Behind the Bastards - Special X-Mas Non-Bastard: Raoul Wallenberg, History's Greatest Hero

Episode Date: December 25, 2018

In Episode 40, Robert is joined by Anna Hossnieh to discuss one of his heroes, Raoul Wallenberg. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, motherfuckers? Nope, that's not how we're going to start it. That's so good. I'm Robert Evans. Hello. This is the Behind the Bastards 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. And I figured that in light of the holiday season, the fact that 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 Anna Hosnia, co-host of the ethnically ambiguous podcast. What did I fuck up? She didn't even notice. No, she did. She's just immune to it. Hosnia. That's totally fine.

Yeah, who cares? At this point, who cares? Most people go like, Hosni, or Hosni. You are there, my friend. All right, let's leave this all in. Lawrence, yeah, we're keeping it in. This will be good because that way, if any of our listeners meet you, they will know how to approximately pronounce your name. How are you doing today, Anna?

I'm good. I overslept this morning, which is common for me on a nice Monday. I can't hop back that well into the work week after a weekend. No, there's no hopping. I just got off of a red eye from DC, so I am ruined right now. Were you fighting the good war? Yeah, kind of. I was teaching baby cops how to find Nazis on the Internet. Of course you were. That is the most you thing I've ever heard in my life. Anna, have you ever heard of a fellow named Raoul Wallenberg?

No. I'm curious, though. You're about to. In a world so full of evil, depless greed, unspeakable cruelty, and that one Ariana Grande music video that was kind of mean, 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 a pretty common feeling in 2018 as we watch society spiral into oblivion. You've got that Weinstein laugh going again.

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 eternal power of lying. Raoul 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 Satanist Easter present, I think that's in December too. I don't really know much. No, probably not. I just lied about that.

I think this might also count. We're recording this during Hanukkah, but it's not going to run during Hanukkah, but you can consider it a Hanukkah present as well, if that is your desire. Any kind of present, if you like presents, this is a kind of one of those for you. A Christmaca, if you will. Christmaca Satanist Easter. Right. Let's talk about Raoul Wallenberg's story after this. Raoul Wallenberg's parents were the science of two wealthy Swedish families.

His father was also named Raoul Wallenberg and was a naval officer in the Swedish Navy. His mother, Maj Wising, was the daughter of a neurologist. They married in 1911, but Raoul contracted cancer a few months later and died three months before the birth of the son who would carry on his name. But he didn't go by the second or junior? No, because his dad was dead as shit. So you don't got to do that if your dad dies. So Swedish. Well, no, I'm not going to do that. That's breaking the law again.

So our Raoul Wallenberg was born on August 4th, 1912, in Kapsta, Sweden. He spent his first few years living in bougie comfort with his mother and his grandmother. Raoul grew up in about as much privilege as it's possible to grow up with. His grandfather had been the Swedish ambassador to Japan. His uncles were wealthy bankers, founders of the Inskilda Bank. He had Kenhuer Bishops. His great-grandfather was a Jewish man who'd become the king's chief financial advisor. He himself was not Jewish, but he comes from privilege. You've got a relative who's advising the king on where to invest money.

Anyone who's got an ambassador, uncle, you're like, oh, here we go. Here we go. I actually lived near the Saudi embassy, and I can tell you those kids do not drive well. Do you ever walk by and go, oh, if I'm feeling crazy today, maybe I'll go in there. I mean, again, we're really trying to get away from talking about committing crimes on this podcast. Oh, sorry. I can't help myself. I will say it looks pretty fortified. You would have trouble. Next to a really good shop for getting desserts and stuff. Well, I mean, that makes sense.

Really nice desserts and coffee. Also a nice t-shirt store next door, and then Saudi embassy. Where is it? Like in Koreatown area? No, it's in the west side. Oh, I don't know that. Most of the embassies are kind of on that Wilshire block, like the consulates and stuff. Some Saudi building, and it's like this giant fortress looking thing in the middle of a shopping district. It's really weird. It's one of those things. There's no signs. I didn't realize until later, but there's regularly really nice cars with diplomatic plates driving through, and usually driving like a bat out of hell. I mean, if I had diplomatic plates, I would...

