Raoul Wallenberg - Disappearance

Disappearance

On October 29, 1944 elements of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under Marshal Rodion Malinovsky launched an offensive against Budapest and by late December the city had been successfully encircled by Soviet forces. Despite this the German commander of Budapest, SS Lieutenant General Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, refused all offers to surrender, setting in motion a protracted and bloody siege of the Hungarian capital. At the height of the fighting, on January 17, 1945, Wallenberg was called to General Malinovsky's headquarters in Debrecen to answer allegations that he was engaged in espionage. Wallenberg's last recorded words were, "I'm going to Malinovsky's ... whether as a guest or prisoner I do not know yet." Documents recovered in 1993 from previously secret Soviet military archives and published in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet show that an order for Wallenberg's arrest was issued by Deputy Commissar for Defence (and future Soviet Premier) Nikolai Bulganin and transmitted to Malinovsky's headquarters on the day of Wallenberg's disappearance. In 2003, a review of Soviet wartime correspondences indicated that Vilmos Böhm, a Hungarian politician who was also a Soviet intelligence agent, may have provided Wallenberg's name to the NKVD as a person to detain for possible involvement in espionage.

Information about Wallenberg after his detention is mostly speculative; there were many witnesses who claim to have met him during his imprisonment. Wallenberg was transported by train from Debrecen, through Romania, to Moscow. The Soviet authorities may have moved him to Moscow in hopes of exchanging him for defectors in Sweden. Vladimir Dekanosov notified the Swedish government on January 16, 1945 that Wallenberg was under the protection of Soviet authorities. On January 21, 1945, Wallenberg was transferred to Lubyanka prison and held in cell 123 with fellow prisoner Gustav Richter, formerly a police attaché at the German embassy in Romania. Richter testified in Sweden in 1955 that Wallenberg was interrogated once for about an hour and a half, in early February 1945. On March 1, 1945, Richter was moved from his cell and never saw Wallenberg again.

On March 8, 1945, Soviet-controlled Hungarian radio announced that Wallenberg and his driver had been murdered on their way to Debrecen, suggesting that they had been killed by the Arrow Cross Party or the Gestapo. Sweden's foreign minister, Östen Undén, and its ambassador to the Soviet Union, Staffan Söderblom, wrongly assumed that they were dead. In April 1945, William Averell Harriman of the U.S. State Department offered the Swedish government help in inquiring about Wallenberg’s fate, but the offer was declined. Söderblom met with Vyacheslav Molotov and Stalin in Moscow on June 15, 1946. Söderblom, still believing Wallenberg to be dead, ignored talk of an exchange for Russian defectors in Sweden.