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The
September 20, 2001
REOPENING THE RAOUL WALLENBERG
CASE
THE TRUTH ABOUT WALLENBERG
Amy Knight
Raoul Wallenberg: Report of the Swedish-Russian Working
Group
Report on the Activities of the Russian-Swedish Working
Group for Determining the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg (1991-2000)
Reports by the Independent Consultants to the
Swedish-Russian Working Group on the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg, January 12,
2001:
Liquidatsia:
The Question of Raoul Wallenberg’s Death or
Disappearance in 1947
By Susan Ellen Mesinai, 48 pp.
Cell Occupancy Analysis of Korpus 2 of the Vladimir Prison:
An Examination of the Consistency of Eyewitness Sightings of Raoul Wallenberg
with Prisoner Registration Cards from the Prison Kartoteka
By Marvin W. Makinen and Ari D.
Kaplan, 63 pp.
Swedish Aspects of the Raoul Wallenberg Case
By Susanne Berger, 63 pp.
1.
On January 13, 1945, the Swedish
diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, accompanied only by his chauffer, left his legation
in Budapest for a meeting with officers of the advancing Soviet army, which was
then in the process of “liberating” the city from the pro-Nazi
government. Wallenberg’s apparent purpose in seeking out the Soviets was
to ensure the protection of Jews and their property in
But for all his sophistication in
dealing with the Nazis, the thirty-two-year-old Wallenberg was, according to
one of his colleagues at the legation, “naïve when it came to the
Russians.” Whether he met with Soviet officers remains unknown. It is now
clear, however, from recently released reports, that Wallenberg, despite being
a diplomat from a neutral country, was promptly taken into custody by the
Soviet army and that three days later, on January 16, the Soviet deputy
minister of defense, Nikolai Bulganin, sent a coded telegram to the commander
of the Second Ukrainian Front, Marshall Malinovsky, ordering Wallenberg’s
arrest by the notorious military counter-intelligence branch known as SMERSH, a
Russian acronym for “Smert’
shpionam,” meaning “Death to Spies.”
Why the Soviets arrested
Wallenberg and took him off to
The most far-reaching and thorough
investigation into the Wallenberg affair was conducted, and recently concluded,
by the Joint Swedish-Russian Working Group on Raoul Wallenberg, whose members
included officials from the Swedish and Russian security agencies, and also
Wallenberg’s half-brother, Guy von Dardel. Their investigation began in
September 1991, just a month after the coup attempt in Moscow, and the Swedish
members were hopeful that, under the new Russian policy of openness,
long-suppressed information about Wallenberg would finally be released. (1)
Unfortunately, although the Russians have provided significant new materials
relating to Wallenberg, their archival policy has become increasingly
restrictive, and some key collections that were accessible in 1991 were later
closed. (2) Moreover, the authors of the published reports did not have direct
access to several important archives, including those of the Russian Foreign
Intelligence Service and the counterintelligence service, as well as the
archives of the Swedish intelligence service. Until the materials in these
archives can be consulted, all conclusions about Wallenberg’s fate must
remain preliminary. A further problem is that Russian authorities claim
Wallenberg’s prison file – clearly a crucial piece of evidence
– is missing.
Nonetheless, the reports of the
working group, issued separately by the Swedes and the Russians in January 2001
along with three additional reports by the group’s independent
consultants, significantly improve our understanding of the Wallenberg affair.
Ten years of painstaking archival research and interviews in Russia, Sweden,
and numerous other countries uncovered many new details about the Stalinist
prison regime, the political machinations of Soviet leaders (not only among
themselves but also with respect to Sweden), and the arbitrary way in which
they disposed of the lives of innocent people.
What is also revealed in these
reports is that the Wallenberg case goes well beyond the individual tragedy of
a young man whose heroism saved the lives of thousands of Jews. Wallenberg, who
belonged to one of Sweden’s most prominent financial families, was a pawn
in a larger political game played out
by the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, by Sweden as the tensions
of the postwar era increased. Indeed, this is a game that has continued for
more than a half-century, with the Soviets (and later the Russians)
stonewalling efforts to find out the truth about Wallenberg and Swedish
authorities, for one reason or another, not pressing as hard as they might.
