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 bur ...