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Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg (2 January 1895 - 17 September 1948) or simply Count Bernadotte, was a Swedish diplomat noted for his negotiation of the release of about 15,000 prisoners from the German concentration camps in World War II. He was assassinated by members of the underground Jewish group Lehi during his service as United Nations mediator in Palestine.

Bernadotte's grandfather was King Oscar II of Sweden, but Bernadotte's father Oscar Bernadotte left the royal family to pursue a marriage that his father disapproved. Folke Bernadotte was a graduate of the military school of Karlberg and a Swedish cavalry officer in the Royal Horse Guards. By the end of World War II he headed the Swedish-led White Buses expedition, headquartered at Friedrichsruh, Germany, when, in 1945, he received a German surrender offer from Heinrich Himmler. After the war, he was unanimously chosen by the victorious powers to be the United Nations Security Council mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1947-1948. He was assassinated in Jerusalem while pursuing his official duties.

Biography

Early life

He was the son of Oscar Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg (formerly Prince Oscar of Sweden) and his wife, née Ebba Henrietta Munck af Fulkila. Oscar, the son of King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway, married without the King's consent in 1888, thereby leaving the royal family, and was in 1892 given the hereditary title Count of Wisborg by the Grand Duke Adolphe of Luxembourg.

Marriage and children

On 1 December 1928 he married Estelle Manville (b. 26 September 1904 in Pleasantville, New York), a wealthy American heiress whom he had met in the French Riviera. They had four sons: Gustaf (b. 1930), Folke (b. 1931), Frederik (b. 1934) and Bertil (b. 1935).

Diplomatic career

World War II

Bernadotte, while vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross in 1945, attempted to negotiate an armistice between Germany and the Allies. At the very end of the war, he received Heinrich Himmler's offer of Germany's complete surrender to Britain and the United States, provided Germany was allowed to continue resistance against the Soviet Union. The offer was passed to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Harry S. Truman.

Just before the end of the war, he led a rescue operation transporting interned Norwegians, Danes and other western European inmates from German concentration camps to hospitals in Sweden. Around 15,000 people were taken to safety in the "White Buses" of the Bernadotte expedition, including between 6,500 and 11,000 Jews.

There has been some debate as to whether Bernadotte was sympathetic toward Nazi ideology. Leading up to and following his assassination, such accusations appeared prominently in the Israeli press. Israeli journalist and historian Danny Rubinstein writes that many scholars have explored the allegation, but very few believe that "it was anything more than perhaps a tendency," and "ost say there is no basis for such a claim whatsoever."

UN mediator

Following the 1947 UN Partition Plan, on 20 May 1948, Folke Bernadotte was appointed the United Nations' mediator in Palestine. This made him the first official mediator in the history of the world organization. In this capacity, he succeeded in achieving a truce in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and laid the groundwork for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

First proposal

At the end of June, 1948, Bernadotte submitted his first formal proposal in secret to the various parties. It suggested that Palestine and Transjordan be reformed as "a Union, comprising two Members, one Arab and one Jewish". As far as the boundaries of the two Members were concerned, Bernadotte thought that the following "might be worthy of consideration".

1. Inclusion of the whole or part of the Negev in Arab territory.
2. Inclusion of the whole or part of Western Galilee in the Jewish territory.
3. Inclusion of the City of Jerusalem in Arab territory, with municipal autonomy for the Jewish community and special arrangements for the protection of the Holy Places.
4. Consideration of the status of Jaffa.
5. Establishment of a free port at Haifa, the area of the free port to include the refineries and terminals.
6. Establishment of a free airport at Lydda.

Bernadotte summarised his considerations in making the proposal as follows:

To sum up, in putting forward any proposal for the solution of the Palestine problem, one must bear in mind the aspirations of the Jews, the political difficulties and differences of opinion of the Arab leaders, the strategic interests of Great Britain, the financial commitment of the United States and the Soviet Union, the outcome of the war, and finally the authority and prestige of the United Nations.

Second proposal

After the unsuccessful attempt with the first proposal, Bernadotte continued with a more complex second proposal that abandoned the idea of a Union and proposed two independent states. This proposal was completed September 16 and had as its basis seven "basic premises" (verbatim):

1. Peace must return to Palestine and every feasible measure should be taken to ensure that hostilities will not be resumed and that harmonious relations between Arab and Jew will ultimately be restored.
2. A Jewish State called Israel exists in Palestine and there are no sound reasons for assuming that it will not continue to do so.
3. The boundaries of this new State must finally be fixed either by formal agreement between the parties concerned or failing that, by the United Nations.
4. Adherence to the principle of geographical homogeneity and integration, which should be the major objective of the boundary arrangements, should apply equally to Arab and Jewish territories, whose frontiers should not therefore, be rigidly controlled by the territorial arrangements envisaged in the resolution of 29 November.
5. The right of innocent people, uprooted from their homes by the present terror and ravages of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return.
6. The City of Jerusalem, because of its religious and international significance and the complexity of interests involved, should be accorded special and separate treatment.
7. International responsibility should be expressed where desirable and necessary in the form of international guarantees, as a means of allaying existing fears, and particularly with regard to boundaries and human rights.

