Swedish and American researchers have unearthed new facts surrounding the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, whose disappearance after his January 1945 arrest in Budapest by the Red Army has remained one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. The Soviets claimed he was executed on July 17 1947 but no reliable proof of death has ever been found for a man celebrated as a hero for saving up to 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps. Unverified eye witness reports that Wallenberg continued to live either as a prisoner in Soviet forced labour camps or was secretly confined in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka jail continued into the 1980s. Now, new archives from Russia Federal Security Service (FSB) have identified "with great likelihood" a man described only as Prisoner Number Seven, who was interrogated six days after the diplomat's officially reported death, as Wallenberg. The FSB reported the find last November to Susanne Berger and Vadim Birstein, two members of a research team that conducted a 10-year investigation into Wallenberg's disappearance in the 1990s. "Never before have Russian officials stated the possibility of Raoul Wallenberg's survival past this date so explicitly," said a letter to Wallenberg's relatives from the researchers, released on Thursday. "The full reasons for FSB archivists' conclusion that Raoul Wallenberg may be identical with the Prisoner Number Seven who was interrogated in Lubyanka on July 23, 1947 remains unclear. There exists, however, strong circumstantial evidence in support of such an assessment." "So far, Russian officials have not presented any additional information for their claim." Tomas Bertelman, the Swedish ambassador to Moscow, has written to Yuri Trambitsky, the head of the FSB's Central Archive, asking for more clarification and noting that "if this hypothesis is confirmed, it will be almost sensational". Sweden's foreign ministry spokesman has announced that it will "look at the information to see what it contains in order to make a decision on what we can do". As Sweden's envoy in Budapest from July 1944, Wallenberg prevented the deportation of at least 20,000 Jews destined for Nazi concentration camps or death factories. He also prevented German officers occupying the Hungarian capital from carrying out plans to destroy the city's Jewish ghetto, averting a massacre of its 70,000 residents. He was arrested the day after the Soviet Red Army seized the city, along with his Hungarian driver Vilmos Langfelder. The Russians never explained why they detained him but the Swedish diplomat's involvement with America's wartime secret service, confirmed by the CIA in the 1990s, is thought to be the pretext for the arrest. Ove Bring, professor in international law at the National Defense College in Stockholm, has called for the Wallenberg case to be reopened. "Everything we believed earlier is turned upside down by this," he said. "This has to be investigated again. If he was still alive six days later, then maybe he was alive for a longer period of time. Did he live another week, or a year or 10 years? Suddenly that's an open question."Russians 'lied' about death of diplomat who saved Jews from Holocaust
A Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, was actually still alive after his Soviet captors reported his death in a Moscow prison, according to new Russian archive evidence.
Sunday, 4 April 2010
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