2.
The working group’s ten-year
investigation, and the five reports that resulted from it, go a long way toward
explaining Russian motives for arresting Wallenberg and keeping him in prison
at least until July 1947, the last
date for which there is proof that
he was alive. Although there is no record of formal charges against Wallenberg,
it is almost certain that the Soviets arrested him because they believed he was a spy, for either the
Allies, the Germans, or both. The WRB, for which Wallenberg worked in Budapest,
cooperated closely with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
precursor to the CIA. In fact, Iver Olsen, who helped to organize
Wallenberg’s mission and communicated regularly with him in Budapest, was
the representative for both the WRB and the OSS in Stockholm. The Soviets were
well aware of the OSS-WRB connection and of Wallenberg’s relations with
Olsen, and so, as evidence cited in the reports suggests, the Soviets suspected
that Wallenberg was, at least in some capacity, an OSS operative. (3)
According to the Swedish report,
however, there is evidence that Wallenberg’s work on behalf of the WRB
was purely humanitarian, and that any suspicion on the part of the Soviets to
the contrary was incorrect:
An
internal CIA document from 1955 indicates that when asked whether he had ever
had operational contact with Raoul Wallenberg or used him operationally, Olsen
repeatedly and categorically denied having done so. His contacts with Raoul
Wallenberg had been only in his capacity as WRB representative. “Olsen
was extremely emphatic on this point.” … None of the WRB dealings
with Raoul Wallenberg reveals any direct links to intelligence work. . . . . It
cannot be ruled out that some OSS agents also perceived Raoul Wallenberg as an
agent. On the other hand, the CIA has not found material anywhere that
indicates that Raoul Wallenberg was aware of Olsen’s links with the OSS .
. . (4)
Wallenberg’s many contacts
in Budapest (evident in his appointment calendar, which was confiscated upon
his arrest and returned by the Russians to Guy von Dardel in 1989) may also
have aroused doubts on the Soviet side about the neutrality of his mission.
According to the reports of Susanne Berger and Susan Mesinai, outside experts
who served as independent consultants to the working group, several people who
helped Wallenberg in his rescue work were involved in the Hungarian resistance
movement and in other projects sponsored by Allied intelligence. Thus, for
example, Wallenberg had contacts with the underground nationalist society, EXZ,
made up of church leaders and aristocrats working toward an independent
democratic leadership of Hungary.
Then there was Wallenberg’s
close contact, for the purpose of negotiating for the lives of Jews, with Nazi
leaders in Budapest, including Adolf Eichmann. Wallenberg himself received
funds from the leading Jewish resistance organization, known as JOINT, whose
representatives routinely made deals with Nazi officials to save Jews from the
death camps. The Soviets were highly suspicious of JOINT, which they later
claimed was part of a “global Zionist plat.” Also, according to the
Russian report, some of the “protective passports” issued by
Wallenberg to Hungarian Jews fell into the hands of the Nazis, who were then
able to escape arrest when the Soviets occupied Hungary. The Russian report
gives no evidence for this claim.
According to a SMERSH assessment
from February 1945, cited in the Swedish report:
Instead
of protecting the interests of the Soviet Union and Hungary, the Swedish
Embassy and Swedish Red Cross are giving protection to the enemies of the Soviet
Union and Hungarian people and providing them with refuge and sanctuary.
Presumably “enemies”
referred to both members of the Hungarian underground who opposed Soviet
occupation and Nazis who allegedly obtained Swedish passports.
Although SMERSH was arresting
large numbers of people at random behind the front in Budapest, the order for
Wallenberg’s arrest, coming as it did from high quarters in Moscow, must
have been issued for a specific reason – presumably because Wallenberg
was believed to be a spy. In view of the highly centralized structure of the
Stalinist system and the fact that Stalin was a micromanager when it came to
cases of important political prisoners, it is doubtful that either Deputy
Defense Minister Bulganin or Viktor Abakumov, the chief of SMERSH, would have
ordered Wallenberg’s arrest without Stalin’s explicit approval.
