Рауль Валленберг: Судьба және құпиясы

20th century Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat and humanitarian

Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg (4 August 1912 – disappeared 17 January 1945)

On 17 January 1945, during the Siege of Budapest by the Red Army, agents of SMERSH detained Wallenberg on suspicion of espionage, and he subsequently disappeared. In 1957, 12 years after his disappearance, he was reported by Soviet authorities to have died of a suspected myocardial infarction on 17 July 1947 while imprisoned in the Lubyanka, the prison at the headquarters of the NKVD secret police in Moscow. A document released in 2023 as part of The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection indicates Vyacheslav Nikonov, a KGB deputy at the time, determined as part of a 1991 inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, that he was likely executed by Soviet authorities in late 1947 due to evidence that he may have been associated with people helping not only Jews but also Nazi war criminals escape prosecution. However, there is no conclusive proof of this and his cause and date of death have been disputed ever since, with some people claiming to have encountered men matching Wallenberg's description until the 1980s in Soviet prisons and psychiatric hospitals. The motives behind Wallenberg's arrest and imprisonment by the Soviet government, along with questions surrounding the circumstances of his death and his ties to US intelligence, remain shrouded in mystery and are the subject of continued speculation. In 2016, the Swedish Tax Agency declared him dead in absentia, with the pro forma date of death noted as 31 July 1952. As a result of his successful efforts to rescue Hungarian Jews, Wallenberg has been the subject of numerous humanitarian honours in the decades following his presumed death. In 1981, US Congressman Tom Lantos, one of those saved by Wallenberg, sponsored a bill making Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the United States, the second person ever to receive this honour. Wallenberg also became an honorary citizen of Canada, Hungary, Australia, the United Kingdom and Israel. In 1963 the Israeli agency Yad Vashem designated Wallenberg one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Numerous monuments have been dedicated to him, and streets have been named after him throughout the world. The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States was founded in 1981 to "perpetuate the humanitarian ideals and the nonviolent courage of Raoul Wallenberg". It gives the Raoul Wallenberg Award annually to recognize persons who carry out those goals. In 2012, Wallenberg was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress "in recognition of his achievements and heroic actions during the Holocaust." Declassified documents have confirmed that Raoul Wallenberg worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA. Although some have claimed that Wallenberg was responsible for rescuing 100,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust in Hungary, historians regard that figure as an exaggeration; Yad Vashem estimates the number of people granted protective paperwork as about 4,500 individuals.

Wallenberg was born in 1912 in Lidingö Municipality, near Stockholm, where his maternal grandparents, Per Johan Wising and his wife Sophie Wising (née Benedicks), had built a summer house in 1882. His paternal grandfather, Gustaf Wallenberg, was a diplomat and envoy to Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sofia. His parents, who married in 1911, were Raoul Oscar Wallenberg (1888–1912), a Swedish naval officer, and Maria "Maj" Sofia Wising (1891–1979). His father died of cancer three months before he was born, and his maternal grandfather died of pneumonia three months after his birth. His mother and grandmother, now both suddenly widows, raised him together. they had a son, Guy von Dardel, and a daughter, Nina Lagergren. After high school and his compulsory eight months in the Swedish military, Wallenberg's paternal grandfather sent him to study in Paris. He spent one year there, and then in 1931 he studied architecture at the University of Michigan in the United States. He used his vacations to explore the United States, with hitchhiking being his preferred method of travel. About his experiences, he wrote to his grandfather saying, "When you travel like a hobo, everything's different. You have to be on the alert the whole time. You're in close contact with new people every day. Hitchhiking gives you training in diplomacy and tact." Wallenberg was aware of his one sixteenth Jewish ancestry and proud of it. It came from his great great grandfather (his maternal grandmother's grandfather) Michael Benedicks, who immigrated to Stockholm in 1780 and converted to Christianity. Ingemar Hedenius (one of the leading Swedish philosophers) recalls a conversation with Raoul dating back to 1930 when they were together in an army hospital during military service:
We had many long and intimate conversations. He was full of ideas and plans for the future. Although I was a good deal older – you could choose when to do your service – I was enormously impressed by him. He was proud of his partial Jewish ancestry and, as I recall, must have exaggerated it somewhat. I remember him saying, 'A person like me, who is both a Wallenberg and half Jewish, can never be defeated'. Raul Wallenberg's Jewishness is supported also by Sweden researcher Paul A. Levine, who wrote in his monograph about Wallenberg:
There is general agreement that around the end of the eighteen[th] century, a German Jew named Benedicts emigrated to Sweden, establishing the material line of [Raoul's] Wallenberg’s family. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1935. Upon his return to Sweden, he found his American degree did not qualify him to practice as an architect. Later that year, his grandfather arranged a job for him in Cape Town, South Africa, in the office of a Swedish company that sold construction material. After six months in South Africa, he took a new job at a branch office of the Holland Bank in Haifa. He returned to Sweden in 1936, securing a job in Stockholm with the help of his father's cousin and godfather, Jacob Wallenberg, at the Central European Trading Company, an export import company trading between Stockholm and central Europe, owned by Kálmán Lauer, a Hungarian Jew.