Lawless. Yeah, I would never drive sober. So, when Roll's mother remarried in 1912, he was six years old. His stepdad became the administrator of the largest hospital in Sweden. By all accounts, his childhood was a happy one. His mom and stepdad gave him a great deal of freedom to roam around, and he generally had an opportunity, not a lot of rich kids have, which is to kind of come to their own conclusions about life. Roll 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 swede. He wanted his grandson, Raoul, to grow up understanding the duty and obligation that he felt people owed each other. Raoul graduated from secondary school in 1930. He spent nine months in mandatory military service, and then spent a year at the University of Poitiers in France. By the time he was 20, 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 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 the languages. I just learned all the languages. There's no television. Yeah, exactly. Like, there's no Twitter to distract me. Anyway, I speak Chinese. I'm never going to go there because there's no antibiotics.

It's just a hobby. It's just a hobby. In 1931, Raoul traveled 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, Raoul had no interest in surrounding himself with a bunch of wealthy pricks. 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. Nice. I heard it's nice. It's like in Ann Arbor area. Yeah, it's in Ann Arbor area. Gorges during the winter. Most of what I know about Michigan is that Ann Arbor is a place in it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

That's very true. Mm-hmm. All right, moving on. He was popular at college. One classmate recalled that Raoul was a star who always thought to the essence of an issue. He was full of energy, good humor, and generally a good guy. Raoul refused to join a fraternity because in the words of a friend, he worried it would isolate him from a certain strata of students.

Wow, he really is a good guy. He's like, I'm sorry, fraternities just aren't for me. I just feel like I don't want to hang around with rich people all the time. Yeah. He's like, I'm not trying to get sucked into bro culture. You know, really trying to open my eyes and see what's out there. Just trying to see the world. Yeah.

Yeah. During the holidays, Wallenberg indulged in his passion, hitchhiking. He wrote in a letter to his grandpa that quote, when you travel like a hobo, everything's 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 and tact. 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, this is definitely. I'm like, could I have done that? No, I would have been murdered in my moments of diplomacy. I mean, yeah, yeah.

I mean, as a heads up, this is a story of a guy who's born into about as much privilege as he's possible to be born into, but who actually deploys it really effectively, which is part of why I like this story. So during a second summer in America, while he's hitching from Chicago to Ann Arbor, the East Coast distances are always weird. When I was in DC, I would go through two or three states in a day just to get lunch. What are you people doing over there? Once when I was in Chicago, I took the train to Ann Arbor for the day. It's nuts.

That easy. 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 got to really. You got to want it. The East Coast is nonsense. And I don't care who knows it except for Pittsburgh. Okay.

Official East Coast City of this podcast. Really? Okay. Yeah. I don't know why. That's where movie theater started. Really? Yep.

Well then. Pittsburgh. There you go. So during his second summer in America, this paragraph is taking us a while. While hitching from Chicago to Ann 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 worth 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 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. He was robbed and tossed in a ditch, but even this didn't cause him to give up hitchhiking.

Oh my God. Just the calmest guy 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. Yeah. Wow. He took this as a warning to carry less cash and, quote, try to become more devious, which is good advice in general in life. He's like, I learned from everything. Yeah. This is a learning opportunity.

Yeah. Yeah. Raul came to love the United States and he had a difficult time leaving the country after February 1935 when he completed his BA in architecture. Believe he did because the world was beckoning to him. Raul 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 30s was flooded with Jewish refugees from Germany, men and women who'd been bankrupted by the Nuremberg laws 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. Yeah. 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 to grow out. Oh, somebody's delivering something, possibly a Nazi. She doesn't care for it.

No, every time she hears that word. In 1937, Raul's grandfather and mentor Gustav died. Raul's 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, 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 wore on and the Second World War sparked off, Raul 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'd fled to Sweden. But in 1941, with Hitler at the height of his murderous power, Raul's uncle Jacob introduced him to a man named Kalman Lauer. Lauer was a Hungarian businessman who had interests across Central Europe. Since Lauer was Jewish, Nazi domination of Central Europe made it almost impossible for

him to travel, not get killed. Exist. It was a rough time. Exist. If you were a Jewish guy in Central Europe. Lauer'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.