The proposal then made specific suggestions that included (extracts):

1. The existing indefinite truce should be superseded by a formal peace, or at the minimum, an armistice.
2. The frontiers between the Arab and Jewish territories, in the absence of agreement between Arabs and Jews, should be established by the United Nations.
3. The Negev should be defined as Arab territory.
4. The frontier should run from Faluja north northeast to Ramleh and Lydda (both of which places would be in Arab territory).
5. Galilee should be defined as Jewish territory.
6. Haifa should be declared a free port, and Lydda airport should be declared a free airport.
7. The City of Jerusalem, which should be understood as covering the area defined in the resolution of the General Assembly of 29 November, should be treated separately and should be placed under effective United Nations control with maximum feasible local autonomy for its Arab and Jewish communities with full safeguards for the protection of the Holy Places and sites and free access to them and for religious freedom.
8. The United Nations should establish a Palestine conciliation commission.
9. The right of the Arab refugees to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory at the earliest possible date should be affirmed by the United Nations, and their repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation, and payment of adequate compensation for the property of those choosing not to return, should be supervised and assisted by the United Nations conciliation commission.

Bernadotte's second proposal was prepared in consultation with British and American emissaries. The consequences of their involvement is poorly known, since the meetings were kept strictly secret and all documents were destroyed. The secret was publically exposed in October, only nine days before the US presidential elections, causing President Truman great embarrassment. Truman reacted by making a strongly pro-Zionist declaration, which contributed to the defeat of the Bernadotte plan in the UN during the next two months. Also contributing was the failure of the cease-fire and continuation of the fighting.

After Bernadotte's death, his assistant American mediator Ralph Bunche was appointed to replace him. Bunche eventually negotiated a ceasefire, signed on the Greek island of Rhodes. See 1949 Armistice Agreements.

Reception

The Israeli government criticized Bernadotte's participation in the negotiations. In July 1948, Bernadotte said that the Arab nations were reluctant to resume the fighting in Palestine and that the conflict now consisted of "incidents." A spokesman for the Israeli government replied: "Count Bernadotte has described the renewed Arab attacks as "incidents". When human lives are lost, when the truce is flagrantly violated and the SC defied, it shows a lack of sensitivity to describe all these as incidents, or to suggest as Count Bernadotte does, that the Arabs had some reason for saying no... Such an apology for aggression does not augur well for any successful resumption by the mediator of his mission". Two months before the assassination, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a British intelligence officer, wrote in his diary: "Bernadotte sentenced himself to death by the Jews".

Assassination

Bernadotte was assassinated on 17 September 1948 by members of the Lehi group, sometimes known as the Stern Gang. The assassination was approved by the three-man Lehi 'center': Yitzhak Shamir, Natan Yellin-Mor and Yisrael Eldad, and planned by the Lehi operations chief in Jerusalem, Yehoshua Zetler. A four-man team lead by Meshulam Makover ambushed Bernadotte's motorcade in downtown Jerusalem and team member Yehoshua Cohen fired into Bernadotte's car. Bernadotte and his aide, UN observer Colonel André Serot were killed. The following day the United Nations Security Council condemned the killing of Bernadotte as "a cowardly act which appears to have been committed by a criminal group of terrorists in Jerusalem while the United Nations representative was fulfilling his peace-seeking mission in the Holy Land".

Lehi took anonymous responsibility for the killings in the name of Hazit Hamoledet (The National Front), a name they copied from a war-time Bulgarian resistance group. The group regarded Bernadotte as a stooge of the British and their Arab allies, and therefore as a serious threat to the emerging state of Israel.. Most immediately, a truce was currently in force and Lehi feared that the Israeli leadership would agree to Bernadotte's peace proposals, which they considered disastrous. They did not know that the Israeli leaders had already decided to reject Bernadotte's plans and take the military option.

Lehi was forcibly disarmed and many members were arrested, but nobody was charged with the killings. Yellin-Mor and another Lehi member, Schmuelevich, were charged with belonging to a terrorist organization. They were found guilty but immediately released and pardoned. Yellin-Mor had meanwhile been elected to the first Knesset. Years later, Cohen's role was uncovered by David Ben-Gurion's biographer Michael Bar Zohar, while Cohen was working as Ben-Gurion's personal bodyguard. The first public admission of Lehi's role in the killing was made in on the anniversary of the assassination in 1977. The statute of limitations for murder had expired in 1971.

