Raoul Wallenberg

About

Raoul Gustav Wallenberg was born near Stockholm, Sweden, . His parents both hailed from prominent Swedish families, whose members included bankers, bishops, diplomats and professors. Wallenberg’s father, Raoul Oskar Wallenberg (1888-1912), a lieutenant in the Swedish navy, had died of an illness three months before his son’s birth. His paternal grandfather, Gustav Wallenberg (1863-1937), a respected diplomat, took charge of shaping young Raoul’s life. The elder Wallenberg raised his grandson as a citizen of the world, ensuring he had opportunities to learn about different cultures and languages, and dispatching him on trips around Europe and other locales.

In 1936, Wallenberg began working for a Dutch bank in Haifa, a city in present-day northern Israel. While living in Haifa, he heard firsthand accounts from German-Jewish refugees about the plight of Jews under Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), who became the chancellor of Germany in 1933 and whose anti-Semitic Nazi Party was in control of the country.

By the early 1940s, Wallenberg had taken a job with a Stockholm-based food-exporting company. Its owner, a Jew, could no longer safely travel through much of Europe, which by that time was under Nazi domain. Wallenberg replaced him on such trips and thus became acquainted with Budapest, the capital of Hungary.


In December 1944, the Soviet military began a siege of Budapest. On January 17, 1945, Wallenberg and his driver, Vilmos Langfelder, began a journey to Debrecen, located 120 miles east of Budapest, where the Soviets and a provisional Hungarian government were headquartered. The exact purpose of the trip is unknown, although one possibility is that Wallenberg wanted to discuss how to protect the Jews from pro-Nazi Hungarian thugs once the Red Army left the country. However, along the way to the meeting, Wallenberg and his driver were taken into custody by Soviet forces. What happened to the two men next remains a mystery, as they were never seen or heard from again by the outside world.

In 1947, Andrei Vyshinsky (1883-1954), the Soviet deputy foreign minister, announced that Wallenberg was not in the Soviet Union and suggested he had possibly died during the Russian effort to seize Budapest. Then, in 1957, Andrei Gromyko, the country’s new deputy foreign minister, admitted that Wallenberg had been imprisoned by the Soviets. According to Gromyko, it was revealed in recently discovered paperwork that Wallenberg had succumbed to heart disease in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in July 1947 and was then cremated. The paperwork never was handed over to the Swedish authorities, nor was any explanation given as to why Wallenberg had been incarcerated. Some experts suggested that the Soviets might have believed Wallenberg was a spy for Western nations.