We'll throw a picture of him up on the site. I don't have one on this document because I am cracked out, Anna. Oh boy. I can see the literal red eye in your eye. Oh, 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 a central casting white man, you would pick Raoul Wallenberg, 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 fells in love with the city, which is an easy thing to do. Truly. Budapest, beautiful, beautiful city. Gorgeous.

One of the prettiest cities to see from water that I've ever went. Yeah. Lovely place. Now Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany at the time. The Aryans have kind of a history of being on the wrong side of any given conflict ideologically. Especially fried food. Oh my God. Oh man, I had some of the best.

Your eye just twitched thinking about it. It was a brick of bacon, like the size of an actual building brick that was all fried. The consistency of a Cheeto all the way through was so good, so good at fried food in Hungary. Pretty good at beer. But on the wrong side of your diet. Well, yeah. Fried bacon. End of World War II.

Yeah. End of World War I. Yeah. One day, you know. One day. A lot of rough decisions made in the early part of the 20th 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 who boy. I got washed away by all that, by all the German behavior. I guess we just let them take the blame for this one. Start walk away whistling. Well, no one saw us. Were we really there? Yeah.

They were definitely there. Yeah. Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany. Its soldiers fought and died in Russia, alongside the men of the Wehrmacht. 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. But they were not sent 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 have in charge than say Hitler, if you happen to be Jewish, which is a low bar. Yeah. Very low bar. Yeah. But he was not Hitler. So by early 1944, Hungary's 700,000ish Jews were probably the most intact Jewish community in Europe. Wow.

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 Horthy was not a total fool. He had to become clear as a bell by 1944 that the Germans were not going to win this war. He tried to pull his country out of the war and out of its alliance with Germany, but Hitler was like, no, dog. I'm Hitler.

I'm Hitler. You may have heard of me. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. We've both heard of Hitler. We've all heard of Hitler. The Wehrmacht occupied Hungary on March 19th, and Horthy was basically ordered to put a bunch

of Hungarian Nazi types in charge of the country. He wasn't removed from power at this point, but he was told like, you ain't doing nothing, dog. And you better throw some people that we like in charge. Yeah. So once the Nazis were in charge, the Nazis did what Nazis do, exterminate Jewish people. By July, they had deported around 440,000 Jews, and this was the rapidest deportation and elimination of a Jewish population in Europe.

Within a couple of weeks, they deported like 400 something thousand people. Jesus Christ. Most of them wound up in Auschwitz, where 320,000 of them were exterminated upon arrival. Inter, the US government, kind of belatedly, took a couple of years, a few million deaths. But while up until this point, the United States' reaction to the Holocaust could best be described as piss poor, the Roosevelt administration finally decided we should maybe do something about this thing we don't have a word for yet, because the word genocide wasn't coined until after this point, but they decided to do something.

Murder rampage. Murder rampage. There you go. Yeah. And Ivor Olsen to Stockholm as the official representative of the War Refugee Board, or WRB. Now, Olsen's task was to find someone who could speak both Hungarian and German, and was willing to travel into one of the deadliest parts of the world as the Reich slowly collapsed

and tried 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 1944, as officially the Secretary for the Swedish Embassy in Budapest. So, we're going to talk about what he did in Budapest. But first, do you like products? Are you a fan of services? I am.

Well, that's what we're, that's about ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're talking about not a bastard today, the opposite of a bastard, Hero. So when we last left off, Wallenberg had made it to Budapest as a secretary with the Swedish Embassy, but that job title was essentially nonsense. Wallenberg had a pretty open mandate to try to save people's lives, and they'd given him a job so that he was technically attached to the embassy. But was he almost on a secret mission? Yeah, that's exactly what was happening. So Wallenberg's one condition for taking this job was that he had 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 happens in government, but they were like, sure. We're in kind of a weird time. This is a weird time. Why not? Can't make the situation worse. Have you guys seen what's happening out there? By late July, the only intact Jewish community left in Hungary was the Jewish ghetto in Budapest. Now, before the Nazis could deport and exterminate all of them, too, 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, 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. And Horthy's a complicated figure in history, we'll say that. So 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 400 Jewish people to staff it. He didn't pay them because he didn't really have the money to do that, but that wasn't the point. As embassy employees, these Jews would be protected against deportation. 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. It was done well once. Let's just say, this is going to save your life. Let's just say, you work without pay so that you can't get deported. Is that cool with everybody?

