This friendship continued in the critical months 1944 - 1945 while Pál Szalai, high-ranking member of the police force supported Raoul Wallenberg.
He left the party in 1942 disillusioned, and returned to a high-ranking police force position in October 1944 to help people in mortal danger from the Holocaust.
Dr. Otto Fleischmann Doctor of Medicine and psychologist of the Swedish Embassy motivated Károly Szabó to play active role in the rescue actions of Raoul Wallenberg.
Pál Szalai supported his friend with important personal documents, signed from the German command in the Battle of Budapest.
The only one who could stop it was the man given the responsibility to carry the massacre out, the commander of the German troops in Hungary, Major General Gerhard Schmidhuber.
Shocked and incredulous, he asked for a direct hearing with the Hungarian interior minister Gábor Vajna, in the basement of the Budapest City Hall where he had his headquarter, and threatened fictitious legal and economic measures against the "3000 Hungarian citizens" (in fact, a much smaller number) declared by Perlasca as residents of Spain, and the same treatment by two Latin American governments, to force the minister to withdraw the project.