From Ravensbrück to freedom: The story of Sweden’s daring ‘White Bus’ rescue
In April 1945, as Nazi Germany is on the brink of defeat, the Swedish Red Cross launches the largest rescue operation of World War II. The mission – arranged in secret between a Swedish aristocrat and Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, SS chief Heinrich Himmler – ultimately saves 15,000 prisoners from Nazi camps. One of the destinations is Ravensbrück, the main concentration camp for female prisoners, where thousands of women are evacuated on board Sweden’s now-iconic “White Buses”.
In the spring of 1945, an extraordinary rumour had begun to circulate among the prisoners in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Word was that the Red Cross, which in the past few weeks had negotiated the distribution of food packages and the evacuation of a handful of the camp’s worst-off inmates, planned a much larger rescue operation, potentially bringing hundreds of them to Sweden.
“I walked around and whispered to myself: ‘Lakes and forests, lakes and forests.’ It became like a mantra for me,” Anika Neyssel, a 26-year-old Dutch woman interned for her involvement in the French resistance movement, said in her post-Ravensbrück testimony.
The timing was crucial. It was the final phase of the war, and as the Allies pressed on from the West and Russia’s Red Army from the East, the Nazi camp guards had drastically ramped up their efforts to eliminate any remaining evidence of their systematic atrocities. Ever since October – when camp commander Fritz Suhren had received the order to execute 2,000 prisoners per month – the white, thick smoke billowing from the crematory had become a sickening constant. But now, the ovens were working so hard, the chimneys had begun spitting out big red flames.
“Ravensbrück already had a gas chamber and a crematory, but an additional gas chamber from Auschwitz had been brought in and installed in the camp. We could literally smell the daily executions. The horror was indescribable,” Selma Van de Perre, a Jewish resistance fighter from the Netherlands recalled in her 2020 memoir “My Name Is Selma”.
By then, Van de Perre wrote, she and the other inmates had already come to the same chilling conclusion: “The Germans were panicking and wanted to leave as few witnesses as possible.”
The already poor living conditions in the camp had also worsened. Infectious diseases like Typhus, Diphtheria and Tuberculosis were spreading like wildfire, killing the weak and starved inmates like flies.
The miracle babies who survived Ravensbruck
But just as the women braced for the worst, dozens of buses from the Swedish Red Cross pulled up outside the camp’s barbed wire fences. For many, rescue had arrived.
Between April 23 and April 25, and in several different convoys that travelled under the guise of night, some 2,500 women – most of them from Belgium, France Poland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia – were brought on the buses past the abandoned trenches and bombed-out remains of Hitler’s “Third Reich” to safety in Sweden.
Secret talks
The last-minute rescue was no coincidence. It was the result of months of secret negotiations between Count Folke Bernadotte, vice president of the Swedish Red Cross and son of Sweden’s Prince Oscar, and Hitler’s right-hand man, SS chief Himmler.
“Most of this happened behind Hitler’s back,” Ulf Zander, a Swedish historian at the University of Lund and expert on World War II, explained.
Himmler had at this point realised the Germans were going to lose the war and had hoped that the premature release of some of the Nazis’ prisoners would buy him goodwill.
“He lived in a complete fantasy world,” Zander explained. “Before he committed suicide [on May 23, 1945, three days after being captured by the British, and two weeks after Germany’s May 8 surrender. eds. note], he still believed he could become Germany’s new leader and negotiate with at least some of the Allies.”
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