Churchill, however, never waited idly for the world to construct his legend. From the 1890s onward, he strove to put himself in the places, especially the wars, where he would be best situated to advance his fame and realize his ambitions, and as he made his way through a series of adventures, he promptly wrote articles and books about each of them, thus shaping in large degree how others would view his actions. Moreover, he was an excellent writer; his articles and books sold very well, and in 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His sharp wit and dazzling rhetoric enhanced his reputation.

In Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War,” Patrick J. Buchanan seeks to demolish the Churchill myth, along with several related ones, which he does with surprising success. I say “surprising,” not because the myth itself was ever unassailable—excellent historians, including Ralph Raico, long ago pounded Churchill’s feet of clay into dust—but because Buchanan is known primarily as an ideological polemicist. Yet in this book he presents respectably balanced and well-documented arguments for his theses. If he is not himself a professional historian, he has absorbed the works of scores of well-reputed historians, and he carefully assesses a number of counterarguments against his position. Although Buchanan presents no previously unreported facts, he offers abundant evidence expressed in clear, forceful prose. All in all, he makes a persuasive case.

Buchanan correctly views the two world wars as “two phases of a Thirty Years’ War.” He argues that both phases were unnecessary and that Great Britain “turned both European wars into world wars.”

For World War I, he maintains: “Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.”

For World War II, he maintains: “Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year war in which fifty million would perish.”

He argues that the decisive event in the run-up to World War II was not the infamous 1938 appeasement at Munich—because the Germans had good reason to reabsorb the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia—but the 1939 guarantee, which was foolish of the British to make and foolish of the Poles to rely on. It was foolish because Britain had no means of defending Poland. When Hitler attacked in 1939, after Polish leaders refused to return Danzig to Germany, the British could only watch helplessly.

Buchanan begins his narrative at the end of the nineteenth century and ends it at the conclusion of World War II. Churchill occupies center stage in this extended drama because he “was the most bellicose champion of British entry into the European war of 1914 and the German-Polish war of 1939.” Along the way, Buchanan adduces evidence that Kaiser Wilhelm II, a grandson of Queen Victoria and nephew of King Edward VII, did not seek war with Great Britain (in 1910, he “marched in Edward’s funeral—in the uniform of a British field marshal”). Likewise, 30 years later, Hitler wished to avoid war with Great Britain, whose people and empire he admired: “His dream was of an alliance with the British Empire, not its ruin.”

The Lebensraum he sought lay to the east of Germany, not to the west. The Germans did not seek to “conquer the world,” despite frequent claims to that effect, and in any event, they lacked the means to achieve such a conquest.

No short review can depict the breadth, the depth, and the many fascinating details of Buchanan’s book. Read it and see for yourself. It may well challenge your most cherished beliefs about Winston Churchill and the world-shattering Thirty Years’ War of 1914–45.

For Mises, classical liberalism is the world view that liberates mankind from the ancien régime, with its systems of caste and class, favors and privileges, inequalities and injustices.² If groups of individuals wish to cling to their traditional identities and their longing for custom, tradition, and rituals, they are free to do so in the liberal society. But they are prevented, or at least greatly hindered, from imposing them on others, since the agency of government is limited to securing peaceful cooperation through a rule of law with equal treatment for all. Under limited government liberalism, the resentment, envy, and anger of some cannot be transformed into political malice and abuse toward others.

In the face of the ascending influence of socialist ideas, liberalism is the worldview and economic system, in Mises’s eyes, that can forestall the establishment of a terrible collectivist tyranny, which can only produce stagnation and poverty. Socialism is merely the old petty resentments and personal envy now cloaked in the rhetoric of a grandiose theory of economic and institutional exploitation and injustice. Worse, the triumph of socialism would introduce an economic system without a rational method for economic calculation. Thus socialism also would lead to waste, inefficiency, and a standard of living far below that of the market order it would replace.

All of these anti-liberal forces were set loose by World War I: socialism, nationalism, racism, and fascism. Together they cumulatively represented a counterrevolution against all that classical liberalism had advocated and succeeded in creating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were man’s return to the master and to chains. They heralded the end of the free man.

Behind the anti-Semitic aspect of collectivism’s counterrevolution, Mises believed, were envy and resentment against those who had succeeded socially and economically in the arena of free-market opportunity. While Mises did not discount the role of non-economic factors in generating anti-Jewish sentiments, especially in earlier ages, he was persuaded that the most important factor behind them in modern times was the frustration of those who had failed against competitors who happened to be Jewish or of Jewish ancestry.

Nazi race doctrine was unable to define and classify scientifically the incontestable characteristics of a “Jew” or an “Aryan.” Indeed, in the context of Europe’s long history of conquest and mixings of multitudes of ethnic and racial groups, there was no scientific meaning to a “pure” race in virtually any part of the continent. And after enumerating the many negative meanings that had been given to “Jewish” culture, attitudes, behavior, and influence on German society, Mises concluded that the only thing that could be found in common in them was that the critic did not like them. For example, the Jews were criticized for being either economic liberals in favor of rugged individualism or communists desiring the nationalization of the individual; for being either warmongers for profits or dangerous pacifists unwilling to fight for their country; for being either Zionist nationalists or rootless cosmopolitans with loyalty to no one; for being either crude materialists or utopian idealists; for being either advocates of democracy or agents of dictatorship. “Jew” was simply the covering term for whatever was disliked or considered undesirable in society.³

Pivotal Role

Yet it was a fact, as Mises pointed out, and as mentioned in part one, that the Jews played a pivotal role in the cultural and economic development of Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Those who resented the passing of older and more traditional forms of social order or who were unable to adapt as easily to the rising currents of market competition saw the Jew as the cause of their “misfortune.” The Jews were central to industrialization, modern commerce, railway infrastructure, and raw-material and resource development, especially in Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary–even though at no time did the Jews represent more than 1 percent of the population of the German Empire, and scarcely 5 percent of the population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

For traditionalist Germans, the Jews represented “modernity” and secularization–especially in its free market manifestation. For the various non-German nationalities in eastern Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Jews represented “German” cultural and economic domination, especially since the German and Austrian Jews saw German “culture” as the most enlightened and progressive force, something into which a large majority of them wanted to assimilate.⁴

But the fact remained that in the market, individuals continued to patronize the suppliers who could provide better and/or less-expensive products and services. People demonstrated their preferences and voted with their money for those with whom they found it advantageous to do business. As Mises explained it:

Many decades of intensive anti-Semitic propaganda did not succeed in preventing German “Aryans” from buying in shops owned by Jews, from consulting Jewish doctors and lawyers, and from reading books by Jewish authors. They did not patronize the Jews unawares–“Aryan” competitors were careful to tell them again and again that these people were Jews. Whoever wanted to get rid of his Jewish competitors could not rely on an alleged hatred of Jews; he was under the necessity of asking for legal discrimination against them. Such discrimination is not the result of nationalism or of racism. It is basically–like nationalism–a result of interventionism and the policy of favoring the less efficient producer to the disadvantage of the consumer.⁵

And if the Jews were to be blamed for bringing anti-Semitism on themselves it would have to be for their most meritorious qualities:

But if the cause of anti-Semitism were really to be found in distinctive features of the Jews, these properties would have to be extraordinary virtues and merits which would qualify the Jews as the elite of mankind. If the Jews themselves are to blame for the fact that those whose ideal is perpetual war and bloodshed, who worship violence and are eager to destroy freedom, consider them the most dangerous opponents of their endeavors, it must be because the Jews are foremost among the champions of freedom, justice, and peaceful cooperation among nations. If the Jews incurred the Nazis’ hatred through their conduct, it is no doubt because what was great and noble in the German nation, all the immortal achievements of Germany’s past, were either accomplished by the Jews or congenial to the Jewish mind. As the parties seeking to destroy modern civilization and return to barbarism have put anti-Semitism at the top of their programs, this civilization is apparently a creation of the Jews. Nothing more flattering could be said of an individual or a group than that the deadly foes of civilization have well-founded reasons to persecute them.⁶

Contributions Exaggerated

Mises did not assert that civilization was the result of the Jews. He pointed out that the anti-Semites greatly exaggerated the contribution of the Jews to modern society and its accomplishments. What was distinct about the German and Austrian Jews was that they were small minorities in the greater society who could easily be targeted for economic discrimination through interventionism, with no ability to politically prevent more powerful special-interest groups from using the state at their expense. And “the Jews” were able to serve as a convenient hook on which could be hung all the excuses for individual disappointment and national humiliation, especially in the wake of defeat in World War I.⁷

What the Vienna of Mises’s time demonstrated, especially in the decades before the war, is that classical liberalism in practice means the protection of freedom in reality. The reawakening of Jewish life in Germany and Austria was made possible by the Enlightenment culture of reason, experience, and individualism in place of superstition, blind faith, and cultural collectivism. The spirit of individualism fostered a growing environment of self-education and self-improvement in the Jewish community. However, that spiritual individualism would have been stymied if it had not coincided with the new epoch of political and economic liberalism in which the individual could apply his liberated mind to the external world.

