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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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
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
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 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 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 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? 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, 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.
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
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
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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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
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
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
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
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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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
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
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 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 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 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
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 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, 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 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, 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 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.
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, 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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
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
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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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
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 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, fight Nazis. I love about you.