Soviets Assist Probe of Wallenberg’s Fate : Humanitarianism: They had said the Swede who rescued Hungarian Jews in World War II had died in 1947. Now, officials will release all data.

For the first time, Soviet authorities have admitted the possibility that Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis, may not have died in a Soviet prison in 1947, a Canadian professor investigating the case said Monday.

“They are now entertaining the possibility that he did not die when the Soviet Union said he did,” Irwin Cotler, a law professor and chairman of an international commission on the Wallenberg case, told reporters.

For decades, Soviet officials had stubbornly insisted that Wallenberg died in Moscow after being arrested by Red Army troops in Hungary.

The international group headed by Cotler has arrived in Moscow to seek more information about Wallenberg, and Soviet officials have pledged publicly to cooperate by making available from state archives all documents relating to the case.

“We now give the people in the commission full access to the archives,” Yevgeny Rymko of the Soviet Foreign Ministry told a news conference. Other members of the commission, along with Cotler, were present for the news conference, which took place at the Swedish Embassy.

The Soviet willingness to cooperate with the foreigners, to open the once top-secret archives for an investigation into the festering controversy, is part of the process of confronting past wrongs.

The investigating team, which includes Soviet human rights activists, will spend the week looking through documents and talking to former and current inmates and staff members at Vladimir Prison, 120 miles east of Moscow, where Wallenberg is said to have been sighted years after Soviet officials said he was dead.

When the foreign members of the investigating team depart at the end of the week, their Soviet counterparts will continue the search for traces of Wallenberg.

Most of the purported sightings were at Vladimir Prison in the 1950s and ‘60s, but the investigators think that Wallenberg may have been moved to another prison, because inmates at other prisons say they saw him more recently.

Two sources said they saw Wallenberg at a prison between Moscow and Leningrad as late as 1987. If alive, he would be in his late 70s.

Soviet officials told the Swedish government in 1957 that Wallenberg had died in a Soviet prison in 1947. Until last year, the case was considered closed by the Kremlin.

Wallenberg is credited with saving as many as 20,000 Hungarian Jews from being deported to Nazi death camps by supplying them with Swedish passports.

Although officially he went to Budapest in 1944 as an emissary of the International Red Cross, his true mission was to save as many Jews as possible from the Nazis and their Hungarian allies.

Wallenberg was last seen in public in January, 1945, after the Red Army liberated Hungary. He was en route to see the commander of Soviet troops in the town of Debrecen.

His disappearance caused a scandal that has tainted Swedish-Soviet relations ever since. No reason has yet been given for his arrest. In honor of his deeds, he was made an honorary U.S. citizen in 1981 by an act of Congress.

In May, the group headed by Cotler completed a 1,200-page report that asserts that the evidence is “incontrovertible that Wallenberg did not die in 1947.”

Soviet officials made the first big compromise in October by inviting Wallenberg’s relatives and friends to the Soviet Union. On that emotional visit, the Swedish guests were presented with Wallenberg’s passport, address book and calendar and were shown a card that recorded his registration as a prisoner of war in Lubyanka Prison on Feb. 6, 1945.

They were also shown a handwritten letter from a doctor at the prison saying a prisoner named Wallenberg had died of a heart attack.

The security police and Foreign Ministry authorities had steadfastly held to that version of Wallenberg’s death. Now, even officials of the security police, the KGB, have said that they will assist in the search by Cotler’s commission.

Among the commission members in Moscow is Guy von Dardel, Wallenberg’s half brother, who last October met with KGB officials and visited Vladimir Prison. Afterward, he said he was more convinced than ever that his brother had survived longer than Soviet authorities had admitted.