Wallenberg's 'protective passes' saved thousands of lives

Holocaust: More than 20,000 names sit alongside that of Oskar Schindler on the list of non-Jews honoured by Israel for saving people from the Holocaust.

The now-famous German industrialist, who rescued more than 1,000 Jews from death at the Plaszow death camp by inventing imaginary jobs for them in his factory, is simply the best known of an army of people whose courage and cunning earned them the title "Righteous Among the Nations" from Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.

Some drew up lists like Schindler, others hid hunted Jews in their attics and outhouses, while a distinguished legion of diplomats used fake documents and formal stamps to help people flee the "Final Solution" as it loomed before them.

One such diplomat was the aristocrat Raoul Wallenberg, who was sent by neutral Sweden to Budapest to help Hungary's 650,000 Jews after Hitler ordered them to be transferred to the waiting gas chambers of occupied Poland.

For 400,000 men, women and children, Wallenberg came too late. They were put on trains to Auschwitz just days before he arrived. Taking up his post as first secretary at the Swedish mission, the 32-year-old resolved to do what he could for the 230,000 Jews who remained.

A letter from Sweden's King Gustav V to Hungary's wartime leader, Miklos Horthy, prompted Hitler's erstwhile puppet to jerk his strings and call a halt to the deportation of the rest of Budapest's Jews, plans for which had been personally approved by Adolf Eichmann, the chief engineer of the "Final Solution".

Wallenberg used this temporary reprieve to issue thousands of Jews with Swedish "protective pass" documents which he had designed with the tastes of German bureaucracy in mind: they were printed in bold blue and yellow, carried the Swedish national symbol of three crowns and were emblazoned with a plethora of official stamps.

It was an odd quirk of the Nazis - perhaps the most bureaucratic of mass murderers - that their wrath could be deflected by pieces of paper like this.

In Hungary and across Europe, a few diplomats worked day and night to produce documents capable of stopping the Holocaust in its tracks for a few seconds.

Wallenberg employed hundreds of Jews to help him churn out the vital passports and he hung blue and yellow flags outside dozens of safe houses around Budapest and declared them Swedish territory. These houses gave refuge to more than 15,000 Jews.

In October 1944, Horthy was deposed after trying to switch allegiance to the Allies, and the German-backed Arrow Cross party took control in Hungary. Its reign was brutal and Eichmann's mass deportations resumed at once.

Wallenberg doled out his passports to prisoners being marched towards Austria and crammed into cattle trucks for the journey to Auschwitz. Then he demanded that the SS guards immediately set free all bearers of Swedish documents.

As Soviet troops approached Budapest in January 1945, Wallenberg learned that Eichmann had ordered a final massacre of the remaining Jews in the city. Using his precious diplomatic stationery once more, he sent a letter to Gen August Schmidthuber, commander of the German troops in Hungary, warning him that he would be held personally responsible for the massacre and executed after the war.

As the Red Army advanced, Schmidthuber backed down. When the Soviets arrived, they found 120,000 Hungarian Jews still alive. Wallenberg is credited with saving 100,000 of them.

Wallenberg met the Soviets as they entered Budapest and left the city to visit their military HQ in eastern Hungary on January 17th, 1945. He was never seen again. Moscow claims that he died in the custody of the Soviet security police on July 17th, 1947.

Wallenberg's relatives - like his niece, Nane, the wife of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and those he rescued, including US senator Tom Lantos - have failed to discover his fate. No body was returned and no proof of death was ever offered.

Nine other Swedes have been honoured as "Righteous Among the Nations"; Ireland is one of the few European countries not represented on the list.

The continent which spawned the war did not provide all its heroes, however. In Brazil's embassy in Paris, Luiz de Souza Dantas issued visas to hundreds of Jews and homosexuals deemed "undesirable" by both the Nazis and Brazilian immigration officials.

In Vienna, China's consul-general, Dr Fong Shan Ho, gave desperate Jews visas to Shanghai, which allowed them to escape Nazi-controlled territory.

As the Nazis and their collaborators massacred Jews in Lithuania, Japan's acting consul there, Chiune Sugihara, ignored Tokyo's orders and issued more than 2,000 transit visas to Polish Jewish refugees to allow them to flee east through the Soviet Union. Despite its alliance with Germany, Japan honoured the visas upon arrival.

Forty-five years after he signed the documents, Mr Sugihara explained why he did so. "I'm glad I found the strength to make the decision to give it to them," he said. "They were human beings and they needed help."