Raoul Wallenberg

Swedish businessman and diplomat from a wealthy family who effectively pulled off the rescue of more than 12,000 Hungarian Jews as WW II was drawing to a close. Escorted out of Budapest in 1945 by Russian troops, he has been missing ever since. He was reported to be dead at two different times between 1945 and 1947 by Soviet sources. Since his disappearance, he has been recommended for a Nobel Prize for Peace and made an honorary citizen of three countries. The search for information about his whereabouts continues.

Raoul was born to one of the most famous families in Sweden, the large Wallenberg family. His father, Raoul Oscar Wallenberg, was an officer in the navy who died of cancer three months before the boy was born. His mother, Maj Wising Wallenberg was remarried to Fredrik von Dardel in 1918. Raoul’s grandfather, Gustav Wallenberg, took care of his education, planning for him to continue the family tradition in banking. Raoul was more interested in architecture and trade. He graduated with top grades in Russian and drawing in 1930. After serving in the army he traveled to the U.S. in 1931 to study architecture at the University of Michigan. He graduated with honors in three and a half years. In 1935, he received his Bachelor Degree of Science in Architecture and returned to Sweden.

The market for architects in Sweden was small so his grandfather sent him to Cape Town, South Africa and then six months later to a Dutch bank office in Haifa, Palestine (now Israel). There he first met Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Germany. Their stories of Nazi persecution affected him deeply. He became a business partner of Koloman Lauer, a Hungarian Jew and a director of a Swedish-based import and export company. On his many trips through Nazi-occupied France and Germany he quickly learned how the bureaucracy worked. In 1944 the world learned about the extermination camp at Auschwitz and began to understand what Hitler meant by his "final solution to the Jewish problem.