But it was the ideology of interventionism and socialism put into practice in the period between the two world wars that enabled the prejudices of the envious and the resentful to be applied against their more successful competitors. Mises explained the methods by which the power of the interventionist state could be turned against a minority group such as the Jews:

If, for instance, members of the minority are alone engaged in a specific branch of business, the government can ruin them by means of customs provisions. In other words, they can raise the price of raw materials and machinery. In these countries [in post-World War I Central and Eastern Europe], every measure of government interference–taxes, tariffs, freight rates, labor policy, monopoly and price control, foreign exchange regulations–were used against minorities. If you wish to build a house or use the services of an architect from the minority group, then you find yourself beset by difficulties raised by the departments of building, of health, of fire. You will wait longer to receive your telephone, gas, electric, and water connections from the municipal authorities. The department of sanitation will discover some irregularities in your building. If members of your minority group are injured or even killed for political reasons, the police are slow in finding the culprit. Against such obstacles all provisions of minority protection are useless. Think of the assessment of taxes. In those countries, Chief Justice Marshall’s dictum “The power to tax is the power to destroy” was practiced against the minorities. Or think of the power that [occupational] licensing gives to a government.⁸

In the two decades following World War I the governments of Central and Eastern Europe, especially in countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania, used these types of interventionist policies to prohibit and restrict economic opportunities for the Jewish populations. This was often accompanied with brutal acts of violence against the lives and property of Jews.⁹

It was precisely through such interventionist policies that the Jews were excluded from German social and economic life in the years following the triumph of Hitler’s National Socialist movement in 1933. During the first five years of the Nazi regime, restrictions, regulations, and prohibitions were imposed on the German Jewish community that completely reversed the previous hundred years of economic and social liberalization. Step by step Jews were legally banned from the professions, academia, the arts and sciences, and commerce, industry, and trade. This was matched by savage physical attacks on Jews throughout the country, in which thousands where killed, beaten, or arrested and imprisoned in the new system of concentration camps.¹⁰

What had taken five years to accomplish in Nazi Germany itself was achieved within weeks and months in Austria following its annexation to the Third Reich in March of 1938. The following, admittedly lengthy, passages from Bruce Pauley’s book on the history of Austrian anti-Semitism gives a chilling sense of the tragedy that befell the Jews of Vienna in the days and months after the Anschluss.

The night of 11–12 March 1938 marked the dramatic end of a thousand years of Austro-Jewish history. On Friday, 11 March, all the Jewish newspapers of Vienna published their usual weekly editions. By the next day their offices and those of other Jewish organizations had been seized by Nazis. Within a matter of days, or at most a few months, nearly all Austrian Jews had lost their means of livelihood and in many cases their homes as well. . . .

Gangs of Nazis invaded Jewish department stores, humble Jewish shops in the Leopoldstadt, the homes of Jewish bankers, as well as the apartments of middle-class Jews, and stole money, art treasures, furs, jewelry, and even furniture. Some Jews were robbed of their money on the street. All automobiles owned by Jews were confiscated immediately. Jews who complained to the police about the thefts were lucky if they escaped arrest or physical violence. . . .

SA men stood at the entrances of Jewish shops; Christians who entered the stores were arrested and forced to wear signs saying they were “Christian pigs.” . . . Within a few hours or at most a few days all Jewish actors, musicians and journalists lost their jobs. By mid-June 1938, just three months after the Anschluss, Jews had already been more thoroughly purged from public life in Austria than in the five years following Hitler’s takeover of power in Germany. Tens of thousands of Jewish employees had lost their jobs. Only rarely were they given any warning or severance pay. Among those dismissed were all state and municipal employees (what few there were), including 183 public schools teachers, and employees of banks, insurance companies, theaters, and concert halls. Meanwhile, private Jewish businesses large and small were either confiscated outright or their owners were paid only a small fraction of the property’s true value. Jews were also excluded from most areas of public entertainment and to some extent even public transportation by the early summer of 1938; similar rules were not imposed on German Jews until November. Austrian Jews were also subjected to all kinds of personal insults and indignities that were not the result of official Nazi legislation. If a gentile streetcar passenger did not like the looks of a Jewish fellow passenger in the summer of 1938, he could have the trolley stopped and the Jew thrown off. The number of coffeehouses and restaurants that would not serve Jews grew from day to day. All of the public baths and swimming pools were closed to the Jews. Park benches all over the city had the words “Juden verboten” stenciled on them. Jews were not admitted to theater performances, concerts, or the opera. Numerous cinemas had notices saying that Jewish patronage was not wanted. Sometimes Jews were ejected from a motion picture theater in the middle of a performance if gentiles complained about them. SA men at times even stood at the last tramway stop in the suburb of Neuwaldegg in order to prevent Jews from strolling in the nearby Vienna Woods. . . .

After 2 July Jews were not allowed to enter certain public gardens and parks, and none at all after September 1939. At the end of September 1938 both Jewish physicians and Jewish lawyers lost their right to serve gentile clients. Only about fifty Jewish lawyers were able to make a living even briefly under these circumstances. After 5 October Jews were not permitted to enter sports stadiums as spectators. Shortly after the November Pogrom the Jews were not even allowed to appear in public during certain times of the day. After January 1939 they could not use sleeping or dining cars on railroad trains. . . .

The confiscation of Jewish homes and other kinds of wealth by Austrian Nazis both before and after Kristallnacht probably had less to do with Nazi ideology than it did with economic self-aggrandizement–that is, pure old-fashioned greed.

. . . Already by December 1938, 44,000 Jewish apartments had been Aryanized out of a total of about 70,000 [in Vienna]. . . . Jews were sometimes notified by a piece of paper on their front door that they had only a few days or even hours to move out of their apartments. . . . Likewise, the confiscation of Jewish jobs was also an answer to Viennese unemployment, which had been endemic during the entire interwar period, and especially in the 1930s.¹¹

Illusory Gains

In the spring of 1940, shortly before Mises left Geneva to come to the United States, he pointed out that Austria had had a thousand outstanding entrepreneurs before the Anschluss in 1938. Of these at least two-thirds had been Jews. Now, two years later, all of these Jews either had been tortured and murdered, or sent off to concentration camps, or expelled from the country. The supposed gains to the remaining Austrian population through confiscation and expulsion of their Jewish neighbors were all illusionary, Mises insisted, based on the crudest of Marxian fallacies:

The so-called Aryanization of firms was based on the Marxist idea that capital (machinery and raw material) and the labor input of workers were the only vital ingredients of an enterprise, whereas the entrepreneur was an “exploiter.” An enterprise without entrepreneurial spirit and creativity, however, is nothing more than a pile of rubbish and iron. Today the Aryanized firms, one and all, contribute nothing to exports. They are either working for the military or they have been liquidated. Commercial ties abroad, built up by more than one hundred years of unrelenting effort, have been broken. The core of skilled workers have been dispersed and displaced from its traditional skills.¹²

Thus the ideology of envy and the interventionist policies of discrimination under German National Socialism brought to a disastrous close the liberal epoch of freedom for the Jews in Austria. In 1938, Austria’s Jewish population had numbered around 250,000. By May 1939 only 121,000 were still in Austria, with most of the rest having emigrated. Those who were not able to leave ended up in the inferno of the Holocaust.¹³ According to one estimate, fewer than 300 survived the war in hiding in Austria.

Among those who left before or immediately after Germany’s annexation of Austria were many members of the Austrian school of economics or Mises’s private seminar circle (both Jews and non-Jews): Martha Steffy Browne, Gottfried Haberler, Friedrich A. Hayek, Felix Kaufmann, Fritz Machlup, Ilse Mintz, Oscar Morgenstern, Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan, Alfred Schutz, Erich Voegelin, to name just a few. Mises had departed in the autumn of 1934 for a teaching position at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva when it was clear that the collectivist darkness was starting to fall over the center of Europe. He made a new life for himself after 1940 in the United States, as did many of his Austrian colleagues and friends, where the spirit of freedom was not yet in the same shadow of tyranny as in their native country. America, for them, was still a land where Austrian Jews such as Mises could breathe the air of liberty.

