A 32-year-old Swedish architecture student with no diplomatic training climbed onto the roof of a deportation train in Budapest in late 1944 and handed protective papers through the cracks while guards fired warning shots over his head. This episode traces how Raoul Wallenberg, heir to one of Europe’s wealthiest banking families, was shaped by hitchhiking across Depression-era America, by hearing refugees’ stories at a bank in Haifa, and by a screening of the banned film Pimpernel Smith, then recruited by Iver Olsen of the War Refugee Board, who was secretly working for the OSS. We examine how the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 brought Adolf Eichmann to Budapest and deportations of 12,000 people a day.

The episode breaks down the Schutzpass, a legally meaningless but visually authoritative document that exploited the fascist bureaucracy’s reverence for stamps and letterheads, and the 32 buildings Wallenberg declared Swedish territory to shelter up to 10,000 people. We weigh the popular legend of 100,000 saved against Yad Vashem’s estimate of about 4,500 passes, note the overlapping work of Carl Lutz and Giorgio Perlasca, and then follow Wallenberg to Soviet headquarters in January 1945, his last words about going as a guest or a prisoner, and the decades of shifting Soviet explanations, from the 1957 Smoltsov letter claiming a heart attack to later Russian suggestions of execution by poison.

• Why Wallenberg’s ignorance of diplomatic protocol was his greatest weapon
• The threat sent to General Schmidhuber that reportedly stopped the destruction of the Budapest ghetto, and the disputed accounts of that event
• Declassified CIA documents showing his liaison role with the Hungarian underground
• The toll on his family, including his mother and stepfather’s deaths in 1979, and the Wallenberg bank’s wartime dealings with Germany
• His honorary U.S. citizenship in 1981 and Sweden’s declaration of death in absentia in 2016