so
fast the Nazis, who couldn't read Hungarian anyway, didn't seem
to be checking faster. Wallenberg's eyes urged them faster. Before
the game is up In minutes, he had several hundred
(25:58):
people in his convoy. International Red Cross trucks there at
Wallenburg's behest arrived and the Jews clambered on. Wallenberg jumped
into his own car. He leaned out of the car
window and whispered, I am sorry to the people he
was leaving behind. I am trying to take the youngest
ones first, he explained, I want to save a nation. Wow, yeah,
that's wild. This is an act of pure balls. Wallenberg
had no legal basis for what he was doing, but
(26:19):
he knew something important about fascists, which is that they
respond to confident leadership. It's kind of their only thing.
They'll do whatever a loud and certain person tells him
to do. That's so cool, yeah, he just, Oh, this
is how naz fine. They just want a confident guy
to yell at. Yeah. Saving people grew to become an
(26:39):
all consuming obsession for Raoul. Before he traveled to Budapest,
he had confided in a friend that his nightmare would
be to return to Stockholm, knowing that he hadn't done
absolutely everything in his power to save as many Jews
as possible. So while he was in Budapest, Walloenberg slept
just four hours a night at most. He was constantly
in motion while he was awake. This was necessary because
the fascists were always moving. To Tommy laugh that, a
(27:00):
thirteen year old who lived in one of Wallenberg's safe
houses recalled this. One morning, a group of these Hungarian
fascists came into the house and said that all the
able bodied women must go with them. We knew what
this meant. My mother kissed me, and I cried, and
she cried. We knew we were parting forever. And she
left me there an orphan tall intents and purposes. Then
two or three hours later, to my amazement, my mother
returned with the other women. It seemed like a mirage,
(27:21):
a miracle. My mother was there, she was alive, and
she was hugging me and kissing me, and she said
one word Wallenberg. I knew who she meant, because Wallenberg
was a legend among the Jews. In a complete and
total hell in which we lived, there was a savior
angel somewhere moving around. After she had composed herself, my
mother told me they were being taken to the river
when a car arrived and outstepped Wallenberg, and they knew
immediately who it was, because there was only one such
(27:43):
person in the world. He went up to the Arrow
Cross leader and protested that the women were there under
his protection. They argued with him, but he must have
had incredible charisma, some great personal authority, because there was
absolutely nothing behind him, nothing to back him up. He
stood out there in the street, probably feeling the loneliest
man in the world, trying to pretend that there was
some behind him. They could have shot him then and
there in the street and nobody would have known about it. Instead,
(28:04):
they were lented and let the women go. Oh. He
just kept screaming at He just kept screaming at him
until he saved hundreds of people. Yeah, that's crazy, Jesus,
this man, this guy, right, he's hell of it. It's
almost like a folk hero. Wallenberg became famous among the
Nazis as well. Aikman called him juw Dog Wallenberg because
(28:26):
Nazis are not very creative at all. That doesn't sound
like ro ro Juel, like if if I'm trying to
do that, I'm just saying like there's other yea Aikman.
They harassed him regularly, and the Nazis even blew up
his car. At one point he took to sleeping in
different houses every night in order to avoid assassination. Dawnt.
(28:48):
The Soviet war machine was closing in on Budapest. There
were only a hundred thousand or so Jews left alive
in the Budapest ghetto. Aikeman ordered five D S. S.
Troops and even more Arrow Cross soldiers to ring the
ghetto and prepare for what would have been the largest
gun based massacre of World War two. Now, for a
little bit of historical perspective, the largest I think gun
based massacre of the war was the Bobby Yard massacre,
(29:10):
which I think was one been forty two with the
innsets grouping unit shot like thirty thou people when they
line a bunch of people up and then just yeah,
and they actually had they stopped doing that in favor
of the gas chambers because like so many of those
guys went up killing themselves and becoming alcohol excuse that
you just can't have people do that. It's hard, it's hard,
it's hard. Fu off off. Now. So yeah, that was
(29:32):
the plan, and these guys, you know, at this point
in nineteen forty five year an S. S. Trooper in Budapest.
Number one, you're probably were wounded fighting the Russians, which
is why you're in a place like Budapest. So these
were hard sons of bitches. Uh probably who would have
been you know, they would have had to be to
be capable of massacring a hundred thousand people. But that's
the situation that we're in in ninety five, and we
will talk about what happens next after somes and we're back. Boy, howdy,
(30:05):
I do love ads, boy howdy. So we were talking
about how the Nazis were going to massacre a hundred
thousand people by shooting them to death in the Budapest ghetto.