For many Austrians, and especially Austrian Jews, there long remained a nostalgia for the old Vienna before World War I. It represented peace, freedom, security, and certainty with its liberal values and apparent tolerant atmosphere in which a vast diversity of peoples lived and worked, and culturally gained from each other. As the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig expressed it, “It was sweet to live here, in this atmosphere of spiritual conciliation, and subconsciously every citizen became supernational, cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.”¹⁴

Yet this appearance was deceiving. Beneath the surface, anti-liberal currents were at work that brought this idyllic epoch to an end. In too many people’s hearts and minds, collectivist attitudes and sentiments dominated their conduct and desires. Ludwig von Mises explained the problem and danger in the years immediately after World War I. The mentality of people had lagged behind the political and economic changes in nineteenth-century society. Institutions had been transformed more rapidly than the everyday psychology of men. And a counterrevolution against freedom had emerged. It was characterized by the migrations of a growing multitude of people from the countryside to the cities, from traditional society to urban life, Mises argued:

Immigrants soon find their place in urban life, they soon adopt, externally, town manners and opinions, but for a long time they remain foreign to civic thought. One cannot make a social philosophy one’s own as easily as a new costume. It must be earned–earned with the effort of thought. . . . The growth of the towns and of the town life was too rapid. It was more extensive than intensive. The new inhabitants of the towns had become citizens superficially, but not in ways of thought. . . . More menacing than barbarians storming the walls from without are the seeming citizens within–those who are citizens in gesture, but not in thought.¹⁵

Classical liberalism requires not only a political and economic philosophy. Its survivability is also dependent on an attitude and a philosophy of life: the accepting of self-responsibility for both successes and failures; a respect for others as individuals; a realization that peace of mind comes only from within, and that purpose and meaning cannot be bought at others’ expense; and an understanding that one’s own freedom, and that of others, should not be traded away for a few pieces of silver and a false sense of security through political paternalism.

Men’s unwillingness or inability to adopt this wider and deeper sense of a true citizenship of liberty brought all the ruin of the last 100 years, including the barbaric extermination of the Jews of Europe and the destruction of an entire continent in World War II. After analyzing the collectivist roots of Nazism and the anti-Jewish attitudes of both Germans and many others at that time, Mises concluded: “Mankind has paid a high price indeed for anti-Semitism.”¹⁶

Notes

1. Mises’s monumental work on Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), originally published in 1922, is not merely a logical argument against the possibility of socialist central planning–which of course is a centerpiece of the book. It is also a sweeping and majestic analysis of the social, cultural, and political potential of a free and classical liberal community, and the poverty and destructive tendencies of all forms of collectivism. His 1927 volume, Liberalism (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1985) presents an integrated and coherent exposition of the truly humane world that a liberal society can bring mankind. All these themes on the nature of the free society were brought together in his masterful treatise, Human Action (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996). On Mises as social and political philosopher, see Richard M. Ebeling, “Planning for Freedom: Ludwig von Mises as Political Economist and Policy Analyst” in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Competition or Compulsion? The Market Economy versus the New Social Engineering (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2001), pp. 1–85.
2. See Ludwig von Mises, “The Clash of Group Interests” [1945] in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Money, Method and the Market Process: Essays by Ludwig von Mises (Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Press, 1990), pp. 202–14; and Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 112–22.
3. Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 171–77.
4. Many of these assimilated Jews were embarrassed and ashamed of their “eastern cousins” who continued to follow more traditional Jewish cultural and religious forms. Their physical appearance and religious practices seemed a reminder of what they had chosen to escape from. And the arrival of these more orthodox Jews in Berlin and Vienna in the years both before and after the first World War was viewed with great unease. Indeed, the assimilated Jews were fearful that their country orthodox cousins would make them look “bad” in the eyes of their non-Jewish neighbors. They would be tarred with the negative impressions these orthodox Jews would (and did often) create in the minds of non-Jewish Germans and Austrians. See Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: Eastern European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Derek J. Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), pp. 195–205; and Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), pp. 231–57.
5. Mises, Omnipotent Government, p. 184.
6. Ibid., pp. 184–85.
7. Indeed, though Mises does not draw attention to this point, what most German and Austrian Jews shared with their non-Jewish countrymen was an enthusiasm for German imperialism on the eve of World War I, and they served in the German army in a proportion far in excess of their percentage in the general population. They also shared the same resentments and feelings of humiliation with the defeat of the German and Austrian armies at the end of the war, especially in the wake of the peace terms imposed by the Allied powers in 1919. See Elon, The Pity of It All, pp. 297–354; Howard M. Sachar, Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), pp. 205–82; and Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The perversity, as Mises does point out, is that many of the non-Jews in Germany tried to maintain their mental equilibrium in the face of German’s defeat by looking for a scapegoat for the humiliation of 1919 and found it in a Jewish “stab in the back.” See Mises, Omnipotent Government, p. 187: “It was salvation for the self-esteem of all these disheartened souls when some generals and nationalist leaders found a justification and an excuse: it had been the work of the Jews. Germany was victorious by land and sea and air, but the Jews had stabbed the victorious forces in the back. Whoever ventured to refute this legend was himself denounced as a Jew or a bribed servant of the Jews. No rational argument could shake the legend. . . . It must be realized that German nationalism managed to survive the defeat in the First World War only by means of the legend of the stab in the back.” Mises later developed the theme of envy and resentment as the foundation for anti-capitalist attitudes; see Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1956).
8. Ludwig von Mises, “Postwar Reconstruction” [1941] in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Vol. 3: The Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), p. 13.
9. On how such interventionist policies were used against the Jews in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the period between the two World Wars, see Sachar, Dreamland, and Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1983); see also P. G. J. Pulzer, “The Development of Political Antisemitism in Austria” in Josef Fraenkel, ed., The Jews of Austria: Essays on Their Life, History and Destruction (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1967), pp. 429–43.
10. For detailed accounts of the growing political and interventionist discrimination and prohibition on the social, civil and economic liberties of the Jews in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), pp. 43–105; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Bantam Books), pp. 48–69; J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism, 1933–1945, Vol. 2: State, Economy and Society, 1933–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), pp. 521–67; Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 113–158; Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933–1943 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989); Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper/Collins, 1997); Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 82–102; also, Stephen Roberts, The House that Hitler Built (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), pp. 258–67; and Marvin Lowenthal, The Jews of Germany: A Story of Sixteen Centuries (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publications Society of America, 1938), pp. 392–421; on anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1920s, see, Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 2001), pp. 43–81. And on the response of the Jews in Germany to mounting interventionist discrimination and violence in the 1930s, see John V. P. Dippel, Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire: Why So Many German Jews Made the Tragic Decision to Remain in Nazi Germany (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
11. Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 275, 280–84, 288–90.
12. Ludwig von Mises, “A Draft of Guidelines for the Reconstruction of Austria” [1940] in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Vol. 3: The Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction, pp. 135–36.
13. For an account of how it was the rise of immigration barriers across Europe and North America in the post-World War I period that closed the door and determined the fate of many German and Austrian Jews who therefore had no route of escape from the Nazis, see Dwork and van Pelt, Holocaust, pp. 103–32; also Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Random House, 1967); and David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968). On the general development and effects of immigration restrictions, see, John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).14. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday [1943] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 13.
15. Mises, Socialism, p. 38.
16. Mises, Omnipotent Government, p. 192.

I’d like to know what audiences are thinking when they leave the theater. I suspect the standard reactions are along these lines: The Nazis sure were bad. Or, hate and intolerance are terrible. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

I wonder how many people came away thinking: Government certainly is dangerous. How can we limit its power so it will never engage in systematic mass murder again? Too few, I fear.

Murderous hatred was certainly a necessary condition for the Holocaust. But it was hardly a sufficient condition. How many Jews could Hitler and his thugs have killed had Germany had a strong classical liberal tradition undergirding a constitutionally limited government. The question answers itself.

Murder on the scale perpetrated by Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, et al. requires a state; that is, a legitimized machinery of force. Only a state can concentrate the resources (thanks to taxation) necessary for such a monstrous feat. More important, only a state has the mystique (thanks to its schools, among other things) to command the sort of allegiance required to induce large numbers of people to cooperate or at least to stand by and let it happen. A dictator is just a bully with a state at his disposal.

Hate and intolerance are likely to be features of the social landscape for quite some time to come. Trying to avert future systematic mass murders by abolishing hate and intolerance is naive and futile—especially if government accumulates new powers in the process. A more efficacious and feasible course (albeit still extremely difficult) is to institutionalize strict limits on government power. When that’s achieved, aspiring dictators will have difficulty achieving office higher than neighborhood bully.

