PER ANGER: Thousands of Hungarian Jews were rescued from death in Nazi extermination camps thanks to Swedish diplomat Per Anger, who died on August 25th aged 88.
Not only did he ferry out reports of the systematic extermination of Europe's Jews, he also fashioned false passports to save the lives of potential victims. As the enormity of the calamity became obvious, Sweden posted a special envoy to Budapest, operating under diplomatic cover, the now legendary Raoul Wallenberg. Per Anger, working with Wallenberg, snatched several hundred Jews from forced marches out of Budapest.
Nor was Per Anger's heroism restricted to subverting the Holocaust. During the early 1940s, he had already established a reputation for siphoning vital intelligence from Berlin to Stockholm.
More than a decade later, after Hungary's abortive uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956, Per Anger - then based in Vienna - helped thousands to flee Budapest. And for more than five decades he doggedly pursued Soviet authorities for information about Wallenberg, whose capture by and possible murder in Russia became one of the Cold War's causes célèbres.
Per Anger's diplomatic career started in January 1940, when he joined the Swedish delegate to Berlin aged 26. At great personal risk, he contacted underground movements and conveyed their warnings of an impending German invasion of Scandinavia to Stockholm.
By the time his superiors alerted Norway, it was already too late. The Oslo government summoned the German military attaché, who denied everything. The next day Germany overran Norway.
Per Anger returned to Stockholm in June 1941, and worked in the foreign ministry's trade section dealing with Hungary. Impressed by his diligence and perspicacity, his masters appointed him second secretary at the Swedish legation in Budapest, a position he took up on November 1942.
His colleagues included Hugo Wohl, the Hungarian-Jewish head of a Swedish firm in Budapest; the Swedish legation's veteran chief, Carl Ivan Danielsson; and the Swedish Red Cross representative, Valdemar Langlet. Together they became, in the words of US Senator Tom Lantos, "radiant sparks of humanity that glowed in the darkest of midnights".
At first, Hungary seemed comparatively peaceful. Per Anger married his wife, Elena, in 1943, and found time to hunt game in Transylvania. In 1941 Hungary, under the right-wing regime of Admiral Horthy, had joined Germany in attacking the Soviet Union. Yet Third Reich pan-Aryan fantasies found little resonance among the Magyar nationalists of Budapest.
Hungary was also the only oasis for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. By 1944 the community numbered nearly 750,000 people. Refugees told Per Anger of Nazi atrocities. Some camp escapees drew sketches of gas chambers, which he forwarded to his superiors in Stockholm.
Germany's defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 led some Hungarian politicians to consider signing a separate peace with the Soviet Union. But Hitler would have none of it. Frustrated with Budapest's vacillations, Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944.
For Hungary's Jews, this was catastrophe. They were corralled into ghettos, robbed of their property and forced to wear the yellow star. The Nazi in charge of the murder of Europe's Jews, Adolph Eichmann, arrived in Budapest and began rounding up every Jew in sight. Hugo Wohl approached Per Anger in desperation. The Swedish diplomat instantly issued Wohl with a false provisional Swedish passport. Soon hundreds of Jews followed Wohl's example, and other legations copied Per Anger's initiative, like the Papal Nuncio and the neutral Spanish.
But their efforts were a drop in the ocean. By the time Wallenberg arrived in July 1944 - at the instigation of the US War Refugee Board and Sweden's own Jewish community - Eichmann had sent more than 400,000 Jews to the death camps. A game of cat and mouse ensued. Wallenberg hosted Eichmann at the legation, but the Nazi, while accepting that Hitler was losing the war, insisted on carrying out his "duties", and ominously warned Wallenberg to avoid "accidents". Days later, a truck crushed Wallenberg's car - luckily without him inside.
Meanwhile, Per Anger, Wallenberg, Langlet and Danielsson set up safe houses throughout Budapest, disguised as Swedish libraries and research institutes. Next, they started issuing a Shutzpass, or "protective pass", whose colourful royal Swedish motif persuaded the Nazis and their Hungarian lackeys to release Jews in their charge. But by November 1944, forced death marches had begun, and Per Anger and Wallenberg drove up and down the columns, issuing passes and defying German guards by literally snatching Jews from their hands.
In January 1945, Wallenberg bullied a Nazi commander into cancelling plans for the wholesale massacre of Budapest's remaining Jews. Two days later the victorious Red Army arrived. Wallenberg was arrested as "a foreign spy" on January 17th, and was never seen again. Per Anger was taken into Soviet custody, too, but released three months later after Swiss intervention. He credited Wallenberg with saving 100,000 Jewish lives.
So what made Per Anger stand up to evil when so many other Europeans remained silent? Aspects of his upbringing suggest clues. He was born in Gothenburg, the eldest of three boys, to an engineer father and a language teacher mother. Theirs was a close-knit family, noted Elizabeth Skoglund in her 1997 biography A Quiet Courage.
Per Anger's deeply-held Lutheran beliefs helped him through the first crisis in his life, the accidental death of his brother Jan, an airforce pilot, in 1936.
Per Anger studied law at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala. He graduated in 1939, and took up his Berlin posting after a brief stint in the army.
After returning to Sweden in 1945, he took various overseas appointments. In 1966 he was put in charge of Sweden's international aid programme. He became ambassador to Australia in 1970 and Canada in 1976.
His natural modesty made him keep Wallenberg's story alive in speeches and books, while downplaying his own role in wartime Budapest.
In 1982 Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum named Per Anger as one of the "righteous among the nations", alongside saviours like Oskar Schindler and Wallenberg. In 1989 he confronted Mikhail Gorbachev about Wallenberg's whereabouts, but to no avail. Even at home Per Anger faced resistance, says Skoglund, as "pusillanimous" bureaucrats tried to muzzle him so as not to upset Russia.
He is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.
Per Johan Valentin Anger: born 1913; died, August 2002