Wallenberg’s fate

статья в NYT:

MOSCOW — The 1945 disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg — a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi gas chambers — ranks among the most enduring mysteries of World War II.

This summer, however, the newly published diaries of the original head of the K.G.B. — found secreted inside the wall of a dacha — have shed fresh light on the case by stating outright for the first time that Wallenberg was executed in a Moscow prison.

“I have no doubts that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947,” wrote Ivan A. Serov, a Soviet military man who ran the K.G.B. from 1954 to 1958.

... the Kremlin released a report in 1957. It said a newly discovered, partial medical report indicated that Wallenberg, age 34, died of a heart attack in prison in July 1947 — 

... the final report in 2000 reached no definitive conclusion about Wallenberg’s fate, and found that documents had been destroyed or altered to eliminate all traces of him

Memoirs from high-ranking Kremlin officials are exceedingly rare, and this one, while hardly definitive, contains several references to previously unknown documents on Wallenberg.

They include a report about Wallenberg’s cremation, and another quoting Viktor Abakumov, who preceded Serov as head of state security but was tried and executed in 1954 in the last Stalin purges. Abakumov apparently revealed during his interrogation that the order to “liquidate” Wallenberg had come from Stalin and Vyacheslav M. Molotov, the foreign minister.

Four years ago, Serov’s only grandchild, Vera Serova, 57 [не гуглицо], a retired ballet dancer, hired workers to renovate the garage at the dacha she inherited from her grandfather in northwestern Moscow. The workers demolishing the internal walls stumbled upon a few hidden suitcases.

Mrs. Serova turned over a copy of the diaries to a publisher, who condensed them into a single, 632-page volume. The book was released in conjunction with a small museum exhibition curated by the Russian Military-Historical Society. [гони про дробности!]

 He died of a heart attack in 1990 at 84 [по другой версии попал под поезд].

In the half-dozen pages devoted to the Wallenberg case — somewhat sketchy and written in dry, bureaucratic language — Serov said Nikita S. Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin as Soviet leader, had asked him to investigate what happened, respond to Sweden and help purge Molotov. Serov wrote that ultimately he failed to uncover the full circumstances of Wallenberg’s death, and found no evidence that he had been a spy.

Foreign governments and researchers have long suspected that Moscow was withholding documents, unwilling to confirm that Stalin would coldbloodedly order the murder of a foreign diplomat rather than admit that the Kremlin had been lying.

Marie Dupuy, Wallenberg’s niece and heir to the sustained clan effort to unearth the truth, said she would like to see the original diaries and ask the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., for the documents mentioned by Serov. “Numerous questions remain about the source material, which must be thoroughly evaluated before any conclusions can be drawn,” Ms. Dupuy said in a statement on her website.

• статья Хинштейна о Серове в МК 
• статья про Валенберга на Ньюзру

Пользуясь дипломатическим статусом, Валленберг выдавал местным евреям "защитные паспорта", предоставлявшие их владельцам статус шведских граждан, ожидающих репатриации. Он убедил некоторых немецких генералов не выполнять приказы Гитлера по вывозу евреев в лагеря смерти, угрожая им наказанием за военные преступления, и таким образом предотвратил уничтожение будапештского гетто в последние дни перед наступлением Красной Армии. Всего ему удалось спасти не менее 100.000 венгерских евреев. В одном только будапештском гетто к моменту прихода советских войск находилось 97.000 человек. Из 800.000 евреев, проживавших в Венгрии до войны, выжило лишь 204.000.

За заслуги перед человечеством Раулю Валленбергу поставлены памятники во многих городах мира.