* * *

Thanks to a passel of government programs, Americans are increasingly getting the message that parenthood can’t be left to amateurs any longer. A century and a half after responsibility for schooling was lifted from parents’ shoulders, is the state ready to relieve them—starting with low-income people—of the rest of the job of rearing children? Susan Orr doesn’t like what she sees.

Programs such as Head Start are often defended as “investments” in children that promise to avoid later social problems like crime and dependency. John Hood looks at the data and isn’t impressed.

No matter how the advocates of gun control try to evade it, America’s founding generation was avidly pro-gun and not just for sporting purposes. Joseph Stromberg explores the relationship between firearms and the philosophy on which the United States was established.

The federal government did many things to turn what might have been a short recession into the Great Depression. In his series finale, Richard Timberlake explains that one of those things was the manipulation of the banking system’s reserve requirements.

One of Franklin Roosevelt’s first acts was to outlaw the possession and monetary use of gold. It was an assertion of executive power that would have far-reaching consequences, writes James Bovard.

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission get upset when a company achieves a dominant share of a market. Are consumers at risk from a dominant firm? Christopher Mayer ponders the question, showing that “market share” is not the simple concept that regulators think it is.

Is the market order compatible with authoritarianism? Even some champions of capitalism reluctantly believe so. John Marangos disagrees, arguing that economic freedom holds the seeds of political freedom.

Francis Hirst is virtually unknown today. But in his time, he was a prominent advocate of individual liberty and opponent of state power, both the welfare and warfare variety. Mark Brady introduces us to this forgotten English champion of freedom.

A government-controlled education system that only sought to teach children to read would have been bad enough. But what about a school system designed to recast society in a collectivist mold? Daniel Hager profiles an old proponent of such a system, George Counts.

Our columnists once again find provocative topics to chew on. FEE President Donald Boudreaux reminds us government isn’t a god, then looks at a claim that workers are being forced to work without pay and responds, “It just ain’t so!” Lawrence Reed sees differences between taxes and user fees. Doug Bandow explores President Clinton’s Balkans folly. Dwight Lee illustrates that even gifts entail opportunity costs. Mark Skousen thinks economic growth could double and go on indefinitely. Russell Roberts warns that nothing is free.

Our reviewers render verdicts on books about money, the welfare state, Mugwumps, the classics, secession, and the work of a major public choice economist.

—Sheldon Richman

He defied the evil forces of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, two of history’s worst mass murderers. He confronted racists, torturers, assassins, and even Hitler’s chief executioner, Adolf Eichmann, while saving almost 100,000 lives. More astounding, he saved lives inside enemy territory, since escape was impossible. He was armed only with a pistol, which he never used.

Working in Nazi-controlled Hungary, Wallenberg liberated thousands of Jews from boxcars bound for the gas chambers. He pulled Jews out of the death marches. He saved Jews from being shot and dumped into the Danube. He singlehandedly thwarted Nazi plans to massacre 70,000 Jews remaining in the Budapest Central Ghetto.

After the Red Army captured Budapest, Wallenberg was taken away by Stalin’s dreaded NKVD secret police. Apparently they tortured him and tried to turn him into a Soviet spy, but he remained defiant.

Wallenberg, greatest libertarian hero of the twentieth century, vanished into the wretched Soviet gulag and continues to be an agonizing mystery today. But for people around the world, he is the Angel of Rescue, and the mere mention of his name brings tears.

Wallenberg certainly didn’t look like the stuff that heroes are made of. He was medium height with brown eyes, a large nose, small chin, and receding curly brown hair. Tibor Baranski, an associate, described Wallenberg as a thin man, rather shy, and virtually fearless. He dressed elegantly and was always clean-shaven.

Bjorn Burckhardt, who had met Wallenberg in South Africa, described him this way: Raoul did not do things in a normal manner. His way of thinking was so winding and involuted. But his intellect impressed everyone. And he could outtalk anyone. Perhaps his greatest asset was his charm, which influenced people to respect him.

Wallenberg, recalled Swedish diplomat Per Anger, was not a superman type. We met in Stockholm some years before he came on his mission to Budapest in 1944, and we became very good friends. I learned to know Raoul more as an intellectual. . . . He spoke with a soft voice and sometimes looked like a dreamer. . . . It did not take long, however, till you discovered that he had a remarkable inner strength, a core of fighting spirit. Furthermore, he was a clever negotiator and organizer, unconventional, and extraordinarily inventive. I became convinced that no one was better qualified for the assignment to Budapest than Raoul.

Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was born August 4, 1912, in his maternal grandparents’ summer home on Kapptsta, an island near Stockholm. He descended from a long line of Lutheran capitalists who built banks, factories, ships, and railroads—some 50 businesses altogether. His father Raoul Wallenberg, Sr., a 23-year-old naval officer, died of abdominal cancer three months before young Raoul was born. His mother, Maj Wising, was the great-granddaughter of a Jewish jeweler.

Raoul’s paternal grandfather, Gustaf Wallenberg, Swedish ambassador to Turkey, became his mentor. Gustaf was an individualist, an entrepreneur, and a free trader who believed people should be bound together by peaceful commercial relations rather than military alliances.

Gustaf arranged for Raoul to broaden his vision by spending summers in France and Germany, and he learned French and German as well as English. To better understand America, Raoul enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned an architecture degree in 1935. Then Gustaf arranged for the young man to serve as an intern with the Wallenberg family bank in Capetown, South Africa, where Raoul discovered that banking wasn’t for him. After six months, he became an intern with a Dutch business in Haifa, Palestine. He heard European refugees tell horrifying stories of Nazi barbarism. I think I have the character for positive action rather than to sit at a desk and say no to people, he wrote Gustaf.

An Unpromising Future

Back in Stockholm, Wallenberg seemed destined for failure. He unsuccessfully tried his hand as an architect, an importer, and a speculator. Discouraged, he asked his father’s cousins, Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, about a job at their Enskilda Bank, but they vetoed the idea.

Gustaf Wallenberg died in March 1937, leaving Raoul without a sponsor. He soon discovered that each branch of the Wallenberg family protects its own kin but not the others. His mother, who had remarried health services administrator Frederik von Dardel, wasn’t in a position to help.

Wallenberg heard about a job with Kálmán Lauer, a Hungarian Jew whose Stockholm-based company Mellaneuropeiska Handelsaktiebolaget (Middle European Trading Company, or Meropa as it was called) mainly shipped grain, chickens, and goose-liver paté from Hungary to Sweden. Since Hungary had allied itself with Hitler in 1941, Lauer couldn’t safely travel through Europe, so he needed a Gentile fluent in the major European languages and adept at negotiation. Wallenberg went to work. While traveling through Germany and occupied France, Wallenberg became skilled at negotiating with Nazis. And through Lauer’s family, he got to know the Budapest Jewish community.

“The Final Solution”

January 20, 1942, in a villa at 56 Am-Grossen-Wannsee, Wannsee, a town outside Berlin: a key meeting of high-ranking officers of the SS, Hitler’s elite secret police. Among those present were General Reinhard Heydrich and SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. They agreed it wasn’t practical to rid Europe of Jews through emigration. The Jews had to be deported east and exterminated. In his conference notes, Eichmann described this as the final solution. The killing agent would be Zyklon B, a compound of hydrogen and cyanide which had been developed to kill rodents. It turns into lethal gas at room temperature. Orders went out to build gigantic gas chambers.

The Allies soon learned about these plans, but they did little. President Franklin Roosevelt rejected pleas that Allies should take direct action against the Nazi extermination campaign. Convinced that winning the war was the fastest way to stop the Nazis, Allied military leaders claimed they couldn’t afford to divert any forces—even though U.S. bombers flew right over Auschwitz and hit other targets only five miles away. By 1944, the only European Jewish community that hadn’t been wiped out was in Hungary, an Axis power which still retained some independence from Germany. Following German losses on the eastern front, Hungarian diplomats started sounding out the Allies for an armistice. This would have cut off Germany from its Axis allies Romania and Bulgaria—and from vital oil supplies. Accordingly, Hitler ordered his soldiers to occupy Hungary on March 19, 1944.

Among the arrivals was Adolf Eichmann, who came with a mile-long column of his special forces. Eichmann headed the Gestapo’s Section IV B4 (Jewish affairs) and organized the extermination of Jews in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. If Nazi political wrangling hadn’t gotten in the way, he would have exterminated Jews in Poland, too. He had developed a four-step killing process: mark Jews by requiring them to wear yellow Star of David patches on their outer garments; collect Jews from their scattered residences, commonly in the middle of the night; isolate Jews in ghettos; and, finally, deport them to the death camps.

