JERUSALEM — The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to immediately release to the family of Raoul Wallenberg any evidence it has that can substantiate new reports that the Swedish diplomat was shot in prison.
“The fact that this information emanated from Ambassador Alexander Yakovlev, a former close confidant of Mikhail Gorbachev and current chairman of a presidential commission which rehabilitates political victims of the Soviet era, is an indication that, after 55 years of lies, the world may finally learn the truth of the ultimate fate of the greatest Holocaust rescuer,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement Monday.
On Monday, a news wire agency quoted Yakovlev, head of the Presidential Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, as saying: “Now we have no doubts he [Wallenberg] was shot in the Lubyanka.”
Yakovlev said his panel had asked military prosecutors to investigate the case based on evidence and documents it had gathered, and that he was sure Putin would soon issue a decree rehabilitating Wallenberg. The decree will say that “Wallenberg was a victim of Stalin’s repression,'” Interfax, the news agency, quoted Yakovlev as saying.
A Swedish official working with Russia on unraveling the fate of Wallenberg said his country is no closer to knowing how the diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during World War II died.
Jan Lundvik, a member of a joint Swedish-Russian committee working to uncover Wallenberg’s fate, said the Swedish side of the inquiry had garnered fresh evidence on the chain of events which led to the diplomat’s imprisonment.
But the central issue of how and when he died is unsolved. “We have a number of conflicting versions, but we have no way of telling which one reflects the truth,” Lundvik told Reuters late Monday.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, called upon the Swedish authorities to make every effort to clarify Wallenberg’s fate, and to take action against those responsible for his murder.
“The Swedish authorities have the legal authority to take action against those who committed this terrible crime…one can only hope that they will exercise the fullest legal means to ensure prosecution if the perpetrators are still alive,” Zuroff said.
Lundvik noted that the Soviets had first said in 1957, citing a report by a doctor at the Lubyanka, that Wallenberg had been found dead in his cell after a heart attack.
“Then there are the versions that it was not a natural death but that he was put to death. There is the one that he was shot, there is the one that he was poisoned, and there is still another version that he died after having been badly treated,” he said, adding there is no definitive evidence indicating the newest version in more truthful than others.