LARS BERG

Lars Berg, author of The Book That Disappeared: What Happened in Budapest, worked in the Swedish Embassy’s Sector B, which oversaw the interests of certain foreign nationals in Hungary, including Soviet and Belgian. Like Per Anger, he was a career diplomat. Berg set up residence in the fully staffed home of a wealthy nobleman who had left Budapest, and so was able to wine and dine Adolph Eichmann when Wallenberg forgot that he had invited the perpetrator of the Final Solution to dinner. It was at this meeting, witnessed by Berg, that Eichmann threatened Wallenberg, who was trying to talk him out of further genocide, by saying that “accidents do happen, even to a neutral diplomat.”

Berg is also credited with saving the life of Peter Zwack and his family when their family was found hidden in a cellar by the Arrow Cross. The Arrow Cross soldiers were about to march them all to the Danube where they would be shot, when Lars Berg came rushing into the house, brandishing a machine gun and shouting that the house was under Swedish protection.

Lars Berg’s book, published in English by Vantage Press in 1960, was not only critical in raising questions about the documentation that disappeared with Wallenberg. Berg also, with supporting materials in later editions, introduced the world to the importance of Count Michael Tolstoy-Kutuzow to the Wallenberg case. Berg no doubt knew Tolstoy-Kutuzow personally, first because he was a Soviet, presumably aristocrat (fleeing from the Soviets) married to a Belgian woman and so under Berg’s “protection.”

Once the Soviets fully occupied Budapest, Tolstoy-Kutuzow emerged as the Soviet agent in charge of foreign residents in Budapest, with subsequent indications that he was NKVD. At a time when Wallenberg had been taken into protective custody and was on his way to Moscow prisons and the Swedish Embassy staff were considered with some suspicion by the Soviet command, Berg – emerging from hiding but separated from the Embassy staff – was essentially spared by Tolstoy-Kutuzow and advised how best to conduct himself to avoid arrest and a worse fate.

Thus, while Berg as head of Sector B was a likely candidate to share Wallenberg’s fate as head of Sector C, he was not taken to Moscow – unlike Heinrich Grossheim-Krisko, an employee of sector B who – besides Wallenberg and Langfelder – to be taken into Soviet captivity from the Swedish Embassy. Presumably this is because Tolstoy-Kutuzow knew that Berg was a career diplomat, unlike Wallenberg and Grossheim-Krisko.

Tolstoy-Kutuzow later escaped the impact of Soviet purges and took refuge with his wife in Ireland. Eichmann, who no doubt arranged for an assassination attempt on Wallenberg’s life, found refuge in Argentina until his capture by the Israelis. Berg, who returned to his native Sweden, wrote an account which addresses some of the more disturbing aspects of Wallenberg’s disappearance from Budapest.