The case of Raoul Wallenberg, the missing Swedish here of World War II, will be raised at the follow-up conference on the Helsinki agreement in Madrid. The Swedish Foreign Minister Olo Ullsten has promised to mention it in his speech to the 35-nation conference. This follows assurances that the United States delegation will also raise in Prof. Guy von Dardel, Wallenberg’s half-brother was in the Spanish capital to lobby conference delegations. Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviet army in 1945 after having saved thousands of Hungarian Jews. Over the years there have been many sightings of him in Soviet camps or prisons.
Although Sweden has raised the case three times with the Soviet Union in the past two years, these have all been in bilateral contacts and Sweden’s appeals for a fresh review of the case have been rebuffed. The Russians stick adamantly to a report, first issued in 1957, that Wallenberg died in the Lubyonko Prison two years after the war, despite the many alleged sightings of him after that date.
In May of this year, Ullsten raised the matter with Soviet. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and vowed that Sweden would continue to do so as long as the Soviet Union failed to produce Wallenberg, who would now be 68, or to give a more convincing account of his fate.
Wallenberg’s family is organizing an international hearing on the case in Stockholm on Jan. 15, the 36th anniversary of his arrest in Budapest by Soviet military police.
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.
