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Despite Sweden's economic ties with Germany throughout the war, the escalation of the Holocaust saw relations turn sour, and Sweden became a safe haven for thousands of Danish and Norwegian Jews in 1943. As the Axis forces rapidly lost ground the following year, Scandinavian authorities became concerned for those prisoners detained in German territories. Swedish diplomats in Berlin were able to negotiate the repatriation of some Scandinavian prisoners in late 1944, and a series of humanitarian and smuggling missions helped map out where the remaining Danish and Norwegian prisoners were being kept. This then led to the largest rescue mission of the Second World War.

Negotiations

In February 1945, the vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, Folke Bernadotte, met with Heinrich Himmler to negotiate the release of all Danish and Norwegian prisoners from German concentration camps. Himmler would not agree, but allowed the Swedish Red Cross to collect all Scandinavian prisoners from Germany and its territories and relocate them to relative safety at the Neuengamme camp near Hamburg (close to the Danish border). Further negotiations in March resulted in some concessions, and non-essential laborers (i.e. the elderly, sick, and children), as well as German-Swedish mothers and their children, were transferred to Sweden. On April 21, Himmler met with another Swedish representative and allowed the Red Cross to relocate thousands of Jews from various concentration camps. Himmler was one of the first top officials in the Nazi regime to realize that the war was lost, and these negotiations were part of his attempts to curry favor with the Allies. On April 23, Himmler met with Bernadotte once more and attempted to use him as an intermediary through which he offered Germany's surrender to the Western Allies, although it was ultimately rejected.

The White Buses

The Swedish Red Cross rescue fleet set out in March with 75 vehicles and 250 volunteers, and roughly 1,000 people could be transported on each round trip. Soviet advances and British-American air raids directly threatened the rescue mission, therefore the Red Cross painted its fleet of buses white to distinguish that they were non-military; the "White Buses" have since come to symbolize this mission. In the following weeks, almost 6,000 Scandinavians were relocated to Neuengamme. As Neuengamme reached its capacity, German authorities relocated around 2,000 non-Scandinavian prisoners to other camps to make space. In April, Danish buses and trains were called into action to transport prisoners from Neuengamme to Scandinavia, while the Red Cross convoys began additional trips to rescue non-Scandinavians. This included many French, Belgian, and Dutch prisoners, particularly from the women's camp at Ravensbrück; the mission's preferential treatment of Scandinavian and Western European prisoners, at the expense of Eastern Europeans, has become a point of contention in recent decades. As the situation in Germany became more unstable, the convoys were often attacked, and several prisoners were killed in transit. Due to the nature and discretion of the mission, there are no official figures for the total number of people rescued in the white bus missions, and it is unclear what proportion were Jewish. However, the estimates suggest that the mission rescued over 15,000 prisoners from concentration camps in the last six weeks of the war, and helped thousands more after German surrender as part of UNRRA programs.