Raoul Wallenberg

Encyclopedia : R : RA : RAO : Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Wallenberg (1912-1947) in passport photo from June 1944

Memorial to Raoul Wallenberg in Great Cumberland Place, London

USPS Wallenberg Stamp, 1997

Memorial to Wallenberg in Budapest, Hungary

[Raoul Gustav Wallenberg] ([Media helphelp]·[info]) (August 4, 1912 – July 16, 1947 (unconfirmed)) was a Swedish diplomat and a member of the influential Wallenberg family. In the later stages of World War II, he worked tirelessly and at great personal risk to save many thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. He was later arrested by the Soviets who suspected him of being a spy; his death in their custody is still a matter of great controversy.

Contents

1 Birth and Family
2 Education and Employment
3 Holocaust
4 Arrest
5 Official \"Death\"
6 Post death sightings
7 Legacy
8 Trivia
9 References
10 See also
11 External links

Birth and Family

He was born in Kappsta, Sweden to Raoul Oscar Wallenberg (1888-1912), a Swedish naval officer, and Maria "Maj" Sofia Wising (1891-1979), through whom he had some Jewish descent. Raoul senior died of cancer three months before Raoul junior was born. Raoul junior's paternal grandfather was also a Swedish diplomat. In 1918, Raoul junior's mother married Fredrik von Dardel. Raoul Wallenberg also had a maternal half-sister, Nina, who married a Lagergren, and whose daughter Nane is married to Kofi Annan.

The Wallenberg family in Sweden has been rumoured to have Jewish descent, which is incorrect. On the male line, the Wallenbergs are descendants from Swedish farmers in Östergötland. Raoul jr is the only member of the family with a known Jewish descent.

Education and Employment

In 1931, Wallenberg went to study in the United States and received a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Michigan in 1935. He also learned Russian. He returned to Sweden, and his grandfather arranged a job for him in Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked for a Swedish company that sold construction material. In the same year, he went to work at a branch office of a Dutch bank in Haifa in Palestine, where he befriended a Hungarian Jew. He returned to Sweden in 1936 and took a job at The Central European Trading Company. The firm was owned by a Jewish man, Lauer, who was restricted from visiting certain areas of Europe, so Wallenberg went instead. There, he learned how the Nazis thought and how best speak to them.

Holocaust

During the Holocaust, Wallenberg was deeply disturbed by the Nazis' campaign. He was assigned as first secretary to the Swedish legation in Budapest, Hungary, on July 9, 1944. He used his diplomatic status to save many Hungarian Jews by issuing them Swedish "protective passports" (German: Schutz-Pass), which identified the bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation. Although not legally valid, these documents looked impressively official and were generally accepted by the German and Hungarian authorities, occasionally aided by outright bribery. He also rented houses for Jewish refugees with embassy funds and put up fake signs such as "The Swedish Library" and "The Swedish Research Institute" on their doors. He housed other refugees in the Swedish legation in Budapest. He skillfully negotiated with Nazi officials such as Adolf Eichmann and the commander of the German Army in Hungary, General Gerhard Schmidthuber and got them to cancel deportations to German concentration camps by having his fascist ally, Pál Szalay, deliver a note in which Wallenberg threatened to have them prosecuted for war crimes. This was just two days before the Russians arrived.

Wallenberg is thought by the Israeli organization Yad Vashem to have personally saved the lives of many thousands of Hungarian Jews. An apocryphal story credits him with either threatening or persuading a German general to ignore orders from Adolf Hitler to destroy the ghettos and kill the remaining inhabitants in the last desperate days before Budapest's liberation. If true, the number of people saved by Wallenberg's actions would rise to about 100,000. When the Russians finally took over, they found 97,000 Jews living in Budapest's two ghettos. In total, 120,000 of the pre-war population of about 330,000 Hungarian Jews survived.

Arrest

Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviet Red Army on January 17, 1945 as they entered Budapest, probably on suspicion of being a spy for the United States. To this day, the U.S. government refuses to either confirm or deny this. He was taken to Lubyanka in Moscow with his driver Langfelder. Wallenberg was then transferred to Lefortovo prison in another part of Moscow for two more years.

