“The Righteous Among the Nations of the World” - this title was posthumously awarded to a Swedish diplomat in 1963, who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, and died in a Soviet prison under unclear circumstances.
The name of this man is Wallenberg Raul Gustav, and he deserves that as many people as possible know about his feat, which is an example of true humanism.
Raoul Wallenberg: family
The future diplomat was born in 1912 in the Swedish city of Kappsta, near Stockholm. The boy never saw his father, as a naval officer Raul Oscar Wallenberg died of cancer 3 months before the birth of the heir. Thus, his mother, May Wallenberg, was engaged in his upbringing.
Raoul Gustav’s paternal family was famous in Sweden, and many Swedish financiers and diplomats came from her. In particular, at the time of the birth of the boy, his grandfather - Gustav Wallenberg - was the ambassador of his country in Japan.
At the same time, on the maternal side, Raul was a descendant of a jeweler named Bendix, who is considered one of the founders of the Jewish community of Sweden. True, the ancestor of Wallenberg at one time adopted Lutheranism, so all his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were Christians.
In 1918, Mai Wising Wallenberg remarried the Swedish Ministry of Health official Fredrik von Dardel. In this marriage, a daughter Nina and a son Guy von Dardel were born, who later became a nuclear physicist. Raul was lucky with his stepfather, because he treated him in the same way as his native children.
Education
The upbringing of the boy was mainly dealt with by his grandfather. First, he was sent to military courses, and then to France. As a result, by the time he entered the University of Michigan in 1931, the young man spoke several languages. There he studied architecture and at the end he received a medal for excellent studies.
Business
Although Raoul Wallenberg's family did not need funds and occupied a high position in Swedish society, in 1933 he sought to earn his own money. So, as a student, he went to Chicago, where he worked in the pavilion of the Chicago World's Fair.
Having received a diploma, in 1935 Raul Wallenberg returned to Stockholm and took part in the swimming pool design competition, taking second place.
Then, in order not to upset his grandfather, who dreamed of seeing Raoul as a successful banker, he decided to gain practical experience in the field of commerce and went to Cape Town, where he entered a large company engaged in the sale of building materials. Upon completion of the internship, he received a brilliant description from the owner of the company, which greatly pleased Gustav Wallenberg, who at that time was the ambassador of Sweden to Turkey.
Grandfather found his beloved grandson a new prestigious job at the Dutch Bank in Haifa. There Raoul Wallenberg met young Jews. They fled from Nazi Germany and talked about the persecution they suffered there. This meeting made the hero of our story realize his genetic connection with the Jewish people and played an important role in his future destiny.
Raoul Wallenberg: biography (1937-1944)
The Great Depression in Sweden was not the best time to make a living working as an architect, so the young man decided to start his own business and made a deal with one German Jew. The enterprise failed, and in order not to be left without work, Raul turned to his uncle Jacob, who arranged a nephew at the Central European trading company, owned by the Jewish Kalman Lauer. A few months later, Wallenberg Raul was already a partner of the company owner and one of its directors. During this period, he often traveled to Europe and was horrified by what he saw in Germany and in the countries occupied by the Nazis.
Diplomatic career
Since in those years in Sweden everyone knew what family the young Wallenberg (the dynasty of diplomats) came from, in July 1944 Raul was appointed first secretary of his country's diplomatic mission in Budapest. There he found a way to help the local Jews who were waiting for death: he gave them Swedish “protective passports”, which gave the owners the status of Swedish citizens awaiting repatriation to their homeland.
In addition, he managed to convince some Wehrmacht generals to obstruct the execution of the orders of his command to export the population of the Budapest ghetto to the death camps . Thus, he was able to save the life of the Jews, who were going to destroy before the arrival of the Red Army. Already after the war, it was estimated that as a result of his actions, about 100 thousand people were saved. Suffice it to say that in Budapest alone, 97 thousand Jews met Soviet soldiers, while out of all 800 thousand Hungarian Jews, only 204 thousand survived. Thus, almost half of them owed their salvation to the Swedish diplomat.
The fate of Wallenberg after the liberation of Hungary from the Nazis
According to some experts, Soviet intelligence conducted surveillance for most of Wallenberg's stay in Budapest. As for his further fate after the arrival of the Red Army, various versions were voiced in the world press.
According to one of them, in early 1945, he, along with his personal chauffeur V. Langfelder, was detained by a Soviet patrol in the building of the International Red Cross (according to another version, he arrested the NKVD in his apartment). From there, the diplomat was sent to R. Y. Malinovsky, who was at that time in command of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, as he intended to give him some secret information. It is also believed that he was detained by SMERSH officers who decided that Raoul Wallenberg was a spy. The reason for such suspicions could be the presence of a large amount of gold and money in his car, which could be mistaken for treasures stolen by the Nazis, while in fact they were left to the diplomat for storage by the saved Jews. Be that as it may, the documents evidencing the seizure of large sums of money and valuables from Raoul Wallenberg, or their inventory, were not preserved.
