Raoul Wallenberg was born Aug. 4, 1912 in Kappsta, Sweden.
In 1931, Wallenberg went to the United States to study. In 1935 he received a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan. He also learned to speek Russian.
He returned home to Sweden. His grandfather arranged a job for him in Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked for a Swedish company that sold construction materials. That same year, he went to work at a branch office of a Dutch bank in Haifa, Palestine, where he befriended a Hungarian Jew. In 1936 he returned to Sweden and took a job at the Central European Trading Company. This firm was owned by a Jewish man, Lauer, who was restricted from visiting certain areas of Europe, so Wallenberg went instead. It was there that he learned how to talk to Nazis, and how they thought.
During the Holocaust, Wallenberg was deeply disturbed by the Nazi's campaign. He was assigned as First Secretary to the Swedish legation in Budapest, Hungary on July 9, 1944. He used his diplomatic status to save many Hungarian Jews by issuing them Swedish "protective passports", which identified the bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation. Although not legally valid, these documents looked impressively official and were generally accepted by the German and Hungarian authorities, occasionally aided by outright bribery. Wallenberg also rented houses for Jewish refuges with embassy funds and put up fake signs such as "The Swedish Library" and the "Swedish Research Institute" on their doors. He housed other Jewish refuges in the Swedish legation in Budapest. He skillfully negotiated with Nazi officials such as Adolf Eichmann and the Commander of the German Army in Hungary, General August Schmidthuber and got them to cancel deportations to German concentration camps by having his Fascist ally, Pal Szalay, deliver a note which Wallenberg threatened to have them prosecuted for war crimes. This was just 2 days before the Russians arrived.
Wallenberg is thought by the Israeli organization Yad Vashem, to have saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews. An apocryphal story credits him with either threatening or persuading a German General to ignore orders from Adolf Hitler to destroy all the ghettos and kill the remaining inhabitants in the last desperate days before Budapest was liberated. If true, the number of people saved by Wallenberg's actions would rise to about 100,000. When the Russians finally took over, they found 97,000 Jews living in Budapest's two ghettos. In total, 120,000 of the pre-war population of about 330,000 Hungarian Jews survived.
January 17, 1945 Wallenberg was arrested by the Russian Red Army as they entered Budapest. Probably on suspicion of being a spy for the United States. To this day, the U.S. Government refuses to either confirm or deny this. Wallenberg was taken to Lubyanka in Moscow with his driver Langfelder. Wallenberg was then transferred to Lefortovo prison in another part of Moscow for 2 more years.
On Feb. 6, 1957, under international pressure, the Russians released a document they claimed to have found in their archives stating that "the prisoner Wallenberg, who is known to you, died last night in his cell." The document was dated July 17, 1947, and was signed by Smoltsov, head of the Lubyanka prison infirmary then. The note was addressed to Vikto Abrakumov, the Soviet Minister of State Security. However, the Soviets didn't explain why they hadn't released this information to others. There were many reports of sightings long after the date of his supposed death. People released from the Gulag claimed to have seen a foreign inmate answering to Wallenberg's description as late as 1981.
