Doomed...

 



 

from Pimpernel Smith (1941)
 

You will never rule the world... because you are doomed.
All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed.
Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back.
You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another,
leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred.
And still, you will have to go on... because you will find no horizon... and see no dawn
... until at last you are lost and destroyed.
You are doomed, Captain of Murderers,
and one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words.  

Lesley Howard's speech  prophesying of the downfall of Nazism.

This 1941 propaganda film was well received in the US (released as 'Mister V') where it helped turn public opinion toward intervening in the war.  It  was also apparently the inspiration for Raoul Wallenberg, who whilst  working as a Swedish diplomat in Nazi occupied Budapest, saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from being sent to the gas chambers in 1944.

Both actor and diplomat died in mysterious circumstances with links to the intelligence services of the powers of the day.

Howard was shot down over the Bay of Biscay by the Luftwaffe in 1943. 
 He was on a scheduled flight en route to Portugal and the German fighters involved went outside their normal range to take down the flight.  Various theories have been put forward suggesting...

(1) It was mistaken for a flight that German Intelligence believed on which Churchill was flying to Portugal.
(2) That Howard was working for British Intelligence and was on his way to try and dissuade Franco from joining the Axis powers.
(3) The shooting down was sanctioned directly by Goebbels who had been ridiculed on film by Howard and was aware of the value of his propaganda films.


When the Nazi's started deporting Hungarian Jews to the death camps in 1944, Wallenberg, with US help, travelled to Hungary as a Swedish diplomat.  Once there he set up a system issuing Swedish passports to the remaining Budapest Jews and rented 32 buildings that were declared as Swedish sovereign territory where they housed nearly 10,000 Jews until Budapest was recaptured by the advancing Soviet forces.  He also negotiated with the retreating Nazi forces to ensure that the planned destruction of the Budapest ghetto and murder of the remaining 70,000 Jews did not happen. 

During the fighting to retake Budapest in 1945, he was ordered to attend a meeting with a Russian General over allegations of being involved in espionage and was never officially seen again.  In 1957 the USSR released documents to state he had been transported to the Soviet Union and had died of a heart attack in a Moscow cell in 1947.

In the 1990's further documents released by the US showed that he was very probably also working under cover for US Intelligence (OSS) to try and destabilise the pro-Nazi Hungarian government.  Whilst in Russia, a 1991 investigation concluded his arrest had been ordered from Moscow by  the NKVD (secret police) and he had been executed in Lubyanka prison 1947.  Although several accounts from ex Soviet prisoners and Intelligence officers have surfaced that puport to have seen/heard him alive and incarcerated into the late 1980's.