Folke Bernadotte (1895–1948)

Indeholder "'Dømmer ikke ...'", "Ved Indgangen til den kommende Verden", "Blæst hid af Vinden", "Røde Kors", "'It's a long way to Tipperary'", "I den totale Krigs Europa", "Mennesker i Beskyttelsesrum", "Mod Slutningen", "Sidste Akt", "Blandt Krigsfanger Nord for Polarkredsen", "Mit møde med det fjerde Rige", "Vi begynder i Tyskland", "Prins Carl", "Belgisk Mellemspil", "Atter i Tyskland", "Rødekorskonferencer", "Finsk Ihærdighed", "I det østlige Europa", "Ankara - Athen", "Det tyske Problem", "Røde Kors' Idealer", "Efterskrift: Over det blaa Middelhav", "Mindeord over Greve Folke Bernadotte af Einer Mellerup".

???… (més)

"I myself have been criticized because, during the last war, as one of the leaders of the Swedish Red Cross, I did not publicly denounce Nazism and its methods." So wrote Count Folke Bernadotte at the end of this book, which he completed writing just a few weeks before his brutal murder in Jerusalem at the ends of terrorists from the Stern Gang. The book covers the period between his role in 1945 negotiating with Himmler and the Nazi leadership to get Scandinavian citizens out of concentration camps to safety in Sweden, and his short period as UN Peace Mediator in Palestine. Those who killed Bernadotte considered him to be an enemy of the Jewish people. Though they almost certainly had not read this manuscript, there are in these pages some sentences that might raise eyebrows. Here, for example, is what Bernadotte had to say about the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal: "It is really just to condemn collectively all the members of a given organization? Is it absolutely certain that all those who have joined, for example, the SS, are guilty of a crime?" The short answer is, yes. This is an extraordinary historical document and helps shed light on a man who was both revered and hated in his lifetime -- and for years afterwards.… (més)

This is the diary of Counte Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Mediator sent to manage the truce between Israeli and Arab forces during the War of Independence and also to make progress toward a peace settlement. Bernadotte was not able to complete his mission, as he was assassinated in September 1948 by terrorists of the Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang).

The belief held by many Israelis at the time — and not only the Lehi — was that Bernadotte was taking the Arab side. This book offers some evidence that this was true. He makes is very clear that, in his view, the UN Partition Plan of 1947 was a very bad idea, and it was unfortunate that the Jews proclaimed their own state. He also didn’t like the fact that a number of states, including such world powers as the USA and USSR, had already recognised the new Jewish state. This made it much harder to suggest to the Israeli leaders that they drop the idea of Jewish sovereignty, which is precisely what Bernadotte proposed.

It is also clear from his description of meeting both Arab and Israeli leaders how much he preferred the company of the former. Israeli foreign minister Moshe Sharett is described in an unflattering way, as are all the Israeli leaders he meets. The Arabs are nearly uniformly charming. The proposals Bernadotte was putting forward — refusing the Israelis any claim on any part of Jerusalem, urging them to drastically cut back on immigration (meaning refugees from the Holocaust, mostly), giving up all of the Negev to Arab rule, and so on — these could all be interpreted as being hostile to the Jews.

None of that — none of it — justified the cold-blooded murder of Bernadotte and the French colonel Serot who was at his side. The cowardly assassins were never punished for their crime, which remains a source of shame to this day.… (més)

Before he was the United Nations peace envoy to the Middle East during the first Israeli-Arab war, Count Folke Bernadotte played a central role in a bizarre series of meetings with Heinrich Himmler and other leaders of Hitler’s Germany in the final days of the Second World War.

Bernadotte’s mission, in his role as a leader of Swedish Red Cross, was to negotiate the release of Norwegian and Danish prisoners held in German camps. But inevitably, Himmler tried to use him to mediate a deal with General Eisenhower to end the war in the West — and allow German armies to turn their guns on the advancing Soviet armies.

In the end that deal fell through, though Bernadotte’s humanitarian efforts were more successful.

The count came under criticism for his apparent friendliness towards the Nazis, a point addressed by his children in a 2009 foreword to the book. Among others, the noted historian Hugh Trevor-Roper believed Bernadotte to have been anti-Semite. Bernadotte’s book was largely ghost-written, as his children point out, and it is quite evident where Bernadotte’s story ends and where the professional writer begins.

As it is based on his diaries and reports from the spring of 1945, Bernadotte is able to comment favourably on his first meeting with Himmler and describes in some detail his attempts to persuade the Nazi leaders how humanitarian gestures at this time, weeks before the end of the war, would help them, not least in ensuring that the legacy of the Third Reich is not further tarnished. (He actually writes such things in the book.)

Here and there, one finds mentions of how absolutely evil the Nazi regime was, but these feel like additional material added by the ghost writer, and do not come from the original reports.

Three years after the book was written and published, Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by terrorist from the Stern Gang, who believed — as did many others — that Bernadotte was no friend of the Jewish people.… (més)