Beginning in 1938, the Kingdom of Hungary, under the regency of Miklós Horthy, passed a series of anti Jewish measures modeled on the so called Nuremberg Race Laws enacted in Germany by the Nazis in 1935. Like their German counterparts, the Hungarian laws focused heavily on restricting Jews from certain professions, reducing the number of Jews in government and public service jobs, and prohibiting intermarriage. Because of this, Wallenberg's business associate, Kálmán Lauer, found it increasingly difficult to travel to his native Hungary, which was moving still deeper into the German orbit. Hungary became a member of the Axis powers in November 1940 and later joined the Nazi led invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Out of necessity, Wallenberg became Lauer's personal representative. He traveled to Hungary to conduct business on Lauer's behalf and to look in on members of Lauer's extended family who remained in Budapest. He soon learned to speak Hungarian and, from 1941, made increasingly frequent travels to Budapest. Within a year, Wallenberg was a joint owner and the International Director of the company.

Wallenberg was directly inspired by "Pimpernel" Smith, a 1941 British anti Nazi propaganda thriller. The film had been banned in Sweden, but Wallenberg and his sister, Nina, were invited to a private screening at the British Embassy in Stockholm. Enthralled by Professor Smith (played by Leslie Howard), who saved twenty eight Jews from the Nazis, Nina stated, "We thought the film was amazing. When we got up from our seats, Raoul said, ‘that is the kind of thing I would like to do’".

At the end of May 1944, George Mantello received and immediately publicized two important reports given to him by Romanian diplomat Florian Manilou, who had returned from a fact finding trip to Romania and Budapest at Mantello's request. Manilou received material from Miklos "Moshe" Krausz in Budapest, who worked with Carl Lutz to rescue Jews. One of the reports was probably Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl's abridged version of the 33 page Auschwitz Protocols (i. e., the Vrba Wetzler and Rosin Mordowicz reports). The reports described in detail the operations of the Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp. The second was a 6 page Hungarian report that detailed the ghettoization and deportation of 435,000 Hungarian Jews, as updated to 19 June 1944, by towns, to Auschwitz. Mantello publicized the reports' findings immediately upon receipt. This resulted in large scale grass roots protest in Switzerland against the unprecedented barbarism against Jews and led to Horthy being threatened by Roosevelt and Churchill Winston Churchill's letter: "There is no doubt that this persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world "

