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.
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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 Russians, 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.”
Banking on Himmler’s illusions
For Sweden, whose government had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that its neutral stance was being perceived as pro-German, Himmler’s illusions came like a godsend. “The Swedish ball-bearing industry continued to export to Germany for a long time, and financial transactions between Sweden and Germany caused significant irritation among the British and Americans,” Zander said. “The Allies made it very clear: 'If you haven’t figured out who’s winning this war, it’s time you do.'”
Sweden got the message. On the request of its occupied neighbours Norway and Denmark, the Swedish government tasked Bernadotte, a skilled diplomat and a top official within the Red Cross, to head the talks.
“No other organisation would have been able to pull this off. Sweden was neutral, and the Red Cross was the only actor both sides trusted enough to negotiate with,” an official at the Swedish Red Cross in Stockholm said, who did not want to appear with her name as she was speaking on behalf of her institution in general.
“It was a defining moment for Sweden,” she said.
Between February and April 1945, Bernadotte travelled to Germany to meet Himmler a total of four times. At first, the discussions focused on the release and evacuation of only Scandinavian prisoners, but as the frontlines drew closer, Himmler gradually allowed the rescue mission to cover also other nationalities.
In all, Sweden deployed 75 vehicles, including 35 white-painted buses carrying the Red Cross’s emblematic symbol on the sides and roofs, and 250 volunteers to the mission.
At the men’s last meeting, which took place in the middle of the night between April 23 and 24 in the northern German city of Lubeck, Himmler, who had now grown desperate for post-war outs, unexpectedly granted Bernadotte the right to evacuate anyone he wanted – on the condition he delivered a message to the Swedish government. The message was to be passed on to US General Dwight Eisenhower and contained a proposal for a potential German surrender on the entire Western front. The Allies ended up rejecting the offer.
Race against the clock
In the meantime, the first Swedish convoy had arrived at Ravensbrück. It was an extremely risky – and time-sensitive – mission. Some of the buses had been deployed in such a rush that they had been painted on the ferry over to mainland Europe.
“The Swedes were nervous. Their main concern was that Himmler no longer had control over his own men – and that they wouldn’t keep to their word,” Zander said.
In a bid to save as many prisoners as possible, the Swedes packed the buses to the rim.
A first transport carrying 786 women, including 650 French prisoners, departed in the early hours of April 23. The following two days, three more convoys, with 1,754 women and “around 50 children” onboard, left the camp.
Eight-year-old Irene Krausz-Fainman was one of the children aboard the buses. "I think I only saw my mum cry twice in my life. Once when we arrived at Ravensbrück and they took away her wedding ring. And then when we walked out of the gates, got on the White Buses, and the Swedish driver put his coat around me," she recalled in Magnus Gertten’s 2011 documentary “Harbour of Hope” – named after the Malmo port where the women would finally find their freedom.
Perilous journey
But the dangers were far from over. Before they could reach Denmark and board the ferry to Sweden, they first had to pass a treacherous German warzone still engulfed in fighting. Despite their Red Cross insignias, two of the convoys were struck by Allied fighter jets as German tanks tried to integrate them for protection.
One of the Swedish drivers, and more than a dozen passengers, were killed in the air strikes.
On April 26, after travelling for more than 72 hours and having covered 500 kilometres, the first White Bus convoy reached Nyborg in Denmark, where a ferry to Sweden waited for the women.
The Swedes were now out of vehicles to save the thousands of prisoners that still remained in Ravensbrück [Editor’s note: in 1944, the camp counted some 70,000 inmates] and who Himmler had suddenly granted them permission to take. To remedy this, the Swedes managed to negotiate a last-minute train transport and were able to bring out an additional 3,960 women. The train carrying them would later become known as the “ghost train” after having gone missing for four days before reappearing in Lubeck on April 29, after which the women were brought to Denmark and finally Sweden.
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Horrific sights
In Sweden, the arrival of the White Buses and their passengers shocked everyone. Up until then, the Swedes had largely been shielded from the horrifying reports of the Holocaust due to an “informal censorship” imposed by the government for fear that “anti-German” publicity could jeopardise the country’s neutrality and potentially draw it into the war.
When the White Buses approached Sweden, many Swedes were exposed to the realities of Hitler’s war crimes for the very first time. In one of the first uncensored news reports, filmed aboard one of the ferries carrying the Ravensbrück survivors and included in Gertten’s documentary, the reporter could hardly contain his emotion when he saw the many emancipated bodies.
“We go down into lower deck. I’m describing what I’m seeing here: It is horrific no matter where I look.”
In the same footage, a woman can be heard comforting one of the passengers in the background: “In two hours, you will be in Sweden, and then you will be taken to a hospital. You need to be a little patient." An almost inaudible moaning voice then answers: "My heart is broken."
Another journal film captured the moment the women stepped off the ship in Malmo. “The pitiful procession seems endless. The elderly, the sick, children, mothers with newborns – born into suffering and captivity,” the narrator observed.
The scenes show how the women, dressed in rags, cautiously smile as they move forward on the dock. Many look frightened and confused, as though they are unsure they have really reached safety. Mothers can be seen pressing their blanket-covered babies almost desperately to their chests.
“Many survivors didn’t immediately grasp that they were now in a country where they no longer had to fear for their lives,” Zander explained, noting that the Swedish reception experience – although well-intentioned – was also partly traumatising.
There were several reasons for that. Almost immediately after their arrival, the women were sent to a sanitation centre, where they were washed, deliced and given new clothes. Their old garments were burned to prevent the spread of diseases.
“For those who had survived the concentration camps, this was a terrifying experience. To them, burning their clothes signaled that their time had come – that they were about to be executed,” Zander said, adding that many had also hidden their most valuable personal items in those clothes.
They also underwent a medical examination, and were split into two groups: those deemed to be in fair health, and those who were ill and needed to be quarantined and admitted to hospital. Some were very ill.
“Several women died shortly after we arrived in Sweden. The malnutrition, the blows and the injuries from Ravensbrück had left them too weak to recover,” Van de Perre recalled in her memoir.
The overall reception experience, however, was mainly a good one, and the women were given food, sweets, clothes and cigarettes as well as some pocket money during their stay. Hundreds of temporary reception centres had been set up in schools, museums and hotels across southern Sweden to house them.
“My mother could never get over the kindness that was shown to us,” the now aged Krausz-Fainman said in the 2011 documentary. “They gave me so many dolls I couldn’t believe it.”
After a few months of convalencence, Sweden began to repatriate the survivors. But not everyone wanted to leave. In all, Sweden took in some 30,000 survivors during the war – half of them brought in by the Red Cross rescue mission – and 8,000 of chose to stay.
The Dutch resistance fighter Neyssel was one of them. She went on to marry a Swede, took on her husband’s name Bremell, and founded a family in the southwestern city of Goteborg. In 1949, she testified against the Ravensbrück camp commander Suhren and two especially brutal camp supervisors. All three were sentenced to death for their war crimes.
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