Children…

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The White Buses and
other rescue operations
When the Nazi empire neared it final collapse, even SS
chief Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s most faithful follower,
began looking for ways of saving the Third Reich or his
own skin. One result was the secret negotiations which
took place in March 1945, between leading Nazis and
Count Folke Bernadotte, Deputy Chairman of the
Swedish Red Cross.These led to Sweden and Denmark
obtaining permission to send to Germany an expedition
made up of dozens of army buses painted white
with big red crosses. This risky expedition was staffed
by several hundred members of the armed forces and
some doctors and nurses. Their mission was to transport
women and children with links to Sweden out of
Germany, and rescue Scandinavian concentration camp
prisoners. The prisoners were to be transferred first to
the Neuengamme concentration camp before being
transported home. For that to happen, the Swedish Red
Cross accepted at the end of March the SS demand
that they move some 2,000 seriously ill and dying
French, Polish and Soviet prisoners from Neuengamme
to other camps. During transport, some died. In April,
the mission was expanded and all told, approximately
20,000 prisoners from some 30 different nationalities
were transported to Sweden in one of the largest rescue
actions of the war. About one third of these were Jews,
of whom a majority were women.
The exact number of Jews and others saved by the
White Buses remains uncertain, as are other important
aspects of this rescue mission.
Receiving the condemned in 1945
After the Bernadotte expedition ended, Sweden continued
to accept thousands of Nazi victims. Throughout Swe
den they received treatment, some long-term, in order
to regain their physical health. Most chose eventually to
leave the country. Many such survivors were interviewed
by the Cooperative Committee for Democratic Reconstruc
tion, and some of the interviews were published for the
book De dödsdömda vittna (“The Condemned Bear Witness”)
in the autumn of 1945. Decades later, one survivor
again interviewed said: “It was difficult to be re-born in
1945: a sick body and a tortured soul. But life wanted
me, and life collected me again from the abyss.”
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