Following the report's publication the administration of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned to the newly created War Refugee Board (WRB) in search of a solution to the genocide against Jews. US Treasury Department official Iver C. Olsen was dispatched to Stockholm as a representative of the WRB and tasked with putting together a plan to rescue the Jews of Hungary. In addition to his duties with the WRB, Olsen was also secretly employed as the chief of "Currency Operations" for the Stockholm station of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States' wartime espionage service. and Miklos "Moshe" Krausz, they issued "protective passports" (German: Schutz Pass), which identified the bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation and thus prevented their deportation. Although not legal, these documents looked official and were generally accepted by German and Hungarian authorities, who sometimes were also bribed. With the money mostly raised for the War Refugee Board by American Jews, Wallenberg rented 32 buildings in Budapest and declared them to be extraterritorial, protected by diplomatic immunity. He put up signs such as "The Swedish Library" and "The Swedish Research Institute" on their doors and hung oversized Swedish flags on the front of the buildings to bolster the deception. The buildings eventually housed almost 10,000 people. At the height of the program, more than 350 people were involved in the rescue of Jews. Sister Sára Salkaházi was caught sheltering Jewish women and was killed by members of the Arrow Cross Party. Tibor Baranski was a 22 year old religious student who was recruited by Papal Nuncio Monsignor Angelo Rotta to help save Jews. Baranski, who posed as a Vatican representative, saved about 3,000 Jews. He collaborated with diplomats, including Wallenberg. He met with and talked with Wallenberg on the phone several times. Baranski described Wallenberg's motivation as "divinely human love." "We knew in a second we shared the same opinion the same recklessness, the same determination, all through," said Baránszki. Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz also issued protective passports from the Swiss embassy in the spring of 1944; and Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasca posed as a Spanish diplomat and issued forged visas. Portuguese diplomats Sampaio Garrido and Carlos de Liz Texeira Branquinho rented houses and apartments to shelter and protect refugees from deportation and murder and issued safe conducts to approximately 1,000 Hungarian Jews. Berber Smit (Barbara Hogg), the daughter of Lolle Smit (1892–1961), director of N. V. Philips Budapest and a Dutch spy working for the British MI6, later claimed to have been his girlfriend, also assisted Wallenberg, as did her son. However, she was temporarily engaged to Wallenberg's colleague Lars Berg, and later married a Scottish officer; which has not dispelled claims that Wallenberg was homosexual. Wallenberg started sleeping in a different house each night, to guard against being captured or killed by Arrow Cross Party members or by Adolf Eichmann's men. Two days before the Soviet Army occupied Budapest, Wallenberg negotiated with Eichmann and with Major General Gerhard Schmidthuber, the supreme commander of German forces in Hungary. Wallenberg bribed Arrow Cross Party member Pál Szalai to deliver a note in which Wallenberg persuaded the occupying Germans to prevent a Fascist plan to blow up the Budapest ghetto and murder an estimated 70,000 Jews. The note also persuaded the Germans to cancel a final effort to organize a death march of the remaining Jews in Budapest by threatening to have them prosecuted for war crimes once the war was over. Wallenberg (who was already dead at the time of Szalai's deposition) saved hundreds of people but was not directly involved in the plan to save the ghetto. While Perlasca was posing as the Spanish consul general, he learned of the intention to burn down the ghetto. 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 headquarters, and threatened legal and economic measures against the "3000 Hungarian citizens" (in fact, a much smaller number) declared by Perlasca as residents of Spain, and similar treatment to Hungarian residents in two Latin American republics, to force the minister to withdraw the project. This actually happened in the following days. The Swedish consulate building still exists as of 2019, on the hill behind the Hotel Gellért, with a reference to Wallenberg at the front.