Eichmann didn’t want Jews to panic and disrupt his plans before he was ready, so he ordered leading members of the Budapest Jewish community to form a Jewish Council. He told them what they desperately wanted to hear: I will visit your museum soon, because I am interested in Jewish cultural affairs. You can trust me and talk freely to me—as you see, I am quite frank with you. If the Jews behave quietly and work, you will be able to keep all of your community institutions.

On May 15, 1944, the death trains began rolling to Auschwitz. There were as many as five trains a day, each with about 10,000 Jews. By mid-June, 147 trains had taken 437,000 Jews. It went like a dream, Eichmann bragged.

At last, the Allies stirred. Western diplomats pressured Hungarian representatives. The Pope urged the 75-year-old Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy to stop the slaughter. The American Air Force and Britain’s Royal Air Force bombed Budapest. None of these external methods worked.

Roosevelt approved an effort to save some Jews by working within Hungary. Funding would be provided through the War Refugee Board, but Americans, as belligerents, couldn’t operate openly behind enemy lines. The War Refugee Board’s representative in Sweden, Iver Olsen, was assigned the task of finding somebody from a neutral country. This person had to be a Gentile, fluent in European languages, capable of dealing successfully with the Nazis—and unimaginably courageous. Olsen heard Wallenberg’s name in the elevator of the eight-story building on Strandvagen Street where American diplomatic offices were located. He heard it from Kálmán Lauer, whose import-export company’s offices were in the same building. Olsen arranged a meeting and was impressed with the 31-year-old Wallenberg’s passion and apparent ability to size up people quickly.

Wallenberg didn’t get much guidance, because nobody knew exactly what would be involved. He spelled out his terms. He must have diplomatic status—he was named Second Secretary of the Swedish legation. He could send his own messages by diplomatic courier. If funds provided by the U.S. War Refugee Board and the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee were inadequate, he could raise funds by other means. He could contact anyone including the ruler of the country and the anti-Nazi underground. He could use whatever means he considered necessary, including bribery. He could provide asylum to persecuted people with Swedish documents. After these terms were accepted, Wallenberg spent 48 hours reading diplomatic messages between Stockholm, Washington, and Budapest.

On July 6, 1944, Wallenberg caught an airplane from Stockholm to Berlin, and two days later was on a train for Budapest. His train probably passed the 29-boxcar train carrying the last of Hungary’s rural Jews to Auschwitz.

According to Nazi statistics, there were about 230,000 Jews left in Budapest. Eichmann relished the prospect of shipping them out in a few days, but Regent Horthy still retained nominal independence from Germany, and he suspended the deportations. While he was certainly anti-Semitic—he had approved laws persecuting Jews—he feared execution as a war criminal by the Russians advancing in the East or the Americans and English who had landed in Normandy.

Wallenberg’s Mission Begins

Wallenberg arrived in Budapest July 9. The city had representatives from five neutral nations—Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey, as well as Sweden. There were also representatives from the International Red Cross and the Pope. Some of these had already made limited efforts to save Jews. The Swedish representative had issued about 650 protective passes to Jews who could document family or business connections to Sweden. The Swiss issued several hundred emigration certificates to British-controlled Palestine, although it was impossible for these people to leave Budapest.

Wallenberg spent a couple of weeks getting to know the Jewish community better, finding recruits, and building an organization. Budapest Jews were so demoralized, and Wallenberg looked so unfit for the task, with his fresh face and clean-cut dark blue suit, that he had considerable difficulty persuading people they could help themselves.

Wallenberg recognized there were several ways he could appeal to those in power. First, Horthy’s puppet regime did want the legitimacy that comes with international acceptance. Second, Swedish representatives handled Hungarian and German business in several countries. Third, many in the regime feared possible execution by the Allies after the war. Finally, there were many others whose cooperation could be bought with food or cash bribes.

Wallenberg took immediate steps to make his mission look impressive. He designed a Schutz-Pass certificate which was much snazzier than the drab Swedish passport. He gave it an official-looking triple crown of the Royal Swedish government. He had it printed in Sweden’s colors, yellow and blue. He embellished it with seals, stamps, and signatures.

These passes suggested the holder had some kind of connection to Sweden and intended to leave Hungary for Sweden. Until that could happen, the holder was under the protection of the Royal Swedish Legation.

Although these Schutzpasse had no standing in international law, they worked. One of Wallenberg’s drivers noted that he understood the German mentality. He knew that Germans reacted to formal documents and authority.

It’s likely, too, that the Nazis tolerated the passes as long as they affected a minority of the Jews. The Nazis probably figured they could disregard the passes whenever they wished, but Wallenberg’s strategy was delay. With the Allies winning the war, he believed that the longer people could be maintained under Swedish protection, the more survivors there would be.

Wallenberg got permission from the Hungarian Foreign Ministry to issue 1,500 Schutzpasse, but he kept after officials there, and they upped his quota to 4,500. Eventually, he issued over three times that many.

But Jews couldn’t leave Budapest, and their situation became ever more desperate. Wallenberg stockpiled food, clothing, and medicine. He built up a staff of around 400 people with shifts working around the clock, and they established medical facilities, nurseries, and food distribution points.

Wallenberg versus Eichmann

Wallenberg feared that Horthy’s order suspending the deportations wouldn’t last long, so he tried to get as many Jews as possible under international protection. He needed housing. This meant dealing with Eichmann, who controlled properties taken from Jews. Eichmann liked to spend evenings at Budapest’s mirror-lined Arizona nightclub, and Wallenberg observed him closely there—and twice bribed headwaiters to seat him at a table next to Eichmann. Then Eichmann proposed a get-acquainted discussion. Wallenberg explained that he wanted about 40 Budapest buildings for his operations. Eichmann asked how much he would pay, and Wallenberg replied the equivalent of $200,000 in Swedish kroner. Eichmann scoffed at such a low price for Jews, but he was willing to talk, because from his standpoint wherever the Jews lived, he would get them.

Wallenberg ended up renting 32 Budapest buildings, each displaying the Swedish flag. They became the core of the international ghetto, which eventually accommodated some 50,000 Jews. Usually, they were moved in under the cover of night, so the individuals would be less vulnerable to attack, and the government wouldn’t be aware how many Jews were sheltered. Wallenberg provided food for these people. He maintained hospitals on Taytra and Wahrmann streets, serving 200 patients at a time.

He hit on a brazen strategy which saved more and more Jews from the death trains. As one of his drivers explained: Raoul usually had with him a book with names of passport holders. Sometimes the book had all blank pages. When he arrived at the train, he then made up Jewish names and began calling out. Three or four usually had passports. For those who didn’t, I stood behind Raoul with another fifty or more unfilled passports. It only took me ten seconds to write in their names. We handed them out calmly and said, `Oh, I’m terribly sorry you couldn’t get to the legation to pick it up. Here it is. We brought it to you.’ The passport holder showed it to the SS and was free.

On October 15, 1944, Horthy announced that his government was negotiating with the Russians for an armistice. This news triggered a Nazi coup. Horthy was out, and fanatical Arrow Cross (Hungarian fascist party) head Otto Skorzeny was in command. He ordered that the deportations of Jews be resumed. Wallenberg’s whole campaign was in jeopardy. He redoubled his efforts.

I was forced out of one of the Swedish safe houses and taken to a brick factory yard, Ferenc Friedman remembered. It would be only minutes before we boarded the death trains. Suddenly two cars drove up. There was Wallenberg in the first one, with Hungarian officials and German officers in the second car. He jumped out, shouting that all those with Swedish papers were under his protection. I was one of 150 saved that day. None of the others ever came back.

Dr. Stephen I. Lazarovitz described what it was like to be saved by Wallenberg: I was an intern, just before my final exams. When the Arrow Cross came to power I was not allowed to continue my studies and was drafted to a forced labor camp in Budapest. On October 28 we were yanked to the freight railway station of Jósefváros, where we boarded the freight wagons. The doors of the wagons were locked from the outside.

Suddenly two cars drove up between the railway tracks. Wallenberg jumped out from the first car, accompanied by his Hungarian aides. He went to the commanding police officer in charge, talked to him, and presented official papers. Soon the officer made an announcement. He said that those who had authentic Swedish protective passports should step down from the wagon and stand in line to show their papers. Should anybody step down from the cattle cars who had no Swedish protective passport, he would be executed on the spot. The authenticity of the passports would be checked by him and by Wallenberg from the books of the Swedish embassy, which Mr. Wallenberg had brought with him.

In the meantime, Mr. Wallenberg’s aides pulled out a folding table from the car, opened it, placed it between the rail tracks, and put the big embassy books on top of it. The commanding Nazi police officer put his gun in front of the books. We, who were in the cattle cars, watched all this from the small barred windows of the cattle cars. The doors were opened.

