"Righteous Among the Nations" - this title was posthumously awarded in 1963 to a Swedish diplomat 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 Raoul 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, since Navy officer Raoul Oskar Wallenberg died of cancer 3 months before the birth of the heir. Thus, his mother, Mai Wallenberg, was involved in his upbringing.
Raul Gustav's paternal family was known in Sweden, many Swedish financiers and diplomats came from it. In particular, at the time of the birth of the boy, his grandfather - Gustav Wallenberg - was the ambassador of his country to 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 in Sweden. True, Wallenberg's ancestor at one time converted to Lutheranism, so all his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were Christians.
In 1918, Mai Vising Wallenberg remarried Swedish He alth Ministry official Fredrik von Dardel. This marriage produced a daughter, Nina, and a son, Guy von Dardel, who later became a nuclear physicist. Raul was lucky with his stepfather, as he treated him exactly the same as his own children.
Education
The boy's upbringing was mainly done 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 upon graduation received a medal for excellent studies.
Business
Although the family of Raoul Wallenberg did not need funds and held a high position in Swedish society, in 1933 he sought to earn a living on his own. So, as a student, he went to Chicago, where he worked in the pavilion of the Chicago World's Fair.
After graduating, Raoul Wallenberg returned to Stockholm in 1935 and took second place in a swimming pool design competition.
Then, in order not to upset his grandfather, who dreamed of seeing Raoul as a successful banker, he decided to getpractical experience in the field of commerce and went to Cape Town, where he joined a large company selling building materials. Upon completion of the internship, he received an excellent reference from the owner of the company, which made Gustav Wallenberg very happy, who at that time was the Swedish ambassador 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 Nazi Germany and spoke of the persecution they experienced 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 a German Jew. The enterprise failed, and in order not to be left without a job, Raul turned to his uncle Jacob, who arranged for his nephew in the Central European Trading Company owned by the Jew Kalman Lauer. A few months later, Wallenberg Raoul was already a partner in the owner of the firm and one of its directors. During this period, he often traveled around Europe and was horrified by what he saw in Germany and in the countries occupied by the Nazis.
Diplomatic career
Since in those years everyone in Sweden knew what family the young Wallenberg (a dynasty of diplomats) comes from, in JulyIn 1944, Raoul was appointed first secretary of his country's diplomatic mission in Budapest. There, he found a way to help 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 generals of the Wehrmacht to interfere with the execution of orders from his command to transport the population of the Budapest ghetto to the death camps. In this way, he was able to save the lives of the Jews, who were going to be destroyed before the arrival of the Red Army. After the war, it was estimated that about 100 thousand people were saved as a result of his actions. Suffice it to say that 97,000 Jews met Soviet soldiers in Budapest alone, while only 204,000 of all 800,000 Hungarian Jews survived. Thus, almost half of them owed their salvation to a Swedish diplomat.
The fate of Wallenberg after the liberation of Hungary from the Nazis
According to some experts, Soviet intelligence conducted surveillance during most of Wallenberg's stay in Budapest. As for his future 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 driver V. Langfelder, was detained by a Soviet patrol in the building of the International Red Cross (according to another version, the NKVD arrested him at his apartment). From there, the diplomat was sent to R. Ya. Malinovsky, who at that time commanded the 2nd Ukrainian Front,because he intended to tell him some secret information. There is also an opinion that he was detained by SMERSH officers who decided that Raoul Wallenberg was a spy. The basis for such suspicions could be the presence of a large amount of gold and money in his car, which could be mistaken for treasures looted by the Nazis, when in fact they were left to the diplomat for safekeeping by rescued Jews. Be that as it may, no documents have been preserved indicating the seizure of large sums of money and jewelry from Raoul Wallenberg, or their inventory.
At the same time, it is 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, researchers were forced to collect facts bit by bit. So, they managed to find out that he was transferred to Moscow, where he was placed in a prison on Lubyanka. German prisoners who were there during the same period testified that they communicated with him through the "prison telegraph" until 1947, after which he was probably sent somewhere.
After the disappearance of its diplomat in Budapest, Sweden made several inquiries about his fate, but the Soviet authorities reported that they did not know where Raoul Wallenberg was. Moreover, in August 1947, Deputy Foreign Minister A. Ya. Vyshinsky officially announced that there was no Swedish diplomat in the USSR. However, in 1957, the Soviet side was forced to admit that RaulWallenberg (see 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 archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which he asks to oblige Abakumov to submit a certificate on the Wallenberg case and proposals for its liquidation. Later, the Deputy Minister himself addressed in writing to the Minister of State Security of the country and demanded a specific answer in order to prepare the USSR's reaction to the appeal of the Swedish side.
Investigations into 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 repression", the Prosecutor General's Office made 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 having diplomatic immunity, were arrested and kept until their death in the prisons of the USSR.
This document has been criticized because no documents were made available to the public regarding, for example, the reasons for the detention of Wallenberg and Langfelder.
Research by foreign scientists
In 2010, studies by American historians S. Berger and W. Birshtein were published, in which it was suggested that the version regarding the death of Raoul Wallenberg on July 17, 1947 was false. In the Central Archive of the FSB, they found a document stating that 6 days after the specified datethe head of the 4th department of the 3rd Main Directorate of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR (military counterintelligence) interrogated “prisoner number 7” for several hours, and then Shandor Katon and Vilmos Langfelder. Since the last two were associated with Wallenberg, scientists have suggested that it was his name that was encrypted.
Memory
The Jewish people appreciated everything that Wallenberg Raoul did for his sons during the Holocaust.
The monument in Moscow to this disinterested humanist is located at the Yauza Gate. In addition, there are monuments in memory of him in 29 cities around the world.
In 1981, one of the Hungarian Jews, rescued by a diplomat, who later emigrated to the United States and became a congressman there, initiated the awarding of the title of honorary citizen of this country to Wallenberg. Since then, August 5 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 Righteous Among the Nations, which, in addition to him, was awarded to the German businessman Oscar Schindler, the Polish member of the Resistance Movement - the fearless Irene Sendler, officer Wehrmacht Wilhelm Hosenfeld, Armenian emigrants who once escaped the genocide in Turkey, the Dilsizyans, 197 Russians who hid Jews in their homes during the occupation, and representatives of about 5 dozen other peoples. Only 26,119 people for whom the pain of their neighbor was not a stranger.
Family
Wallenberg's mother and stepfather devoted their entire lives to searching for the missing Raoul. They even ordered itstepbrother and sister to consider the diplomat alive until the year 2000. Their work was continued by their grandchildren, who also tried to find out how Wallenberg died.
Kofi Annan's wife - Nana Lagergren, Raoul's niece - became a well-known fighter against the challenges of the millennium and continued the humanistic traditions of her family, the founders of which were her uncle. She also focuses on the problems of children who cannot get an education due to 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 withdrawal 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 escape death in prison, where he ended up without trial.
