Royal who saved thousands of Jews from Nazis was killed by Zionists. Here’s why

“I asked him [Heinrich Himmler] if he would not admit that there were decent people among the Jews, just as there were among all races. I told him that I had many Jewish friends. To my surprise, he admitted that I was right…,” wrote Folke Bernadotte about one of his meetings with Heinrich Himmler, the second in command of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Himmler was in-charge of the concentration camps where millions of Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
At the end of the meeting in 1945, Himmler checked if Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, the Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, had chosen a good chauffeur. Bernadotte had the best man, Himmler was informed.
“Good,” replied Himmler. “Otherwise it might happen that the Swedish papers would announce in big headlines: ‘WAR CRIMINAL HIMMLER MURDERS COUNT BERNADOTTE’.
This was one of the many meetings Folke Bernadotte had with Heinrich Himmler.
Bernadotte, who was leading rescue missions in Germany for the Red Cross, was negotiating the release of the inmates of the camps that housed thousands of Danes, Norwegians, Poles, French, Jews, and Germans. Eventually, Bernadotte’s efforts bore fruit. His extensive work helped free tens of thousands of prisoners, including thousands of Jews, held in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
But fate had something else for the liberator of the Jews.
Ironically, Bernadotte, who fearlessly walked into the lion’s den to free thousands, including Jews, from the most infamous Nazi camps, was assassinated by Zionists just 3 years later. His killers were members of a radical Zionist paramilitary militant organisation, Lehi, which was an offshoot of the infamous Stern Gang.
Bernadotte was killed by the Zionist outfit in 1948 in Jerusalem.
Fast-forward to October 2024, Israeli-Arab hostilities have escalated into a war with Hamas, the Gaza-based terror outfit. The conflict, which began on October 7, 2024, is nearing its one-year anniversary with no signs of stopping. Instead, the situation in West Asia has worsened after Iran, a supporter of Hamas, launched around 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1.
Amid these tensions, anti-Israeli forces engaged in a bloody war with the Jewish nation have amplified the term “Zionist” as a slur for Israelis. Meanwhile, the Israeli far-left has also been using the term to criticise nationalists and right-leaning Jews. What’s common in both parties is that they allege that it is the Zionists who are responsible for the agonies of people battered by the decades-long war in the Middle East.
Labelling all Jewish Israelis as Zionists draws on the controversial history of the Zionist movement.
The movement, founded in the late 19th century, sought to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, with Zionists advocating for the political and cultural revival of the Jewish people in their “ancestral land”. In pursuit of their “promised homeland”, several radical Zionists took up arms and formed militia groups.
For Bernadotte, who met his final fate at the hands of Zionists, it was both tragic and ironic how his life ended while he was working to forge a peaceful future for all in the region, including Arabs and, of course, Jews.
It was early 1945, and the Allied forces were tightening their hold on German Chancellor Adolf Hitler amid his diminishing military successes. The fall of Hitler’s regime was imminent. That’s when Hitler turned World War 2 more lethal and more savage as he vowed that Nazi Germany would fight to the very last man.
As the distant echoes of defeat grew louder, “the Fuhrer’s hatred of the Jews intensified further”, according to American journalist and author Shelley Emling in A Forgotten Hero.
Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer of the notorious Schutzstaffel (SS), was the man responsible for accelerating and intensifying the operation of the killing machine of the Nazis.
“The concentrated period of lethal violence in the closing round of the war. Of the millions who perished in the concentration camps, around 30 per cent died in the final five months of the war… The Fuhrer’s hatred of the Jews only intensified,” wrote Shelly.
On the other hand, there was mounting pressure on governments to get their citizens locked up in Nazi camps to be released. There was also a growing fear of what the Nazis might do to the imprisoned Jews as their regime faced an inevitable collapse.
It was against this backdrop that the polyglot Swede Folke Bernadotte negotiated deals with the architect of the Holocaust to free the prisoners locked up in the Nazi Camps.
The Bernadotte rescue operation gained fame for its ‘white buses’, which were painted entirely white with only the Red Cross emblem on the side, ensuring they wouldn’t be mistaken for military vehicles.
The operation consisted of 308 personnel, including around 20 medics, and the rest were volunteer soldiers. It used 36 hospital buses, 19 trucks, seven passenger cars, seven motorcycles, a tow truck, a field kitchen, and complete provisions for the journey, including food and fuel, which they were prohibited from sourcing in Germany.
On many of the rescue operations, Bernadotte himself would accompany the rescued prisoners.
“Folke managed to secure a number of planes and even reached out to [British PM] Winston Churchill, who agreed to place a certain number of English planes at Finland’s disposal so long as Folke was able to amass the necessary pilots and ground crews,” wrote Shelley Emling in A Forgotten Hero.
But, it was not just the Scandinavians who were freed due to the efforts of Bernadotte.
“Initially, it was not intended that the expedition would rescue prisoners other than Scandinavians, although over 400 Danish Jews were, of course, included,” Amitzur Ilan wrote in his 1999 book, Bernadotte in Palestine.
Shelley Emling in her book quotes the World Jewish Congress to say that Bernadotte’s White Buses saved thousands of Jewish lives.
