Folke Bernadotte and the White Buses

Abstract

The Swedish Red Cross expedition to the German concentration camps in March-April 1945 was the largest rescue effort inside Germany during World War II. By a conservative estimate, over 17,000 prisoners were transported via Denmark to Sweden up until 4 May 1945. This expedition, though formally a Red Cross detachment led by Count Folke Bernadotte af Wisborg, Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, was in reality a Swedish Army detachment whose costs were covered by the Swedish Government. All vehicles were painted white so that they should be easily distinguishable from German vehicles, especially from the air, and so are known as ‘the White Buses’.Count Bernadotte arrived in Berlin on 16 February 1945, for political negotiations that included four meetings with Heinrich Himmler. Bernadotte’s original instructions had been to intervene for Scandinavian prisoners in Germany, and one controversy about his mission has been his relations to the Jews. But on 26 March Bernadotte received new instructions from ...