Abstract
Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was born in Stockholm on August 4, 1912. He was a member of a prominent Swedish family, the Wallenbergs, who for generations had played an important role in the country’s economic, political, and social life. His father, Raoul Oscar (1888–1912), was a naval officer, who died from cancer three months before his son was born, leaving the son to be raised by his widowed mother, Maj Wising Wallenberg (1891–1979). In 1918, his mother married Fredrik von Dardel (1885–1979), and from this marriage, two children were born, Guy in 1919 and Nina in 1921.
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Notes
See Lauer’s letters to Marcus Wallenberg, April 20, 1945, and to Jacob Wallenberg, September 29, 1944, in Gert Nylander and Anders Perlinge, Raoul Wallenberg in Documents, 1927–1947 (Stockholm, 2000), 100, 101, 106, 107.
Elenore Lester, Wallenberg: The Man in the Iron Web (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1982), 62.
See also Lena Einhorn, Handelsresande i liv: Om vilja och vankelmod i krigets skugga (Stockholm, 1999), 173.
See Christoph Gann, Raoul Wallenberg: So viele Menschen retten wie möglich (Munich, 1999), 19.
The Nazis’ will for a “Final solution” of the “Judenfrage” was not the only reason for the occupation of Hungary, as is often stated; see Jenö Lévai, “The Hungarian Deportations in the Light of the Eichmann Trial,” in Nathan Eck and Arieh Leon Kubovy, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. v (Jerusalem, 1963), 69–103, here 72ff. and 88.
According to Per Anger, Med Raoul Wallenberg i Budapest: Minnen från krigsdren i Ungern (Stockholm, 1985), 84, deportations on a smaller scale continued;
see also Jenö Lévai, th The Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry, ed. by Lawrence P. Davis (Zurich, 1948), 249, 254ff., 302. See also Gann, Wallenberg, 37, 43, 48.
For the early phase of the rescue attempts, see Paul A. Levine, From Indifference to Activism: Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust 1938–44, 2nd rev. and enlarged edn (Uppsala, 1998), chapter 12, 246ff., 258, 264; see further Lévai, Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 46ff., or idem, The Black Book, 227ff., 274ff.
Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols (New York. 1981). here vol. 2. 1085.
Harvey Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, rev. edn (New York, 1995), 66.
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© 2009 Tanja Schult
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Schult, T. (2009). Raoul Wallenberg’s Life, Mission, and Fate. In: A Hero’s Many Faces. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236998_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236998_3
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