5 of the World’s Most Devastating Financial Crises

Raoul Wallenberg


Wallenburg, Raoul
Raoul Wallenburg, c. 1930s.
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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 to him after his arrest.

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  Jimmy Hoffa
  

Savvy, smart, and no-nonsense, Jimmy Hoffa started out as a union organizer and by 1958 had climbed the ranks to become the president of the Teamsters, the largest labor union in the United States. It was widely known that many of the Teamsters’ dealings were deeply corrupt. He was avidly pursued by federal authorities, whom he managed to evade until 1964, when he was sent to federal prison for jury tampering and a host of other crimes. Even from behind bars, it seemed that Hoffa succeeded in controlling Teamster activities. He was released in 1971 under the condition that he would steer clear of union activities. On July 30, 1975, Hoffa went to a restaurant in suburban Detroit for what is thought to have been a meeting with Teamster officials. He was never seen again and was legally declared “presumed dead” in 1982. His remains one of the most-compelling mysterious disappearances of the 20th century.

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