Official \"Death\"

On February 6, 1957, under international pressure, the Soviets released a document they claimed to have found in their archives stating that "the prisoner Wallenberg, who is known to you, died last night in his cell." The document was dated July 17, 1947, and was signed by Smoltsov, then head of the Lubyanka prison infirmary. The note was addressed to Viktor Abakumov, the Soviet minister of state security. However, the Soviets did not explain why they had not released this information to others.

Post death sightings

There were many reports of sightings long after the date of his death. People released from the Gulag claimed to have seen a foreign inmate answering to Wallenberg's description as late as 1990. A number of testimonies have placed him alive in Siberian or Russian prisons as late as 1981.

Josyp Terelya, the Ukrainian activist who was imprisoned by the Soviets for refusing to abandon his Catholic faith and Ukrainian nationalism, wrote in his autobiography that he believes he was imprisoned with Wallenberg in one of his many imprisonments. He drew pictures and devoted a significant portion of his autobiography to this man and the influence he had on him.

Legacy

Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park, Budapest, Hungary. This park commemorates Wallenberg and others who protected many of Budapest's Jews from deportation to extermination camps.
Raoul Wallenberg was made an Honorary Citizen of the United States in 1981. The bill was sponsored by Representative Tom Lantos, a Hungarian Jew who as a teenager found refuge in one of Wallenberg's safe houses. He was later made an honorary citizen of Canada in 1985, of Israel in 1986, and of the city of Budapest in 2003.
In 1996, Wallenberg was honored by Israel's Yad Vashem memorial as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, recognizing those non-Jews who helped save Jews from the Holocaust.
Raoul Wallenberginstitutet, The Raoul Wallenberg Institute, was established in 1984 at Lund University in Sweden. RWI aims to be a leading institution for research, education, and training regarding all aspects of international human rights law.
Several schools in Sweden have been named after Wallenberg, and there are several streets named Wallenbergsgatan or Raoul Wallenbergsgatan.
[The Wallenberg Endowment] of the University of Michigan awards the prestigious Wallenberg Medal and Lecture to outstanding humanitarians doing heroic work around the world. The university's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning also awards Wallenberg Scholarships to exceptional undergraduate and graduate students, many of which are given to enable students to broaden their study of architecture to include work in distant locations.
In 2001, a memorial was created in Stockholm to honour Wallenberg. Unveiled by King Carl XVI Gustaf, at a ceremony attended by Kofi Annan and his wife, Wallenberg's niece, is an abstract memorial depicting people rising from the concrete, accompanied by a bronze replica of Wallenberg's signature which saved so many lives. It has garnered a lot of criticism in Sweden because many see it as ugly and unworthy of such a great hero; however, Wallenberg's sister Nina Lagergren expressed her approval of the memorial.
Raoul Wallenberg Alternative High School is located in San Francisco, California and a grammar school (P.S. 194) in Brooklyn, where Wallenberg's legacy is celebrated every year in December.
Raoul Wallenberg has streets named after him in the Israeli cities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, in Earl Bales Park near Bathurst and Sheppard in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and the street adjacent to the Amtrak station in Trenton, New Jersey.
Raoul Wallenberg Park is located in Nepean, Ontario, Canada on Viewmount Drive, just off of Merivale Road.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is located on a Washington, DC street named Raoul Wallenberg Place in his honor.
In 1989 the Soviets returned his personal belongings to his family. His passport, money, daybook, and clothing were returned; his personal papers, however, were not returned.
At the unveiling of the Stockholm monument, King Carl XVI Gustaf said Wallenberg is 'a great example to those of us who want to live as fellow humans'. UN Sec. Gen. Kofi Annan said Wallenberg is 'an inspiration for all of us to act when we can and to have the courage to help those who are suffering and in need of help.'
The famous Irish folk singer Andy Irvine performs a song called 'Raoul Wallenberg' celebrating Wallenberg's life

Trivia

His niece, Nane Maria Annan (née Lagergren) is the wife of current United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

References

Lester, Elenore; New York Times Magazine (1980)
Berger, Susanne; "Stuck in Neutral: The Reasons behind Sweden's passivity in the Raoul Wallenberg case" (2005); www.raoul-wallenberg.asso.fr

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.