3.
Upon their arrival in Moscow on
February 6, 1945, three weeks after their capture in Budapest, Wallenberg and
his driver were imprisoned in separate cells in the NKVD’s notorious
Lubianka prison. On Wallenberg’s prison card he was registered as a
“prisoner of war,” and it was noted that he was arrested on January
19. Prison records released to the working group by Russian authorities show
that Wallenberg’s first interrogation took place on February 8 –
“a typical night session lasting three and a half hours,” in the
words of the Swedish report. According to these records, Wallenberg was not
questioned again until the end of April, a month before he was transferred to
Lefortovo prison in Moscow, together with a cellmate, Willy Roedel, a German
diplomat. Although Wallenberg remained in Lefortovo throughout 1946, he was, so
the prison records state, interrogated only twice during his incarceration there.
After he was transferred back to Lubianka, in early March 1947, the records
show only one further interrogation, on March 11, 1947.
Some of Wallenberg’s fellow
inmates (several of whom were German prisoners of war interviewed after being
repatriated by the Soviets in the early 1950s), as well as former prison staff
and security officials questioned by the working group, suggest that Wallenberg
was well treated physically despite the fact that he consistently refused to
cooperate with his interrogators. According to these witnesses, there could
have been a few additional, unrecorded interrogations, but the general
impression of the witnesses was that Wallenberg was rarely questioned. If the
Soviet prison records are accurate, then it is puzzling why the Soviets, in
dealing with such a well-known prisoner, with extensive connections in the
political and intelligence circles of the Western allies, would not have wanted
to question him further. A look at what went on at the official level between
Sweden and Russia on the Wallenberg matter, documented largely by materials
from the Russian and Swedish Foreign Ministry archives, may provide some clues.
Initially, the Soviets
acknowledged that they had Wallenberg in their custody. In a memo of January
16, 1945, USSR Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Dekanozov informed the Swedish
legation in Moscow that Wallenberg was under the “protection” of
Soviet troops in Budapest. The Russian ambassador to Sweden, Alexandra
Kollontai, told Wallenberg’s mother, Maj von Dardel, in February 1945
that her son was in Soviet custody, although she did not say where. However,
after all the other members of the Swedish legation had returned to Sweden in
April 1945, and the Swedish Foreign Ministry began to press the Soviets for answers,
the Soviets claimed they had no knowledge of Wallenberg’s whereabouts.
Amazingly, the Swedish envoy to
Moscow, Staffan Soederblom, who had initially urged the Soviets for information
about Wallenberg, went along with their story, suggesting on more than one
occasion in 1945 that Wallenberg had probably been killed in Hungary either in
a car accident or during fighting as the Soviets took over Budapest. Although
these theories were circulating in Budapest and on Soviet-controlled Hungarian
radio, it is puzzling that Soederblom would have given them credence, in view
of the communications of both Dekanozov and Kollontai about Wallenberg being in
Soviet hands.
The Swedish report suggests that
Soederblom, who was forced to retire because of mental illness six years later,
had lost his ability to make sound judgments. This is borne out by the fact
that Soederblom simply repeated his views about Wallenberg in a meeting with
Stalin in June 1946 – a meeting for which Stalin had set aside an hour
but which lasted only five minutes. According to the Russian report:
The
interview, most likely, caused Stalin some bewilderment, and possibly even
irritation – not one major issue was raised. It emphasized the ambiguity
of the [Swedish] approach to the Wallenberg affair: from one side [of the
Swedish government], a request for an investigation, from the other – a
“personal opinion” type of comment that the diplomat had most
likely died in Budapest.
As the Russian report notes, the
Soviet side did not consider it possible for a diplomat to have a
“personal opinion” on matters of state and therefore would have
assumed that Soederblom’s views represented those of the Swedish
government. And so the Soviets might have concluded that the Swedish government,
despite requesting an investigation, apparently wanted the Wallenberg case
closed.
