Raoul Wallenberg

( August 4 , 1912 – July 16 , 1947 (unconfirmed) was a Swedish Diplomat and a member of the influential Wallenberg Family . In the later stages of World War II , he worked tirelessly and at great personal risk to save many thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust . He was later arrested by the Soviets who suspected him of being a spy; his death in their custody is still a matter of great controversy.

BIRTH AND FAMILY

He was born in Kappsta, Sweden to Raoul Oscar Wallenberg (1888-1912), a Swedish naval officer, and Maria Sofia Wising "Maj" (1891-1979). Raoul senior died of cancer three months before Raoul junior was born. Raoul junior's grandfather, "farfar", was a Swedish diplomat. In 1918, Raoul junior's mother married Fredrik von Dardel. Raoul Wallenberg also had a sister, Nina, who married a Lagergren.

EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT

In 1931, Wallenberg went to study in the United States and received a Bachelor's Degree in architecture from the University Of Michigan in 1935 . He also learned Russian. He returned to Sweden, and his grandfather arranged a job for him in Cape Town, South Africa , where he worked for a Swedish company that sold construction material. In the same year, he went to work at a branch office of a Dutch bank in Haifa in Palestine , where he befriended a Hungarian Jew. He returned to Sweden in 1936 and took a job at The Central European Trading Company. The firm was owned by a Jewish man, Lauer, who was restricted from visiting certain areas of Europe , so Wallenberg went instead. There, he learned how to talk to Nazis and how they thought.

HOLOCAUST

During the Holocaust, Wallenberg was deeply disturbed by the Nazis' campaign. He was assigned as first secretary to the Swedish legation in . He skillfully negotiated with Nazi officials such as Adolf Eichmann and the commander of the German Army in Hungary, General August Schmidthuber and got them to cancel deportations to German concentration camps by having his fascist ally, Pál Szalay, deliver a note in which Wallenberg threatened to have them prosecuted for war crimes. This was just two days before the Russians arrived.

Wallenberg is thought by the Israeli organization Yad Vashem to have personally saved the lives of many thousands of Hungarian Jews. An apocryphal story credits him with either threatening or persuading a German general to ignore orders from Adolf Hitler to destroy the ghettos and kill the remaining inhabitants in the last desperate days before Budapest's liberation. If true, the number of people saved by Wallenberg's actions would rise to about 100,000. When the Russians finally took over, they found 97,000 Jews living in Budapest's two ghettos. In total, 120,000 of the pre-war population of about 330,000 Hungarian Jews survived.

ARREST

Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviet Red Army on January 17 , 1945 as they entered Budapest, probably on suspicion of being a spy for the United States . To this day, the U.S. government refuses to either confirm or deny this. He was taken to Lubyanka in Moscow with his driver Langfelder. Wallenberg was then transferred to Lefortovo prison in another part of Moscow for two more years.

DEATH

On February 6, 1957, under international pressure, the Soviets released a document they claimed to have found in their archives stating that "the prisoner Wallenberg, who is known to you, died last night in his cell." The document was dated July 17, 1947, and was signed by Smoltsov, then head of the Lubyanka Prison infirmary. The note was addressed to Viktor Abakumov , the Soviet minister of state security. However, the Soviets did not explain why they had not released this information to others.

POST DEATH SIGHTINGS

There were many reports of sightings long after the date of his death. People released from the Gulag claimed to have seen a foreign inmate answering to Wallenberg's description as late as 1990. A number of testimonies have placed him alive in Siberian or Russian prisons as late as 1981.

LEGACY

A number of testimonies have placed him alive in Siberian or Russian prisons as late as 1981 .

Raoul Wallenberg was made an Honorary Citizen Of The United States in 1981 . The bill was sponsored by Representative Tom Lantos , a Hungarian Jew who as a teenager found refuge in one of Wallenberg's safe houses. He was later made an honorary citizen of Canada in 1985 , and of Israel in 1986 .

In 1996 , Wallenberg was honored by Israel's Yad Vashem memorial as one of the Righteous Among The Nations , recognizing those non-Jews who helped save Jews from the Holocaust .

The street that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is on is named Raoul Wallenberg Place in his honor.

In 1989 the Soviets returned his personal belongings to his family. His passport, money, daybook, and clothing were returned; his personal papers, however, were not returned.

Raoul Wallenberg Alternative High School is located in San Francisco, California and a grammar school (P.S. 194) in Brooklyn .

TRIVIA

His niece is the wife of current United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan .

REFERENCES

Lester, Elenore ; ''New York Times Magazine'' (1980)

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Raoul Wallenberg