Russia Admits Wrongdoing in Death of Wallenberg

For the first time, Russia admitted Friday that Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis, was illegally arrested by Soviet troops and died in KGB custody.

The statement by Russia’s prosecutor general is the first official acknowledgment of wrongdoing by Soviet authorities and a public admission that Wallenberg was a victim of cynical Soviet suspicion and Stalin’s police state.

Wallenberg’s diplomatic status and extraordinary efforts to rescue Jews in wartime Hungary were well known to the advancing Red Army, said Jan Lundvik, the Swedish ambassador to a joint Russian-Swedish investigating commission that has prepared a new report on the case. But the Soviets were deeply suspicious that anyone would take such actions without having an ulterior motive.

“He risked his life to save Jews. But for Soviets, that was hard to understand,” Lundvik said. “They thought he must have been covering up for something else--that is, for spying.

“This is official recognition that a grievous mistake was made.”

For years, the Soviet government denied knowledge of Wallenberg or offered weak evidence that he had died of natural causes. For decades, the Swedish government and the Wallenberg family have kept up pressure on Soviet and Russian officials in an effort to learn the truth.

The Russian statement issued Friday formally “rehabilitates” Wallenberg and his driver, Vilmos Langfelder, and declares them innocent of all spying charges. But the statement doesn’t explain how the two died--a mystery that won’t be answered when the investigating commission issues its final report next month.

Russian officials say the main reason is that, somewhere along the line, there was a cover-up; when they went into the archives, all documents related to Wallenberg had disappeared.

“The archives were simply purged, and all the files were destroyed to hide the evidence,” said Leonid Troshin, spokesman for the prosecutor general’s office.

In its statement, the prosecutor’s office acknowledges that Soviet troops who seized Wallenberg in Budapest on Jan. 17, 1945, had no right to do so. They had no evidence of any wrongdoing by Wallenberg, his country was not an adversary of the Soviet Union, and international law accorded him diplomatic immunity.

“The prosecutor’s office has established that members of the Swedish diplomatic mission, Wallenberg and Langfelder, were unjustly arrested and deprived of freedom by Soviet extrajudicial bodies for political reasons as ‘socially dangerous persons,’ without being charged with the commission of a specific crime,” the statement said.

The statement also maintains the current government line that it is impossible to learn exactly how and why Wallenberg and his driver died. But its acknowledgment that they were “repressed” suggests that their fate was similar to others who were executed on Stalin’s orders.

Alexander Yakovlev, the head of the government’s Committee on Rehabilitation, which prepared the case for the prosecutor general’s review, said the evidence strongly suggests that Wallenberg was shot by the KGB. In the 1980s, when Yakovlev was a member of the Politburo, then-KGB chief Vladimir A. Kryuchkov even told him so.

“At some point, Kryuchkov, in a fit of candor, told me that Wallenberg was liquidated,” Yakovlev said Friday in an interview with Echo of Moscow radio.

Many believe that somehow the diplomat--who would now be 88--may have survived Stalin’s prisons and camps and could even still be alive.

“The rehabilitation means that they have confessed that Raoul was the victim of their repression,” Wallenberg’s half-sister, Nina Lagergren, told the Associated Press. “But it is no concrete evidence of what happened to Raoul.”

In Los Angeles, the Anti-Defamation League welcomed the long-awaited acknowledgment by the Russian government, said Marjorie B. Green, the group’s national director of education policy and programs.

“The ADL feels there is a certain poignant satisfaction in ending the mystery surrounding what had befallen this remarkable and righteous man,” Green said. “We knew that he had been captured by the Soviets. We didn’t know whether he was in the gulag and had died after years or whether he had been shot sooner. That was the mystery.”

Wallenberg’s bravery in wartime Budapest, the Hungarian capital, is legendary. In 1944, the Swedish government, with the support of the United States, sent him on a special mission to save Jews in German-occupied Hungary from Nazi extermination camps.

Wallenberg began issuing Swedish identity papers to as many Jews as possible. Sweden was neutral in the war, and the papers persuaded many German officers to leave their bearers alone. Wallenberg also set up “safe houses,” declaring them Swedish national territory, where thousands of Jews were sheltered during Nazi roundups. Eventually other diplomats from neutral nations were inspired to take similar measures.

When the Nazis began to ship Jews out of Budapest in train cars, Wallenberg went to the train stations and--with little more than bravado on his side--insisted that many of the passengers had Swedish passports or other papers. Other times, he ran alongside the cars, stuffing documents through the windows and then demanding that their bearers be released.

In the end, Jewish groups say, Wallenberg personally rescued at least 20,000 and perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews.

When the Soviets arrived, they were suspicious of his activities, including his frequent contacts with German officials and support from Washington, even though the U.S. was a wartime ally. The statement Friday acknowledges that although no legal charges were brought against Wallenberg, he was held on charges of working for foreign intelligence.

In 1947, the Soviet government told Sweden that Wallenberg was not in the Soviet Union and that he had been killed in fighting in 1945. But after freed POWs reported having seen Wallenberg in Soviet prisons, the government changed its story.

In 1957, the Soviet government admitted that Wallenberg had been held in a Soviet jail but had died of natural causes--a heart attack--in his cell July 17, 1947. As evidence, they produced a document signed by a prison doctor saying that Wallenberg had been found dead in his cell.

In the glasnost period of the late 1980s, Soviet officials located and returned some of Wallenberg’s personal items to his family: his passport, some crumpled dollar bills, his diary, address book and cigarette case.

But by the time the joint Swedish-Russian investigation commission began work in 1991, the archives were bare of documents related to Wallenberg. That is highly unusual, because Stalinist officials generally kept scrupulous records about prisoners, and even the most sensitive archive materials were usually kept sealed, not destroyed.

Lundvik said that he believes the Russians when they say the documents are missing and that the commission will disband after the report is released next month.

But he added that the Swedish government still considers the case open. “Sometimes things that disappear, later reappear,” he said.

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Times staff writer Erin Texeira in Los Angeles contributed to this report.