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People of Note - Obituaries
GenealogyBuff.com - Per Anger, Former Swedish Diplomat
Posted By: GenealogyBuff.com
Date: Sunday, 4 September 2016, at 4:34 p.m.
System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Per Anger, Former Swedish Diplomat
December 07, 1913 - August 30, 2002
Former Swedish diplomat, Per Anger, who worked with Raoul Wallenberg in shielding thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi death camps, has died. He was 88. Anger died in a Stockholm hospital August 25, 2002, after suffering a stroke. Per Johan Valentin Anger was born December 7, 1913, in Gothenburg, Sweden. He studied law at the University of Stockholm, and then later at the University of Uppsala. After he graduated in November 1939, the same day as war broke out between the Soviet Union and Finland, Per Anger was drafted to the army. Shortly thereafter the Foreign Department offered him a trainee position at the Swedish legation in Berlin, Germany. Per Anger finished his army service in January 1940, and by the end of that month he arrived in Berlin. In June 1941, Anger returned to Stockholm and became an official Swedish diplomat. On March 19, 1944, Germany invaded Hungary and Per Anger witnessed firsthand the Nazi persecutions. He was shocked the first day when suddenly every fourth person on the street was wearing a yellow Star of David. Anger, as First Secretary of the Swedish Legation in Budapest, began issuing temporary protective passports that identified Jews as Swedes to keep them from being sent to Nazi death camps. He was joined by Wallenberg, who is credited with saving some 20,000 Jews from deportation before he was arrested in 1945 by Soviet troops and disappeared at the age of 32. After the war, Anger led numerous appeals to find out more of Wallenberg’s fate. In the 1980s, he traveled to Moscow to appeal personally to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2000, the Russians finally acknowledged that Wallenberg and his driver were imprisoned for political reasons until they died in 1947. For his heroic actions, Anger received several awards. In 1982, he was awarded as a "Righteous Among the Nations" by the State of Israel and Yad Vashem, given to gentiles who, with danger for their own lives, rescued Jews during World War II. He had a tree planted in his honour in "The Avenue of the Righteous" in Jerusalem. In 1995, he was honoured with the Hungarian Republic's Order of Merit.In 1996, he was honoured by the Jewish Council of Sweden. A book about Per Anger was published in 1997; A Quiet Courage—Per Anger, Wallenberg's Co-Liberator of Hungarian Jews” written by Elisabeth R Skoglund and published by Baker Books. And in 2000, Anger was awarded honorary Israeli citizenship. He is survived by his wife, Elena, and three children.
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