Folke Bernadotte

Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg, was a grandson of the King of Sweden, a cavalry officer and a scouting leader whom the war turned into one of Europe’s best-known humanitarians. As vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross he organised exchanges of seriously wounded prisoners between Germany and the Western Allies in 1943–1944, and in the spring of 1945 he negotiated with Heinrich Himmler the removal to Sweden of thousands of concentration camp prisoners – the operation known as the White Buses. In the last days of the Third Reich it was through him that Himmler tried to offer the Western Allies a surrender. Three years later, as the first UN mediator in Palestine, Bernadotte was shot dead in Jerusalem by gunmen from the Jewish underground organisation Lehi. His wartime achievements are still disputed, and his death became the first great warning of how high the price of mediating in the Middle East conflict could be.

The king’s grandson, a Guards officer

He was born in Stockholm on 2 January 1895, the son of Prince Oscar Bernadotte and Ebba Munck af Fulkila. His grandfather was King Oscar II, and his uncle the future King Gustaf V. In 1888 his father had married a lady-in-waiting from outside the reigning houses and renounced his rights to the throne and his royal title; his children bore the surname Bernadotte and, from 1892, the title of Count of Wisborg, conferred by the Grand Duke of Luxembourg. The household was deeply religious – Prince Oscar was active in the evangelical movement and in charitable organisations – and many biographers regard this upbringing, which combined a sense of service with Protestant piety, as the key to his son’s later path.

Folke attended school in Stockholm and then the Karlberg Military Academy. He passed his officer’s examination in 1915, became a lieutenant in 1918 and served in the cavalry of the Horse Guards, rising to the rank of major. Neutral Sweden fought no wars, so his military career was quiet and largely ceremonial. The turning point in his private life was his marriage, on 1 December 1928 in Pleasantville near New York, to an American, Estelle Manville, the daughter of an industrialist of the Johns-Manville company. The marriage gave Bernadotte connections and financial independence, as well as a close knowledge of the United States. The couple had four sons; two of them died in childhood, a loss Bernadotte felt very deeply.

In the 1930s he represented Sweden at world’s fairs – in Chicago in 1933 and, in 1939, in New York as commissioner general of the Swedish pavilion. From 1937 he headed the Swedish Scout Association (Sveriges Scoutförbund). When war broke out in Europe he drew the scouts into the country’s defence preparations: they were to train in air-raid protection and medical service.

The Red Cross and the prisoner exchanges

The Swedish Red Cross, chaired by Folke’s uncle Prince Carl, was during the war one of the few institutions able to talk to both sides. Bernadotte became its vice-president in 1943 and soon emerged as the most active member of its leadership. His first major undertaking was an exchange of seriously wounded and sick prisoners of war between Germany on the one side and Britain and its allies on the other. In October 1943 ships from both sides arrived in the port of Gothenburg, and the prisoners were transferred from one set of vessels to the other under the supervision of the Swedish Red Cross. A further exchange followed in the autumn of 1944. According to the Swedish Red Cross, some 11,000 men returned home in the two operations.

The exchanges brought Bernadotte public attention, contacts in the German Foreign Ministry and a reputation as a man who could see difficult negotiations through. On the German side, meanwhile, people were increasingly looking to Sweden for a channel to the Western Allies. The head of SS foreign intelligence, Walter Schellenberg, and Himmler’s personal masseur Felix Kersten, who lived in Stockholm, argued to the Reichsführer that humanitarian gestures towards Scandinavians might open the way to talks with the West. The Swedish government and the Norwegian and Danish authorities in exile, for their part, had been pressing since 1944 for the rescue of their citizens imprisoned in the Reich. Bernadotte, whose background opened doors and who had the Gothenburg experience behind him, was the natural envoy.

The White Buses

In February 1945 Bernadotte flew to Berlin. On 19 February he met Himmler at the SS sanatorium in Hohenlychen; further talks took place on 2 and 21 April. He obtained permission to gather Scandinavian prisoners in the Neuengamme camp near Hamburg and then to take them to Sweden. From mid-March columns of buses, lorries and ambulances painted white with red crosses, crewed by several hundred volunteers from the Swedish armed forces, drove across the disintegrating Reich under shellfire and air raids. They collected Danes and Norwegians from camps and prisons and brought them to Neuengamme, and from there through Denmark to Sweden.

In April, as the machinery of the Reich fell apart, the operation was extended to prisoners of other nationalities, above all women from the Ravensbrück camp: French, Polish, Dutch, Belgian and Jewish women. According to Bernadotte’s own account and the Swedish press of May 1945, some 15,000 people had been evacuated by the end of April – about 8,000 Scandinavians and about 7,000 people of other nationalities. In May and June, after Germany’s surrender, thousands more former prisoners were brought to Sweden, among them many Polish and Polish-Jewish women. Estimates vary depending on whether only the Red Cross transports are counted or also the later evacuations by ship and train.

The operation also had a dark side. The Swedish historian Ingrid Lomfors and other researchers have shown that, to make room for the Scandinavians in overcrowded Neuengamme, the Swedish buses carried more than 2,000 sick prisoners of other nationalities – French, Poles, Soviet citizens – to other camps in March, where many of them died. The priority given to Scandinavian citizens followed from the Swedish government’s mandate and from Himmler’s conditions, but after the war it became the basis for accusations that the Swedes had saved “their own” at the expense of others.

Himmler’s go-between

Bernadotte spoke to Himmler as the representative of a humanitarian organisation, but the Reichsführer saw him above all as a channel to the Western Allies. As early as February Schellenberg sounded out whether the count would pass a proposal for talks to Eisenhower; Bernadotte replied that he could do so only at Himmler’s own express request and only if it meant a genuine surrender. Himmler hesitated for a long time, bound by loyalty to Adolf Hitler and by fear of him. On the night of 20–21 April, at Kersten’s estate outside Berlin, he also met Norbert Masur, an envoy of the World Jewish Congress, and a few hours later Bernadotte.

