In two new studies researchers argue that the Swedish government’s extreme passivity in the case of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg – who vanished from Budapest, Hungary in January 1945 – seems to have been a conscious decision by Swedish officials who placed Sweden’s broader economic and political interests (as they defined them) over the need to rescue their own diplomat. Members of Wallenberg’s family are now calling for a new, independent investigation into the official handling of his fate.
In the spring of 1946, Swedish officials missed several crucial opportunities to resolve the disappearance of 32-year-old-Swedish diplomat and businessman Raoul Wallenberg from Budapest, Hungary. In the second half of 1944, Wallenberg had managed to protect the lives of tens of thousands of Budapest’s Jews from Nazi persecution. In January 1945 he was detained by Soviet military counterintelligence and disappeared. Soviet officials repeatedly denied any knowledge about Wallenberg’s whereabouts.
Then suddenly, by late April 1946, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signaled his willingness to make important concessions to Sweden if Sweden and the Soviet Union were to conclude a $300 million dollar Soviet-Swedish credit and trade agreement before the end of the year. However, even when such a pact was signed in record time in October 1946, Swedish officials did not raise the subject of Wallenberg’s disappearance with the Soviet leadership.
In a new analysis, the Swedish historian Peter Axelsson argues that Swedish officials, in particular the Swedish Foreign Minister Östen Undén, were so eager to take advantage of Stalin’s surprising gesture to improve Swedish-Soviet relations, that they apparently felt they could not do two things at the same time, namely, conclude the planned trade agreement and at the same time press for answers about Raoul Wallenberg’s disappearance.
In short, Axelsson suggests that Swedish representatives made a conscious decision to prioritize Sweden’s national interests over the need to seek Wallenberg’s rescue. As the former Swedish diplomat Jan Lundvik summed up the matter succinctly already some years ago: “They did not want him back.”
Wallenberg’s mother, Maj von Dardel, was acutely aware of the Swedish Foreign Ministry’s attitude towards her son. She repeatedly decried the lack of enthusiasm displayed by Swedish diplomats and referred to their handling of her son’s disappearance as “cold blooded.”
In fact, during a crucial six-month-period from December 1945 to June 1946, the controversial Swedish Ambassador to Moscow Staffan Söderblom, asked Soviet officials no less than three times – including during a fateful personal audience with Stalin – to provide confirmation that Wallenberg was no longer alive. The full motives behind Söderblom’s behavior have remained obscure. Two official Swedish inquiries – the bilateral Swedish-Russian Working Group (1991-2000) and the so-called Eliasson Commission (2003) – concluded that Söderblom acted on his own accord, without direct instruction from his superiors.
During the same period other Swedish officials, too, repeatedly insisted in both private and public communications that Wallenberg was either dead or could not be saved. In that sense, Söderblom’s actions – in many ways – represented the norm rather than the exception within the Swedish Foreign Ministry.
THE CENTRAL question that emerges and that Wallenberg’s family now urgently want to have answered is why the Swedish government’s passivity was so extreme and why Swedish officials apparently decided to abandon their own diplomat right at the moment when the Soviet leadership signaled a more conciliatory attitude towards Sweden and – even more troubling – when it appeared that Wallenberg was still alive.
It seems that Swedish representative may have had a variety of concerns, some of which were not previously fully recognized or understood. Additional new research findings suggest that Wallenberg may have had knowledge and possibly some connections to Swedish intelligence operations in Hungary in 1943-1944. These operations began in the autumn of 1943 and were carried out in close cooperation with American, Hungarian and also British intelligence representatives.
They were at least partially directed against the Soviet Union and may have already involved important post-war considerations. Swedish participation in such actions were complicated by the fact that since June 1941 Sweden officially represented Soviet interests in Hungary. It needs to be established in greater detail if the Swedish government had any concerns about the public disclosure of its extensive neutrality violations and other controversial revelations about activities related to Wallenberg’s work in Hungary.
Specifically, the new insights lead to a potential reevaluation of the actions of Staffan Söderblom and other Swedish officials, including Sverker Åström, one of Sweden’s top diplomats of the Cold War era. Åström was closely involved in the Wallenberg investigation for nearly six decades and is suspected of having functioned as a Soviet asset throughout his long career.
It needs to be urgently determined if and how the issues outlined above – together with other factors – affected the official investigation of the Wallenberg case in 1945 as well as in later years, including during the 1990s when an official Swedish-Russian Working Group investigated Wallenberg’s fate (1991-2000).
There are indications that both Swedish and Russian officials intentionally kept the focus of the Wallenberg investigation very narrow, misrepresented and omitted important details and information in the case from their respective official reports and failed to provide access to key documentation to researchers and Wallenberg’s family. This includes the obviously intentional and egregious withholding of documentation by Russian officials in 1991that indicates Raoul Wallenberg was possibly alive six days after his official death date, from members of the Swedish Working Group, which included Wallenberg’s brother Guy von Dardel.
Members of Wallenberg’s family and researchers are now calling for a new official, independent investigation to determine once and for all the full circumstances behind the continuing failure to solve the mystery of Wallenberg’s fate. The new findings strongly suggest that additional information and insights remain to be discovered in Swedish and international archives, especially in Russia, Hungary, the US and Great Britain.
Dr. Vadim Birstein, is a biologist and historian, was a member of the first International Commission on Raoul Wallenberg headed by Prof. Guy von Dardel, Wallenberg’s half-brother, in 1990-91. He is the author of many books and a member of the Authors Guild (USA) and the North American Society for Intelligence History.
Susanne Berger is the founder and coordinator of the Raoul Wallenberg Research Initiative (RWI-70). She served as an independent consultant to the official Swedish-Russian Working Group that investigated the fate Raoul Wallenberg in Russia (1991–2000). She is a Senior Fellow with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) in Montreal, Canada.