I did not know what to do because my protective passport was not authentic but forged. Suddenly I saw from the window that one of the aides was Leslie Geiger, a member of the Hungarian national hockey team, a patient of my father, and a personal friend. I decided to step down from the cattle car. It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life.

I stood in line for an hour because I was at the end of the line. When I was close to the table, I stepped forward, went to Leslie Geiger, and whispered in his ear that my passport was forged. I asked him if he could help me. He said that he would try. When it was my turn, Leslie Geiger whispered a few words in Wallenberg’s ear. Raoul Wallenberg looked at me, holding my forged passport in his hand, and said, `I remember this doctor. I gave him his passport personally. Let’s not waste our time because it’s late. We need him now at the Emergency Hospital of the Swedish embassy.’ The Nazi commanding officer then said, `Let’s not waste our time! Next.’

On another occasion, according to Wallenberg driver Sandor Ardai, we had come to a station where a train full of Jews was on the point of leaving for Germany and the death camps. The officer of the guard did not want to let us enter. Raoul Wallenberg then climbed up on the roof of the train and handed in many protective passports through the windows. The Arrow Cross men fired their guns and cried to him to go away, but he continued calmly to hand out passports to the hands which reached for them. But I believe that the men with the guns were impressed by his courage and on purpose aimed above him. Afterwards, he managed to get all Jews with passports out from the train.

In early November, Nyilas, as Arrow Cross goons were called, held several hundred Jews at Dohany Synagogue. Joseph Kovacs recalled that on November 4, Wallenberg burst into the temple and stood himself in front of the altar and made this announcement: `All those who have Swedish protective passes should stand up.’ That same night a few hundred Jews were freed, and they returned to their houses under the protection of Hungarian policemen.

Dr. Jonny Moser, one of Wallenberg’s assistants: I remember when we were told . . . that 800 Jews were to be transported away. The deportations had started on foot to Mauthausen. Wallenberg caught up with them at the frontier. `Who of you has a Swedish protective passport? Raise your hand!’ he cried. On his order I ran between the columns and told the people to raise their hand, whether they had a passport or not. He then took command of all who had raised their hand, and his attitude was such that nobody of the guards opposed it, so extraordinary was the convincing force of his attitude.

The Angel of Rescue

After Regent Horthy was overthrown, Eichmann returned to Budapest, but he faced serious obstacles. Since the Red Army was advancing from the east and south, roads to the Polish death camps were blocked. The German military needed all available railroad capacity for moving war matériel. The only way out of Hungary was to Austria, so Eichmann decided Jews would walk the death march to the Austrian border 25 miles away. Between mid-November and mid-December, some 40,000 Jews were forced out of their homes or picked up on the street, then ordered to march 15 to 20 miles a day without food, in frigid weather. A quarter of them died.

According to Per Anger, a compatriot of Wallenberg, The persecuted Jews’ only hope was Wallenberg. Like a rescuing angel he often appeared at the very last moment. Just when a deportation was about to start . . . he used to arrive at the station with a written . . . permission to set free all Jews with Swedish protection passports. . . . [He] manufactured all kinds of identification and protection documents on an endless scale. Uncountable were those Jews who during the march toward Vienna had given up all hope, when suddenly they received from one of Wallenberg’s `flying squadrons’ a Swedish protection document, like their ancestors once upon a time during their long journey were rescued by manna from Heaven.

Susan Tabor remembered: My mother, my husband, and I had been two nights without food. Then we heard words, human words, the first we had heard in what seemed like an eternity. It was Raoul Wallenberg. He gave us that needed sense that we were still human beings. We had been among thousands taken to stay at a brick factory outside Budapest. We were without food, without water, without sanitation facilities. Wallenberg told us he would try and return with safety passes. He also said that he would try to get medical attention and sanitary facilities. And true to his word, soon afterward some doctors and nurses came from the Jewish hospital. But what stands out most about Raoul Wallenberg is that he came himself. He talked to us, and . . . he showed that there was a human being who cared about us.

Wallenberg bombarded the fascist Arrow Cross government with memoranda demanding an end to barbarism. At the very least, these memoranda let officials know that they were being observed and could be held accountable.

Wallenberg cultivated friends at the highest level. He even tried to influence Eichmann himself. Shortly before Christmas 1944, he invited the Nazi to dinner. The war is over, Wallenberg told Eichmann. Why don’t you go while you still can and let the living live? Eichmann: I have my job to do.

Swedish diplomat Lars Berg reported that Wallenberg fearlessly tore Nazi doctrines to shreds and predicted that Nazism and its leaders would meet a speedy and complete destruction. I must say that these were rather unusual, caustic words from a Swede who was far away from his country and totally at the mercy of the powerful German antagonist Eichmann and his henchmen.

Stunned by Wallenberg’s bold attack, Eichmann reportedly replied: I admit that you are right, Mr. Wallenberg. I actually never believed in Nazism as such, but it has given me power and wealth. I know this pleasant life will soon be over. My planes will no longer bring me women and wines from Paris nor any other delicacies from the Orient. My horses, my dogs, my palace here in Budapest will soon be taken over by the Russians, and I myself, an SS officer, will be shot on the spot. But for me there is no rescue any more. If I obey my orders from Berlin and exercise my power ruthlessly enough here in Budapest, I shall be able to prolong my days of grace.

Eichmann added: I warn you . . . I shall do my very utmost to defeat you. And your Swedish diplomatic passport will not help you, if I consider it necessary to do away with you. Even a neutral diplomat might meet with accidents. Several days later, a big German truck smashed into Wallenberg’s car and totaled it. Wallenberg, who wasn’t inside, filed a formal complaint, and Eichmann declared: I will try again.

The Red Army began its siege of Budapest on December 8, 1944. That day, in his last letter to his mother Wallenberg wrote, I really thought I would be with you for Christmas . . . I hope the peace so longed for is no longer so far away.

Wallenberg’s people were increasingly at risk. Tibor Vayda: There were more than three hundred men and women at our office, which was also a Swedish protected house at 4 Ulloi Street. The Nyilas stormed in and shouted, `Wallenberg is not here. Everybody, get out. Swedish protection means nothing. Protective passes mean nothing.’ People wanted to take their luggage, but the Nyilas sneered. `You don’t need luggage because you will be dead soon.’ About noon we were marched to SS headquarters. We expected to be shot after being thrown into the Danube. Somehow—and I still do not know how—a message was gotten to Wallenberg. At 2:00 in the afternoon his car roared through the courtyard. Not one of the three hundred was lost. He simply put it straight to the SS commando: `You save these men, and I promise your safety after the Russians win the war.’

Eichmann fled Budapest on December 23, but the crisis for the Jews got worse as Russian guns pounded the city. Nyila goons pulled children out of an International Red Cross children’s home and a Jewish orphanage, and many were shot. The Institute of Forensic Medicine, Budapest, reported: In the most brutal manner, the Nyilas made short work of their victims. A few were simply shot, but the majority were mercilessly tortured.

On January 4, 1945, the Nyilas announced their intention to dismantle the international ghetto and force inhabitants into the Central Ghetto where living conditions were the worst—and where goons could easily find large numbers of Jews. Wallenberg persuaded Erno Vajna, brother of the interior minister and an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to suspend transfers into the Central Ghetto in exchange for some of the food which Wallenberg had stockpiled.

Wallenberg organized a new campaign to help save Jewish children. Working with the International Red Cross and the Swedish Red Cross, he provided food, shelter, and medical care for some 7,000 children.

Wallenberg’s Crowning Achievement

Finally, just days before the Russians entered Budapest, Wallenberg learned that about 500 SS and Arrow Cross soldiers were preparing to murder all 70,000 people in the Central Ghetto. Wallenberg contacted German General August Schmidthuber, an SS commander, and demanded that he stop the planned massacre. Wallenberg warned that he would make sure the general got hanged as a war criminal if the bloodbath occurred. Apparently frightened at that prospect, Schmidthuber ordered the conspirators to desist. He made it clear that if necessary he would uphold the order with his own forces. This was Wallenberg’s crowning achievement, a single negotiation which saved the lives of 70,000 people.

It is of the utmost importance, wrote the Hungarian author Jeno Levai, that the Nazis and Arrow Crossmen were not able to ravage unhindered—they were compelled to see that every step they took was being watched and followed by the young Swedish diplomat. From Wallenberg they could keep no secrets. The Arrow Crossmen could not trick him. They could not operate freely. . . . Wallenberg was the `world’s observing eye,’ the one who continually called the criminals to account.

