Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg (4 August 1912 – disappeared 17 January 1945)He is presumed to have died in 1947, although the circumstances of his death are not clear and this date has been disputed. Some reports claim he was alive years later. 31 July 1952 is the date of death declared by the Swedish Tax Agency in October 2016 and determined in accordance with Swedish law. was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and humanitarian. He saved thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings he declared as Swedish territory.

On 17 January 1945, during the Siege of Budapest by the Red Army, Wallenberg was detained by SMERSH on suspicion of espionage and 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. However, the 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 psychatric 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 is also an honorary citizen of Canada, Hungary, Australia, United Kingdom and Israel. Israel has 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 created 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. He was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress "in recognition of his achievements and heroic actions during the Holocaust."

Although some have claimed that Wallenberg was responsible for rescuing 100,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust in Hungary, historians consider that figure to be an exaggeration, and the actual number of people rescued to be in the range of 4,500 individuals, according to Yad Vashem.

Early life

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. In 1918, his mother married Fredric von Dardel; 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. Although the Wallenberg family was rich, he worked at odd jobs in his free time and joined other young male students as a passenger rickshaw handler at Chicago's Century of Progress. 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:

Raul Wallenberg’s Jewishness is supported also by Sweden researcher Paul A Levine, who wrote in his monograph about Wallenberg:

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.

World War II

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, becoming a member of the Axis powers in November 1940 and later joining the Nazi-led invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Out of necessity Wallenberg became Lauer's personal representative, traveling to Hungary to conduct business on Lauer's behalf and also 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. In this capacity Wallenberg also made several business trips to Germany and Occupied-France during the early years of World War II. It was during these trips that Wallenberg was able to closely observe the Nazis' bureaucratic and administrative methods, knowledge which proved valuable to him later.

Meanwhile, the situation in Hungary had begun to deteriorate as the tide of the war began to turn decisively against Germany and its allies. Following the catastrophic Axis defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad (in which Hungarian troops fighting alongside German forces suffered a staggering 84% casualty rate) the regime of Miklos Horthy began secretly pursuing peace talks with the United States and the United Kingdom. Upon learning of Horthy's duplicity, Adolf Hitler ordered the occupation of Hungary by German troops in March 1944. The Wehrmacht quickly took control of the country and placed Horthy under house arrest. A pro-German puppet government was installed in Budapest, with actual power resting with the German military governor, SS-Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer. With the Nazis now in control, the relative security from the Holocaust enjoyed by the Jews of Hungary came to an end. In April and May 1944 the Nazi regime and its accomplices began the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Under the personal leadership of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann

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