His next move was to start issuing a new type of Swedish passport, the Schütz Pass. The government gave him the authority to print 1500 of these passes, and he lobbied to increase that number to 4,500 and eventually just started printing them out and handing them out like hotcakes without permission. 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 in 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, all of which were just nonsense. He just knew that it made it look more legit.

But the Germans were like, wow! There's a shitload of stamps on this motherfucker. All right, I guess we're not committing genocide today. Did you see the stamps? That's absurd. It's just really ridiculous that it worked. Because the Schütz Pass was more or less a lie, but it was a lie that worked. By the end of the war, it's possible that he issued as many as 20,000 of them, which means 20,000 human lives were saved by, what was in essence, a really good set of doodles and bullshit.

But it worked. Oskar Schindler, for some comparison, saved around 1,200 human lives, which is obviously still an immense, almost unthinkable act of heroism, but I'm just trying to point out the Titanic scale of what Wallenberg accomplished, because he's just getting started at this point. So one of the reasons Wallenberg 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, well, then you can make them do almost anything. In other words, Wallenberg took advantage of the Nazi tendency to just follow orders and used it to save lives rather than end them. Now, the War Refugee Board and Swedish government

provided Wallenberg with enough funds to rent 32 buildings. He declared them extraterritorial buildings, which was, again, not a thing. He told everyone that these buildings were legally covered by Swedish diplomatic immunity, and he told this lie so forcefully that it wasn't questioned. The buildings he rented were built to hold less than 5,000 people, but Wallenberg, being a pretty decent architect, remodeled them and was able to fit 35,000 Jews inside of them. What?

He also operated a soup kitchen and a hospital for the people in Budapest's Jewish ghetto. Wow. Yeah. He's hitting with all steam here. Working fast. Couple of months into the job at this place. Yeah. On October 15, 1944, the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement seized power and deposed Admiral Horthy.

Now, the Arrow Cross was essentially just the Hungarian Nazis, you know? Okay. 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 Jews before they could depart for the journey to Auschwitz. Sandor Ardai, 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 Cross men began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports into the hands that were reaching out for them. I believe the Arrow Cross men 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 walk to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colors. I don't remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and Arrow Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it. He would regularly stop trains and just shout at SS,

even when he didn't have passports, would just berate the SS guys in charge of the crowd to let whole carloads of people off. What? Yeah, there was nothing backing him up. He was just going out there and being like, these are Swedish citizens with no proof. Just a really good liar and really good at bullshitting and pretending he has the force of a government behind him. It really is the power of confidence. It's the power of being a tall white guy.

Yeah, he's like, fake it till you make it. Fake it till you make it, fake it till you avert a genocide. Yeah. Now, Nazis being Nazis, they did push back against Wallenberg's safe houses. On Christmas Eve, 1944, a bunch of Nazis raided one of Wallenberg's safe houses. 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 to save bullets. Oh my God. Germans, you know, they're Nazis. Yeah, they're Nazis. Jesus Christ. 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 50 or 60 people that night. Now, 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 order to cope. He found Aryan-looking young Jewish men and he put them in Arrow Cross uniforms and had them guard his safe houses. He started issuing protective papers to everyone and just ignored the fact that the Swedish government hadn't actually given him the power to do that. When his funding ran low, Wallenberg turned to blackmailing local officials and businessmen and committing other petty crimes in order to finance his rescue operations. Of course, why wouldn't you at this point? Why not? Fuck it. The world's ending.

Yeah. The Arrow Cross responded by declaring Wallenberg's protective passports to be no longer valid. Wallenberg protested to the government and somehow managed to get them reinstated. But at the end of the day, Eichmann 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 1944, the Russians had advanced enough that the Germans could no longer send Jews to Auschwitz on trains. This didn't present a major problem for a guy like Eichmann because he still had the option of just forcing the prisoners to go on a 125 mile death march without food or sleep, which pretty much kills the same amount of people as a gas chamber in the European winter. Tens of thousands of Jews were sent off on an enormous forced march to their doom.

