Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg

Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg (4 August 1912 – disappeared 17 January 1945) was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and humanitarian. During the closing years of World War II, he saved hundreds of Jews in German-occupied Hungary from German Nazis and Hungarian fascists. Between July and December 1944, as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest, Wallenberg provided protection passports and housed Jews in buildings identified as Swedish territory.

During the Red Army's Siege of Budapest on 17 January 1945, Wallenberg was captured by SMERSH on suspicion of espionage and later disappeared. He was later believed to have died on July 17, 1947, while imprisoned in the Lubyanka, the prison at the KGB secret police headquarters in Moscow. The motives for Wallenberg's arrest and detention by the Soviet Union, as well as the circumstances of his death and his ties to US intelligence, remain unknown.

Wallenberg has received various humanitarian distinctions in the decades since his believed death as a result of his successful efforts to rescue Hungarian Jews. One of those spared by Wallenberg, US Congressman Tom Lantos, supported legislation in 1981 to make Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the United States, the second person ever to earn this honor. In addition, Wallenberg holds honorary citizenship in Canada, Hungary, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Wallenberg has been named one of Israel's Righteous Among the Nations. Numerous memorials have been erected in his honor, and streets have been named after him all throughout the world. The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States was founded in 1981 to "perpetuate Raoul Wallenberg's humanitarian ideals and nonviolent courage." It bestows the Raoul Wallenberg Award on those who achieve such objectives on an annual basis. The United States Congress gave him a Congressional Gold Medal in appreciation of his achievements and heroic deeds during the Holocaust.