Per Anger: The Swedish Diplomat Who Saved Budapest’s Jews
The Diplomat Who Forged Passports to Save Budapest’s Jews
A single sheet of paper, stamped with Sweden’s three crowns and signed by a young second secretary who had no real authority to issue it, became the difference between deportation and survival for hundreds of Budapest’s Jews in the summer of 1944. The man who signed those sheets was Per Anger, and his story deserves to be told with the same precision I bring to every document that crosses my desk.
A Lie Printed in Blue and Yellow
When Hugo Wohl walked into the Swedish legation in Budapest in the spring of 1944, Per Anger had no diplomatic instrument on hand that could legally protect a Hungarian Jew from deportation, so he improvised one. Wohl, the Hungarian Jewish head of a Swedish firm in the city, had watched Adolf Eichmann’s machinery begin rounding up every Jew in sight, and he came to Anger in desperation. Anger’s response was to issue Wohl a false provisional Swedish passport, a document with no basis in international law but with just enough official weight, stamped and signed, to make German and Hungarian officials hesitate. Word spread fast. Hundreds followed Wohl’s example, and soon other neutral missions, the Papal Nuncio’s office and the Spanish legation among them, copied the tactic. Anger’s legation alone issued 700 of these false provisional passports before the summer was out.
This wasn’t the improvisation of a man new to danger. Anger had already spent years moving intelligence out of hostile territory before he ever picked up a pen to forge a travel document.
The Making of a Reluctant Hero
Per Anger’s diplomatic career began in Berlin, not Budapest, and it started with a warning nobody heeded. He joined the Swedish legation there in January 1940 as a 26 year old trainee, and at considerable personal risk he made contact with underground movements who were tracking German troop preparations. Anger relayed their warnings of an impending invasion of Scandinavia back to Stockholm. By the time his superiors passed the warning to Norway, it was already too late; the German military attaché in Oslo simply denied everything when confronted, and Germany invaded Norway the following day.
Anger returned to Stockholm in June 1941 to work the Hungary desk in the foreign ministry’s trade section. His diligence there earned him an appointment as second secretary at the Swedish legation in Budapest, a post he took up on 26 November 1942, two years before the crisis that would define his life.
Comrades in the Dark
Anger did not act alone, and crediting the full circle around him matters as much as crediting him. His colleagues in Budapest included Hugo Wohl, the veteran legation chief Carl Ivan Danielsson, and Valdemar Langlet of the Swedish Red Cross. US Senator Tom Lantos, himself a survivor whose family was helped by this network, later called them “radiant sparks of humanity that glowed in the darkest of midnights.”
For a while, Budapest felt almost untouched by the war around it. Anger married his wife, Elena, in 1943 and found time to hunt game in Transylvania. Hungary, under Admiral Horthy’s right wing regime, had joined Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, yet Nazi racial ideology found surprisingly little traction among Magyar nationalists. Hungary remained, improbably, the one oasis for Jews left in Nazi occupied Europe, its Jewish community numbering nearly 750,000 people by 1944. Refugees who reached Anger described the atrocities unfolding elsewhere; some camp escapees even gave him sketches of gas chambers, which he forwarded to Stockholm.
When Budapest Stopped Being Safe
Germany’s invasion of Hungary in March 1944 ended the illusion of safety in a single stroke. After the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, some Hungarian politicians had begun weighing a separate peace with the Soviets. Hitler would not tolerate the vacillation, and German troops crossed into Hungary that March. For Hungary’s Jews, the consequences were immediate: confinement to ghettos, confiscation of property, and the yellow star. Eichmann arrived in Budapest shortly after to oversee what became one of the fastest deportation campaigns of the entire Holocaust.
Wallenberg Arrives
By the time Raoul Wallenberg reached Budapest in July 1944, sent at the urging of the US War Refugee Board and Sweden’s own Jewish community, Eichmann had already deported more than 400,000 Jews to the death camps. What followed was a genuine game of cat and mouse. Wallenberg hosted Eichmann at the Swedish legation, and the Nazi official, while conceding privately that Germany was losing the war, insisted on continuing his “duties” and warned Wallenberg to avoid “accidents.” Days later, a truck rammed Wallenberg’s car; he was not inside at the time.
Anger, Wallenberg, Langlet, and Danielsson responded by setting up bogus safe houses across Budapest, disguised as Swedish libraries and research institutes, hiding people in plain sight behind an administrative facade the Germans had no reason to question.
The Schutzpass and the Death Marches
The Schutzpass, Sweden’s “protective pass,” worked because its royal Swedish motif projected an authority the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators were reluctant to challenge outright. As deportations gave way to forced death marches in November 1944, Anger and Wallenberg drove the length of the columns themselves, handing out passes and physically pulling Jews away from German guards. In January 1945, Wallenberg pressured a senior German commander into cancelling plans for a final massacre of Budapest’s remaining Jews. Two days later, the Red Army arrived. Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet forces as an alleged spy on 17 January and was never seen again. Anger himself was taken into Soviet custody but released three months later following Swiss intervention. He would later credit Wallenberg with saving 100,000 Jewish lives, a figure that speaks to how far a single legation’s improvised paperwork could stretch when backed by nerve.
What Made Him Stand Up?
Per Anger’s willingness to defy an occupying power traces, at least in part, to a close-knit upbringing in Gothenburg, where he was born the eldest of three sons to an engineer father and a language teacher mother. Biographer Elizabeth Skoglund, in her 1997 account A Quiet Courage, described a household shaped by Anger’s deeply held Lutheran faith, which he leaned on through the first real crisis of his life, the death of his brother Jan, an air force pilot, in an accident in 1936. Anger studied law at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala, graduated in 1939, and took up his Berlin posting after a short stint in the army.
A Long Diplomatic Coda
Wartime Budapest was the defining chapter of Per Anger’s career, but far from the closing one. He returned to Sweden in 1945 and went on to serve in Egypt and Ethiopia in 1946, France from 1953, Austria from 1955, and San Francisco from 1961. In 1966 he took charge of Sweden’s international aid program, then served as ambassador to Australia from 1970 and to Canada from 1976, closing his career with what he considered a dream posting, ambassador to the Bahamas, from 1978. Characteristically modest, Anger spent much of his later life keeping Wallenberg’s story alive through speeches and writing while downplaying his own role. In 1956, when he assisted Hungarians fleeing across the Austrian border after the failed uprising, several of the refugees he helped turned out to be Jews he had already saved once, in 1944.
Righteous Among the Nations
Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum recognized Per Anger as one of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1982, placing him alongside Oskar Schindler and Wallenberg, and granted him honorary Israeli citizenship in September 2000. In 1989 he confronted Mikhail Gorbachev directly about Wallenberg’s fate and received no real answer. Even in Sweden, Skoglund notes, he faced quiet resistance from bureaucrats she called “pusillanimous,” wary of upsetting relations with Russia by pressing the question too hard.
Per Johan Valentin Anger, righteous diplomat, was born 7 December 1913 and died 25 August 2002. Watch the archival footage on Vimeo for a visual record of Anger’s account of the Budapest rescue operations.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
Featured by CNN, BBC, Newsweek... Awarded by the U.S. Dept. of State
Ask | Recognition | Books | Set as preferred source