Wallenberg gathered up trucks, food 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. The Jews finally caught on. They started groping in pockets for bits of identification. A driver's license or birth certificate 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 people in his convoy. International Red Cross trucks, there at Wallenberg'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 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 them to do. That's so cool. Yeah, he just hacked their little Nazi brain. Oh, this is how Nazis were. I'm fine. They just want a confident guy to yell at them, that's what I'll do. Oh, that's genius. Saving people grew to become an all-consuming obsession for Raoul. Before he traveled to Budapest, he'd 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, Wallenberg 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, too. Tommy Lapid, a 13-year-old who lived in one of Wallenberg's safehouses, 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, and orphaned all intents and purposes.

Then, two or three hours later, to my amazement, my mother returned with the other women. It seemed like a mirage, 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 person in the world. He went up to the Arrowcross 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 something behind him. They could have shot him then and there in the street, and nobody would have known about it. Instead, they relented and let the women go. Oh, he just kept screaming at them. He just kept screaming at them until he saved hundreds of people. That's crazy. Jesus, this man.

This guy, right? Wallenberg. He's almost like a folk hero. Wallenberg became famous among the Nazis as well. Eichmann called him Jewdog Wallenberg, because Nazis are not very creative people. No, not at all. Jewdog? Yeah.

That doesn't sound like Raoul. Get out of here. Ra-Jewel? Maybe? If I'm trying to do that, I'm just saying, there's other fucking Eichmann. 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. As 1945 dawned, the Soviet war machine was closing in on Budapest.

There were only 100,000 or so Jews left alive in the Budapest ghetto. Eichmann ordered 500 SS 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 II. Now, for a little bit of historical perspective, the largest, I think, gun-based massacre of the war was the Bobby Yar massacre. I think it was 41. It might have been 42. The Einsatzgruppen unit shot like 30,000 people that day.

That's when they lined a bunch of people up and then just... Yeah. And they actually stopped doing that in favor of the gas chambers because so many of those guys went up killing themselves and becoming alcoholics. You just can't have people do that. It's hard. Oh, is it hard being a Nazi? It's hard being a Nazi.

Oh, fuck off. Fuck off. Now, so yeah, that was the plan. And these guys, you know, at this point in 1945, if you're an SS 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. Yeah.

Probably who would have been... You know, they would have had to be capable of massacring 100,000 people. But that's the situation that we're in in 1945. And we will talk about what happens next after some eds. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become

the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Boy howdy. I do love ads. Boy comma howdy. We were talking about how the Nazis were going to massacre 100,000 people by shooting them

to death in the Budapest ghetto. Oh, the joy. The joy? Oh, you're talking about the ads. No. Talk about Wallenberg coming to hopefully save them at the last second. Yep. So Eichmann had ordered this massacre, but he was not there in person because he was trying

to escape Nazi Germany, which he did for a while. So the task of murdering all these people went to SS General August Schmitt-Thuber. Now, Wallenberg cut onto the plan and he went straight to Schmitt-Thuber'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.

Schmitt-Thuber 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. She's like, what are you talking about? He's like, you know, you're going to get in trouble. I don't know. Let him go. I'll get you in trouble with some sort of international legal committee that doesn't

work right now. Yeah. The Soviets took Budapest later in January. And that should have been the start of Wallenberg's happy ending. But Rawls' contact with the American government led the Soviets to suspect he was some sort of spy, because Ivor Olsen, the guy who had hired him and worked for the war refugee board, also worked for the OSS. And while the USSR was not nearly as anti-Semitic as the Nazis, they were still pretty anti-Semitic.

And one of the things that you read about the guys who found Wallenberg in there and why they found 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, he's got to 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 no way this man just wants to save human lives.

So Rawls was arrested. And we don't really know what happened to him. The most likely story is that he died sometime in the 1950s in the KGB's infamous Lubyanka prison. Oh my God. He died 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. In April of 1945, the US State Department even offered Sweden for help in asking the Russians about Wallenberg to 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. In 1946, after intense public demand, the Swedish foreign minister 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 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. What? Yeah. Oh, you never give Stalin an opening. You never give Stalin an opening. Not Jaystall.

