Findings show 'U' alum shot by Soviets

From staff and wire reports

Raoul Wallenberg, a 1935 University alumnus and the Swedish diplomat who disappeared after helping thousands of Jews escape Nazi-occupied Hungary, undoubtedly was shot and killed by the Soviets, the head of a Russian presidential commission said yesterday.

The statement by Alexander Yakovlev, chairman of the presidential commission on rehabilitation of victims of political repression, indicates that Russia may be on the verge of confirming allegations that Soviet authorities have denied for a half-century.

"We do not doubt that he was shot at Lubyanka," the Soviet secret police headquarters and prison in Moscow, the news agency Interfax quoted Yakovlev as saying.

"We must put an end to this story, which has acquired an acute international significance and has been poisoning the atmosphere for a long time," he said, according to the report.

If Wallenberg was indeed shot, it likely would have happened before Soviet leader Josef Stalin's death in 1953.

Yakovlev could not be reached for comment, but a commission staff member, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the substance of the report.

Wallenberg graduated with honors from the University's College of Architecture in 1935 and in 1944 he was sent by the Swedish Foreign Ministry to Budapest, Hungary to head a rescue mission of the Jews still living there.

The last confirmed sighting of Wallenberg was on Jan. 17, 1945, in Budapest when he was 32 years old. Wallenberg was a member of one of Sweden's wealthiest and most prominent industrialist families.

He distributed Swedish passports to Jews in deportation trains and on death marches, won diplomatic protection for whole sections of Budapest and organized food and medical supplies. His efforts are credited with saving at least 20,000 lives.

The Soviet army occupied Budapest in January 1945 and Wallenberg was arrested and brought to the Soviet Union. The Soviets said he was suspected of spying, and a former Red Army soldier told a Russian TV channel last month that he detained Wallenberg after noticing that he had an oddly shaped mess kit.

Some observers have speculated the arrest also could have been retaliation for his family's companies having sold ball bearings and other strategic supplies to the Nazi regime.

In the years that followed, countless clues and claims emerged - as well as contradictory accounts from the Kremlin, which Yakovlev said "became entangled in lies."

"At first we said he was killed in a street in Budapest, then we said he was taken under the protection of our troops," Interfax quoted him as saying.

Then came a memo from then-Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko saying Wallenberg died of a heart attack in Soviet custody in 1947. Many former prisoners continued to claim Wallenberg was alive as late as the 1970s and 1980s.

Many people taken prisoner by the Soviet Army in Hungary vanished - including a former soldier discovered this year in a Russian mental hospital.

Todd Endelmann, a University history professor teaching a Holocaust course, said the new information brings some kind of closure to Wallenberg's disappearance.

"It has long been suspected that Wallenberg died in the Soviet Union," Endelman said. "This information doesn't change the importance of what he did regarding the Swedish passports. Rather, it is important to have closure and this information helps finish the story."

The University's Raoul Wallenberg Endowment, established in 1985, honors those who have taken a courageous stand. In October, Nina Lagergren, Wallenberg's half-sister, spoke about her brother at the 10th annual Wallenberg Lecture.