Australia makes Raoul Wallenberg first honorary citizen

Australia awarded honorary citizenship to World War II hero Raoul Wallenberg on Monday, marking the first time the country has bestowed the honor.

Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest during the Holocaust, saved thousands of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, with the backing of the Swedish government.

“The lives of those he rescued are Mr. Wallenberg’s greatest memorial and Australia is honoured to have survivors he rescued living in Australia today,” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said, according to AFP and The Australian.

An official ceremony is scheduled for May 6 in Canberra. Wallenberg has previously been awarded posthumous honorary citizenship of Israel, Hungary, the United States and Canada.

In an operation that at one point employed over 300 people, Wallenberg issued passports and protective documents to facilitate the escape of much of Budapest’s Jewish population.

To protect the Jews, he was even able to house them in more than 30 buildings he had purchased and marked with the Swedish flag, which, using his diplomatic powers, made the properties technically Swedish territory and thus legally out of reach to the Germans.

Wallenberg disappeared after the Soviets took Budapest in January 1945. The Soviet Union issued a statement in the 1950s that Wallenberg died in a Soviet prison in 1947, but his relatives and other interested parties continued to search for clues to his whereabouts for decades after.