Did The Soviet KGB Execute, Raoul Wallenberg, One Of The Righteous Among The Nations Who Saved 100,000 Hungarian Jews

Raoul Wallenberg was last seen alive on 17 January 1945 in Hungary

By Raf Sanchez

8 AUGUST 2016

JERUSALEM: The newly-published memoirs of the first chief of the KGB may shed light on the fate of a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust only to disappear in the final weeks of the Second World War. 

Raoul Wallenberg is honoured around the world for rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis by issuing them with fake Swedish passports or housing them in diplomatic buildings.

'I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself that I'd done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.' 

― Raoul Wallenberg

But in January 1945 he vanished from the streets of Soviet-occupied Budapest and was never seen again.

His family has long suspected that he was kidnapped by the Soviet Union but have never received definitive proof of what happened to him. 

Moscow's story has changed over the decades. At first Russia claimed that Soviet intelligence had nothing to do with Wallenberg's case, they later said he died of a heart attack in a prison camp.

Now, the memoirs of KGB chief Ivan Serov offer another explanation - he was executed at Stalin's orders. 

‘I have no doubts that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947,’ Serov wrote in his memoirs, according to the New York Times.

The spy chief wrote that he had been tasked by Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, to find out what happened to Wallenberg during a thaw in relations between Sweden and the USSR in the 1950s. 

The Kremlin hoped that offering an explanation might help mend ties with the Scandinavian country.   

Ultimately, Serov was unable to find definitive proof but concluded that Wallenberg had been executed. He also mentioned that he had seen a document about Wallenberg's cremation. 

Moscow may have believed that Wallenberg was a US spy in Hungary and there are some indications that their suspicions were correct. 

Declassified CIA documents indicate that the diplomat may have collected intelligence for the spy agency's wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. 

Wallenberg's family have campaigned for more than 50 years to learn the truth of what happened him to him. His niece, Marie Dupuy, said she had written to the KGB's successor, the FSB, to ask for the documents mentioned by Serov.

Raoul Wallenberg - Family Still Struggles to Uncover the Fate of Holocaust Hero

However, Ms Dupuy warned it was premature to draw ‘firm conclusions’ from the diaries and noted that they contained a number of factual errors that undermined their credibility. 

Serov's recollections were recently published in Russia under the title ‘Notes from a Suitcase: Secret Diaries of the First KGB Chairman, Found Over 25 Years after His Death’.

The title refers to the fact that the memoirs were found hidden in a suitcase that had been stored covertly inside an internal wall at Serov's home.

He may have stored them there after falling out of favour with the ruling Communist Party in the 1970s and growing suspicious.