During the war, Bernadotte even tried to negotiate an armistice between the Nazis and the Western Allies, without the knowledge of Adolf Hitler. However, that plan didn’t materialise.
Bernadotte emerged from the 1945 mission consistent with his previous reputation: “simple, well-meaning, energetic, bold, shallow, capable of leadership”, according to Ilan.
With an elevated reputation as a negotiator, the liberation of prisoners provided Bernadotte with a launching pad in his endeavour of saving human lives.
Two years later, as tensions in the Middle East flared up following the adoption of the UN partition resolution on November 29, 1947, the decades-long conflict between the Jews and the Muslims intensified.
The conflict in Palestine escalated, like never before, as Jews from all over the world assembled to “reclaim” what they called their homeland, Israel. Many of them had been driven out of their native countries.
When Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, five Arab armies invaded the newly formed Jewish nation, in what would come to be known as the First Arab-Israeli War.
Following the heightened tensions, Bernadotte was appointed the mediator by the UN General Assembly on May 20, 1948. The UN Security Council tasked him with being the United Nation’s mediator in Palestine, to broker peace between Jews and Arabs in the aftermath of the bloody war that erupted following Israel’s declaration of independence.
Within a month, Bernadotte succeeded in arranging a 30-day cease-fire on June 11.
After visiting Cairo, Beirut, Amman, and Tel Aviv, Bernadotte concluded that the UN partition plan was an “unfortunate” decision.
He subsequently put forward his own proposal, the ‘Bernadotte Plan’, aimed at uniting the two conflicting sides.
The Arab world rejected the Bernadotte Plan, and so did Israel.
“Most of these mediators are spies for the Jews anyway,” said a high-ranking Syrian officer, Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, as he assessed the intentions of Bernadotte, the UN mediator.
The radical Jews were left infuriated with the Bernadotte Plan, which, among other terms, would see them relinquish control over Jerusalem. The Israeli government was bent on achieving a military triumph too.
“While his [Bernadotte’s] intentions may have been noble, the result was a mediation mission doomed before it even began. Folke wasn’t trusted by the Israelis, who were infuriated by stories that he had played nice with the Nazis. There was also, of course, the lingering criticism in some circles that Folke had ignored the Jews when rescuing people from the concentration camps, even though the World Jewish Congress estimated that many thousands of Jewish lives were saved by the White Buses,” Shelley Emling in A Forgotten Hero.
However, the Bernadotte-mediated ceasefire was short-lived and fighting between Israelis and Arabs resumed on July 8.
As the First Arab-Israeli War got fiercer, Bernadotte on his UN Dakota plane took a 45-minute flight to Jerusalem from Beruit on September 17.
As Bernadotte landed in Palestine, he was quick to realise the bitterness Jews had developed for him.
“Bernadotte’s day started with a shot hitting an armoured car in his convoy while he was visiting Ramallah. No one was hurt and, according to army liaison officer Moshe Hillman, Bernadotte was proud of the bullet hole and showed Hillman the UN flag that had saved him,” notes a remembrance piece in the Jewish Virtual Library. Hillman was an Israeli military liaison officer, accompanying Bernadotte.
Bernadotte escaped narrowly, but he couldn’t dodge the second attempt on his life that evening.
“In the Katamon quarter, we were held up by a Jewish Army-type jeep placed in a roadblock and filled with men in Jewish Army uniforms. At the same moment, I saw an armed man coming from this jeep. I took little notice of this because I merely thought it was another checkpoint. However, he put a Tommy gun through the open window on my side of the car, and fired point-blank at Count Bernadotte and Colonel Serot,” General Aage Lundstrom, a Swedish Air Force officer, was quoted in a Jerusalem Post report.
The report was written by Aaron Reich in 2021, recounting the incidents of the fateful day in 1948.
“I also heard shots fired from other points, and there was considerable confusion… Count Bernadotte bent forward, and I thought at the time he was trying to get cover. I asked him: ‘Are you wounded?’ He nodded, and fell back… When we arrived [at Hadassah hospital]… I carried the Count inside and laid him on the bed…. I took off the Count’s jacket and tore away his shirt and undervest. I saw that he was wounded around the heart and that there was also a considerable quantity of blood on his clothes about it. When the doctor arrived, I asked if anything could be done, but he replied that it was too late,” Lundstrom was quoted in the Jerusalem Post report.
That was the end of Bernadotte. He was hit six times.
A plan hatched by Zionist Lehi leaders, including future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and peace activist Natan Yellin-Mor, killed the man who strived to achieve peace between Israel and the Arab world, especially the Palestinians, wrote Aaron Reich.
Although the Stern Gang later claimed responsibility for the assassination of Bernadotte, no one was ever charged by the Israeli government. The killing wasn’t even publicly acknowledged until 1977.
A day after the shooting incident, Bernadotte’s body was flown to Haifa and then to Sweden, via France.
Bernadotte’s life and death stand out in the complex history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. It is quite a twist of fate and handiwork of circumstances that a man who saved thousands of Jews ultimately lost his life to Zionists. Perhaps Bernadotte’s own words sum up best the purpose of the humanitarian efforts of his lifetime, “We weren’t brought into this world to be happy, but to make others happy.”