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Russia Admits Responsibility for Murder of Raoul Wallenberg

December 22, 2000

Russian authorities on December 21 admitted that Russia was responsible for the murder of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis during World War II. The statement by Russia's prosecutor general is the first official acknowledgment of wrongdoing by Soviet authorities. Wallenberg was arrested by Russian soldiers in Budapest, Hungary, in 1945. Soviet authorities first denied having any knowledge of Wallenberg's whereabouts and then later acknowledged that he had been arrested but claimed that he was a spy and had died of a heart attack in prison. However, the Swedish government and Wallenberg's family have continued to press for an official investigation of Wallenberg's fate. Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new "democratic" Russian government continued to stonewall the Swedish requests. However, Sweden and Russia agreed in 1997 to co-operate in trying to establish the truth about Wallenberg's disappearance.

The official acknowledgement of Soviet wrongdoing came in the form of a statement from Russia's prosecutor-general Vladimir Ustinov that concluded that Wallenberg and his driver, Vilmos Langfelder, "were repressed by Soviet authorities." The statement stopped short of acknowledging that communist authorities had ordered the murder of Wallenberg. However, the head of the Russian committee on rehabilitating victims of Soviet repression was quoted in November as saying he was sure Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg had been executed in the notorious Lubyanka prison. "Now we have no doubts he (Wallenberg) was shot in the Lubyanka," said Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Presidential Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. Yakovlev was considered the father of the policy of glasnost under Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev.

With the encouragement of officials in the U.S., Sweden sent the 32-year old Wallenberg, scion of Sweden's wealthiest family, to Nazi-occupied Hungary in July1944. Sweden maintained official neutrality throughout the war, and thus maintained diplomatic relations with Germany. Wallenberg's ostensible duty was to serve as a secretary in the Swedish embassy in Budapest. However, Wallenberg, with full diplomatic privileges, was charged to save as many Jews as possible from Nazi execution. He arrived in Budapest with 650 protective passports for Jews who had some connection with Sweden. Upon his arrival, Wallenberg issued 4,500 special documents known as "protective letters." Since Sweden represented seven other countries in Hungary, the protective letter authorized its holder to travel to Sweden or to any of the other countries it represented. The Nazis and their Hungarian quislings were reluctant to arrest Jews who held Swedish identity papers for fear of offending neutral Sweden, which carried on trade with Germany throughout the war. Wallenberg also carried a letter from the Swedish king to the Miklos Horthy, the Nazi's quisling ruler of Hungary. Wallenberg maintained contact with Horthy and others in the Hungarian puppet regime, and was able to exert pressure on them to curtail the most severe forms of the anti-Jewish measures. Wallenberg also established diplomatic safe houses where thousands of Jews were sheltered during Nazi roundups.

On October 17, 1944, with the Russians advancing on Budapest, Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi who was directly in charge of the Holocaust, ordered the deportation of all remaining Jews in Budapest. Eichmann declared the Swedish protective letters null and void, but after protests by Wallenberg and other diplomats, the Nazis reinstated the letters. Since the railway lines were too close to the Russian front, Eichmann ordered a death march of 20,000 Jews to the Austrian border. Wallenberg and representatives of other neutral countries followed the marchers in their vehicles and distributed food, clothing, and medication. He was able to extricate many Jews from the death march by claiming that they were Swedish protected Jews. When the Soviet siege of Budapest began in December 1944, Wallenberg remained in the city with the protected Jews. In the end, Wallenberg personally rescued at least 20,000 and perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews.

When the Soviet army entered Budapest on January 17,1945, the communists arrested Wallenberg because of his frequent contacts with German officials and support from Washington. "He risked his life to save Jews. But for Soviets, that was hard to understand," said Jan Lundvik, the Swedish representative to a joint Russian-Swedish investigating commission. "They thought he must have been covering up for something else--that is, for spying."

For years, the Soviet government denied any knowledge of Wallenberg. In 1947, the Soviet government told Sweden that Wallenberg had been killed in battle 1945. But freed wartime prisoners reported having seen Wallenberg in Soviet prison. The communists finally admitted in 1975 that Wallenberg had been held in a Soviet jail but claimed that he had been a spy and had died of a heart attack on July 17, 1947.

The Russian statement issued Dec. 21 acknowledges that the Soviet troops who seized Wallenberg in Budapest on Jan. 17, 1945, did so illegally. "The prosecutor's office has established that members of the Swedish diplomatic mission, Wallenberg and Langfelder, were unjustly arrested and deprived of freedom by Soviet extrajudicial bodies for political reasons as 'socially dangerous persons,' without being charged with the commission of a specific crime," the statement said. The statement also declares that Wallenberg and his driver were innocent of all spying charges.

The Russians still claim that they can find no evidence on how Wallenberg died. However, Yakovlev, the head of the Russia's Committee on Rehabilitation, said that a KGB chief had told him during the 1980s that Wallenberg was shot by the KGB. "At some point, Vladimir Kryuchkov, in a fit of candor, told me that Wallenberg was liquidated," Yakovlev said on Dec. 21 in an interview with Moscow radio. Kryuchkov, while still head of the KGB in 1989, announced that all files on dissidents were being shredded. It's possible that the Wallenberg file was among them. Kryuchkov was briefly jailed for his role in the attempted coup against Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 but has since been released.

Wallenberg has been honored as one of the "Righteous among the Nations," (non-Jews who helped save people from the holocaust), by Vad Yashem, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Authority. Albert Einstein nominated Wallenberg for the Nobel Peace Prize. The U.S. Congress named Wallenberg as an honorary U.S. citizen in 1981. Wallenberg is the only person receive that honor aside from Winston Churchill. Eichmann was captured in Argentina and executed by Israel in 1960. His boss, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, committed suicide when he was captured the British army in 1945. Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who ordered the "final solution," also committed suicide in 1945 as the Red Army advanced on Berlin. World War II Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who ordered the murder of millions of Russian citizens, died in 1953. The murderers of Wallenberg have never been identified.

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