The official Soviet era claim that Raoul Wallenberg died on July 17, 1947 appears ever more questionable. Since new documentation in the case continues to surface, Russian historian Nikita Petrov and other Wallenberg experts argue that the investigation should be officially reopened.

In 2001, the official Swedish report of a joint Swedish-Russian Working Group that had investigated Wallenberg’s fate in Russia for ten years, concluded with these succinct words: “The burden of proof regarding the death of Raoul Wallenberg rests with the Russian government”.

Eleven years later, the world is still waiting for that proof.

The current official Russian version of Wallenberg’s fate in the summer of 1947 remains that he supposedly died of a heart attack in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. This position is so conservative and outdated that it contradicts even the official Russian Working Group report from 2001 which underlined that it was far more likely that Wallenberg’s death in 1947 – if he in fact died then – was not due to natural causes but the result of an execution.

Death or Isolation?

As Hans Magnusson, the former Chairman of the Swedish Working Group remarked in a speech in Moscow a few weeks ago, the idea that Wallenberg should have died on July 17, 1947 “seems an increasingly shaky one.” In January, Magnusson was appointed by Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt to conduct a fact finding mission to study what new information exists in the Wallenberg case and how it can best be followed up. Read more