The decisive conversation took place late in the evening of 23 April at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck and lasted into the early hours of 24 April. Himmler declared that Hitler was finished and asked Sweden to pass to the British and Americans his offer of surrender on the Western Front; in the east the Germans were to fight on. Bernadotte warned that the Allies would almost certainly reject a partial surrender, but he accepted the letter and flew with it to Stockholm. The Swedish government passed the offer to the British and American ministers, and on 25 April Harry Truman and Winston Churchill replied that only an unconditional surrender to all three powers simultaneously was possible. On 28 April Reuters revealed the affair to the world. Hitler, who learned of it in the bunker, regarded it as treason: he had Himmler’s liaison officer at his headquarters, Hermann Fegelein, shot, ordered Himmler himself to be arrested and expelled him from the party in his testament. Himmler was never actually arrested, however – such was the outcome of the episode known as Himmler’s offer.

Bernadotte was therefore neither an “Allied leader”, as he is sometimes portrayed, nor an Allied envoy, but a neutral intermediary without any mandate for political negotiations. The drawn-out talks nevertheless allowed him to extract further concessions from Himmler over the prisoners: in the last days of April thousands of women, Jewish women among them, left Ravensbrück for Sweden – even as the SS was marching other columns of women prisoners out of the same camp on death marches.

The dispute over his record

In June 1945 Bernadotte published a book, Slutet (“The End”), in which he described his talks with Himmler and the rescue operation. It quickly appeared in many translations and cemented his fame. Soon, however, a dispute began over who deserved the credit. Kersten claimed that it was he who had prepared Himmler to make concessions and that Bernadotte had merely reaped the rewards. In 1953 the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, relying on the masseur’s papers, accused the count of reluctance to save Jews and portrayed him as a man who merely carried out orders. The charge long overshadowed Bernadotte’s memory, especially in Israel.

Later research, above all by the Swedish historian Sune Persson, undermined this version. According to Persson, some of the documents on which Trevor-Roper had relied were drawn up or altered after the war, and the surviving records show that in April 1945 Bernadotte did indeed also press for the release of Jewish women prisoners from Ravensbrück. It remains a fact, however, that in line with the instructions of the government in Stockholm the count put Scandinavians first for most of the operation, and that the transfer of sick prisoners out of Neuengamme is the darkest chapter of the whole undertaking.

Red Cross president and UN mediator

In 1946 Bernadotte succeeded his uncle as president of the Swedish Red Cross, and in August 1948 he chaired the International Red Cross Conference in Stockholm. He organised aid for starving post-war Europe and for refugees. His experience of talking to warring parties meant that in the spring of 1948, when the 1948 Arab–Israeli War broke out after the end of the British Mandate and the proclamation of Israel, the great powers on the Security Council named him UN mediator in Palestine on 20 May 1948. He was accompanied by the American diplomat Ralph Bunche.

Bernadotte negotiated the first truce, in force from 11 June to 9 July 1948, and created the nucleus of the military observer mission that grew into UNTSO. At the end of June he put forward his first proposals: a union of the Jewish and Arab states with Transjordan, the Negev to go to the Arabs and Galilee to the Jews, and Jerusalem to be included in the Arab part with autonomy for its Jewish population. Both sides rejected them, and in Israel the proposal to give up Jerusalem caused outrage. After the second truce, which began on 18 July, Bernadotte prepared a new report, completed on 16 September: the Negev for the Arab state, Galilee for Israel, Jerusalem under international control, and the right of Arab refugees to return to their homes or to receive compensation.

Assassination in Jerusalem

On 17 September 1948, the day after the report was completed, a convoy of UN cars was stopped in the Katamon district of Jerusalem by a jeep carrying men in Israeli uniforms. One of them ran up to Bernadotte’s car and fired a burst from a submachine gun at close range, killing the count and the French colonel André Sérot, who was sitting beside him. The assassination was carried out by members of Lehi, a radical Jewish armed organisation that regarded the mediator as a tool of the British and his plan as a threat to Jewish Jerusalem. The gunman was Yehoshua Cohen, and the killing had been approved by the organisation’s three-man leadership: Natan Yellin-Mor, Israel Eldad and the future Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir. The assassins claimed responsibility under the assumed name “Homeland Front”.

The government of David Ben-Gurion condemned the crime, dissolved Lehi and arrested hundreds of its members, but the actual perpetrators were never tried; those convicted of membership of a terrorist organisation were soon amnestied. Bernadotte was buried in Stockholm. His last report became the basis of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948, which spoke of the refugees’ right of return, and the mediator’s mission passed to Bunche, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for the armistices of 1949. Only in 1995, at a ceremony attended by the Swedish deputy prime minister, did Israel’s foreign minister Shimon Peres publicly condemn the killing.

His place in the war

Bernadotte was neither a politician nor a commander, and his part in the Second World War was confined to its last two years. Even so, he belonged to the small group of people from neutral countries who used their state’s particular position to wrest thousands of prisoners from the Reich – Scandinavians, but also Polish, French and Jewish women from Ravensbrück, many of whom would not have survived the last weeks of the war. His talks with Himmler also showed how the leadership of the Third Reich was falling apart in April 1945: the second man in the state was trying to buy himself a future behind Hitler’s back, while the Allies, true to the principle of unconditional surrender, refused to be divided. The dispute over the priorities of the “White Buses” and the fate of the prisoners moved out of Neuengamme are a reminder that even rescue operations followed the logic of national interests. His death in Jerusalem made Bernadotte at once a figure of the war that was ending and the first victim of the conflict that grew out of it.