Nbc-tv to Air Miniseries on Wallenberg Next Year

NBC-TV will air a miniseries next year on Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from being exterminated by the Nazis.

The script of the film, based on interviews with people who knew Wallenberg, books and articles, is being written by Gerald Green, who authored the TV minseries “Holocaust,” according to Mike O’Hara, NBC’s publicity director for movies and miniseries.

O’Hara, in a telephone interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said that Richard Chamberlain, star of two successful miniseries, Shogun and The Thom Birds, will portray Wallenberg. The role of SS Lt. Col. Ad’f Eichmann, who was Wallenberg’s major foe in Budapest, and other major roles have not yet been cast, O’Hara said.

The series will focus on Wallenberg’s activities form the spring of 1944 to the end of World War II in 1945. In 1944, Wallenberg, at the behest of the United States and the Swedish governments, went to Budapest to attempt to secure the safety of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews who were menaced by the nation’s Nazi-dominated regime.

By various tactics, including distribution of thousands of Swedish passports to Jews, Wallenberg, a non-Jew, succeeded in his mission of mercy. The Soviet Union, which had Wallenberg arrested when the Red Army entered Budapest in 1945, claims that he died in a Soviet prison in 1947. Fueled by intermittent reports of sightings of Wallenberg in Soviet prisons after that date, speculation continues that Wallenberg may still be alive. If so, he will be 72 years old next month.

The miniseries will be filmed mainly in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, beginning in late August, according to O’Hara. A press report quotes the film’s director, Lamont Johnson, as saying that Hungarian officials were not eager to allow filming in Hungary because of the film’s epilogue, which conjectures that Wallenberg may still be alive. Johnson is traveling in Europe and is not available for comment.