Why would Stalin have been
irritated? Perhaps, as both the Russian and Swedish reports suggest, the
Soviets wanted to use Wallenberg as a bargaining chip, apparently as part of an
exchange agreement for Soviet citizens in Sweden whom the Kremlin wanted back.
This might explain the mixed signals they sent about Wallenberg from the very
beginning. Publicly they spread the false information that Wallenberg was dead,
while through other channels they apparently wanted the Swedes to know that
Wallenberg was in their custody.
The reports, including those from
the Russian side, document several meetings between Soviet and Swedish
diplomats during 1946 at which the Soviets hinted about an exchange for
Wallenberg. This is confirmed in a 1986 statement by Swedish Ambassador to
Moscow Rune Nystroem, cited by Susanne Berger:
That
Raoul Wallenberg could have been exchanged for persons in Sweden was a question
that came up, or at least was suggested by the Soviets, at a very early stage
in the [Wallenberg] case. On the Swedish side, however, it appears that the
suggestion was either not understood or it was felt that it was not possible to
agree to an exchange. (5)
If an exchange was indeed the
Soviet intention, then it would explain why, as Russian security officials have
told the working group, Wallenberg was never formally charged with any crime
and no official investigation, which would have entailed intensive
interrogations, was carried out. He was viewed, at least up until the end of
1946, more as a hostage than as a political criminal awaiting trial.
It is not clear why the Swedish
government did not pursue the Wallenberg case more forcefully; Swedish
officials may have been concerned about the fate of Swedish businesses located
in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, which were in danger of being
confiscated if Sweden did not quickly establish “normal” political
and economic relations with the East Bloc. Whatever the explanation, the Swedes
could not ignore the Wallenberg issue after German and other prisoners of war
returning from the Soviet Union in the early 1950s testified that Wallenberg
had been in both Lubianka and Lefortovo prisons between 1945 and 1947.
When the Swedes again began pressing
the Soviets for answers about Wallenberg, the post-Stalin government, headed by
Nikita Krushchev, apparently decided that some sort of a response was called
for. In February 1957, after protracted discussions within the Soviet
leadership about how to handle the Wallenberg matter (discussions that are well
documented in the working group’s reports), Soviet Foreign Minister
Andrei Gromyko handed over a memorandum to the Swedish government stating that,
after a thorough search of the prison archives, a single document had been
discovered. The document, a copy of which was attached to the memorandum, was a
handwritten report by the Lubianka prison doctor, A.L. Smolstov, addressed to
then Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov. Smoltsov stated that Wallenberg
had died in his cell of a “sudden myocardial infarction” on July
17, 1947.
A notation on the report
(presumably added by Smoltsov later) stated that on instructions from Abakumov,
Smoltsov had ordered the body to be cremated. According to this now well-known
Gromyko memorandum, no further documentation about Wallenberg could be found,
and, because Smoltsov had dies in 1953, there would be no opportunity to
question him. Gromyko also claimed that Abakumov, who had been executed in
1954, had given the Soviet Foreign Ministry false information about Wallenberg,
thus implying, disingenuously, that his ministry had not known about Wallenberg
being a prisoner.
Not surprisingly, the Swedes were
not convinced that this was the whole story, particularly since Wallenberg was
only thirty-four years old at that time and had no history of heart trouble.
The case was kept alive in Sweden by continued reports over the years about
Wallenberg’s presence in prisons and labor camps at various places in the
Soviet Union well after 1947. The reports came from former prisoners of war who
eventually were repatriated to Central and Eastern Europe, as well as from some
former Soviet prisoners.
These witnesses recalled either
meeting someone they though was Wallenberg or hearing about Wallenberg from
other prisoners. At least seven witnesses, for example, mention
Wallenberg’s presence in Moscow prisons after 1947; three former
prisoners reported seeing someone who appeared to be Wallenberg at prisoner
transit points in the late 1940s; two witnesses say they saw Wallenberg at the
Kazan Special Psychiatric Hospital in the early 1950s; and there are at least
seven reports about Wallenberg having been seen or heard of in Vladimir prison,
located 250 kilometers east of Moscow, after 1947.
