January 17 marked the 80th anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg’s disappearance in the Soviet Union. After eight decades, the central questions in the Wallenberg case remain unanswered: What exactly happened to him after his trail broke off in Moscow in the spring of 1947? And why was the Swedish government’s passivity in the case so extreme?
We now know that Swedish officials consciously abandoned Wallenberg almost immediately after he disappeared in January 1945, a decision that had serious consequences for Sweden’s official handling of the case.
Despite document destruction and other forms of censorship, it is clear that highly relevant information remains available in both Russian and Swedish archives. Unfortunately, over the years, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has instead signaled that it is primarily interested in removing the issue from the Swedish-Russian agenda. This theme has run like a red thread through the Wallenberg case ever since 1945.
Swedish officials say that they do not know which documents about the Swedish diplomat are still classified – in their own archives or in collections held by other Swedish authorities – and they show no interest in finding out.
In 2019, the ministry announced that a total of 170,000 pages in the Raoul Wallenberg case are now available to the public and that only 230 pages remain confidential. The statement obscures the fact that the Foreign Ministry’s Wallenberg case file is far from complete. It also reinforces misconceptions about how the documentation of the case is organized.
Only a limited part is stored in the official case file at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thousands of documents are held in various other collections in the ministry archive and in other Swedish agencies, including the Swedish Security Police (Säpo). The result is that neither Wallenberg’s family nor the general public have a clear idea which documents are stored in which archival collection.
Moreover, highly relevant documents about the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews were never formally registered or archived at all.
IN NOVEMBER 2009, Russia released the sensational information that Wallenberg was possibly the numbered prisoner (No. 7) who was interrogated in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow on July 23, 1947. If true, it means that he was alive six days after his official date of death of July 17, 1947. It also means that previous versions of his death provided by Soviet and later Russian authorities are false.
In 2011–2012, Swedish and Russian officials held top-level discussions about this information, the most important to emerge in the case since 1945. However, documents related to these exchanges were never registered in the Swedish Foreign Ministry’s Wallenberg case file.
A separate memo was immediately classified: a cipher fax from the Swedish Embassy in Moscow to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm, dated October 19, 2011, in which Col. Vladimir K. Vinogradov, a senior officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), confirmed that it was “certain and tochno” (a fact) that Raoul Wallenberg was interrogated on July 23, 1947. Our family was never informed.
At two meetings in 2009-2010 with Russian President Vladimir Medvedev and then-prime minister Vladmir Putin, neither Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt nor Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt bothered to bring up the crucial information about Wallenberg that had emerged just a few months earlier.
The Swedish government evidently had little interest in continuing further investigations of the Wallenberg case, as officials focused instead on expanding business relations with Russia.
Russian officials argue that the new details and the fact that they withheld them for decades “doesn’t matter” and that they have no further information that could shed light on the full circumstances of Raoul Wallenberg’s fate. Despite strong evidence to the contrary, Swedish officials have largely accepted this position and have stopped investigating the case.
The Swedish government already in 1946 made a conscious decision to abandon Wallenberg even though Swedish officials had relatively clear indications that he was alive and imprisoned in the Soviet Union. Instead, Sweden prioritized a large Swedish Russian credit and trade agreement (equivalent to more than $4 billion today) and made at least three formal requests to the Soviet leadership to declare him dead.
By March 1947, Wallenberg’s mother, Maj von Dardel, was so upset by her government’s inaction that she walked into the Swedish Foreign Ministry and demanded to know why Swedish officials assumed that her son was no longer alive, in the absence of clear evidence. She also characterized the official handling of her son’s case as “cold-blooded.”
During the 1990s, both Swedish and Russian officials kept a narrow and strictly controlled focus in the Wallenberg investigation. Both sides misrepresented and omitted important information in their respective reports and failed to provide researchers access to key documentation.
Almost all information about top Swedish diplomats Sverker Astrom and Rolf Sohlman, the longtime Ambassador to Moscow (1947–63), remains strictly classified in Swedish archives. Both men played a central role in the official handling of the Wallenberg case for decades and were suspected of functioning as Soviet assets.
Sohlman’s discussions with a Russian contact – whom Säpo officials believed to be one of the KGB’s most ruthless counterintelligence officers for more than three years in the early 1960s – must have generated thousands of pages that remain preserved in the archive of the FSB. The material almost certainly contains important background information about Wallenberg’s fate. The decisive clue for this new discovery came from previously classified Swedish documents.
If Swedish officials deliberately abandoned Raoul Wallenberg, it would constitute a serious moral failure that could rise to the level of criminal negligence.
Wallenberg, his family and Sweden as a country deserve better.
In principle, the prime minister can order all Swedish authorities to provide him with a clear summary of what documents they possess about the Wallenberg case, how many remain classified and what type of information is involved.
If the Swedish government already has such a comprehensive compilation, now is the time to publish it. If it doesn’t have such an overview, it’s high time to create one.
We respectfully ask that the prime minister provide full clarity on all information and documentation contained in Swedish archive collections, as a first step in resolving the lingering questions that remain in the case of one of Sweden’s most celebrated citizens, who lost his life in the service of his country.
The writers are nieces of Raoul G. Wallenberg. The full letter is available at www.raoul-wallenberg.eu.