Frederick von Dardel

Fredrik Elias August, b. 28 Aug 1885,d.1979   Maria Sophia (Maj) von Dardel, né Wising, b. November 5, 1891, d. 1979

He studied law at Uppsala University and received his degree in 1908. von Dardel  became Chief Administrative Officer of Karolinska Hospital in 1940. He retired in 1950; married to Maj Wallenberg, né Wising, in 1918. They had two children, Guy (b. 1919) and Nina (b. 1921) and together raised Maj's son, Raoul G. Wallenberg (b. 1912), from her first marriage.

By all accounts, Fredrik von Dardel and Raoul Wallenberg, were very close. When his stepson turned eighteen, Fredrik offered Raoul to address him by his first name. Wallenberg asked to call him "Pappa" (Dad) instead.

After Raoul's disappearance in 1945, Fredrik von Dardel took on the role of "ombudsman" for his affairs. For three decades he worked tirelessly to obtain full information about his stepson's fate, gathering and analysing witness testimonies, and keeping in close contact with the Swedish Foreign Office to press diplomats to continue to pursue the case.

In 1970 he published a book  entitled "Facts Around A Fate" ("Fakta kring ett öde", Proprius Förlag) which outlined many of the most important witness testimonies in the Wallenberg investigation for the first time in public.

Von Dardel also kept detailed notes and a diary, chronicling the actions taken by the family on Raoul's behalf.

At age 90, two years before his death, he petitioned the Swedish government to lift the secrecy restrictions that governed documentation in the Wallenberg case. The government instead decided to merely reduce the secrecy requirement from fifty to thirty years, which kept many important documents inaccessible to the family.