Russians print new info linked to Raoul Wallenberg

Associated Press ^ | 7/31/2011 | ARTHUR MAX

[Hunton Peck]

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Russian archivists have published new material from a German officer imprisoned after World War II who shared a cell with Raoul Wallenberg, the missing Swedish diplomat credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Publication of the statements from Willy Roedel came as a surprise since the Russians had previously denied they existed, say two independent scholars who have researched the Wallenberg mystery for decades, in a paper released Monday.

That raises suspicions that Moscow may be withholding information which could help solve the 66-year-old puzzle of Wallenberg's arrest and disappearance in the gulag, the vast Soviet network of prisons, labor camps and mental asylums, said German researcher Susanne Berger and Russian scholar Vadim Birstein, who were members of the Swedish-Russian Working Group that conducted a 10-year investigation during the 1990s.

Wallenberg, hailed as one of the great heros of the Holocaust, would turn 99 this month and is almost certainly dead. But a determined group of relatives, scholars and admirers continue to search for any clue about his path through an opaque prison system that still remains largely hidden 20 years after the Soviet Union collapsed.

The Russians maintain Wallenberg was executed July 17, 1947, but the Working Group said in its 2000 report there is strong evidence suggesting he lived many years as a prisoner under a different identify or known only by a number, perhaps as late as the 1980s.

From the start, researchers sought information about his known cellmates, including Roedel, a former political adviser to the German ambassador to Romania, but with little success.

Now, Roedel's statements are included in a book, "Secrets of the Third Reich Diplomacy," containing interrogation transcripts or protocols from about two dozen imprisoned German diplomats.

[Hunton Peck]

The only real new information is that Russia has documents about Wallenberg's cellmate, Roeadel, the existence of which they previously denied.

[Popman]

BM for later

[nkycincinnatikid]

The truths hidden in Moscow and London would turn the world spinning the other direction in its orbit.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Hunton Peck. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.