The delegation was sent to the military intelligence (RU) HQ in Moscow, where it met with General Fyodor Kuznetsov, head of the RU. Then, on Abakumov’s demand, the Hungarians were moved to the GUKR SMERSH and, apparently, interrogations followed. On September 29, the Hungarians were sent back to the 4th Ukrainian Front, and two of them were wounded while crossing the front line. It remains unclear why Abakumov wanted to control the Hungarian negotiators.
Abakumov’s personal representative also tried to take control of the second (now official) delegation of the Hungarian government, headed by General Gabor Faragho, which crossed the front line on September 28 at the location of the 1st Ukrainian Front. Kuznetsov, acting on Stalin’s order, took control of the delegates and brought them to Moscow.
On December 8, 1944, SMERSH operatives of the 2nd Ukrainian Front arrested Gerrit van der Waals (a Dutch lieutenant, who, after having been taken prisoner by the Germans, escaped and worked for British Intelligence SOE in Budapest), and Karl (Karoly) Schandl, a young Hungarian lawyer and a member of an underground resistance organization who accompanied van der Waals.79 Van der Waals had important military information for British Intelligence SOE and planned to cross the Soviet front line in order to reach his intelligence contact. On December 6, van der Waals and Schandl naively reported to the Soviet troops who had just arrived, and they were taken into custody. As Schandl stated later, on December 12 they were interrogated separately and the interrogator ‘asked why they had helped the British and the Americans in Budapest and not the Russians’.80 On January 2, 1945, van der Waals and Schandl were taken to Bucharest, and two weeks later they arrived in Moscow by way of Kiev. They were put under the jurisdiction of the 2nd GUKR SMERSH Department.
Van der Waals and Schandl became victims of the Allies’ general misunderstanding of the Soviet attitude toward agents of the Allies. Nicola Sinevirsky described what a SMERSH officer told him in Prague in May 1945: ‘It is quite evident that British Intelligence is slipping,’ he said. ‘I am really amazed at the British… They instruct their agents very badly. Any agent, regardless of whom he works for, must remember, and remember well all his life, that he dare not, at any time or anywhere, disclose the fact that he is an agent… The answer is obvious. Death to Spies.’81 In other words, SMERSH arrested everyone who declared himself to be a British agent.
On December 24, 1944, fighting began inside Budapest while SMERSH operatives continued making arrests. On January 23, 1945, a UKR official of the 2nd Ukrainian Front reported on the arrests between January 1 and January 20, 1945:
On the whole, 48 [agents] were arrested. Of them:
| Agents of German intelligence | 39 |
| Agents of Hungarian intelligence | 7 |
| Agents of German Counterintel.[ligence]organs | 2 |
[…]
In addition, during this period five officials of the Hungarian intelligence service and three representatives of the diplomatic corps were detained. This number includes:
| Employees of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest | 2 |
| Employees of the Hungarian Consulate in Romania | 1 |
According to their nationalities, they are:
| Hungarians | 6 |
| Swedes | 1 |
| Slovak | 1.82 |
The Swede was the well-known Raoul Wallenberg, while the Slovak was the diplomat Jan Spišjak (pronounced Spishak).
Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman trained as an architect, arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944 as Secretary to the Swedish Legation.83 In this capacity he represented the Utrikesdepartementet (UD), the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as well as the War Refugee Board, an American governmental organization established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944. That board was a U.S. executive agency created to aid civilian victims of the Nazi and Axis powers, especially the European Jews.84 Hungary was the last country in Europe where a considerable population of approximately 250,000 Jews still existed, mostly in Budapest. Although on July 6 Admiral Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian regent (really a dictator), ordered the suspension of deportations of the Jews under German supervision to extermination camps in Poland, it was only a matter of time until the deportations resumed. During a short period Wallenberg organized measures that eventually saved the lives of thousands of Budapest Jews, including the printing and distribution of Schutzpasses, protective passports recognized by both the Hungarians and the Germans.
Wallenberg’s work was facilitated by the fact that he belonged to an extremely powerful family in Sweden. His elder second cousins, the brothers Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg, owned an enormous financial and industrial empire, and were also on familiar terms with the Swedish government. While staying in Budapest, Raoul used the brothers’ Stockholms Enskilda Bank as a conduit for funding for his humanitarian work.
However, there was also a negative aspect of this blood relationship. During the whole war, the Svenska Kullagerfabriken AB, a ball-bearing factory that was the main enterprise of the Wallenberg brothers, supplied mostly Germany, but also England and the Soviet Union, with ball bearings that were crucial for the military industry. Because of their continuing supplying of Germany, the relationship of the brothers with the U.S. and England became extremely tense in 1943–44, and this had consequences for the brothers after the war.
As for Jan Spišjak, no doubt he was unpleasantly surprised by the detention. Although he represented the government of the Axis country, before the war, from 1940 to 1941, he had provided Soviet diplomats in Budapest with important intelligence information, and could expect better treatment at the hands of Soviet counterintelligence.85
At first Wallenberg and Spišjak were ‘detained and guarded’, but not arrested.86 A Soviet military report stated that on January 13, 1945, Wallenberg, along with Vilmos Langfelder, an engineer who was Wallenberg’s driver, approached the soldiers of the 7th Guard Army of the 2nd Ukrainian Front fighting in Pest. Wallenberg ‘refused to go to the rear because, as he said, he was responsible for about 7,000 Jewish citizens in the eastern part [Budapest consists of the western part Buda and eastern part Pest divided by the Danube River] of the city’.87 Wallenberg asked to meet with high-level Soviet commanders and to send a telegram to Stockholm to inform the Foreign Office of his whereabouts. The head of the Political Department of the 151st Rifle Division reported Wallenberg’s detention to his superior, and the head of the Political Department of the 7th Guard Army issued an order ‘to forbid Raoul Wallenberg to have contacts with the outside world’.88 Later Langfelder told his cell mate in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow that Wallenberg had never reached Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, with whom he intended to discuss the 7,000 Jewish survivors in Budapest he was responsible for.