Oh the joy, the joy. We're talking about the ads. Yeah,
Now about Wallenberg coming to hopefully saved them at the
last second. Yep, yep ye. So Aikman had ordered this massacre,
but he was not there in person because he was
(30:27):
trying to escape Nazi Germany, which he did for a while.
So the task of murdering all these people went to
s S General August Schmidt Duber. Now Wallenberg caught onto
the plan and he went straight to schmid Duber's office.
He promised the man that if anything happened to the ghetto.
He would make it his business to ensure the general
was found personally responsible for the massacre and hanged for
crimes against humanity. This was pure bluff, but it worked.
(30:48):
Schmidt Duber called off the massacre. Look, man, I don't
want to have to get you hung. I don't want
to get you in trouble, buddy. It's like, what are
you talking about. He's like, you know you're gonna get
in trouble. I don't know. Let him go. I'll get
your trouble with some sort of international legal committee that
doesn't exist right now. The Soviets took Budapest later in January,
and that should have been the start of Wallenberg's happy ending,
(31:09):
but rules contact with the American government led the Soviets
to suspect he was some sort of spy because I
ever Olson, the guy who had hired him and worked
for the War refug Board, also worked for the oss
UM and well, the USSR was not nearly as anti
Semitic as the Nazis, and they're still pretty anti semitic.
And one of the things that you read about the
guys who found Wallenberg in there and why they found
(31:31):
him suspicious is they could not wrap their hands around
the idea of a guy doing everything that Wallenberg had
done just to save Jewish people. They're like, there's gotta
be he's gotta be some sort of a weird spy.
What's going on here? Yeah, there's no way this man
just has goodness of the heart. Yeah, there's the way
that man just wants to save human lives. So Rao
was arrested and we don't really know what happened to him.
(31:52):
The most likely story is that he died sometime in
the nineteen fifties in the KGB's infamous Lubyanka prison. Yeah,
it's fucked up right. The Swedes were so concerned with
having good relations with the USSR and staying neutral that
they took no effort to save the life of a
man who was a citizen of their country, a government employee,
and one of the greatest Swedish heroes ever born uh
In April of nineteen five, the U s State Department
(32:14):
even offered Sweden for help in asking the Russians about Wallenberg,
to like pressure them a little bit, and Sweden said no.
They didn't want to compromise their neutrality by trying to
save this guy's life. Uh. In nineteen forty six, after
intense public demand, the Swedish Foreign Minister and went to
Moscow to ask Joseph Stalin in essence what happened to Wallenberg.
And he did ask him that, but immediately afterwards he
said that he personally thought Wallenberg had probably died in
(32:36):
Budapest and basically gave Stalin an opening, and Stalin took
the opening and just didn't say this was untrue. So
that's the line the government went with for a while. Yeah,
you never give Stalin an opening. You never give Stalin
an opening, not j Staal. That's what he's gonna is
what he's gonna do. So in nineteen fifty seven, after
Stalin's death, the Soviet Union finally admitted that Wallenberg had
(32:56):
in fact survived the war. They said he died of
a heart attack in captivity in nineteen forty eight. This
remained the Russian government's official stance until well after the
end of the Cold War. We still don't really know
what happened to Raoul, although it's safe to say the
Russian government imprisoned, probably tortured in one way or the other,
definitely murdered him uh now at the end of World
War Two was a chaotic time. Estimates very wildly on
(33:17):
how many lives Wallomberg saved. The most common estimate is
a hundred thousand human beings, but it maybe several times
that many. Because his activities provided a blueprint several other
embassies used to rescue Jewish people as well. Wallomberg almost
certainly saved more lives than any other member of the
righteous among nations, which is sort of a title that
the Nation of Israel has awarded the non Jews who
(33:37):
saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Nobody saved more people
than Raoul Wallomberg. And in fact, a hundred thousand lives
is uh one six of the total number of Jews
dead in the Holocaust saved by one guy. Wow. Gideon Housner,
the man who prosecuted Adolf Aikman and later was the
chairman of Yad Vashan, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, said
(33:58):
this about Raoul Wallomberg. Here is a man who had
the choice of remaining in secure, neutral Sweden when Nazism
was ruling Europe. Instead, he left this haven and went
to what was then one of the most perilous places
in Europe, hungry and for what to save Jews. He
won his battle, and I feel that in this age
when there is so little to believe, in, so very
little on which our young people can pen their hopes
and ideals, he is a person to show to the
(34:19):
world who knows so little about him. This is why
I believe the story of Rold Wallenberg should be told
in his figure, in all its true proportions, projected into
human minds. M hm, that's that's the story. Merry Christmas.
