Your Excellencies, I am aware that the Swedish government has a long history of investigating Raoul Wallenberg’s fate, as is evident from the information available on the Swedish Governmental website In addition to this information, I would like to please…
Historic truth is undoubtedly a most elusive substance and all historians face difficult choices. But authorized biographies carry an enhanced risk of avoidance and outright self-censorship. The biographies of Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg, written by two leading Swedish scholars – Håkan Lindgren and Ulf Olsson – , are no exception; in particular, with respect to one of the most controversial subjects in Wallenberg family history, the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg in the Soviet Union in 1945.
To researchers of the Raoul Wallenberg case, the years between Raoul Wallenberg’s return from Israel (then Palestine) in 1936 and his departure for Budapest, remain full of question marks regarding his personal and professional activities. We know he threw himself in a number of business ventures which did not yield great success. He also owned a small printing house (AB Tryck) which appears to have remained operational while he was in Budapest, but which faced difficulties in turning a profit.
In spite of the sharply worded conclusions by two Swedish Commissions – the Swedish-Russian Working Group from 2001 and the Eliasson Commission from 2003 – that Russian efforts to investigate Raoul Wallenberg’s fate in the Soviet Union have been deeply flawed and evasive, the Swedish government has shown no urgency to ensure that researchers can review material deemed vital for clarifying the circumstances of Raoul Wallenberg’s disappearance in Russia.
John Nadler at Time.com writes; “The report issued by the Swedish-Russian Working Group in 2000 listed 17 questions that need to be addressed by the Russian government before Wallenberg’s fate can be determined. In the eight years since, not a…
Nyupptäckta dokument rörande Raoul Wallenberg har väckt forskarnas intresse. Men materialet lyder under ryska sekretesslagar. På sju år har den svenska regeringen inte tagit ett enda steg för att pressa Ryssland till samarbete. Det är oroande, skriver Susanne Berger, historieforskare…
Raoul Wallenberg återvänder, i form av allt fler monument och utställningar. Men hur ska han gestaltas? Hos Statens ljud- och bildarkiv ger man besökarna flera sinsemellan mycket olika bilder. Läs vidareTextstorlek: Normal textStörre textStörst textSkriv ut I morgon tisdag inviger…
“Self financing Genocide; the Gold Train, the Becher and the Wealth of Hungarian Jews”, by Gabor Kadar & Zoltan Vagi, ed. CEU Press “When Angels fooled the World, Rescuers of Jews in Wartime Hungary “, 2003, The University of Wisconsin…
© C.G.McKay
In my talk “Three Puzzles” delivered at a symposium on Wallenberg at Utrikespolitiska Institutet in Stockholm in December 2007, I devoted a section to the so-called “Smit Connection”. By this turn of phrase, I meant partly Raoul’s friendship with the young Dutch girl Berber Smit and partly the fact that Berber’s father, Lolle, the Philips manager in Budapest, was an active player in Allied underground activities in Hungary during the war. “The Smit Connection” was yet another vivid reminder- if it were needed!- of how Wallenberg’s mission was carried out against a background of delicate interacting forces, many of which were not readily perceptible. Nor could it have been otherwise, given the situation occasioned by war.