Holocaust Hero's Fate Remains in Dispute (What Happened to Raoul Wallenberg?)

Wall Street Journal ^ | FEBRUARY 27, 2009 | JOSHUA PRAGER

[nickcarraway]

Sixty-four years after his disappearance, here's where the unsolved Raoul Wallenberg mystery stands.

Since Raoul Wallenberg disappeared into Soviet prisons in 1945, his fate has remained in dispute. The Kremlin has maintained for more than a half-century that the Swedish humanitarian died of a heart attack soon after his capture. But Moscow has yet to definitively document how or when he met his end.

"There is a sort of ambivalence and embarrassment" among Russian leaders regarding Mr. Wallenberg, says former United Nations chief Kofi Annan. Mr. Annan, the husband of Mr. Wallenberg's niece, Nane, says he raised the matter of her missing relative to then-President Vladimir Putin. "You have to prod."

In 1957, the Soviets furnished a report, dated 1947, that attested to Mr. Wallenberg's heart attack. But many experts doubt its authenticity. In the years before it, the Soviets had alleged both that Mr. Wallenberg was not known to them and that he had been murdered by Nazis. In the years after it, witnesses alleged they had seen Mr. Wallenberg in various Soviet prisons and hospitals.

Some have also challenged the Soviet claim that most other documents tied to Mr. Wallenberg were purged. "The file of a foreign diplomat which could some day become crucial for the reputation of this country and its leadership could not possibly be destroyed," the late Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov wrote in September 1989.

The opinion is shared by Susanne Berger, a former consultant to the Swedish-Russian joint governmental task force on Raoul Wallenberg, whose research on Mr. Wallenberg has been funded for 15 years by his half-brother, Guy von Dardel. Ms. Berger believes that among the extant documents the Russians have not disclosed are Mr.

[Larry381]

There were numerous reports by returning German POW’s who reported seeing Wallenberg in various camps in the Far East, some as late as 1950. Some of these same former POW’s also reported seeing Americans in the camps who were POW’s of the Germans when their German camps were overrun by the Red Army.
In both cases these are enigmas that will likely never be solved.

[nickcarraway]

The Wallenberg Curse

By JOSHUA PRAGER
Wall Street Journal

STOCKHOLM -- In neat script, blue ink on white letterhead, Fredrik von Dardel began writing to the stepson he had long been told to leave for dead: "Dear beloved Raoul."

It was March 24, 1956. He always wrote at his living-room table, his wife, Maria, looking on from a corner of the couch by the phone. On a chest, a spray of flowers she kept fresh stood beside a picture of her son, Raoul Wallenberg.

Mr. Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who safeguarded 20,000 Jews in Budapest in the waning months of World War II, vanished into the Soviet penal system in 1945. But the couple, then 71 and 65 years old, believed their son was alive and readied a letter for Sweden's prime minister to take to Moscow.

Einstein's Letter to Stalin About Raoul Wallenberg

[beagleone]

If he ever turns up, I’d like to buy him a beer.