The Hero of Budapest

Among the heroes who, at great risk to their own lives, saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust under the noses of the Nazis, few deserve a more prominent place in the pantheon than Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg.

This ‘Scandinavian Schindler’ personally rescued between 8,000 and 10,000 Jews by his own courageous and resourceful initiatives. Moreover, by bribing, persuading and browbeating the retreating Nazis not to activate their plans to blow up the Budapest Ghetto, where some 70,000 Jewish survivors were left at the war’s end, Wallenberg probably saved more wartime lives than any other individual. Not for nothing is he honoured with memorials worldwide. But, if that role was the ‘triumph’ of the subtitle of Bengt Jangfeldt’s meticulously researched and surely definitive biography, then Wallenberg’s ‘tragedy’ was his hideous fate at the very moment of Hitler’s defeat.

In January 1945, probably on the direct orders of the Stalinist apparatchik Nikolai Bulganin (a decade later feted on a state visit to Britain with Khruschev), Wallenberg was summoned to the Budapest HQ of the Red Army commanded by General Malinovsky, where he disappeared from history.

http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2014/08/hero-budapest

Just read that he was reported to have died within the same compound that housed the KGB.

Hopefully, history will begin to celebrate his story!