Raoul Wallenberg’s family sues Russia’s security service

The family of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II before disappearing under Soviet rule, are suing Russia’s security service for access to its files, their lawyer says.

The Wallenberg family “wants to force the FSB (the successor to the KGB) to give it access to the originals of the documents” that concern Wallenberg’s fate, their lawyer Ivan Pavlov tells AFP.

He says that Wallenberg’s relatives have made many attempts to gain access to the FSB archives dating back to the Soviet era. These were either rejected or the documents they received were incomplete, Pavlov says.

As a special envoy in Nazi-controlled Hungary, Wallenberg issued Swedish identity papers to tens of thousands of Jews, allowing them to flee Nazi-occupied Hungary and likely death.

In 1957, the Soviet Union released a document saying Wallenberg had been jailed in the Lubyanka prison, the notorious building where the KGB security services were headquartered, and that he died of heart failure on July 17, 1947.

But his family refused to accept that version of events, and for decades have been trying to establish what happened to him.

— AFP