One particularly interesting
report came from a Swedish physician named Nanna Svartz, who reported a
conversation in German with a Soviet doctor, Alexander Miasnikov, during a 1961
medical conference in Moscow. According to Dr. Svartz, Dr. Miasnikov told her
that he had recently seen Wallenberg in a Moscow mental hospital. Although Dr.
Miasnikov later denied that he had said this, claiming that a misunderstanding
had occurred because of his poor grasp of German, Dr. Svartz remained convinced
that her version was accurate.
Despite all these reports, the
Soviets (and later the Russians) doggedly insisted that the Gromyko memorandum
was the definitive account of Wallenberg’s death until late 1992, when
the working group’s investigation was well underway. At that time, new
evidence relating to the memorandum and the significance of July 17, 1947, as a
key date in the Wallenberg case was released by the Russian side. Among the new
documents were messages between Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky and
Soviet state security officials showing that the Soviet Ministry of Foreign
Affairs was well aware of Wallenberg’s imprisonment in Moscow as early as
1946. By the spring of 1947 Vyshinsky, still faced with inquiries from the
Swedish government, was looking for a way to resolve the case. On May 14, 1947,
he wrote to his boss, Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov, saying that he had
requested clarification from the state security organs regarding the fate of
Wallenberg and that “insofar as the Wallenberg case remains unresolved
until the present moment I ask you to order Abakumov to present information on
the subject of this affair and suggestions for its liquidation.” It
should be noted that in Russian “its” (ego) could also mean “his,” so it is unclear whether
Vyshinsky was referring to the case’s liquidation or to the liquidation
of Wallenberg. On the same document Molotov ordered Abakumov to “report
to me.”
According to other documents provided
to the working group, Vyshinsky wrote to Abakumov on July 7, 1947, with
suggestions for how they could persuade the Swedes that Wallenberg had dies in
Budapest in 1945. From this it would appear that the Soviets were not planning
to release him. Most ominously of all, a notation on a letter Vyshinsky wrote
to Abakumov two weeks later shows that Abakumov wrote a letter to Molotov on
July 17 (the same date that appeared on the Smoltsov report of
Wallenberg’s death) and that the subject was Wallenberg. This letter,
which could contain the key to the case, is said by Russian archivists to be
missing.
All of the participants in the
working group concur on the significance of July 1947. As the Swedish report
put it, “There can only be full agreement on the fact that important
decisions were taken about him at that time, or, alternatively, that something
serious happened.” The Russian report goes further, arguing that
“all the circumstantial evidence confirms that Raoul Wallenberg died, or
most likely was killed, on July 17, 1947.” Among this evidence is the
Vyshinsky-Molotov document, which, in the Russian view, shows that the Soviets
intended to kill Wallenberg in 1947, and that the Smoltsov report was a cover
for some more sinister cause of Wallenberg’s death. (6) According to
prison documents released to the working group, a few days after July 17
several of the prisoners who had direct contact with Wallenberg were called in
for lengthy interrogations about him and then placed in solitary confinement.
This lends further credence to the view that he had just been killed. After
July 1947 there are no further records of Wallenberg’s presence in any of
the prison registers. His name vanishes without a trace. As for Roedel, the
prisoner with whom Wallenberg spent the most time in the same cell, and
Langfelder, the driver when he was arrested, the archival evidence suggests
that they died within months.
According to Wallenberg’s
fellow prisoners who were released and repatriated in the early 1950s, he
consistently refused to cooperate with his interrogators. Thus by mid-1947 the
Soviets might have given up on him as a source of information and decided to
execute him. And if, as is likely, it was Stalin who decided Wallenberg’s
fate, Stalin’s intense anti-Semitism may have also been a factor.
Wallenberg was a savior of Jews, and Stalin was by this time embarking on his
plans to launch a widespread campaign against Jews in the Soviet Union. (7)
4.