On 29 October 1944, elements of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under Marshal Rodion Malinovsky launched an offensive against Budapest. By late December, the city had been encircled by Soviet forces. Despite this, the German commander of Budapest, SS Lieutenant General Karl Pfeffer Wildenbruch, refused all offers to surrender, setting in motion a protracted and bloody siege of Budapest. At the height of the fighting, on 17 January 1945, Wallenberg was called to General Malinovsky's headquarters in Debrecen to answer allegations that he was engaged in espionage. Wallenberg's last recorded words were, "I'm going to Malinovsky's whether as a guest or prisoner I do not know yet." Documents recovered in 1993 from previously secret Soviet military archives and published in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet show that an order for Wallenberg's arrest was issued by Deputy Commissar for Defence (and future Soviet Premier) Nikolai Bulganin and transmitted to Malinovsky's headquarters on the day of Wallenberg's disappearance. In 2003, a review of Soviet wartime correspondences indicated that Vilmos Böhm, a Hungarian politician who was also a Soviet intelligence agent, may have provided Wallenberg's name to SMERSH as a person to detain for possible involvement in espionage. Information about Wallenberg after his detention is mostly speculative; there were many who claimed to have met him during his imprisonment. Wallenberg was transported by train from Debrecen, through Romania, to Moscow. The Soviet authorities may have moved him to Moscow in the hope of exchanging him for defectors in Sweden. Vladimir Dekanozov notified the Swedish government on 16 January 1945 that Wallenberg was under the protection of Soviet authorities. On 21 January 1945, Wallenberg was transferred to Lubyanka prison and held in cell 123 with fellow prisoner Gustav Richter, who had been a police attaché at the German embassy in Romania. Richter testified in Sweden in 1955 that Wallenberg was interrogated once for about an hour and a half, in early February 1945. On 1 March 1945, Richter was moved from his cell and never saw Wallenberg again. On 8 March 1945, Soviet controlled Hungarian radio announced that Wallenberg and his driver had been murdered on their way to Debrecen, suggesting that they had been killed by the Arrow Cross Party or the Gestapo. Sweden's foreign minister, Östen Undén, and its ambassador to the Soviet Union, Staffan Söderblom, wrongly assumed that they were dead.

On 6 February 1957, the Soviet government released a document dated 17 July 1947 that stated: "I report that the prisoner Wallenberg who is well known to you, died suddenly in his cell this night, probably as a result of a heart attack or heart failure. Pursuant to the instructions given by you that I personally have Wallenberg under my care, I request approval to make an autopsy with a view to establishing cause of death I have personally notified the minister and it has been ordered that the body be cremated without autopsy." In 1989, Wallenberg's personal belongings were returned to his family, including his passport and cigarette case. Soviet officials said they found the materials when they were upgrading the shelves in a store room. In 1991, Vyacheslav Nikonov was charged by the Russian government with investigating Wallenberg's fate. He concluded that Wallenberg died in 1947, executed while a prisoner in Lubyanka. He may have been a victim of the C 2 poison (carbylamine choline chloride) tested at the poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services. In Moscow in 2000, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev announced that Wallenberg had been executed in 1947 in Lubyanka prison. He claimed that Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former Soviet secret police chief, told him about the shooting in a private conversation. The statement did not explain why Wallenberg was killed or why the government had lied about it. General Pavel Sudoplatov claimed that Wallenberg died after being poisoned by Grigory Mairanovsky, an NKVD chemist and torturer. In 2000, Russian prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov signed a verdict posthumously rehabilitating Wallenberg and his driver, Langfelder, as "victims of political repression". Files pertinent to Wallenberg were turned over to the chief rabbi of Russia by the Russian government in September 2007. The items were slated to be housed at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow,

In August 2016, new information about Wallenberg's death came to light when the diary of KGB head Ivan Serov surfaced after Serov's granddaughter found the diary hidden in a wall of her house. "I have no doubts that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947," Serov wrote.

