The Wallenberg Secret

Russia refuses to reveal the fate of “Swedish Schindler”

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest who saved tens of thousands of Jews in the later stages of World War II. He used his consular powers to issue papers for Jewish families, enabling them to flee Nazi-controlled Hungary, and he sheltered people in Swedish buildings. He is considered a hero by many, and yet the fate of Wallenberg remains a mystery to this day – more than 70 years after the events took place. What is more, repeated attempts to shed light on his life and death have been hindered by the Russian security services, most recently this fall.

Wallenberg disappeared after Budapest was liberated by the Soviet army. The Soviet authorities announced that the diplomat died in street fighting in the city. In reality, he was arrested on suspicion of being a spy.

Though authorities later admitted that Wallenberg had died in 1947, the circumstances of his death are still unclear and have been contradicted by various inquiries and witness sightings, with some claiming he was alive as late as the 1980s.

In July 2017 Wallenberg’s niece, Marie Dupuy, launched a case against the Federal Security Service (successor to the KGB) in hopes of forcing it to open up its files on her relative. Hers was just the latest attempt in a decades-long effort by the family to shed light on the brave diplomat’s fate.

Some new evidence about Wallenberg’s fate was contained in the memoirs of Ivan Serov, who headed the KGB in the mid-1950s. According to Serov, Wallenberg was killed at secret police headquarters, the notorious Lubyanka. This has led the Wallenberg family to ask to see the paperwork relating to Wallenberg’s time in the Lubyanka, along with the transcript from another secret police chief’s interrogation, Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov (under Stalin, the heads of the secret police always ended their careers confessing terrible crimes against the state to interrogators). According to Serov, the transcript of Abakumov’s interrogation includes an admission that Wallenberg was “liquidated” on Stalin’s orders.

The FSB has denied the family’s request, arguing that releasing the requested information would violate the privacy of certain “third parties.”

“There is no personal privacy there,” claims Dupuy’s lawyer in the case, Ivan Pavlov, who was interviewed by lenta.ru. “It’s simply cynical to pretend to be protecting the privacy of victims of repression perpetrated by their own predecessors.”

Wallenberg was just 33 at the time of his disappearance. Some accounts claim he was sent to Siberia or imprisoned in a psychiatric facility, and that he did not in fact die in 1947.