Raoul Wallenberg Saved 30,000 Jews In WWII, Family Wants His Mystery Death Resolved
Raoul Wallenberg is thought to have saved as many as 30,000 Jews but his descendants do not know how, when or why he died. The Guardian, Sept. 23, 2019.
Seventy-five years after the amateur Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg embarked on his desperate mission to rescue Budapests Jews, his descendants still do not know how, when or why he died. This week, they are travelling to Stockholm to demand the government finally does a bit more to help them find out.
- Last known picture of Raoul Wallenberg who disappeared in 1945 after being summoned to Soviet military occupation headquarters in Budapest.
I want specific answers to specific questions, said Marie von Dardel-Dupuy, the niece of the young architect and businessman whose bold if haphazard humanitarian operation is thought to have saved the lives of as many as 30,000 Hungarian Jews as the second world war neared its end. Von Dardel-Dupuy, who lives in Switzerland, told the Guardian: He was a great man who wasnt afraid to do the impossible. He deserves for us to know what happened to him. His story is unfinished the mystery must be resolved. There are still so many closed doors, and we must have help in opening them.
No formal, official announcement has ever been made about the fate of Wallenberg, often called Swedens Schindler, who has become an honorary citizen of four countries and the subject of countless books and films since vanishing in early 1945 into the the Soviet prison system, where he is presumed to have died.
Together with historians, the diplomats closest family have for decades wrestled with Soviet, and subsequently Russian, authorities, who they are now certain have withheld crucial information and, at times, actively misled researchers. But they have also faced a largely inert Swedish government that, they say, has since the end of the war displayed an understandable but acutely frustrating reluctance to do anything to antagonise its powerful eastern near neighbour...more...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/23/raoul-wallenberg-family-of-diplomat-who-saved-hungarian-jews
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- Raoul Wallenberg (b. 1912) was a Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest in the second half of 1944. With the support of the World Jewish Congress and the American War Refugee Board, the Swedish Foreign Ministry sent Wallenberg to Budapest in July 1944 to help protect the 200,000 Jews who remained in the capital. From October 15, when the Arrow Cross seized power, to the liberation of the capital three months later, Wallenberg saved Jews through a variety of means -- by issuing thousands of protective documents, by establishing the International Ghetto of protected houses, and by securing their release from deportation trains, death march convoys, and labor service brigades -- all at significant risk to himself.
Wallenberg was detained by Soviet agents on January 17, 1945, soon after the Soviet forces occupied Budapest, and thereafter disappeared without a trace..Alexander Yakovlev, the Russian official appointed to investigate the Wallenberg affair, stated in November 2000 that Wallenberg had been executed in 1947. However, since the Russians further indicated that all records relating to Wallenbergs arrest have been destroyed, no evidence of his imprisonment or death apparently exists. Consequently, many questions about Wallenbergs fate remain unanswered.
For his actions on behalf of Hungarian Jewry, Yad Vashem awarded Wallenberg the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 1963, and the United States granted him honorary citizenship in 1981.
https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/raoul-wallenberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg
- The Arrow Cross Party was a far-right Hungarist party led by Ferenc Szálasi, which formed a government in Hungary known as the Government of National Unity. They were in power from 15 October 1944 to 28 March 1945. During its short rule, ten to fifteen thousand civilians (many of whom were Jews and Romani) were murdered outright, and 80,000 people were deported from Hungary to various concentration camps in Austria. After the war, Szálasi and other Arrow Cross leaders were tried as war criminals by Hungarian courts..https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_Cross_Party
PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)Last edited Mon Sep 23, 2019, 01:17 PM - Edit history (1)
people really need to know.
Karadeniz
(22,280 posts)appalachiablue
(41,055 posts)(USHMM). Deportation of Hungarian Jews: May 15, 1944, From May 15 to July 9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officials, under the guidance of German SS officials, deported around 440,000 Jews from Hungary. Most were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, upon arrival and after selection, SS functionaries killed the majority of them in gas chambers.
Thousands were also sent to the border with Austria to be deployed at digging fortification trenches. By the end of July 1944, the only Jewish community left in Hungary was that of Budapest, the capital.
- Jewish brothers from Subcarpathian Rus (then part of Hungary) await selection on ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. May 1, 1944.
- Jews from Subcarpathian Rus (part of Hungary) undergo a selection on ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. May 1, 1944.
https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1942-1945/deportation-of-hungarian-jews
- (Wiki). Hungary During Word War II, Occupation By Nazis: Oppression at home:
- The Holocaust: On 19 March 1944 German troops occupied Hungary, prime minister Miklós Kállay was deposed and soon mass deportations of Jews to German death camps in occupied Poland began. SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann went to Hungary to oversee the large-scale deportations.
Between 15 May and 9 July, Hungarian authorities deported 437,402 Jews. All but 15,000 of these Jews were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and 90% of those were immediately killed. One in three of all Jews killed at Auschwitz were Hungarian citizens. Sztojay, unlike previous prime ministers, answered mostly to Berlin and was thus able to act independently of Horthy. However, reports of the conditions in the concentration camps led the admiral to resist his policies.
- Hungarian Jewish Women & children from Carpatho-Ruthenia after arrival at the Auschwitz deathcamp (May/June 1944).
In early July 1944, Horthy stopped the deportations, and after the failed attempt on Hitler's life, the Germans backed off from pressing Horthy's regime to continue further, large-scale deportations, although some smaller groups continued to be deported by train. In late August, Horthy refused Eichmann's request to restart the deportations. Himmler ordered Eichmann to leave Budapest.
- Forced labor: The forced labor service system was introduced in Hungary in 1939. The system affected primarily the Jewish population, but many people belonging to minorities, sectarians, leftists and Roma were also inducted. Thirty-five thousand to 40,000 forced laborers, mostly Jews or of Jewish origin, served in the Hungarian Second Army, which fought in the USSR. Eighty percent of them28,000 to 32,000 peoplenever returned; they died either on the battlefield or in captivity.
Approximately half of the 6,000 Jewish forced laborers working in the copper mines in Bor, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) were executed by the Germans during the death march from Bor to Győr in AugustOctober 1944, including the 35-year-old poet Miklós Radnóti, shot at the Hungarian village of Abda for being too weak to continue after a savage beating...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary_in_World_War_II