Wolf wrote:
That was at the very end of the war. Himmler tried to save his own neck.
Incorrect. Himmler had been trying to initiate secret negotiations with agents of the Western Allies ever since 1943 (secret = behind Hitler's back). Himmler had realised by then that the war could not be won by Germany, and that the only way out was a negotiated peace with the Western Allies, leaving Germany free to fight the Soviet Union to a standstill.
Himmler's clandestine action in letting the Jews of Denmark flee to Sweden was a sign to the Allies that he was prepared to trade Jews in return for negotiations. (The action was clandestine in the sense that it was not carried out openly. A warning was given to the Jews by German officials that an action against them was imminent; then the normal German naval patrols were temproarily withdrawn, enabling the Jews to flee by sea. Only Himmler was in a position to organise all of that, although his role remains clouded in secrecy).
The "Jews for trucks" deal, proposed in May when the deportations from Hungary were only just starting, was also a signal from Himmler to the Western Allies of his readiness to negotiate. Another element was the fact that Himmler allowed the Wehrmacht plot against Hitler to proceed, even the Gestapo knew all about it. Himmler took no action against the plotters for a whole day, waiting to see what the outcome was, and only moved when it became clear that the assassination attempt had failed.
For details on Himmler's attempts to initiate negotiations, using the Jews as bargaining chips, I suggest you read the book "Jews For Sale" by the Jewish historian Yehuda Bauer.
By the time Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July, the main deportation to Auschwitz was ending. There subsequent smaller deportations to Austria, but these were for the purpose of providing a slave-labour force to build fortifications on the border.
In October, Eichmann obtained approval from the Hungarian authorities to send 50,000 Jews to Austria to work on fortifications. They were despatched by foot as the railway lines had been cut. Very few of the Jews sent actually reached the worksites in Austria; due to the harsh weather conditions, and the fact that the Jews were in poor condition to start with, many collapsed on the way, and many died. For that reason the attempt to send Jews to Austria by foot was called off, and those who had not reached the border or had not died on the way were returned to Budapest.
It is clear that in organising that particular deportation, Eichmann was implementing orders to provide a labour force for the fortification work in Austria. The attempt to send them by foot failed because it was not practicable, not due to humanitarian efforts by Becher or others.
Other small groups of Jews were sent from other localities in Hungary to various worksites in Austria. In these cases, the transportation succeeded because it was carried out by rail.
There is no evidence that Wallenberg had any influence whatever on the trnasportation of Jews to Austria that occurred from October onward. At most, he played a role in protecting Jews in Budapest from the depredations of the Nyilas gangs.
However, the survival of the large Jewish community in Budapest cannot be attributed to the activities of Anger or Wallenberg. In the first place, the Germans had already extracted as many Jews from Hungary as they needed for slave-labour in Germany and Austria. In the second place, Himmler was concerned to preserve a large number of Jews to use as bargaining chips in his negotiations with the Allies.
The exact date of Himmler's order to cease the selections for killing in the concentration camps is not known, but according to testimony it was toward the end of October 1944. Himmler's motive was to keep Jews alive for use in his attempts at negotiation. In any case, the Jews deported from Hungary subsequent to the German reoccupation in October were sent for slave-labour.
Any statement that the activities of Anger and Wallenberg somehow "frustrated the Holocaust" is simply nonsense. At best their activities were marginal. They had no real influence on the outcome.
The reasons for Wallenberg's arrest by the Soviets remain shrouded in mystery, until such time as former Soviet archives are completely opened. In my opinion, the most likely explanation is that the SOviets suspected that he was somehow involved in Himmler's negotiations with the Western Allies, particularly as he was trying to use Sweden as a conduit.
Whether Wallenberg was knowingly involved in such negotiations cannot be known. But I think that his activity in issuing protective documents to Jews in Budapest, and his procurement of safe houses where they could be kept, was something that was surreptitiously allowed by Himmler in order to keep a substantial number of Jews "on ice" for the purpose of trading them. Whatever Wallenberg's real role was, he was surely a very minor player in the convoluted series of events in Hungary between the German occupation in March 1944 and the Soviet conquest early in 1945.
