Raoul Wallenberg: biography, photo, family

"Righteous Among the Nations" - it was such a title in 1963 that was posthumously awarded to a Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, and died in a Soviet prison under mysterious circumstances.

The name of this person is Wallenberg Raul 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 Kappla, near Stockholm. My father never saw the boy, since the officer of the Navy, Raul Oskar Wallenberg, died of cancer 3 months before the birth of the heir. Thus, his mother was engaged in education - May Wallenberg.

The family of Raul Gustav on the paternal line was known in Sweden, many Swedish financiers and diplomats took place. In particular, at the time of the boy's birth, his grandfather - Gustav Wallenberg - was the ambassador of his country in Japan.

At the same time, on the maternal line Raul was a descendant of a jeweler named Bendix, who is considered one of the founders of the Jewish community of Sweden. True, Wallenberg's ancestor at one time took Lutheranism, so all his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were Christians.

In 1918, May Vising Wallenberg married a second-time official of the Swedish Ministry of Health, Fredrik von Dardel. In this marriage, the daughter of Nina and the son of Guy von Dardel was born, who later became a nuclear physicist. Raul was lucky with his stepfather, since he treated him exactly the same way as his own children.

Education

The upbringing of the boy was mainly his grandfather. First he was sent to military courses, and then to France. As a result, at the time of his arrival at the University of Michigan in 1931, the young man spoke several languages. There he studied architecture and afterwards received a medal for excellent studies.

Business

Although Raoul Wallenberg's family did not need money and occupied a high position in Swedish society, in 1933 he sought to earn his living independently. So, as a student, he went to Chicago, where he worked in the pavilion of the Chicago World Exhibition.

After receiving a diploma, in 1935 Raoul Wallenberg returned to Stockholm and took part in the competition of swimming pool projects, taking second place.

Then, in order not to upset his grandfather, who dreamed of seeing Raul as a successful banker, he decided to get practical experience in commerce and went to Cape Town, where he entered a large company that sells construction materials. Upon completion of the internship, he received a brilliant testimonial from the owner of the firm, which Gustav Wallenberg, who at that time was Swedish ambassador to Turkey, was very pleased.

Grandfather found his beloved grandson a new prestigious job at the "Dutch Bank" in Haifa. There, Raoul Wallenberg met with young Jews. They fled from Nazi Germany and told about the persecution that they were subjected to. This meeting made the hero of our narrative 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 earn a living by working as an architect, so the young man decided to start his own business and made a deal with one German Jew. The enterprise failed, and in order not to remain unemployed, Raoul turned to his uncle Jakob, who arranged a nephew for the Central European Trade Company, a Jewish-owned Kalman Lauer. A few months later Wallenberg Raul was already a partner of the owner of the company and one of its directors. During this period, he often traveled to Europe and was horrified by what he saw in Germany and in countries occupied by the fascists.

Diplomatic career

Since in those years in Sweden everyone knew from which family the young Wallenberg (the dynasty of diplomats) is coming, in July 1944 Raul was appointed first secretary of the diplomatic mission of his country in Budapest. There he found a way to help the local Jews, who were waiting for death: he issued them the Swedish "protective passports", which gave the owners the status of citizens of Sweden, who are waiting for repatriation to their homeland.

In addition, he managed to persuade some Wehrmacht generals to obstruct the execution of orders of his command for the exportation to the death camps of the Budapest ghetto. Thus, he was able to save the lives of Jews, who were going to destroy before the arrival of the Red Army. After the war it was estimated that as a result of his actions about 100 thousand people were saved. Suffice it to say that only in Budapest Soviet soldiers were met by 97,000 Jews, whereas out of all 800,000 Hungarian Jews only 204,000 survived. Thus, almost half of them owed their salvation to the Swedish diplomat.

The fate of Wallenberg after the liberation of Hungary from the Nazis

According to some experts, Soviet intelligence spied 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, together with his personal chauffeur V. Langfelder, a Soviet patrol was detained in the building of the International Red Cross (according to another version, he arrested the NKVD in his apartment). From there the diplomat was sent to R.Ya. Malinovsky, who at that time commanded the 2nd Ukrainian Front, as he intended to inform him of some secret information. There is also the opinion that he was detained by SMERSh employees, who decided that Raoul Wallenberg was a spy. The reason for such suspicions could be the presence of a large amount of gold and money in his car, which could be mistaken for the treasures stolen by the Nazis, whereas in fact they were left to the diplomat for safekeeping by the saved Jews. Be that as it may, there are no documents showing the seizure of large sums of money and jewelry from Raoul Wallenberg, or their inventory.