God damn the Russia always everything. Well, I mean, they
did beat the Nazis, but yeah, and they go and
(34:40):
take the one man who like basically was out. You're
screaming at Nazis until they were like, I don't know,
I'm confused. These voices allowed I guess like the Hungarian
Jewish community wound up, even though it survived later than
most of them were, being like one of the most
completely destroyed Jewish communities in all of Europe, and virtually
the only Hungarian Jews who survived did so because of
what burke, Oh my god, hundred thousand lives. Do you
(35:02):
think they tortured him just to find out who he
was working for and just wouldn't believe it, would you
know it could be this nice? Yeah that's crazy to me. Yeah, yeah,
just a man. What do you think happened to him?
I think he was probably thrown in a prison, tortured
for a little while, thrown into a prison. I think
it's very possible he did die up a heart attack.
He was on the thirty two when all this happened.
(35:22):
But you know, you torture somebody for a while and
you starved them, you know. So he started doing this
in his early thirty's, just thirty two when he got
the job thirty two. He's just like, well, you know, yeah,
a save some lives thirty two with his only professional
training and architecture, and just was like, all right, I'm
just gonna go lie until I've saved a hundred thousand
people and then did it. I imagine at thirty two,
(35:46):
I will still be doing nothing. Well what I like
about podcasting? Podcasting? Yeah, yeah, he's a Well that's why
he's a good person to, uh, to fill people's minds with,
especially on a show where we otherwise just talk about
reckless evil and the insane deadliness of human hate. This
guy who grew up and learned one of the most
(36:08):
important truths you can learn as a tall white guy,
which is that there's all it's a superpower. You know,
if you're a tall white guy and you just balls
your way into a situation with confidence, nan out of
ten people will listen to you. Night Nazis, Nazis. I
don't know, man, I mean, we're supposed to kill these people,
but look at how tall and white he is, and
(36:28):
he's got that paper with all the stamps on it.
I don't know. I guess, I guess we don't kill
these people. It's crazy. It's wild. Get all the train,
Get off the train, Get off the train. Look at
how tall this guys. Get off the train. Yeah, that's amazing.
That's an amazing story. Yeah, never heard of him. That's wild.
I don't even I am so upset with the USSR. Yeah,
(36:51):
it's pretty frustrating. Sweden. Yeah, God, that is so annoying.
It's like you just the man did so much. It's
so much in like five or six months, saved a thousand. Sorry,
we're neutral. Yeah, yeah, so be like Raoul Wallenberg, print
(37:13):
some fake passports and go save people. Speak loudly. Yeah,
be tall, do crime, save lives. Yellot fascist, yellot fat,
yell at fascists, but productively yellot fascists to get them
to be less fashion. Do you think that would work
with the alt right? If you just want to just
spoke loud, like guys, I don't know about this. It's
worth shop. I don't know. He's talking quite loud. And
(37:37):
waffle house, yeah, waffle house, yeah, yeah, and just give
them heart disease through waffle house. Just poison all the waffles. Yeah,
that's the Budapest way, fry everything. Oh yeah, I do
want to go back to Hungary. You need more. It's
(37:58):
actually quite cheap too, yeah, very inexpensive place. Yeah, I
recommend kind of a dictator in charge. Now, that part
is not great, isn't. Europe is just like us. They
go back and forth. The same thing with Poland it's
happening over there as well. Yeah. Yeah, people have some
fascism in charge. Forget how bad it went the last time,
and they're like, what if we try bad again? Yeah,
maybe not everyone will die this time. Yeah, Well we're
(38:20):
on a wave. We better hope. There's a couple of
Wallenberg's waiting in the wings getting their degrees in architecture
right now, learning how to use their power as tall,
balding white men to shout the world and do a
better place I hope. So I need someone to just
tell me where to go. I know. That's that's why
it works. Yeah. So this is a great story about
(38:42):
the power of lives and bullshit to save lives. I
love that part of it because I'm a big fan
aalizing bullshite. Great thing to be able to do. Anna
pluga bless You can listen to my podcast with sharene
Units called Ethnically Ambiguous on the House Stuff Works Network. Yeah,
you can follow me on Twitter, Anna host n. I
tweet about stuff. I retweet Robert every once a while.