Wallenberg looked forward to better times following the defeat of the Nazis. But the Russians came in the tradition of conquerors, not liberators. They considered the local population as an enemy. They seized thousands of Budapest civilians for forced labor, many never to return. Accustomed to the misery of Stalin’s socialist paradise, Russian soldiers went wild robbing people everywhere. They broke into apartments—bourgeois janitors’ apartments were especially vulnerable, since they were invariably on the first floor. Most Budapest women had horrifying stories to tell about brutal rape by Russian soldiers.

On January 13, 1945, Russian soldiers banged on the door of the cellar apartment where Wallenberg was sleeping. He showed his papers and asked to see the division’s commanding officer—he hoped to discuss plans for relieving the Jewish population. Four days later, January 17, 1945, he was transferred to the KGB secret police and whisked away to Moscow’s Lubyanka prison.

The Soviets were aware that Wallenberg was someone to reckon with, since thousands of documents circulated around Budapest with his signature. The Soviets considered him to be a likely adversary because of his well-known capitalist family and his education in the United States. The Soviets suspected that Wallenberg’s work must be a cover—they didn’t see why Christians would put their lives at risk to save Jews. He wasn’t a diplomat. Why else would somebody stay in such a hellish war zone except as a spy?

Recently released CIA documents suggest that Wallenberg did, in fact, help keep Washington informed about anti-Nazi resistance forces struggling to break the alliance between Budapest and Berlin. But there can be no doubt such work was a by-product of his mission to save human lives.

By April 1945, Wallenberg was transferred to Leftortovo Prison, a sure sign that he was in for a long haul. An Italian diplomat claimed that he was in an adjacent cell and communicated for three years by tapping on the wall.

American and Swedish officials made a number of inquiries about Wallenberg’s whereabouts, but Soviet officials denied they knew anything. The Swedish government, which was controlled by socialists who both feared and admired Stalin, didn’t push him hard. Swedish officials refused to try getting Wallenberg out by trading him for the next major Soviet spy they caught.

Despite official denials that Wallenberg was in the Soviet Union, dozens of prisoners emerged from Soviet prison camps and claimed to have seen or communicated with him. By 1957, the Soviets admitted they had taken Wallenberg, but claimed he had died of a heart attack in 1947, when he would have been just 35 years old.

Wallenberg’s mother, Maj von Dardel, and his half-sister Nina Lagergren and half-brother Guy von Dardel remained on the case. In early 1973, Maj von Dardel wrote U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, urging him to make inquiries. One of his assistants drafted a reply to her, but it was stamped Rejected by Kissinger, 10.15.73 and never sent. Apparently Kissinger wouldn’t take action for Wallenberg because Sweden had been critical of President Nixon’s decision to bomb Cambodia.

Fortunately, plenty of people remembered Wallenberg’s heroic deeds. Spurred by reports that he might still be alive, Wallenberg Committees were formed around the world during the late 1970s. The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States organized an exhibition which traveled across the country. Schools, hospitals, parks, and streets were named after him. Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov demanded that the government turn over its Wallenberg files to independent investigators. President Ronald Reagan pushed the Soviets for answers and urged Congress to pass a bill naming Wallenberg an honorary U.S. citizen; he signed it into law on October 5, 1981. A bust of Wallenberg, by the Israeli sculptor Miri Margolin, was placed in the U.S. Capitol. In 1985, NBC broadcast a two-part, four-hour miniseries, Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story, starring Richard Chamberlain.

Despite the much-heralded political opening up of the Soviet Union, it had nothing new to report about Wallenberg. Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren got no new information when they visited the Soviet Union in October 1989, although they were given a few of Wallenberg’s personal effects—diplomatic passport, diary, address book, cigarette case, and some foreign currency. President Reagan raised the issue with Soviet boss Mikhail Gorbachev when he visited the United States in December 1989, but again nothing. Nor has the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union brought any solution to the mystery.

Optimism faded as the years passed without encouraging news. Observers like Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times believe the Soviets murdered him, and coming clean would be too embarrassing because they were all involved. But Guy von Dardel says Russian human rights organizations continue to pursue government archives for clues.

Raoul Wallenberg long ago joined the ranks of immortals. People will continue to be inspired by his heroism, which saved so many human beings from hideous evil. Wherever this beloved man is now, he will endure as the great Angel of Rescue who redeemed hope for humanity and liberty.

One of the Schutzpasse, designed by Raoul Wallenberg, which helped save thousands of Jews from the Nazi death camps.

Courtesy of Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States.

November 1944: here on the platform of the Jósefváros train station, Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg (back toward camera, marked by an X) negotiates with Nazi officers (left) to keep Jews from being herded into boxcars bound for the death camps.

Photograph by Thomas Veres

Raoul Wallenberg at his desk in Budapest.

Photograph by Thomas Veres

Today we are concerned about issues such as doctor-assisted suicide, abortion, the use of fetal tissue, genetic screening, birth control and sterilization, health-care rationing and the ethics of medical research on animals and humans. These subjects are major challenges in both ethics and economics at the end of the twentieth century. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the desire to create a more scientific medical practice and research had already raised the issues of euthanasia, eugenics, and medical experimentation on human subjects. In addition, the increasing involvement of the German government in medical care and funding medical research established the government-medical complex that the National Socialists later used to execute their extermination policies.

The German social insurance and health care system began in the 1880s under Bismarck. Ironically, it was part of Bismarck’s “anti-socialist” legislation, adopted under the theory that a little socialism would prevent the rise of a more virulent socialism.

By the time of Weimar, German doctors had become accustomed to cooperating with the government in the provision of medical care. The reforms of the Weimar Republic following the medical crises of World War I included government policies to provide health care services to all citizens. Socially minded physicians placed great hope in a new health care system, calling for a single state agency to overcome fragmentation and the lack of influence of individual practitioners and local services. The focus of medicine shifted from private practice to public health and from treating disease to preventable health care. During the German “economic consolidation” of 1924-1928, public health improved under new laws against tuberculosis, venereal disease, and alcoholism, with new advisory centers for chemical dependency and counseling bureaus for marriage and sexual problems.

Medical concerns which had largely been in the private domain in the nineteenth century increasingly became a concern of the state. The physician began to be transformed into a functionary of state-initiated laws and policies. Doctors slowly began to see themselves as more responsible for the public health of the nation than for the individual health of the patient. It is one thing to see oneself as responsible for the “nation’s health” and quite another to be responsible for an individual patient’s health. It is one thing to be employed by an individual, another to be employed by the government.

Under the Weimar Republic these reforms resulted in clearly improved public health. However, the creativity, energy, and fundamental reforms found in social medicine during the Weimar Republic seem in retrospect a short and deceptive illusion. Medical reformers had wanted to counter the misery inherited from the first World War and the Second Empire on the basis of comprehensive disease prevention programs. In the few years available to the social reformers, they had remarkable success. But in connection with these reforms the doctor’s role changed from that of advocate, adviser, and partner of the patient to a partner of the state.

Where traditional individual ethics and Christian charity had once stood, the reformers posited a collective ethic for the benefit of the general population. Private charity and welfare were nationalized. The mentally ill, for example, having been literally released from their chains in the nineteenth century and placed in local communities and boarding houses in regular contact with others (the so-called “moral therapy”), were returned to state institutions to become the ultimate victims of state “solutions.”

With the world economic crisis of 1929, welfare state expenditures had to be reduced for housing, nutrition, support payments, recreation and rehabilitation, and maternal and child health. What remained of the humanistic goals of reform were state mechanisms for inspection and regulation of public health and medical practice. Economic efficiency became the major concern, and health care became primarily a question of cost-benefit analysis. Under the socialist policies of the period, this analysis was necessarily applied to the selection of strong persons, deemed worthy of support, and the elimination of weak and “unproductive” people. The scientific underpinning of cost-benefit analyses to political medical care was provided by the new fields of genetics and eugenics.

Genetics and Eugenics

At the same time as these economic and political developments, the application of nineteenth- century scientific discoveries began to make their way into twentieth-century public health and medical practice. Charles Darwin’s studies on natural selection were of course based upon animal populations living in nature and not human populations living in complex societies. But the biological basis of natural selection gave rise to a concept of “survival of the fittest” in human civilizations. This term was coined by the British social anthropologist Herbert Spencer, and the concept led to “Social Darwinism.”

Darwin’s theories (developed in parallel with Alfred Russel Wallace—another British natural scientist) had been published prior to full elucidation of the principles of genetics. With subsequent understanding and acceptance of the science of genetics, the underlying basis of natural selection could more completely be described. While scientists still did not understand what made up the gene (awaiting Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s) they began to search for outward expression of inner genetic tendencies. In the absence of being able to pinpoint individual genes, they sought outward expression of genetic “types.” These “typologies” were largely based upon external measurements of the body.

