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Biography of Raoul WallenbergName: Raoul WallenbergBirth Date: August 4, 1912 Death Date: c. 1947 Place of Birth: Stockholm, Sweden Nationality: Swedish Gender: Male Occupations: diplomat Raoul Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg (1912-ca. 1947) was one of the great heroes of World War II and one of the first victims of the Cold War. In 1944, as a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, he saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from certain death. Taken into custody by the Russians at the beginning of 1945, he simply disappeared.Raoul Wallenberg was born on August 4, 1912, into one of Sweden's wealthiest families, three months after his father had died of cancer. His grandfather, a distinguished diplomat, saw to it that the precocious boy traveled and studied widely, acquiring fluency in several languages, international perspective, and savoir-faire.After graduation in 1935 from the University of Michigan with an honors baccalaureate in architecture, Wallenberg worked in commercial enterprises first in Capetown and then in Haifa, where he learned from German refugees what was happening to the Jewish Germans under Hitler. In 1941 he joined a Stockholm-based export firm whose Jewish …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…in Hungary, translated by David Mel Paul and Margareta Paul (1981). Focusing sharply on the failure of the Swedish government to pursue the case vigorously during the crucial first years after the war is Harvey Rosenfeld's Raoul Wallenberg: Angel of Rescue--Heroism and Torment in the Gulag (1982). Two U.S. congressional publications include the War Refugee Board report from 1945 on Wallenberg's activities and information on the U.S. government's efforts on his behalf since 1981: U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Proclaiming Raoul Wallenberg To Be an Honorary Citizen of the United States, hearing before the Committee, June 4 and 9, 1981; and U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Update on Raoul Wallenberg, hearing before the Committee's Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations, August 3, 1983. Charles Fenyvesi and Victoria Pope provide an account of CIA documents identifying Wallenberg as a U.S. spy: The Angel Was a Spy (U.S. World News, May 13, 1996). |