Raoul Wallenburg, the Swedish diplomat, who saved as many as 20,000 Jews in Budapest in the last months of the Nazi regime, died in a Moscow prison in July, 1947, two years after he was arrested by Soviet authorities in the wake of the Soviet Army’s capture of Budapest in 1945. In the intervening years Soviet authorities have rebuffed every attempt to trace Mr. Wallenburg with statements that he was not known in the USSR
This week-end, nearly a year after the latest Swedish effort to locate the diplomat, the Soviet Government informed Stockholm that Mr. Wallenburg died in Lubyanka Prison, probably of a heart attack.
Mr. Wallenburg went to Budapest in 1944 and organized a staff of 400 whose purpose was to locate surviving Jewish families and provide them with Swedish visas a protection against deportation to death camps. Many of the Jews thus placed under Swedish Legation protection were moved to Sweden while others were taken to various countries with International Red Cross assistance.
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