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 H. 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, VicePresident 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 arc 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 the Swedish Foreign Office, extending his mandate to non-Scandinavians and to ‘the transfer to Sweden of a number of Jews’. On 21 April, Himmler also gave his consent to the Swedish Red Cross to transport women of all nationalities out of Ravensbrück camp. Some 3,000 women were brought out from Ravensbrück by the white buses, and, with an entire German train made available, some 4,000 more female prisoners were transported from Ravensbrück to Denmark and onwards to Sweden.
The accusations against Bernadotte to the effect that he refused to save Jews from the concentration camps are obvious lies. Roughly half of the 7,000 women saved from Ravensbrück seem to have been Jewish. Hillel Storch, the World Jewish Congress representative in Stockholm, estimated that the Swedish Red Cross saved at least 5,000 Jews before the end of the war.
