The Swedish Government published yesterday a White Paper crediting the efforts of the late Count Folke Bernadotte with having saved 19,000 persons, many of them Jews, from death in Nazi camps. Acting on instructions from the Swedish Foreign Office, Count Bernadotte negotiated with Hitler’s Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler to secure the transfer to Sweden of Danish, Norwegian and other civilian prisoners, the White Paper said.
The document was issued in reply to published statements by H.R. Trevor Roper, a British writer on World War II, that credit for the success of the negotiations should not go to Bernadotte and the Swedish Foreign Office but to Felix Kersten, Himmler’s personal masseur. Mr. Trevor-Roper charged that Bernadotte had written a letter to Himmler early in 1945 in which he said that “the Jews are as unwanted in Sweden as in Germany.” This letter the Swedish White Paper branded a forgery.
While the White Paper did not contest the fact that Kersten had played a part in influencing Himmler, it said that both his efforts and those of the Swedish Legation in Berlin could be traced to representations by Hillel Storch, an agent of the World Jewish Congress. Mr. Storch appears to have informed the Swedish Foreign Office after Kersten’s return from Germany that Himmler was prepared to release 10,000 Jews. It is reasonable to suppose that supplementary instructions from the Swedish Foreign Office to Bernadotte to intervene in behalf of non-Scandinavian Jews were connected with the Storch memorandum, the White Paper stated.
The document also reported that Kersten and the Stockholm representative of the World Jewish Congress, Norbert Nasur, visited Himmler on April 21, 1945 and obtained his consent to the release of 1,000 Jewish women in the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. Asserting that the Foreign Office negotiated with Himmler through a variety of channels, including Kersten and Bernadotte, the White Paper notes that Himmler became more amenable to releasing Jews and other prisoners as Germany’s military position became more desperate.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