Still, the authors of the Swedish
report and, more vehemently, those of the three independent reports remain
unconvinced that Wallenberg died in July 1947, and they have strong arguments
on their side. First of all, there is ambiguity surrounding the term
“liquidation,” used by Vyshinsky in his May 17 letter, and the fact
that it could refer either to the man or to the case. If the intention was to
dispose of the case, rather than the man Wallenberg could have become a
“secret prisoner,” identified by a number but with no recorded
name. According to prison files studied by the working group, certain
categories of prisoners were numbered, and their identity kept secret.
Those who question the Russian
version also regard it as surprising that Wallenberg would be killed before his
case was fully investigated and he was sentenced. If the official records are
accurate, Wallenberg was interrogated only five times before July 17, 1947, and
was never sentenced. Even if Wallenberg had refused to cooperate, it would have
been early to give up on him without more extensive interrogations.
Furthermore, if a decision had been made to execute Wallenberg, he would have
been “convicted” of a crime and there would have been some record
of the execution being carried out. (8). As for the possibility that Wallenberg
died because of some sort of accident or from mistreatment, his importance as a
prisoner and reports from other inmates that he was treated relatively well, at least
physically, make this improbably, although it cannot be ruled out. (9)
In addition to the numerous
reports I have mentioned that Wallenberg was alive after July 1947, in 1993
members of the working group interviewed a former hospital orderly at Vladimir
prison, Varvara Larina, who recalled a prisoner kept in isolation there from
the mid-1950s to the 1960s. Larina’s description from memory resembled
Wallenberg, and when shown a number of photographs she chose the one of him.
The fact that several of Wallenberg’s cellmates in Lefortovo and Lubianka
were later transferred to Vladimir prison after being sentenced, and then were
identified only by a number and kept in solitary confinement, led Guy von
Dardel to organize a research effort there in 1991. This was followed up later
by University of Chicago professors Marvin Makinen (himself a former prisoner
at Vladimir) and Ari Kaplan, who conducted an extensive computerized analysis
of prison registration cards for the years 1947 through 1972, concentrating on
the specific section of Vladimir prison where Wallenberg was reported to have
been held (korpus 2).
Makinen and Kaplan found that a
number of witnesses who claimed that Wallenberg was presenting korpus 2 had, in
fact, also been imprisoned in korpus 2 at the time they saw him, and they
identified seemingly empty cells where an isolated prisoner might have been
secretly held. Although Wallenberg’s name does not appear in the prison
registry, Makinen and Kaplan believe that the eyewitness reports of
Wallenberg’s presence “provide compelling reasons to doubt the
credibility of the Gromyko memorandum about the alleged death of Raoul
Wallenberg in 1947 and strongly suggest that he lived incarcerated in the
Soviet Union at least into the 1960s and possibly 1970s and further.”
Central to the problem of
determining Wallenberg’s fate is that, as I have mentioned, his file (delo in Russian) is said by Russian
authorities to be missing, although some documents have turned up that appear
to have been part of that file, such as Smoltsov’s report concerning
Wallenberg’s supposed death in July 1947 from heart failure. Significantly,
when von Dardel was in Moscow in 1989, the Russians produced out of the blue a
plastic bag full of Wallenberg’s personal belongings. They claimed that
the bad was discovered inadvertently in the basement of Lubianka, but this is
unlikely, in view of the strict procedures for dealing with prisoners’
possessions. While it is possible that certain records were deliberately
destroyed, it is implausible that any evidence relating to an inmate as
important as Wallenberg would just disappear, or end up misplaced in a basement.
As Susan Mesinai points out in her
report,
A
prisoner whose presence is already known to the authorities – and the
Russian side has established that this was the case – cannot just
“vanish into thin air.” There must be a paper trail.