The Swedish government initially believed that Bernadotte had been assassinated by Israeli government agents. They publically attacked the inadequacy of the Israel investigation and campaigned unsuccessfully to delay Israel's admission to the United Nations. In 1950, Sweden recognized Israel but relations remained frosty despite Israeli attempts to console Sweden such as the planting of a Bernadotte Forest by the JNF in Israel. At a ceremony in Tel-Aviv in May 1995, attended by the Swedish deputy prime minister, Israeli Foreign Minister and Labor Party member Shimon Peres issued a "condemnation of terror, thanks for the rescue of the Jews and regret that Bernadotte was murdered in a terrorist way," adding that "We hope this ceremony will help in healing the wound."

Footnotes

1. Sune Persson, Folke Bernadotte and the White Buses, Journal of Holocaust Education, Vol 9, Iss 2-3, 2000, 237-268. Also published in David Cesarani and Paul A. Levine (eds.), Bystanders to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation (Routledge, 2002). The precise number is nowhere officially recorded. A count of the first 21,000 included 8,000 Danes and Norwegians, 5,911 Poles, 2,629 French, 1,615 stateless Jews and 1.124 Germans. The total number of Jews was 6,500 to 11,000 depending on definitions. Also see A. Ilan, Bernadotte in Palestine, 1948 (Macmillan, 1989), p37.
2. Werner, Emma. "A Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews During World War II". Westview Press, 2002 ISBN 0813339065 ; Buckser, Andrew. After the Rescue: Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark. Palgrave Macmillan 2003 ISBN 1403962707; and Persson, Sune. "Folke Bernadotte and the White Buses," Journal of Holocaust Education, Vol 9, Iss 2-3, 2000, 237-268. Also published in Cesarani, David & Levine, Paul A. (eds.), Bystanders to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation. Routledge, 2002.
3. Rubinstein, Danny. "A murder waiting to happen", a review of Nesikh yerushalayim (The Prince of Jerusalem) by Ofer Regev, Porat Publishing.
4. F. Bernadotte, To Jerusalem, Hodder & Stoughton, 1951, pp129-131; full report at
5. To Jerusalem, p114-115.
6. To Jerusalem, p238-239; full report at
7. To Jerusalem, p239-241; full report at
8. Ilan, pp186-191.
9. Ilan, pp244-247.
10. The Palestine Post, July 12, 1948
12. A. Ilan, Bernadotte in Palestine, 1948 (Macmillan, 1989) p194; J. Bowyer Bell, Assassination in International Politics, International Studies Quarterly, vol 16, March 1972, 59--82.
13. Security Council 57 (1948) Resolution of 18 September 1948.
14. Heller, Joseph. The Stern Gang; Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940-1949. Frank Cass 1995 ISBN 0714641065, pp252-253.
15. Heller, pp239-255.
16. Heller, passim; Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. Political Assassinations by Jews. SUNY Press 1993 ISBN 0791411656pp267-274.
17. Ilan, Amitzur. Bernadotte in Palestine. MacMillan 1989 ISBN 0333472748, pp200-201; Shamir, loc. cit., p241.
18. Heller, pp261-270.
19. Yair Amikam, Yediot Aharonot, February 28, 1977: interview with Yehoshua Zetler and Yisrael Eldad. English translation in Journal of Palestine Studies, vol 6, no. 4 (1977) 145-147.
20. Ilan, p193.
21. Ilan, p224.
22. Ilan, p238.
23. Ilan, p241.
24. "Israel belatedly condemns U.N. negotiator's murder" and "Israel tries to ease tensions with Sweden" (two articles), Reuters News, 15 May 1995. "Peres apologizes for assassination of Bernadotte", Jerusalem Post, 15 May 1995, page 1.

References

• Kushner, Harvey W. (2002). Encyclopedia of Terrorism. Sage Publications. ISBN 0-7619-2408-6
• Schwartz, Ted (1992). Walking with the Damned: The Shocking Murder of the Man Who Freed 30,000 Prisoners From the Nazis. Paragon House, New York. ISBN 1-55778-315-2
• Marton, Kati (1994). A death in Jerusalem. Pantheon. ISBN 0-679-42083-5

External links

• The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage This book contains the stories of two women who were released from Ravensbrück concentration camp as a result of the efforts of Folke Bernadotte.
• M. Friedman: The road to freedom. An essay by survivor of the holocaust. From "The memory project", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

• Swedish diplomats
• Swedish World War II people
• Assassinated diplomats
• Assassinated Swedish people
• Bernadotte af Wisborg
• World Scout Committee members
• 1895 births
• 1948 deaths