Several former prisoners have claimed to have seen Wallenberg after his reported death in 1947. In February 1949, former German Colonel Theodor von Dufving, a prisoner of war, provided statements concerning Wallenberg. In the transit camp of Kirov, while being moved to Vorkuta, Dufving encountered a prisoner dressed in civilian clothes with his own special guard. The prisoner claimed that he was a Swedish diplomat and said he was there "through a great error". Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal searched for Wallenberg and collected several testimonies. For example, British businessman Greville Wynne, who was imprisoned in the Lubyanka prison in 1962 for his connection to KGB defector Oleg Penkovsky, stated that he had talked to, but could not see the face of, a man who claimed to be a Swedish diplomat. Efim (or Yefim) Moshinsky claims to have seen Wallenberg on Wrangel Island in 1962. An eyewitness asserted that she had seen Wallenberg in the 1960s in a Soviet prison where she worked. During a private conversation about the conditions of detention in Soviet prisons at a Communist Party reception in the mid 1970s, a KGB general is reported to have said that "conditions could not be that harsh, given that in Lubyanka prison there is some foreign prisoner who had been there now for almost three decades." John Farkas was a resistance fighter during World War II and was the last man claiming to have seen Wallenberg alive. Farkas' son has stated that there have been sightings of Wallenberg "up into the 1980s in Soviet prisons and psychiatric hospitals."

In the late 1970s, Annette Lantos, one of the people rescued by Wallenberg, established the International Free Wallenberg Committee to pressure the Soviet Union into providing answers about his disappearance. She later tried to enlist U. S. President Jimmy Carter to seek further information by sending in a postcard to the Ask President Carter radio show and by working with Simon Wiesenthal and Jack Anderson to tell Wallenberg's story through a Washington Post column. Noticing these efforts and angry that Sweden had not gone far enough in their efforts to find Wallenberg, Nina Lagergren, Wallenberg's half sister, traveled to the United States to campaign with Lantos. The efforts of Lantos and Lagergren eventually led to the creation of the Free Wallenberg Committee in Congress, led by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose goal was to determine what happened to Wallenberg. Lantos' husband and fellow Holocaust survivor, Tom, later continued the congressional push for answers regarding Wallenberg after being elected to the House of Representatives in 1980.

One of Tom Lantos' first acts as a representative in Congress was to recognize Wallenberg as an honorary American citizen. After being told by President Carter that the Soviet Union would not answer questions to America about a non American citizen, Lantos worked with Senator Moynihan to pass a bill recognizing Wallenberg as such. The effort grew as 60 Minutes aired a piece on Wallenberg while the resolution was moving through Congress. Newly elected President Ronald Reagan watched the program and joined Lantos and Moynihan in pushing for the resolution to pass. It eventually passed by a 396–2 vote and was quickly signed into law by Reagan, making Wallenberg the second person in history (Winston Churchill being the first) to be made an honorary American citizen by an act of Congress. a well known physicist, retired from CERN and dedicated the rest of his life to finding out his half brother's fate. He traveled to the Soviet Union about fifty times for discussions and research, including an examination of the Vladimir prison records. Over the years, von Dardel compiled a 50,000 page archive of interviews, journal articles, letters, and other documents related to his quest. In 1991, Dardel initiated a Swedish Russian working group to search eleven separate military and government archives from the former Soviet Union for information about Wallenberg's fate, but the group was not able to find useful information. Many, including von Dardel and his daughters, Louise and Marie, do not accept the various versions of Wallenberg's death. They continue to request that the archives in Russia, Sweden, and Hungary become available to impartial researchers.

In 2012, Russian lieutenant general Vasily Khristoforov, head of the registration branch of the Russian Federal Security Service, said that the Wallenberg case was still open. He also dismissed any allegation of a continuing cover up, saying that "this is another state and a different special service" from the Soviet Union and the services in charge of holding Wallenberg.

On 29 March 2016, an announcement was made by the Swedish Tax Agency that a petition to have Wallenberg declared dead in absentia was submitted. It stated that if he did not report to the Tax Agency before 14 October 2016, he would be legally declared dead. Wallenberg was declared dead legally in October 2016, as announced through the petition. Consistent with the approach used in other cases where the circumstances of death were not known, the Swedish tax agency recorded the date of his death as 31 July 1952, five years after he went missing.

