The disappearance of a hero

by Steve Cunningham

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RAOUL Wallenberg is one of the 20th Century's greatest heroes. He saved tens of thousands of lives in the second world war. Yet nobody knows whether he is dead or alive.

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Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, issued visas to up to 100,000 Hungarian Jews, allowing them to flee as the Nazis were preparing to send them to death camps. He also distributed passports to Jews on deportation trains and death marches, won diplomatic protection for whole neighborhoods in Budapest and organised food and medical supplies. His efforts are credited with saving at least 20,000 lives.

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Wallenberg, aged 32, and his chauffeur were arrested in 1945 by�Russia's Red Army and imprisoned as spies. A doctor with the Soviet secret police signed a death certificate for�Wallenberg in 1947, but the Swedish government is not convinced that he actually died at this time.

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Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson says: 'As long as there is no unequivocal evidence of what happened to Wallenberg, and this is still the case, it cannot be said that Raoul Wallenberg is dead.'

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Moscow's claim that he died in Soviet captivity could be accepted only if confirmed beyond all possible doubt, according to Swedish members of a joint ten-year investigation with Russian authorities.

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Reports that Wallenberg had been sighted in the Soviet Gulag have circulated for decades. The most recent has come from a 75-year-old Estonian man, Valter Haller, who said he met a man 'resembling Wallenberg' at a transfer camp in the Soviet far-east city of Magadan.

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The Swedish-Russian investigating panel suggested that Wallenberg may have been kept alive as a secret prisoner in Soviet jails, with the intention of using him as exchange currency with the West, but Russian experts maintain he was shot in Moscow's Lubyanka prison in 1947.

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Haller said of the mystery man: 'His facial features were different, he was more intelligent, and spoke Russian with an accent. We thought he might have been a Brit or a Swede.'

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Moscow first claimed he was killed during fighting in Budapest, then that he was taken under the protection of Soviet troops. A 1957 memo said Wallenberg died of a heart attack in Soviet custody in 1947.

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Russia has now acknowledged for the first time that Wallenberg and his driver Vilmos Langfelder were imprisoned for political reasons. They were officially designated 'victims of Soviet repression'.

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Prosecutor-general Vladimir Ustinov told Swedish and Hungarian diplomats on 19 January: ''It is my sad duty to inform you that Raoul Gustav Wallenberg and Vilmos Langfelder did in fact perish.''

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There were ''no doubts that they were illegally repressed and detained for political motives,' Ustinov said.

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His contempt for the Nazis was equalled only by his hatred of the Communism that was spreading across Central and Eastern Europe.

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Markus and Jacob owned the a bank and sat on the boards of many Swedish companies, some of which traded with Nazi Germany. As a result, they picked up secret Nazi information, including the date of the invasion of Russia, which was passed on to the British Embassy.

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Raoul later helped the Americans in Stockholm with the US War Refugee Board, which had close connections with the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. The connections were enough to fuel the suspicions of the Soviets, who by 1945, were linking Jewish aid to American intelligence services.

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Then Wallenberg vanished. If he is still alive, he will now be 88-years-old and in his 56th year in captivity.