Much of this work was carried out by German anthropologists and physicians (often one and the same at that time) in newly acquired colonies in German East and Southwest Africa, prior to the loss of these colonies to Allied protectorates in World War I. Such work resumed following the war, however, and by 1927 the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics was celebrated in Berlin as the advent of the “German Oxford.” The annual report of the Institute in 1932 stated: “The term eugenics means to establish a connection between the results of the studies in human genetics and practical measures in population policy.”

Under the new “scientific understanding” of human biology provided by genetics and its implementation under eugenics, poverty, for example, would become merely an expression of degeneracy (Entartung) and genetic inferiority. “Inferior” and “superior” became natural terms used by persons of nearly all political persuasions, as readily as the terms “handicapped,” “impaired,” “socially dependent,” or “disadvantaged” are used today.

Life Unworthy of Living

Following World War I there had been concern among some in Germany that the war had decimated the ranks of the qualified and strong while weak, unqualified, and inferior people had been spared. Many felt that scant resources should not be wasted on the sick and suffering. The philosophy of the unimportance of the individual in favor of the people (das Volk) led to the belief that individuals who had become “worthless, defective parts” had to be “sacrificed or discarded.”

Alfred Hoche, a neuropathologist (as Freud had been) and Karl Binding, a lawyer, published a pamphlet in 1922, The Sanctioning of the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living. Binding relativized the legal and moral prohibition, “Thou shalt not kill,” and Hoche alternated between economic and medical arguments. Neurologists in Saxony formally discussed the topic, “Are Doctors Allowed to Kill?” A physician in Dresden pointed out “the contradiction that many persons (reformers) demand an end to the death penalty for crimes, but the same people are for putting imbeciles [sic] to death.” By the time the National Socialist Party came to power in Germany, the mentally ill and the mentally retarded had begun to be sterilized and to be subjected to euthanasia in large numbers in German government institutions.

National Socialism and the Nation’s Health

No profession in Germany became so numerically attached to National Socialism in both its leadership and membership as was the medical profession. Because of their philosophical orientation toward finding a more scientific basis for medical research and practice, government funding for research, and the practical benefits of acquiring university positions and medical practices from the many banned and exiled German Jewish doctors, many physicians supported Nazi policies. One of the first Nazi laws, passed July 14, 1933, was the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny of Hereditary Disease,” intended to “consolidate” social and health policies in the German population and prohibit the right of reproduction for persons defined as “genetically inferior.” After 1933, the connection between the theory and practice of politicized medicine advocated by many in Weimar Germany became actual in Nazi Germany.

A “Genetic Health Court” consisting of judges and doctors made decisions about forcible sterilization. As “advocates of the state,” doctors prosecuted those persons charged with being “genetically ill” in sessions lasting generally no more than ten minutes and from which the public was barred. In 1935, an adjunct law allowed forcible abortion in such cases up to the sixth month of pregnancy. A total of 300,000 to 400,000 were sterilized and approximately 5,000 (nearly all women) died as a result of these operations. After 1945, it was argued to the Restitution Claims Commission of the German Bundestag that the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny of Hereditary Disease” not be considered in the same category as subsequent National Socialist race laws and other Nazi abuses. The sterilization law had been drafted earlier under the Weimar Republic as part of progressive health reform, and as late as 1961 was defended by an expert at the Max Planck Institute on the basis that “every cultured nation needs eugenics, and in the atomic age, more so than ever before.”

German Youth and Euthanasia

Following the sterilization laws, the National Socialists next implemented a strategy of euthanasia to solve the remaining problem of those whose conception and birth had preceded these laws. The pediatrician Ernst Wentzler, while developing plans to improve care in the German Children’s Hospitals in Berlin, personally decided (as consultant to Hitler’s Chancellery) on the deaths of thousands of handicapped children. Hans Nachtsheim placed delivery orders for handicapped children for his pressure chamber experiments on epilepsy. Joseph Mengele delivered genetic and anthropological “material” from Auschwitz to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and conducted his infamous twin experiments on the child victims of the Holocaust.

Julius Hallervorden at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research at Berlin-Buch carried out several research projects based on euthanasia programs. Hallervorden and others systematically collected the brains of their patients who had been killed, taught the murdering doctors how to dissect, and cooperated closely with institutions where murdered children had previously been given thorough examinations and tests. During interrogation by an American officer in 1945, he stated, “I heard that they were going to do that . . . and told them . . . if you are going to kill all these people, at least take the brains . . . . There was wonderful material among these brains beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile disease. I accepted these brains, of course. Where they came from and how they came to me, was really none of my business.” The collection was until recently kept by the Max Planck Institute (formerly the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute) in Frankfurt and used for brain research.

In a system in which so many were routinely condemned to die, the temptation proved strong to use human subjects in medical experimentation prior to their tragic and terrible deaths.

The Luftwaffe had developed aircraft which could climb to altitudes of nearly 60,000 feet, altitudes unattainable by Allied fighter aircraft. However, tolerance of these altitudes on the part of pilots had not yet been tested. Trials on volunteers at altitudes above 36,000 feet had to be discontinued due to severe pain. For this reason, lethal altitude experiments in pressure chambers were conducted on 200 victims held prisoner in Dachau concentration camp in a program called: “Trials for Saving Persons at High Altitude.”

Many German ships were also being sunk in the North Atlantic and North Sea, and the same group of medical investigators conducted painful ice bath experiments on 300 Dachau prisoners in a research program entitled “Avoidance and Treatment of Hypothermia in Water.” Other medical experiments were carried out with chemical and biological warfare agents and infectious diseases.

Following World War II much of this data was kept classified by Allied military authorities on the basis of national security. Debate continues to this day on the validity of these experiments and the ethical implications of any use of such data.

The Banality of Evil

We now know the end of this historical horror story of massive crimes against humanity and the leader of the thousand-year Reich burning in a bunker in Berlin. But it is not so easy to recognize the steps on the path down the slippery slope when we don’t yet know the end of the story—as today we do not know which social health reforms in combination with which new medical technologies have the potential to plunge modern society over a brink in which disaster might result. Is legalized abortion a new form of medicide? Is doctor-assisted suicide a step toward positive euthanasia? Is modern genetic testing and the Human Genome Project the first step to a new eugenics? Is health care rationing, which is always a result of government involvement in medical care, a step toward the new definition of”life unworthy of living” ? Is our present “quality of life index” a new way of saying it?

Nazi medicine was implemented by a political-medical complex—on the basis of political health care—a scientific and social philosophy imposed by a totalitarian regime. It should never happen again, but could it ever happen again?

In the United States the medical profession operates in a mixed (not a national socialist) economy which does not yet have the institutionalized mechanisms of control and regulation of Weimar Germany and in a democratic political system which thankfully does not have the political ideology of the Third Reich. But the “banality of evil” described by Hannah Arendt in the Third Reich may stem largely from a government bureaucracy in which 90 percent of the people think 90 percent of the time about process—not purpose. Does the modern bureaucratization of medicine hold any real risk for a possible return with new health reforms and new medical technologies—to some of the horrors of National Socialist medicine? Removal of personal responsibility (“I was only following orders”), personal authority, and personal choice in a bureaucratized system may leave less and less room for individual ethics in the conduct of medical science and practice.

Politicized medicine is not a sufficient cause of the mass extermination of human beings, but it seems to be a necessary cause. The Nazi Holocaust did not happen for some inexplicable German reason; it is not an event that we can afford to ignore because we are not Germans or not Nazis. The history of Germany from 1914 to 1945 is a telescoping of modernity from monarchy, war, and collapse to democracy and the welfare state, and finally to dictatorship, war, and death.

Medical ethics is the responsibility of all members of a society, not just doctors and scientists. Medicine and science alone do not have the answers to such questions as: When does life begin? When should it end? Are humans just the sum of their genetic parts or genetic programs? While bioethicists debate, individual medical choices are made a million times a day among doctors, patients, their families, and increasingly the government. The product of all these choices ultimately constitutes the ethical, legal, and social framework in which the practice of medicine and of medical research are conducted. In the end it is the preservation of freedom that will guide us to the best application of new health reforms and technologies in the future.

Dr. Robert Ritter of the German National Department of Health (right) and his associates carried out anthropological measurements and genealogical research. They prepared fingerprints and photographs in order to ascertain the “proportion of gypsy blood” in all of the Sinti and Roma of “Greater Germany.”

Nazi medicine was implemented by a political-medical complex, a scientific and social philosophy imposed by a totalitarian regime.

From The Exhibition, “The Value of the Human Being.”