Raoul Wallenberg was from a well-connected and upstanding Swedish family. He’d been a star student of architecture and became a successful businessman. Because of his family and business connections throughout Europe, he was recruited as a special envoy for a major rescue operation of Hungarian Jews in 1944. Between March and June of that year, the Nazis had deported about 400,000 Jews, most of them to the Auschwitz death camp. Wallenberg distributed documents to the Jews of Budapest and convinced Hungarian authorities to let the documentation (called a Schutz-Pass) function as passports. Those passports saved some 15,000 Jews from certain death. In January of 1945 Wallenberg was arrested for unknown reasons by Soviet troops, who later claimed he died of a heart attack in 1947, but no one knows for sure if he died then or what happened.