In May 1996, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released thousands of previously classified documents regarding Raoul Wallenberg, in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act. which listed the names of operatives associated with the CIA's wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The documents also included a 1954 memo from an anonymous CIA source that identified a Hungarian exile living in Stockholm who, according to the author: "assisted in inserting Wallenberg into Hungary during WWII as an agent of OSS". The OSS message noted Wallenberg's contacts with Géza Soós, a high ranking MFM member. The communique further explained that Soós "may only be contacted" through the Swedish legation in Budapest, which was Wallenberg's workplace and also served as the operational center for his attempts to aid the Hungarian Jews. The same message's assertion that Wallenberg "will know if he (Soós) is not in Budapest" is also curious, in that by November 1944 Soós was in hiding and knowledge of his whereabouts would have been available only to persons closely involved with the MFM.

In 2009, reporter Joshua Prager wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal profiling the long term toll that Raoul Wallenberg's disappearance had on his family. His mother Maj and his stepfather Fredrik von Dardel spent the rest of their lives searching for their son. They both died by suicide, overdosing on pills two days apart in 1979. Their daughter, Nina Lagergren, Raoul's half sister, attributed their suicide to their despair about never finding their son. Lagergren and Raoul's half brother Guy von Dardel established organizations and worked to find their brother or confirmation of his death. At the request of their parents, they were to assume he was alive until the year 2000. Author Alan Lelchuk who interviewed, amongst others, Wallenberg's KGB interrogator, wrote a novel that imagines the more powerful of the family may have chosen not to use their influence to locate Raoul as it could have drawn attention to their misdeeds, and they may have considered him an embarrassment, not only for being a man of morality, but his possible homosexuality.

A considerable number of honours, memorials and statues have been dedicated to the memory of Wallenberg. Among them, the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, a non governmental organization which researches Holocaust rescuers and advocates for their recognition, was named in his honor.

In a 2004 paper, Hungarian historian and Holocaust survivor Randolph L. Braham discussed the mythologizing of Wallenberg's rescue activities. Braham notes that Wallenberg's rescue activities did not start in earnest until the Arrow Cross coup in October 1944, and reached their greatest proportions during the siege. He found that through personal heroism and diplomatic support, Wallenberg managed to save about 7,000 to 9,000 Jews. However, during the Cold War, his death was exploited in Western anti Soviet propaganda; in order to make the "Soviet crime" seem worse, his rescue operations were greatly exaggerated. Wallenberg was incorrectly identified as the savior of all Jews in Budapest, or at least 100,000 of them, in official statements as well as many popular books and documentaries. As a result, the rescue efforts of other agents in Budapest have been marginalized or ignored. Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, who puts the number of lives saved by Wallenberg at 4,500, states Lutz and other neutral emissaries saved more Jews, but Wallenberg was the only one who frequently confronted the Nazis and their Arrow Cross accomplices. Although "fact and fiction mixed" in the testimony of Jewish survivors about Wallenberg after the war, Bauer writes, Wallenberg's "fame was certainly justified by his extraordinary exploits". Bauer also points out that the focus on heroic actions taken by Wallenberg and other non Jewish rescuers obscures the heroism of Jews who also carried out rescue actions in Budapest in the final months and were forgotten after liberation. According to Bauer, Wallenberg had a modest personality and would have rejected fictionalized anecdotes and exaggerated totals.

A number of films have been made of Wallenberg's life, including the 1985 made for television movie Wallenberg: A Hero's Story (1985), starring Richard Chamberlain, the 1990 Swedish production Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg, featuring Stellan Skarsgård, and various documentaries, such as Raoul Wallenberg: Buried Alive (1984), the AFI Award winning Raoul Wallenberg, Between The Lines (1985) and Searching for Wallenberg (2003). He also appears in the Spanish television series El ángel de Budapest and is played by Iván Fenyő the series features relatives and the Winnipeg lawyer still piloting inquiries into his case, and was released in Canada and broadcast on the Bravo! network.

Wallenberg is featured prominently in the work of painter and Holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cahana whose father was saved by Wallenberg.

"Wallenberg" (1982) is a track by The (Hypothetical) Prophets, a band project of Bernard Szajner. "Raoul Wallenberg" (1991) is a track on the album Rude Awakening by Andy Irvine.