It was proved that on March 8, 1945, Radio Koshut, which was under Soviet control, reported that during the fighting in Budapest, a Swedish diplomat with that name was killed.

IN USSR

To find out what happened to Raoul Wallenberg, the researchers were forced to collect the facts bit by bit. So, they managed to find out that he was sent to Moscow, where they put him in jail on the Lubyanka. The German prisoners who were there during the same period testified that they had communicated with him through the "prison telegraph" until 1947, after which, they probably sent him somewhere.

After the disappearance of his diplomat in Budapest, Sweden made several inquiries about his fate, but the Soviet authorities reported that they do not know where Raoul Wallenberg is. 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 Raoul Wallenberg (photo above) was arrested in Budapest, taken to Moscow and died of a heart attack in July 1947.

At the same time, in the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vyshinsky's note to VM Molotov (dated May 1947) was found in which he asked to oblige Abakumov to submit a certificate in the Wallenberg case and proposals for its liquidation. Later, the deputy minister himself already wrote to the Minister of State Security of the country and demands to give a concrete answer for preparing the reaction of the USSR 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 RF law "On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression," the Prosecutor General's Office adopted a corresponding decision on 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, still possessing diplomatic immunity, were arrested and held until their deaths in the prisons of the USSR.

This document was criticized, since the public was not provided with documents concerning, for example, the reasons for the detention of Wallenberg and Langfelder.

Research of foreign scientists

In 2010, research was published by American historians S. Berger and V. Birstein, 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, a document was found that, 6 days after that date, the head of Division 4 of the Ministry of the Security Service of the USSR (military counterintelligence) for several hours interrogated "prisoner number 7", and then Shandor Caton and Vilmos Langfelder. Since the last two were connected with Wallenberg, the scientists assumed that it was his name that was encrypted.

Memory

The Jewish people appreciated all that Wallenberg Raul had done for his sons during the Holocaust.

The monument in Moscow to this unselfish humanist is at the Yauzsky gates. In addition, monuments in memory of him are in 29 cities of the planet.

In 1981, one of the Hungarian Jews, rescued by a diplomat who later emigrated to the US and became a congressman, initiated the appropriation Wallenberg of the title of honorary citizen of this country. Since then, August 5 is recognized as a day of his memory in the United States.

As already mentioned, in 1963 the Israeli Institute of Yad Vashem appropriated Raul Gustaf Wallenberg with the honorary title of the Righteous Among the Nations, who was also awarded the German businessman Oscar Schindler, the Polish member of the Resistance Movement - the fearless Iren Sendler, the Wehrmacht officer Wilhelm Hozenfeld, the Armenian Emigrants who once saved themselves from the genocide in Turkey, Dilsizyan, 197 Russians who hid Jews in their homes during the occupation, and representatives of about 5 dozens more. Only 26,119 people, for whom the pain of the neighbor was not a stranger.

A family

Mother and stepfather Wallenberg devoted their entire lives to the search for the missing Raul. They even ordered his stepbrother and sister to consider the diplomat alive until the year 2000 comes. Their case was continued by their grandchildren, who also tried to find out how Wallenberg died.

Kofi Annan's wife - Nana Lagergren, Raul's niece - became a famous fighter with the problems of the millennium and continued the humanistic traditions of her family, whose founders were her uncle. Her focus is also on the problems of children who can not get education because of the poverty of their families. At the same time, there is an opinion that during the genocide in Rwanda, her husband showed himself quite differently from Raoul Wallenberg: Kofi Annan initiated the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from this country where an ethnic conflict was brewing, which had catastrophic consequences for the representatives of the Tutsi people.

Now you know who Raoul Wallenberg was, whose biography still contains a lot of blank spots. This diplomat from Sweden went down in history as a man who saved thousands of lives, but could not escape death in prison dungeons, where he got himself without trial.