Wallenberg, Raoul

Swedish business executive who attempted to rescue several thousand Jews from German-occupied Budapest in 1944, during World War II. He was taken prisoner by the Soviet army in 1945 and was never heard from again.

In Hungary he tried to rescue and support Jews in safe houses, and provided them with false papers to save them from deportation to extermination camps. After the arrival of Soviet troops in Budapest, he reported to the Russian commander January 1945 and then disappeared. The Soviet government later claimed that he died of a heart attack July 1947. However, rumours persisted into the 1980s that he was alive and held in a Soviet prison camp. In the 1990s the Russians said that he had died as claimed, and in December 2000 officially admitted responsibility for his imprisonment and death. A month later, a joint Swedish-Russian commission report cast doubt on these claims, as there was no credible death certificate and many former prisoners claimed they had seen Wallenberg alive decades later. It is thought possible that Russia tried to use him in exchanges for Soviet spies jailed in Sweden.