Federal legislation to grant honorary American citizenship to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who was credited with saving the lives of 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazis, will be introduced in the House of Representatives on Thursday.
Rep. Tom Lantos (D. Cal.) will present the bill, which now has 202 co-sponsors. Lantos and his wife, Annette, both credit Wallenberg with saving them from deportation to a Nazi death camp. Wallenberg was in Budapest in the closing days of World War II. Lantos said Wallenberg went to Budapest at the request of the State Department with a mission to save the lives of those “who had been marked for death by the Nazis.”
Wallenberg issued thousands of Swedish passports and created a refuge for thousands more by acquiring apartment buildings, with American funds, and establishing them as Swedish territory, in Budapest, to give the occupants diplomatic immunity from seizure by the Nazis.
Wallenberg was arrested when Russian troops entered Budapest. He was arrested as an alleged American spy and imprisoned in the Soviet Union where, Soviet officials have declared, he died of a heart attack in 1947. But many persons claimed they have seen Wallenberg alive since and as recently as 1979, Lantos pointed out.
The only other foreigners named honorary American citizens by special acts of Congress were Sir Winston Churchill and Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor who became an internationally famous lawyer and author.
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