That's what he's going to do. So in 1957, after Stalin's death, the Soviet Union finally admitted that Wallenberg had in fact survived the war. They said he died of a heart attack in captivity in 1948. 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 Raul, although it's safe to say the Russian government imprisoned probably tortured and one way or the other definitely murdered him.

Now, at the end of World War II was a chaotic time. Estimates vary wildly on how many lives Wallenberg saved. The most common estimate is 100,000 human beings. But it may be several times that many, because his activities provided a blueprint several years to rescue Jewish people as well. Wallenberg 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 saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

Nobody saved more people than Raul Wallenberg. And in fact, 100,000 lives is one sixtieth of the total number of Jews dead in the Holocaust saved by one guy. Wow. Gideon Hausner, the man who prosecuted Adolf Eichmann and later was the chairman of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, said this about Raul Wallenberg. 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, Hungary. 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 pin their hopes and ideals, he is a person to show to the world who knows so little about him. This is why I believe the story of Raul Wallenberg should be told in his figure in all its true

proportions, projected into human minds. Wow. That's it. That's the story. That's insane. Merry Christmas. God damn, the Russia always ruins everything. Well, I mean, they did beat the Nazis, but yeah.

True. They got there, but then they go and take the one man who basically was out here screaming at Nazis until they were like, I don't know. I'm confused. His voice is loud. I guess I listen. The Hungarian Jewish community wound up, even though it survived later than most of them, but 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 Wallenberg. Because of Wallenberg. Oh my God. Yeah. A hundred thousand lives. Do you think they torched him just to find out who he was working for and just wouldn't believe he was just like, no, 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 of a heart attack. He was 32 when all this happened, but you torture somebody for a while and you starve them.

Oh, so he started doing this in his early 30s. Yeah. He was 32 when he got the job. 32. He's just like, well, you know, I'm going to save some lives. 32 with his only professional training in architecture. Wow. And just was like, all right, I'm just going to go lie until I've saved a hundred thousand

people and then did it. I imagine at 32, I will still be doing nothing. Well, what I like about. Podcasting. Podcasting. Yeah. Well, that's why he's a good person 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 important truths you can learn as a tall white guy, which is that it's a superpower. If you're a tall white guy and you just balls your way into a situation with confidence, nine out of 10 people will listen to you. Nine out of 10 Nazis. Ten out of 10 Nazis. I don't know, man. I mean, we're supposed to kill these people, but look at how tall and white he is.

He's got that paper with all the stamps on it. I guess we don't kill these people. It's wild. Get off the train. Get off the train. Get off the train. Look at how tall this guy is. Get off the train.

Yeah. That's amazing. That's an amazing story. Yeah. Never heard of him? Yeah. That's wild. I'm so upset with the USSR.

Yeah. It's pretty frustrating. Sweden. Yeah. God, that is so annoying. It's like, you just, the man did so much work for you. He did so much in like five or six months, saved 100,000 lives. Like, sorry, we're neutral.

Yeah. Ugh. Yeah. So be like Raul Wallenberg. Save lives. Print some fake passports and go save people. Speak loudly. Yeah.

Do crime. Save lives. Yell at fascists. Yell at fascists. Yeah. But productively yell at fascists. Yeah. To get them to be less fashy.

You think that would work with the alt right if you just want to just spoke loudly? Guys, I don't know about this. It's worth a shot, right? I don't know. I don't know. He's talking quite loud and he is whining. What if we all go to Waffle House? Yeah.

Waffle House. Yeah. Waffle House. Yeah. And just give them heart disease through Waffle House. Yeah. Just poison all the waffles. Yeah.

Or fry them forever. Mm-hmm. The Budapest way. Fry everything. Ugh. Yeah. I do want to go back to Hungary anymore. It's actually quite cheap too.

Bacon and bricks. Yeah. Very inexpensive place. Yeah. I recommend. Kind of a dictator in charge now. That part's not great. Europe is just like us.

They go back and forth. Same thing with Poland. It's happening over there as well. Yeah. Yeah. People. Know how bad it went the last time. Yeah.