At the same time, it was proved that on March 8, 1945, Radio Kossuth, which was under Soviet control, transmitted a message that a Swedish diplomat with that name was killed during the fighting in Budapest.
IN THE USSR
To find out what happened next with Raoul Wallenberg, the researchers were forced to collect facts bit by bit. So, they managed to find out that he was transported to Moscow, where he was put in prison in the Lubyanka. German prisoners who were there during the same period testified that they had communicated with him through the “prison telegraph” until 1947, after which he was probably sent somewhere.
After the disappearance of his diplomat in Budapest, Sweden made several inquiries about his fate, but the Soviet authorities reported that they did not know where Raul Wallenberg was. Moreover, in August 1947, Deputy Foreign Minister A. Ya. Vyshinsky officially declared that there was no Swedish diplomat in the USSR. However, in 1957, the Soviet side was forced to admit that Raul Wallenberg (photo above) was arrested in Budapest, taken to Moscow and died of a heart attack in July 1947.
At the same time, a note by Vyshinsky to V. M. Molotov (dated May 1947) was found in the Foreign Ministry’s archive in which he asks Abakumov to be obliged to submit a statement on the Wallenberg case and proposals for its liquidation. Later, the deputy minister himself wrote to the Minister of State Security in writing and asked for a concrete answer to prepare the USSR’s reaction to the Swedish side’s appeal.
Investigations of the Wallenberg case after the collapse of the USSR
At the end of 2000, on the basis of the law of the Russian Federation “On the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions,” the Prosecutor General’s Office took a decision in the case of the Swedish diplomat R. Wallenberg and V. Langfelder. In conclusion, it was said that in January 1945, these persons, being employees of the Swedish mission in the Hungarian capital, and Wallenberg, among other things, also possessing diplomatic immunity, were arrested and held until their death in USSR prisons.
This document was criticized because documents concerning, for example, the reasons for the detention of Wallenberg and Langfelder were not presented to the public.
Research by foreign scientists
In 2010, the studies of American historians S. Berger and V. Birshtein were published, in which it was suggested that the version was false regarding the death of Raoul Wallenberg on July 17, 1947. The FSB Central Archive found a document stating that 6 days after the indicated date, the head of Division 4 of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR (military counterintelligence) interrogated "prisoner number 7" for several hours, and then Sandor Katonu and Vilmos Langfelder. Since the last two were associated with Wallenberg, scientists suggested that it was his name that was encrypted.
Memory
The Jewish people appreciated all that Wallenberg Raul did for his sons during the Holocaust.
The monument in Moscow to this disinterested humanist is located at the Yauz Gate. In addition, there are monuments in his memory in 29 cities of the planet.
In 1981, one of the Hungarian Jews rescued by a diplomat who later emigrated to the United States and became a congressman there, initiated Wallenberg to be awarded the title of honorary citizen of this country. Since then, August 5th has been recognized as his memorial day in the United States.
As already mentioned, in 1963, the Israeli Yad Vashem Institute awarded Raoul Gustav Wallenberg the honorary title of the Righteous Among the Nations, who, in addition to him, was awarded to the German businessman Oscar Schindler, the Polish member of the Resistance Movement - fearless Iren Sendler, Wehrmacht officer Wilhelm Hosenfeld, Armenian emigrants who once escaped the genocide in Turkey themselves, Dilsizyans, 197 Russians who hid Jews in their homes in occupation, and representatives of about 5 dozen other nations. A total of 26,119 people for whom the pain of their neighbor was not a stranger.
A family
Wallenberg's mother and stepfather devoted their whole lives to searching for the missing Raoul. They even ordered his half-brother and sister to consider the diplomat alive until 2000. Their business was continued by the grandchildren, who also tried to find out how Wallenberg died.
Kofi Annan's wife, Nana Lagergren, Raul’s niece, became a famous fighter with the millennium problems and continued the humanistic traditions of her family, the founders of which were her uncle. Her focus is also on the problems of children who cannot get education because of the poverty of their families. At the same time, there is an opinion that during the genocide in Rwanda, her husband showed himself completely different from Raoul Wallenberg: Kofi Annan initiated the recall of UN peacekeepers from this country, where an ethnic conflict was brewing, which had disastrous consequences for representatives of the Tutsi people.
Now you know who Raoul Wallenberg was, whose biography to this day contains many white spots. This diplomat from Sweden went down in history as a man who saved thousands of lives, but could not avoid death in prison dungeons, where he ended up without trial.