Mesinai herself has made a
painstaking effort to reconstruct what happened to Wallenberg by piecing
together the evidence that is available, including the sightings of Wallenberg,
and analyzing them against the backdrop of what we know about the Soviet prison
regime. Both Mesinai and Susanne Berger are convinced that the Russians are
still withholding crucial evidence in the case, particularly since several
archives have remained closed to researchers – notable, as I have said,
those of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and the counterintelligence
service, which might be expected to have important material on Wallenberg.
Perhaps, then, as Susanne Berger
says, the greatest myth of all is that the truth about Wallenberg cannot be
discovered. The answers may well exist, but if so the Russians are not willing
to provide them, even after fifty-six years, with the principal participants in
the Wallenberg affair long since dead. Once the first cover-up began, it seems
to have set the stage for a cover-up that has been carried out by subsequent
Soviet officials and is almost impossible to reverse, except those from the
Russian side, it would be a mistake to give up and close the case on
Wallenberg. In the words of Mesinai: “If one places one’s ear to
the ground, one will understand as I have – that there is too much
insistence, and has been over time, that there is ‘nothing to be
found,’ and that this case is now ‘history’ – when in
fact the real investigation has barely begun.
(1)
Von Dardel took the
initiative in organizing the effort to work with the Russians in determining
Wallenberg’s fate when he and his sister, Nina Lagergren, visited Moscow
in 1989.
(2)
For example, the
Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the agency responsible for prisons and
labor camps, allowed partial access, in the early Nineties, to special
collections that contained high-level correspondence and reports about foreign
prisoners, but now these collections are completely closed.
(3)
The Swedish report,
for example, mentions that a Soviet deputy foreign minister in an “emotional outburst” told
the Swedish ambassador in Moscow in 1979 that “Raoul Wallenberg had been
spying for the USA and that the Americans privately admitted this.”
(4)
Further release of US
intelligence documents could affect these conclusions. Although some OSS and
CIA documentation on the subject was released recently, a number of important
files, including records of OSS communication between Budapest and Stockholm,
remain classified.
(5)
When the Swedes
inquired about Wallenberg, the
Soviets would often respond by asking them about the repatriation of a seaman
named Granovsky, said to have been an NKVD agent, who had defected to Sweden,
and a young Russian woman named Lida Makarova whose parents were living in the
Soviet Union and demanding her return, although she wished to remain in Sweden.
(6)
Alexander Yakovlev,
chairman of the Russian Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of
Victims of Political Repression Under Stalin, claimed in December 2000 that Dr.
Smoltsov had been relieved of his duties at Lubianka Prison in March 1947. If
Yakovlev is right, it would mean that the Smoltsov report was in fact a
forgery.
(7)
Stalin’s
vendetta against Soviet Jews began in January 1948, with the murder (arranged
by Soviet security chief Abakumov) of Solomon Mikhoels, a leading Jewish
cultural figure. The campaign culminated in 1952, with the arrest of several
leading Jewish physicians on charges of plotting to poison Stalin and other
leaders. See Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s
War Against the Jews: The Doctor’s Plot and the Soviet Solution (Free
Press, 1990).
(8)
It is significant that
in May 1947 Stalin ordered the elimination of the death penalty from criminal
law. Death by shooting was not reinstated until 1950, when Stalin revived its
use for political crimes. See Peter Solomon Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin (Cambridge University Press,
1996). Even after 1950, prisoners, including those charged with espionage, were
executed only very rarely.
(9)
A copy of a ten-page
report from Abakumov to Stalin, dated July 17, 1947, the day that Wallenberg is
alleged to have died, and available in the papers of historian Dmitry
Volkogonov at the Library of Congress, raises other, disturbing questions. The
report, which does not mention Wallenberg or any other prisoners, outlines
procedures for dealing with political cases, one of which is the use of torture
during interrogations as a means of obtaining confessions, and adds that, since
some of the investigators were inexperienced, mistakes had been made. Abakumov
could have been suggesting that someone had decided it was time to torture
Wallenberg into confessing and had gone too far (which would explain why the
interrogation was not registered). On the other hand, the report could simply
have been related to broad policy decisions, including perhaps the transfer of
prisoners such as Wallenberg to the status of special prisoner.
