{"id":1508,"date":"2022-01-10T11:58:03","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T10:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/?p=1508"},"modified":"2025-06-11T11:03:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T09:03:37","slug":"raoul-wallenbergs-heroism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/raoul-wallenbergs-heroism\/","title":{"rendered":"Raoul Wallenberg’s heroism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Raoul Wallenberg\u2019s heroism<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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A heroic rescue operation in the final stages of World War II in a chaotic Budapest \u2013 where countless survivors later testified how he saved their lives \u2013 along with his dramatic disappearance in Soviet captivity and the family\u2019s desperate search for decades has immortalized Raoul Wallenberg\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI am happy that my mission has not been in vain,\u201d said Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest on January 17, 1945, the last day he was seen alive. Photo: Thomas Veres<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I<\/span>n the spring of 1944, the fortunes of war during World War II had long since turned for Nazi Germany and a large part of Europe\u2019s Jews had already been murdered. At that time, there were up to 800,000 Jews in Hungary, which was one of the largest remaining Jewish populations in Europe. When Hungary wanted to side with the Allies, Germany occupied the country and intensified efforts to exterminate the Jewish population in Hungary. Already at the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin in January 1942, the Nazis had calculated the size of the Jewish population in Europe and drawn up guidelines for the \u201cFinal Solution to the Jewish Question\u201d. The minutes show that the plan was to murder a total of 11 million Jews. 742,000 of them were then in Hungary. Between May 15 and July 7, 1944, approximately 437,000 Hungarian Jews \u2013 men, women and children \u2013 were deported by the Nazis. The vast majority were taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where they were gassed to death immediately upon arrival.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Swedish diplomat arrives<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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In this situation, on July 6, 1944, the 32-year-old Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg leaves Stockholm and arrives by train in Budapest three days later. The journey to Hungary took place partly on the same railway tracks used by the trains pulling cattle trucks that took Hungarian Jews to the Holocaust camps. Sweden\u2019s attitude towards the Holocaust had gone from indifference to bureaucratic activism \u2013 from the J-stamp in German passports to Swedish protection passports in Budapest. When the Holocaust reached Norway in the autumn of 1942, Sweden became the first sovereign state since Nazi Germany began its persecution of Jews in 1933 to declare to the Germans that all Jews from a third state were welcome. When the deportation of the Danish Jews was planned, the Swedish government made such a statement on Swedish radio on October 2, 1943. For the first time since Hitler came to power, a European state publicly expressed its willingness to unconditionally accept Jewish refugees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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New dimension<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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From the autumn of 1942, the Swedish Foreign Ministry began to develop a bureaucratic resistance to Nazi Germany\u2019s Jewish policy, which culminated in Budapest in the autumn of 1944 when Raoul Wallenberg took the stage and gave this humanitarian work a whole new dimension. Just hours before Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest, the deportations were temporarily halted by Prime Minister Mikl\u00f3s Horthy following protests from Pope Pius XII, US President Franklin D Roosevelt and King Gustav V of Sweden. With the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs behind him and with support and funding from the USA and from several Jewish organizations, Raoul Wallenberg, as the Foreign Ministry\u2019s envoy \u2013 together with other Swedish legation staff and with diplomats from other neutral countries \u2013 distributed protection passports to vulnerable Jews in the Hungarian capital. So-called Swedish houses with a Swedish flag were declared diplomatic territory. Tens of thousands of Hungary\u2019s remaining Jews were saved this way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Captured by the Soviets<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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After his heroic efforts, Wallenberg was captured by the Red Army and disappeared in the Soviet Union\u2019s concentration camp. \u201cI am happy that my mission has not been in vain,\u201d said Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest on January 17, 1945, the last day he was seen alive. For 76 years, the Swedish diplomat\u2019s family has wondered what happened, why he was arrested by the Soviets and why Sweden did not stand up for its diplomat and hero. Thanks to his heroic efforts to save Hungarian Jews in the final stages of World War II, the Swedish diplomat has been named an honorary citizen of the United States, Canada, Hungary, Australia and Israel. Monuments, streets, stamps and memorial sites around the world have attracted attention to the Swedish diplomat, and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel has also named Wallenberg among the \u201cRighteous among the Nations\u201d. Through his life and death, Raoul Wallenberg challenged the two totalitarian ideologies \u2013 Nazism and Communism \u2013 that ravaged Europe during the 20th century. Sweden\u2019s Foreign Minister Ann Linde has on three occasions in recent years raised the issue of Raoul Wallenberg with her Russian colleague Sergej Lavrov. Many of those rescued by Raoul Wallenberg moved to Israel. One of them was Israel\u2019s current Foreign Minister Yair Lapid\u2019s own father.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raoul Wallenberg\u2019s heroism A heroic rescue operation in the final stages of World War II in a chaotic Budapest \u2013 where countless survivors later testified how he saved their lives \u2013 along with his dramatic disappearance in Soviet captivity and the family\u2019s desperate search for decades has immortalized Raoul Wallenberg\u2019s memory. \u201cI am happy that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-historic-flashback"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1508"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3684,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions\/3684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}