© 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.

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. Wallenberg, a young Swedish businessman-diplomat who helped to protect thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution in wartime Hungary, was arrested by Soviet forces in January 1945 and subsequently taken to Moscow. In 1957, Soviet officials announced that he had succumbed to a heart attack in prison in 1947 — a claim which has never been substantiated.

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