The World - News from Sept. 20, 1988

Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis, died in July, 1947, in a Soviet prison and was cremated, a Soviet official said. Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov, speaking at a press briefing in Moscow, raised the topic of Wallenberg’s death without prompting from reporters. He said a 1957 search of documents at Moscow’s Lubianka Prison had turned up a handwritten note by the prison doctor that said: “Prisoner Wallenberg died in his cell last night, presumably of (heart attack). . . . The body ordered to be cremated without a post-mortem. July 17, 1947.” The Soviets had previously maintained that Wallenberg died in prison in 1947, but Westerners have remained skeptical.