Swedish businessman and humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg was BOTD in 1912. Born in Stockholm to a wealthy and politically prominent family, his father died when he was three months old, and he was raised by his mother and grandmother. He grew up in luxury, attending prestigious private schools followed by eight months of compulsory military service. He studied in Paris for a year, before completing a degree in architecture at the University of Michigan, hitchhiking across the United States during his holidays. After graduation, he worked briefly in South Africa and Israel, returning to Sweden in 1936 to work in an import-export company. Following Hitler’s annexation of Hungary in 1938, Wallenberg’s business partner Kálmán Lauer, a Hungarian Jew, was restricted from travelling. Wallenberg became Lauer’s business representative, learning Hungarian and making frequent visits to Germany and Hungary. In 1941, he attended a private screening of Pimpernel Smith a British propaganda film about a man saving Jews from the Nazis, and resolved to do the same work. In 1944, he led an international mission with the War Refugee Board, issuing “protective passports” to thousands of Hungarian Jews to prevent their deportation. He also hid Jewish refugees in office buildings, personally negotiating with Nazi officials to help free prisoners, and in one case intervened to halt a train bound for the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Following the Russian Army’s capture of Budapest in 1945, Wallenberg was arrested and interrogated by the KGB on suspicion of espionage, and subsequently disappeared. Despite repeated efforts by Allied forces and the American government after the war, his whereabouts and death remain a mystery. He is thought to have been executed by Soviets in 1947, though rumours circulated that he survived in a Russian prison into the 1980s. He officially declared dead by the Swedish government in 2016, with his date of death noted as 31 July 1952, aged 39. Among many posthumous tributes, he was granted honorary American citizenship, and designated one of the Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel. Wallenberg was known to have been gay, a detail played down by his family and supporters for fear of tarnishing his heroic image. He has been portrayed several times onscreen, including by the (closeted gay) American actor Richard Chamberlain in the 1985 TV film Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story and Stellan Skarsgård in the 1990 film God afton, Herr Wallenberg (Good Evening, Mr Wallenberg).