Synopsis
On 7 July 1944, a plane departs from Stockholm airport for the German Reich, carrying a young Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg to Berlin where he is to embark on his onward journey to Budapest by train. Raoul Wallenberg is traveling to Hungary on assignment by both the Swedish government and the War Refugee Board as founded by Roosevelt. His designation is to "save as many lives as possible..."
At the time of his arrival in Budapest, more than 400,000 Jews from the Hungarian provinces have already been deported to the extermination camps. Another 200,000 Jews in Budapest are destined to follow suit. Within only six months, Raoul Wallenberg and his associates - at times risking their own lives - manage to rescue tens of thousands of them from extermination by the SS and their Hungarian accessories.
The documentary also tells of Wallenberg's youth and his difficult relations with the Wallenberg family clan. Accounts are rendered by relatives and - for the first time ever - his mistress at the time.
Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, Raoul's uncles heading Sweden's already at that time most significant commercial empire, are reluctant to offer their nephew any major role within the concern's activities and endeavour to keep him at bay.
During the Second World War, they maintain excellent relations with the warring parties - Marcus both with the Western Allies and Moscow and Jacob both with the Nazi regime as well as the resistance around Carl Goerdeler. Their companies supply war materials not only to the Allies, but - until the end of 1944 - also to Nazi Germany.
Are the reasons for Wallenberg's abduction to the Soviet Union on 17 January 1945 - and his subsequent disappearance within Stalin's dungeons about 60 years ago - to be found among these constellations?
When the Swedish-Russian Working Group on the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg submits its closing report in January 2001, the numerous insights gleaned from its findings offer the basis for our camera team to set off in its quest within the archives and prisons of the former Soviet Union. To this end, interviews are held with high officials both of the former regime and the Secret Service KGB/FSB involved in the investigations concerning Wallenberg's disappearance.
Congruent with the reports by members of the Swedish Working Group and with heretofore unfilmed documents from the archives of the (formerly Soviet) Russian Secret Service, a plausible line of cinematic reasoning is drawn to Wallenberg's presumable murder in 1947 - without omitting those theories considered most probable: his life as continuing within prisons or psychiatric institutions far beyond that date. As Stalin's personal captive, Raoul Wallenberg was a hostage and a trump card in the political and economic power struggle taking place at the end of the Second World War. At all events, he was one of the first victims of the incipient Cold War.
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Credits
Director and screenplayKlaus Dexel
Producer
Klaus Dexel
Camera
Claus Langer, Gerardo Milszstein
Editor
Gisela Castronari
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