The University of Michigan and the US Postal Service celebrated the issuance of the Raoul Wallenberg commemorative postage stamp on April 27 at the Rackham Building Auditorium. The first-day issuance of the stamp was on April 24 in Washington, DC.

President Lee C. Bollinger, Carl January and S. David Fineman of the US Postal Service, Sen. Carl Levin, Rep. Lynn Rivers and Ann Arbor Mayor Ingrid Sheldon spoke at the event.

Wallenberg, who graduated from the U-M in 1935 with a bachelor's degree in architecture, became a Swedish diplomat to Budapest. He helped save the lives of at least 20,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II by bargaining with Nazi officials, establishing safehouses, distributing false passports, disguising Jews in Nazi uniforms and setting up checkpoints to avert deportations.

The Soviet Union arrested Wallenberg, who was then in his mid-30s, as a US spy in 1945. Russians today say variously that he died of a heart attack, was shot or was poisoned in 1947, but reports have persisted that he lived many years after that date.

Per Anger, former Swedish ambassador to Australia and Canada and, during World War II, a member of the Swedish Foreign Service in Hungary with Wallenberg, delivered the U-M's annual Wallenberg Address in 1995, which marked the 50th year of his friend's disappearance.

Anger said that Wallenberg may still be alive in Russia and challenged veterans of Soviet intelligence units and current Russian officials to release all of the available information about the fate of the world-renowned humanitarian.