Wallenberg

74 years ago today (January 17, 1945) Raoul Wallenberg, a 32 year old Swedish diplomat, was arrested by the Soviets in Hungary, sent to the Soviet Union and was never heard from again. From July until December 1944 he voluntarily served as Sweden's special envoy (Sweden was neutral during World War 2) first in a Budapest controlled by Hungarian collaborators with Germany (the Arrow Cross) and later in German-occupied Budapest.

Wallenberg was officially allowed (by the Hungarians and the Germans) to issue 4,500 protective passports which identified the bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation and thus prevented their deportation to the death camps. In reality he issued close to 20,000 protective passports and even went to the train station and handed the passes to Jews already on the cattle cars or on death marches – thus saving them from certain death. He sheltered Jews in 32 buildings (with 2 hospitals and a soup kitchen) in Budapest designated as neutral Swedish territory.  He also convinced the Hungarians and the Germans not to destroy the Budapest Ghetto saving the 70,000 Jews imprisoned there. 

After the Siege of Budapest, Soviet Marshal Rodion Malinovsky (under orders from then Deputy Commissar for Defense, and future Soviet Premier, Nikolai Bulganin) arrested Wallenberg as a spy. He was then sent to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow on January 21, 1945.  The last known surviving foreign prisoner held with Wallenberg left his cell on March 1, 1945. His whereabouts afterwards are not known. Throughout the decades since his disappearance the Soviet, and later the Russian, authorities have made numerous claims about his fate (many that contradict each other) and all have been deemed to be fabrications. Some witnesses state they were with Wallenberg in different Soviet Gulags up until the 1960s.

He was made an honorary citizen of: the US (in 1981), of Canada (in 1985), of Israel (in 1986) and of Australia (in 2013.)

In October 2016 Wallenberg was declared dead by the Swedish Tax Agency, which registers birth and deaths. His official date of death is July 31, 1952, a date that is purely formal since the authority must choose a date at least five years after his disappearance.