While serving as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings which he declared as Swedish territory.

[3] In 1957, 12 years after his disappearance, he was reported by Soviet authorities to have died of a suspected myocardial infarction on 17 July 1947 while imprisoned in the Lubyanka, the prison at the headquarters of the NKVD secret police in Moscow.

[4] However, there is no conclusive proof of this and his cause and date of death have been disputed ever since, with some people claiming to have encountered men matching Wallenberg's description until the 1980s in Soviet prisons and psychiatric hospitals.

The motives behind Wallenberg's arrest and imprisonment by the Soviet government, along with questions surrounding the circumstances of his death and his ties to US intelligence, remain shrouded in mystery and are the subject of continued speculation.

[10][11] Although some have claimed that Wallenberg was responsible for rescuing 100,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust in Hungary, historians regard that figure as an exaggeration;[12][13][14] Yad Vashem estimates the number of people granted protective paperwork as about 4,500 individuals.

[16] Although the Wallenberg family was rich, he worked at odd jobs in his free time and joined other young male students as a passenger rickshaw handler at Chicago's Century of Progress.

[citation needed] Beginning in 1938, the Kingdom of Hungary, under the regency of Miklós Horthy, passed a series of anti-Jewish measures modeled on the so-called Nuremberg Race Laws enacted in Germany by the Nazis in 1935.

Because of this, Wallenberg's business associate, Kálmán Lauer, found it increasingly difficult to travel to his native Hungary, which was moving still deeper into the German orbit.

Under the personal leadership of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel for his role in the implementation of the Nazis' Final Solution, deportations took place at a rate of 12,000 people per day.

This resulted in large-scale grassroots protest in Switzerland against the unprecedented barbarism against Jews and led to Horthy being threatened by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The transports from Hungary were halted with few exceptions by Miklós Horthy two days earlier in large part because he was warned by Roosevelt, Churchill, the King of Sweden and even the Pope after the very vocal Swiss grass roots protests against the mass murder in Auschwitz.

[38] With the money mostly raised for the War Refugee Board by American Jews, Wallenberg rented 32 buildings in Budapest and declared them to be extraterritorial, protected by diplomatic immunity.

[42] Portuguese diplomats Sampaio Garrido and Carlos de Liz-Texeira Branquinho rented houses and apartments to shelter and protect refugees from deportation and murder and issued safe conducts to approximately 1,000 Hungarian Jews.

[48][49] Wallenberg started sleeping in a different house each night, to guard against being captured or killed by Arrow Cross Party members or by Adolf Eichmann's men.

[50] Two days before the Soviet Army occupied Budapest, Wallenberg negotiated with Eichmann and with Major-General Gerhard Schmidthuber, the supreme commander of German forces in Hungary.

For example, British businessman Greville Wynne, who was imprisoned in the Lubyanka prison in 1962 for his connection to KGB defector Oleg Penkovsky, stated that he had talked to, but could not see the face of, a man who claimed to be a Swedish diplomat.

Lantos' husband and fellow Holocaust survivor, Tom, later continued the congressional push for answers regarding Wallenberg after being elected to the House of Representatives in 1980.

After being told by President Carter that the Soviet Union would not answer questions to America about a non-American citizen, Lantos worked with Senator Moynihan to pass a bill recognizing Wallenberg as such.

It eventually passed by a 396–2 vote and was quickly signed into law by Reagan, making Wallenberg the second person in history (Winston Churchill being the first) to be made an honorary American citizen by an act of Congress.

[101][102] In May 1996, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released thousands of previously classified documents regarding Raoul Wallenberg, in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The documents also included a 1954 memo from an anonymous CIA source that identified a Hungarian-exile living in Stockholm who, according to the author: "assisted in inserting Wallenberg into Hungary during WWII as an agent of OSS".

[35] Another declassified memorandum written in 1990 by the curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection, William Henhoeffer, characterized the conclusion that Wallenberg was working for the OSS while in Budapest as being "essentially correct".

This message apparently acknowledged that Wallenberg was acting as a liaison between the OSS and Magyar Fuggetlensegi Mozgalom (the Hungarian Independence Movement or MFM), an underground anti-Nazi resistance organization operating in Budapest.

The communique further explained that Soós "may only be contacted" through the Swedish legation in Budapest, which was Wallenberg's workplace and also served as the operational center for his attempts to aid the Hungarian Jews.

[35] This conclusion is given further weight by additional evidence[35] suggesting that secret communications between the MFM and US intelligence were being transmitted to Washington by the Stockholm office of Iver C. Olsen, the American OSS operative who initially recruited Wallenberg to go to Budapest in June 1944.

This particular disclosure gave rise to speculation that, in addition to his attempts to rescue the Hungarian Jews, Wallenberg may have also been engaged in a separate effort intended to undermine Hungary's pro-Nazi government on behalf of the OSS.

[35] If true, this would seem to add some credence to the potential explanation that it was his association with Western intelligence that led to Wallenberg being targeted by Soviet authorities in January 1945.

[105][106] Author Alan Lelchuk who interviewed, amongst others, Wallenberg's KGB interrogator, wrote a novel that imagines the more powerful of the family may have chosen not to use their influence to locate Raoul as it could have drawn attention to their misdeeds, and they may have considered him an embarrassment, not only for being a man of morality, but his possible homosexuality.

Braham notes that Wallenberg's rescue activities did not start in earnest until the Arrow Cross coup in October 1944, and reached their greatest proportions during the siege.

However, during the Cold War, his death was exploited in Western anti-Soviet propaganda; in order to make the "Soviet crime" seem worse, his rescue operations were greatly exaggerated.