Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and humanitarian. He saved thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings he declared as Swedish territory.
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany. Since 1953, Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, has recognized 26,973 persons as Righteous among the Nations. Yad Vashem's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, recognizes rescuers of Jews as Righteous among the Nations to honor non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazi Germany.
Giorgio Perlasca was an Italian businessman and former Fascist who, with the collaboration of official diplomats, posed as the Spanish consul-general to Hungary in the winter of 1944, and saved 5,218 Jews from deportation to Nazi extermination camps in eastern Europe. In 1989, Perlasca was designated by Israel as a Righteous Among the Nations.
The Budapest Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto set up in Budapest, Hungary, where Jews were forced to relocate by a decree of the Government of National Unity led by the fascist Arrow cross party during the final stages of World War II. The ghetto existed from November 29, 1944 to January 17, 1945.
Per Johan Valentin Anger was a Swedish diplomat. Anger was Raoul Wallenberg's co-worker at the Swedish legation in Budapest during World War II when many Jews were saved because they were supplied with Swedish passports. After the war, he spent a lot of time trying to clarify Wallenberg's fate.
Carl Lutz was a Swiss diplomat. He served as the Swiss Vice-Consul in Budapest, Hungary, from 1942 until the end of World War II. He is credited with saving over 62,000 Jews during the Second World War in a very large rescue operation.
The War Refugee Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944, was a U.S. executive agency to aid civilian victims of the Axis powers. The Board was, in the words of historian Rebecca Erbelding, "the only time in American history that the US government founded a non-military government agency to save the lives of civilians being murdered by a wartime enemy."
The Shoes on the Danube Bank is a memorial erected on 16 April 2005, in Budapest, Hungary. Conceived by film director Can Togay, he created it on the east bank of the Danube River with sculptor Gyula Pauer to honour the Jews who were massacred by Fascist Hungarian militia belonging to the Arrow Cross Party in Budapest during the Second World War. They were ordered to take off their shoes, and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The memorial represents their shoes left behind on the bank.
Lars Ernster was a professor of biochemistry, and a member of the Board of the Nobel Foundation.
Pál Szalai also spelled Pál Szalay and later anglicized as Paul Sterling was a high-ranking Hungarian police officer and reinstated member of the Arrow Cross Party after 1944. In 1945, together with Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, Szalai helped save hundreds of Hungarian Jews in the Budapest ghetto.
The Wallenberg Medal of the University of Michigan is awarded to outstanding humanitarians whose actions on behalf of the defenseless and oppressed reflect the heroic commitment and sacrifice of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest during the closing months of World War II.
George Mantello, a businessman with various diplomatic activities, born into a Jewish family from Transylvania, helped save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust while working for the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, Switzerland from 1942 to 1945 under the protection of consul Castellanos Contreras, by providing them with fictive Salvadoran citizenship papers. He publicized in mid-1944 the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which had great impact on rescue and was a major contributing factor to Hungary's regent Miklós Horthy stopping the transports to Auschwitz.
José Arturo Castellanos Contreras was a Salvadoran army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva during World War II, and in conjunction with a Jewish-Romanian businessman named György Mandl, helped save up to 40,000 Central European Jews, most of them from Hungary, from Nazi persecution by providing them with fake Salvadoran citizenship certificates.
The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (IRWF) is a non-governmental organization which researches Holocaust rescuers and advocates for their recognition. The organization developed educational programs for school to promote peace and civil service. Founded by Baruch Tenembaum, it has offices in Buenos Aires, New York, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro and Jerusalem.
Wallenberg is an opera by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür to a libretto by Lutz Hübner. The plot is developed from events in Raoul Wallenberg's personal life. The opera premiered at the Opernhaus Dortmund on May 5, 2001. It premiered at the Estonian National Opera on June 1, 2007, directed by Dmitry Bertman.
Otto Fleischmann was a Hungarian-born Freudian psychoanalyst.
Paul A. Levine was an American–Swedish Holocaust and genocide historian, co-author of a widely used Swedish textbook on the subject.
Annamaria Torriani-Gorini was an Italian microbiologist best known for her work with bacterial alkaline phosphatase and bacterial physiology. Torriani-Gorini earned her Ph.D. in botany at the University of Milan. She worked at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, had a postdoctoral fellowship at the New York University School of Medicine, was a research associate at Harvard University, and became a professor at MIT. Torriani-Gorini advocated for social and economic justice and promoted women in science. She and her husband Luigi Gorini transformed a house in the Italian Alps into a home for Jewish orphans who were liberated from concentration camps.
Sweden was a neutral state during World War II and was not directly involved in the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe. Nonetheless, the Swedish government maintained important economic links with Nazi Germany and there was widespread awareness within the country of its policy of persecution and, from 1942, mass extermination of Jews.
