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Disputes regarding his death
Several former prisoners have claimed to have seen Wallenberg after his reported death in 1947. In February 1949, former German Colonel Theodor von Dufving, a prisoner of war, provided statements concerning Wallenberg. While in the transit camp in Kirov, while being moved to Vorkuta, Dufving encountered a prisoner dressed in civilian clothes with his own special guard. The prisoner claimed that he was a Swedish diplomat and said he was there "through a great error".

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal searched for Wallenberg and collected several testimonies. 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. Efim (or Yefim) Moshinsky claims to have seen Wallenberg on Wrangel Island in 1962. An eyewitness asserted that she had seen Wallenberg in the 1960s in a Soviet prison.

During a private conversation about the conditions of detention in Soviet prisons at a Communist Party reception in the mid-1970s, a KGB general is reported to have said that "conditions could not be that harsh, given that in Lubyanka prison there is some foreign prisoner who had been there now for almost three decades."

The last reported sightings of Wallenberg were by two independent witnesses who said they had evidence that he was in prison in November 1987. John Farkas was a resistance fighter during World War II and was the last man claiming to have seen Wallenberg alive. Farkas' son has stated that there have been sightings of Wallenberg "up into the 1980s in Soviet prisons and psychiatric hospitals."

Attempts to find Wallenberg
Annette Lantos, one of the people rescued by Wallenberg, began campaigning in the United States to get the Soviet Union to give answers regarding the disappearance, with her first attempt being in the late 1970s with her establishment of the International Free Wallenberg committee. She would later try to get President Jimmy Carter to look for more information by sending in a postcard to the Ask President Carter radio show and by working with Simon Wiesenthal and Jack Anderson to tell Wallenberg's story through a Washington Post column. Noticing these efforts and angry about Sweden not going far enough in their efforts to find Wallenberg, Nina Lagergren, Wallenberg's half-sister, traveled to the United States to campaign with Lantos. The efforts of Lantos and Lagergren eventually led to the creation of the Free Wallenberg Committee in Congress, led by Senator Patrick Moynihan, whose goal was to determine what happened to Wallenberg. Lantos' husband and fellow Holocaust survivor, Tom, would later continue the congressional push for answers regarding Wallenberg after being elected to the House of Representatives in 1980.

Honorary Citizenship
One of Tom Lantos' first acts as a representative in Congress was to recognize Wallenberg as an honorary American citizen. After being told by President Carter that the Soviet Union would not answer questions to America about a non-American citizen, Lantos worked with Sen. Moynihan to pass a bill recognizing Wallenberg as such. The effort grew as 60 Minutes aired a piece on Wallenberg while the resolution was moving through Congress. Newly-elected President Ronald Reagan watched the program and joined Lantos and Moynihan in pushing for the resolution to pass. It eventually passed by a 396-2 vote and was quickly signed into law by Reagan, making Wallenberg the second honorary American citizen in history after Winston Churchill by an Act of Congress.

With his citizenship now granted, the Wallenberg family successfully sued the Soviet Union in 1984 over his disappearance for $39 million, or $1 million per year that Wallenberg's fate has been unknown. However, the Soviet Union ignored the suit and did not pay any of the damages awarded by the judge. They also did not offer any information into his disappearance.

Efforts Outside America
Raoul Wallenberg's half-brother, Guy von Dardel, a well-known physicist, retired from CERN and dedicated the rest of his life to finding out his half-brother's fate. He traveled to the Soviet Union about fifty times for discussions and research, including an examination of the Vladimir prison records. Over the years, Professor von Dardel compiled a 50,000-page archive of interviews, journal articles, letters, and other documents related to his quest. In 1991, Dardel initiated a Swedish-Russian working group to search eleven separate military and government archives from the former Soviet Union for information about Wallenberg's fate, but the group was not able to find useful information. Many, including Professor von Dardel and his daughters, Louise and Marie, do not accept the various versions of Wallenberg's death. They continue to request that the archives in Russia, Sweden, and Hungary become available to impartial researchers.

Present Day Attempts
In 2012, Russian lieutenant-general Vasily Khristoforov, head of the registration branch of the Russian Federal Security Service, said that the Wallenberg case was still open. He also dismissed any allegation of a continuing cover-up, saying that "this is another state and a different special service" from the Soviet Union and the services in charge of holding Wallenberg.

Declared death in absentia
On 29 March 2016, an announcement was made by the Swedish Tax Agency that a petition to have Wallenberg declared dead in absentia was submitted. It stated that if he does not report to the Tax Agency before 14 October 2016, he will be declared dead legally.

Wallenberg was declared dead legally in October 2016, as announced through the petition. Consistent with the approach used in other cases where the circumstances of death were not known, the Swedish tax agency recorded the date of his death as 31 July 1952, five years after he went missing.