The fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued some 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazis before disappearing behind Soviet lines, may soon be revealed, thanks to the appointment of a reform-minded chief of the KGB.
The new KGB head, Vadim Bakatin, is likely to release the intelligence agency’s secret files on Wallenberg soon, according to Irwin Cotler, a McGill University law professor who has championed efforts to uncover the fate of the Swedish war hero.
Cotler applauded the appointment of Bakatin, a one-time Soviet interior minister, to the KGB post last month, following the failed coup attempt in the Soviet Union.
“When he was minister of the interior, he cooperated with us in an unprecedented way,” said Cotler. “He allowed us access to prison archives, and the conclusion at the time was that all evidentiary trails led to the KGB. Thanks to him, we were closer to the truth than ever before.”
Last summer, an international commission which included Cotler and Wallenberg’s half-brother, Guy von Dardel, visited Soviet prisons to “search for the truth” on the fate of the former diplomat, who was last seen alive in 1945.
The Soviets had refused to permit any outside investigations into Wallenberg’s whereabouts for 45 years, until the commission uncovered some proof that he did not die in 1947 as the Soviets had claimed.
The commission also found that the Soviets had only opened their first investigation of his fate in 1988 and promptly closed it. Until then, they had claimed to have conducted prior inquiries into his disappearance.
TWO COUP LEADERS WERE OBSTACLES
Two of the eight hard-liners who served on the “emergency committee” that staged last month’s attempted coup played a leading role in blocking further investigations into Wallenberg’s fate: Boris Pugo, who replaced Bakatin last fall as interior minister, and Vladimir Kryuchkov, whom Bakatin has now replaced as KGB chief.
“Pugo simply refused to cooperate with us as Bakatin had,” said Cotler. “And Kryuchkov refused to hand over any more files. Our inquiry was stopped dead in its tracks.”
“Bakatin had told us that the KGB was causing some difficulties but that if he was ever in a position to help us, he would,” said Cotler. “My sense is we are now on the threshold of discovering what happened to Raoul Wallenberg.”
Cotler was even more confident because of Bakatin’s sincerity. “He vowed that no one would ever be able to say that they had obstructed any investigation” and he “promised that they would do everything possible to find out what happened to a great humanitarian.”
“And to his word,” said Cotler,” Bakatin “opened up the prisons and files. I have every reason to believe that he was sincere.”
Cotler said the Soviets would come under international pressure to come clean on the Wallenberg case once and for all during an international human rights conference taking place in Moscow from Sept. 9 to Oct. 4, under the auspices of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
“We have received assurances from the U.S., Canada, Belgium, Hungary and Sweden that they will bring up the Wallenberg case at the conference,” Cotler said.
Both he and von Dardel will be attending the conference.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
