Wallenberg Kin Invited to Soviet Union

STOCKHOLM â€”  The Soviet Union has invited relatives of the disappeared Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to Moscow amid signs that it may at last be prepared to clear up the fate of the man credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.

The invitation was handed to the Raoul Wallenberg Assn. in Stockholm last week by Soviet Ambassador Boris Pankin, association Chairman Per Anger said today.

Anger, who was serving alongside Wallenberg in the Swedish Embassy in Budapest when Wallenberg disappeared in January, 1945, said he will travel to Moscow in October with Wallenberg’s half-sister Nina Lagergren, half-brother Guy von Dardel and association secretary Sonja Sonnenfeld.

‘It’s a Breakthrough’

Sonnenfeld said it was the first time anybody connected with Wallenberg had been invited to the Soviet Union.

“It’s a breakthrough. It’s clear they want to talk with us, and we were told the meetings would be at a high level,� she said.

Wallenberg was last seen in public on Jan. 17, 1945, being driven to see the commander of the Soviet troops occupying Budapest after the Nazi retreat.

In 1957, then Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko said in a diplomatic note to Sweden that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison 10 years earlier.

But frequent accounts by former inmates of the vast “Gulag Archipelago� prison and labor camp system suggested that he was alive well into the 1970s. He would be 76 if he were still alive.