And they're like, what if we try that again? Yeah. Maybe not everyone will die this time. Yeah. Well. We're on a wave. We better hope there's a couple of Wallenbergs waiting in the wings getting their degrees in architecture right now.

Yeah. Learning how to use their power as tall, balding white men to shout the world into a better place. I hope so. I need someone to just tell me where to go. I know. That's why it works. Yeah.

Yeah. Great story about the power of lies and bullshit to save lives. I love that part of it. Because I'm a big fan of lies and bullshit. Yeah. Great thing to be able to do. Anna. Plugables.

To plug. Plugables. You can listen to my podcast with Shereen Eunice called Ethnically Ambiguous on the How Stuff Works Network. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You can follow me on Twitter at AnnaHoseNie. I tweet about stuff.

I retweet Robert every once in a while. Robert just posted a really crazy video. Oh, yeah. It's wild. A guy, how to get out of like when you fall. Speaking of heroes. Yeah. When you fall through ice.

Yeah. And he did it by falling through ice on video and then like calmly explaining the things that you need to do to extricate yourself from that situation. It's incredible. Yeah. It's truly like. Well, it teaches you these things. 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 strait because it's shocking. It's freezing. And that's why most people die is 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 is not going to kill you right away. It passes. It passes.

You have time to think through your actions and calmly and decisively extricate yourself from the situation. And in every dangerous situation I've ever been in, 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 moving with purpose. And yeah, yeah, great video.

Look it up somewhere. It's on your Twitter. Look up Guy Falls Through Ice YouTube or my Twitter today, but I will have tweeted probably 50 times about- Scroll back four months. Nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know what day it is.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for being on. I can. Yep. You buy a t-shirt. I know I should. But you should buy a t-shirt and you listening should buy a t-shirt from T-Public behind the Bastard Store.

Phone cases as well. Cocaine spoons. Sophie is saying that they sell branded Coke spoons now. Fantastic. So Fleetwood Mac, if you're listening. Branded Coke Tots. Branded Coke Tots. Yep.

Absolutely. Also Fleetwood Mac. We're really, really aiming for that sweet Fleetwood Mac demographic. Yeah. Something to blow cocaine up your butt. Oh, I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. 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 any time. Amazon Prime, man. Yay. Speaking of gigantic evil machines that destroy the... Support the evil. Oh, God.

This paper is even from Amazon. Why is Amazon selling paper? They literally do everything, Robert. There's nothing you can't touch. Oh, this is so unsettling. That at one point came through the hands of Amazon. It's crazy. Do you want to throw some ad rev art away?

Oh, boy. No. It's a machine that generates misery. By the way, my home, it was made by Amazon. Wait, what? Yeah, I live in a prime home. No, you're lying. No, I'm just joking.

It's not there yet. It hasn't gone that far yet. But you know 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, but there's a hole on the wall.

You have to deliver three packages every morning, part of your rent. You just start working for Amazon. Amazon has started to do this thing where they just have random people delivering stuff. They do. They're not good at it. They just show up in random cars. I just see packages lying everywhere now. It's like, you guys don't know how to do this job.

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? What if random people just did everything for nothing? And that's how our company worked, and I get a billion dollars a day. That's the Jeff Bezos plan. He's another guy.

He just was talking very loudly. We're all like, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, that's why I have so much respect for the one guy who doesn't use that power for evil, Raoul Wallenberg. He was in charge of Amazon. Probably just be a company dedicated to saving Syrian refugees. I know.

Amazon Prime, you just literally get a question. What if we just ship them out of the country? They're just delivered to your house and you just take care of them and help them start a new life. Yeah. Yeah. If you're listening to Amazon, that's what you should be doing. That's what you should be doing.

Go to the Greek, the islands in Greece and hell. 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. Anywhere. Anywhere where there is some serious strife with the people. Honduras? Sure.

Ship people out of there. Send them to Ohio? No, that seems mean to them. Send them to Michigan. Yeah. Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor. Wallenberg would appreciate that.

Yeah. Michigan. Nice place. Beautiful. Beautiful place. All right. Well, this has been the episode. Merry holidays, enjoy your winter times, eat eggnog, fight Nazis.

I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed

the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.