Escape from the Third Reich

As Nazi Germany stuttered to its grim denouement, Count Folke Bernadotte – a nephew of the Swedish king and head of the country’s Red Cross – made contact with the Nazis to negotiate the release of thousands of Scandinavian concentration camp inmates. Surprisingly perhaps, he was successful, and over 20,000 prisoners – primarily Danes and Norwegians, but also some French, Poles and others – found themselves loaded onto Bernadotte’s ‘White Buses’. They would exchange some of the most odious addresses in human history – Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt and Dachau – for a passage to Sweden and to freedom.

As one of their number recalled, the transition was sometimes so sudden and unexpected that it was “like a dream”. It is a complex story, full of torturous negotiations with overlapping Nazi agencies, yet it is told with precision and considerable elan by Persson. His book, which was first published in Sweden in 2002, is a comprehensive and wide-ranging treatment of the subject, making ample use of first-hand testimony and going back to the archives to address those aspects that are unclear or have become mired in controversy. As such, it is sure to represent the final word on a most heroic and courageous enterprise; a story which fully deserves wider recognition by the outside world.

Roger Moorhouse is the author of Killing Hitler (Jonathan Cape)