Raoul Wallenberg

August 4, 1912 – July 17, 1947

Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust.

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Raoul Wallenberg was born in 1912 into a wealthy and prominent Swedish family of bankers and diplomats. Well-educated and widely traveled, he studied architecture in the United States and worked in international business, which took him across Europe and gave him useful contacts and languages. Sweden stayed neutral during World War II, and Wallenberg could have spent the war in safety and comfort. Instead, in 1944, he volunteered for a dangerous mission that would define his life. By that year the Holocaust had reached Hungary, home to one of the last large Jewish communities left in Nazi-controlled Europe. In just a few months, the Nazis and their Hungarian allies deported hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to the death camp at Auschwitz, whose horrors were later exposed with the liberation of Auschwitz. With time running out for the Jews still in Budapest, Wallenberg was sent there as a Swedish diplomat with the specific goal of saving as many as he could. Wallenberg proved brilliantly inventive and astonishingly brave. He issued thousands of official-looking Swedish protective passports, called Schutzpässe, which declared their holders to be under the protection of neutral Sweden and awaiting travel there. Though these documents had little real legal force, their impressive seals and stamps intimidated Nazi and Hungarian officials into letting people go. He rented buildings, flew the Swedish flag over them, and declared them Swedish territory, turning them into 'safe houses' that sheltered tens of thousands of people. He is even said to have climbed onto deportation trains and marched alongside forced-march columns, handing out passports and pulling people to safety, sometimes bluffing armed guards face to face. Through these efforts, Wallenberg is credited with helping save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, one of the largest rescue efforts by a single person during the Holocaust. His own ending, though, is a tragedy and a mystery. When Soviet forces captured Budapest in January 1945, they detained Wallenberg, apparently suspecting him of spying, and he vanished into the Soviet prison system. He was never seen in freedom again and is believed to have died in Soviet custody, though exactly how and when remains unknown. Honored by Israel as one of the 'Righteous Among the Nations' and made an honorary citizen of several countries, Wallenberg is remembered, alongside rescuers like Oskar Schindler, as proof that even one determined person can save many lives in the darkest of times.

Raoul Wallenberg

Further reading

Raoul Wallenberg

Further reading