Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg (B.A., Architecture, University of Michigan, 1935) was a businessman and diplomat who served as Sweden's special envoy in Nazi-occupied Budapest, Hungary, between July and December 1944, where he issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings designated as Swedish territory.

On 17 January 1945, during the Siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, Wallenberg was detained by SMERSH on suspicion of espionage and subsequently disappeared. He was later reported to have been imprisoned by the KGB secret police in the Lubyanka.

Due to this disappearance, the circumstances of Wallenberg's death remain mysterious. The Soviet government in 1957 released a document claiming that he had died of a a heart attack in prison on 17 July 1947. A 1991 investigation by the Russian government concluded that he had been executed that same year, and a KGB diary that came to light in 2016 referred to his 1947 "liquidation." However, there are reports, largely from other prisoners, of sightings as late as 1987, while Solzhenitsyn noted in 1973 that, "He has been imprisoned for thirty years and they will not give him up." Wallenberg's half-brother, Guy von Dardel, compiled 50,000 pages of interviews, journal articles, letters, and other documents related to his search for a definitive answer. In October 2016, the Swedish tax agency declared him dead in absentia, recording the date of his death as 31 July 1952, five years after he went missing.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan made Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the United States, an honor only previously extended to Winston Churchill. The same year, The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States was created to "perpetuate the humanitarian ideals and the nonviolent courage of Raoul Wallenberg." On 26 July 2012, the United States Congress posthumously awarded Wallenberg the Congressional Gold Medal "in recognition of his achievements and heroic actions during the Holocaust."