(39:03):
Robert just posted a really crazy video how to get
out of like speaking of heroes, when you fall through ice. Yeah,
and he did it by falling through ice on the
video and then like calmly explaining the things that you
need to do to extricate yourself from that situation. It's incredible.
It's truly like well, and it teaches you these things.
(39:25):
There's a similarity in that video between what Wallenberg did,
which is that when the guy first falls in the ice.
You can hear in his voice that he's in a
pretty dire straight because it's shocking and and that's why
most people dies, that they panic in that moment of
extreme pain. And he walks you through that, like you
just have to breathe for a while and calm down
and realize the cold's not going to kill you right away.
You have time, it passes, You have time to think
(39:48):
through your actions and calmly and decisively extricate yourself in
the situation and in every dangerous situation I've ever been,
and that really is the key, is like, Okay, my
body is telling me to take certain actions right now,
but maybe I should think for just a second and
like figure out calmly, Like you almost never need to
take that sort of panic thrash response. It's all about
(40:10):
moving with purpose. And yeah, yeah it's great video. Yeah,
look it up somewhere. It's on your Twitter. Look up
guy falls through ice YouTube or my Twitter. Just today,
but I will have tweeted probably fifty times a rollback
form nonsense. Yeah, yeah, I don't even know what day
it is. So thanks for having me, Thanks for being
(40:31):
on Yep, you can buy a T shirt, you know,
I should, you should buy a T shirt, and you
listening should buy a T shirt from t Publix behind
the Bastard store phone cases as well, cocaine spoons. Sophie
is saying that they're they sell branded coke spoons now fantastic,
So Fleetwood Mac, if you're listening branded coketotes, branded coke tootes, yep. Absolutely,
(40:51):
Also Fleetwood Mac. We're really really aiming for that. Sweet
Fleetwood Mac immigrants sending to blow cocaine up your butt.
I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at
I right, Okay, you can find my book A Brief
History of Ice. It's a great Christmas gift, although this
will probably be running like the day before Christmas. But
you can buy a kindle book anytime. Amazon Prime man
(41:15):
speaking of gigantic evil machines that destroy the support the evils.
Oh god, this paper is even from Amazon. Why Amazon
selling paper? Do everything, Robert, There's nothing you can at
one point came through the hands of Amazon. Anyway, Amazon,
if you want to throw some ad rev oar No boy, No,
(41:38):
by the way, my home generates misery made by Amazon.
Wait what yeah, I live in a Prime home. No,
you're lying. It's not it's coming. Oh no, I mean
I'm sure we will all live in Prime homes. Yeah.
I live in the Prime apartment complex. There's no bathrooms,
there's a hole in the wall. You have to deliver
(42:00):
three packages every morning. Part of your ready to just
start working Amazon. Amazon has started to do this thing
where like they just have random people delivering stuff. They
do they're not good at They just show up in
random cars. Just see packages lying everywhere now where. It's like,
you guys don't know how to do this job. They
(42:20):
really they it's third party all the way. They just
are like, yeah, you can do it. Half of them
don't deliver your packages. You're like, why do you have
this job? But random people just did everything for nothing,
and that's how our company works. And I get a
billion dollars a day. That's the Jeff Bezos planned. He's
another guy just was like talking very loudly, and we're
(42:41):
all like, yeah, that's why I have so much respect
for the one guy who doesn't use that power for evil.
Rou Wallenberg, so he was in charge of Amazon. Probably
just be a company dedicated to saving Syrian refugees. Amazon Prime,
you just literally get we just ship them out of
the country. You're just delivered to your house, and just
(43:01):
take care of them, help them started your life. Yeah. Yeah,
if you're listening Amazon, that's what you should be doing
to the Greek the islands in Greece. I will stop
talking smack if you just start shipping people out of country.
Cameroon too, can maybe use it. Ugly stuff going on
there anyway, anywhere anywhere where there's some serious strife with
(43:22):
the people Honduras. Ship people out of there. Send them
to Ohio. No, that seemed to mean to them. Send
them to Michigan. Yeah, Rollenberg would appreciate that. Yeah, Michigan,
nice place, beautiful, beautiful. All right, Well, this has been
the episode Mary Holidays. Enjoy your winter times, eat egg nog,
(43:49):
fight Nazis. I love about you.
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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