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    A Forgotten Hero: Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish Humanitarian Who Rescued 30,000 People from the Nazis
    A Forgotten Hero: Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish Humanitarian Who Rescued 30,000 People from the Nazis
    A Forgotten Hero: Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish Humanitarian Who Rescued 30,000 People from the Nazis
    Audiobook6 hours

    A Forgotten Hero: Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish Humanitarian Who Rescued 30,000 People from the Nazis

    Written by Shelley Emling

    Narrated by Julian Elfer

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In one of the most amazing rescues of WWII, the Swedish head of the Red Cross rescued more than 30,000 people from concentration camps in the last three months of the war. Folke Bernadotte did so by negotiating with the enemy-shaking hands with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo. Time was of the essence, as Hitler had ordered the destruction of all camps and everyone in them.

    A Forgotten Hero chronicles Folke's life and extraordinary journey, from his family history and early years to saving thousands of lives during WWII and his untimely assassination in 1948. A straightforward and compelling narrative, A Forgotten Hero sheds light on this important and heroic historical figure.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 19, 2019
    ISBN9781977346957
    A Forgotten Hero: Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish Humanitarian Who Rescued 30,000 People from the Nazis
    Author

    Shelley Emling

    Shelley Emling is a senior editor at The Huffington Post and, as a journalist for more than twenty years, her work, including science articles, has previously appeared in such outlets as The New York Times, Fortune, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and FoxNews.com. She covered Europe for six years for Cox Newspapers, a chain of 17 daily newspapers across the United States that includes The Atlanta Journal Constitution. She launched one of the first blogs for The International Herald Tribune, called 'Raising the Roof.' She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

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    • 4/5
      Count Folke Bernadotte is largely forgotten today, but his murder in Jerusalem in 1948 made headlines around the world. The first UN peace mediator in the Middle East, he was targeted by members of the Lehi (Freedom Fighters of Israel), better known as the Stern Gang. His crime, in their view, was that he was an enemy of Israel and was close to forcing the newly-formed Israeli government led by David Ben Gurion, into relinquishing control of Jerusalem and more. His murderers were never punished.Shelley Emling has done a service by revisiting the life of Count Bernadotte, and focusing on his role in the final days of the Second World War when he organised and led a rescue mission to take female prisoners — overwhelmingly Scandinavians — out of Nazi concentration camps and to safety in Sweden.Emling is extremely sympathetic to Bernadotte and that comes through on every page of the book. But she’s also aware of the controversies that surround him, including allegations that he got rather too chummy with some of the Nazi leaders and that he did little to free Jewish prisoners (she contests this point). Emling quotes at length Bernadotte’s words in which he describes first meeting SS boss Heinrich Himmler — and this does little to warm us to the man, who was at the very least naive.His murder was obviously a crime, and the culprits should have been punished — not least because the attack is a stain on Israel’s reputation that has never been erased. But the story of Bernadotte’s life and his death is a more complex one than this short book can cover.
    • 3/5
      I have never heard of Folke Bernadotte before. I'm really surprised that with all the reading my husband and I do on WWII that neither of us were familiar with him. Bernadotte was a Swedish war hero that organized the rescue of thousands of Nazi prisoners. I knew nothering about Bernadotte before reading this book. I knew next to nothing about Sweden during WWII. I found this book to be very interesting. This is a story that needs to be kept alive and people need to know about him. I hope many come to read this book and learn about this great humanitarian.
    • 5/5
      I first heard of Folke Bernadotte very briefly while reading a book about the Ravensbrück concentration camp so I was delighted to find a book about the man himself and the work he did during the war to secure prisoner releases. Shelley Emling's book about this man is hard to put down. It weaves together not only his story but what was happening in the world at large during the war years. One of the great things about this book is that it tells a story about what was happening on both sides of the conflict. Because Bernadotte represented a neutral country, he was able to work in both German-held and Allied territory and with personnel on both sides. He was simply a man doing what he could to provide aid to people ravaged by the war regardless of affiliation. For this reason he received some criticism in later years but I believe his work is a testimony to us all that there are times when we don't need to take sides but just be willing to help hurting people.Although I have read many books on this period of history, I hadn't heard before some of the details Emling shares about Himmler and his staff, and Hitler and those closet to him in the final days of the war. The chapter about those final days of the Reich were poignant and somber reading. So many had risked so much to bring the Reich to an end and yet there was still much work to do-- countries and people completed devastated by the war that needed so much help to rebuild. It is hard to conceive of the devastation that Europe faced at this time but Emling provides some needed and interesting details.What little I knew about Folke Bernadotte before reading this book did not include the details of his few brief years of life after the war ended and his tragic death. To know those details were the highlight of this book for me. Beacuse of his royal family connections and his wealth, Bernadotte was a man who could have done so many other things with his life but he chose to spend his life as a humanitarian-- giving of himself to help others, even those who didn't understand him or who wanted him dead. He truly gave his life in the pursuit of peace. Even if the rest of the book had been mundane (which it is not) those final chapters of this book make it worth reading-- not just because of what we learn about Folke Bernadotte but also because of the lessons about pursuing peace and humanity that are so necessary in our world today.
    • 4/5
      Folke Bernadotte. The name wasn't at all familiar. Who was this Swedish humanitarian? Why have we forgotten him?Readers of the popular historical fiction novel The Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly know about the Polish women interred in Ravensbruck who were used for medical experiments, called 'rabbits' because they were merely lab 'animals.''' In Kelly's novel, the women are told to board white trucks from the Red Cross, but some doubt their legitimacy. Another noted that "Himmler himself authorized Count Bernadotte of Sweden to take us." A Forgotten Hero is the story of that Count Bernadotte of Sweden!Shelly Emling begins the book with the German invasion of Poland and the removal of Poles to concentration camps through the personal story of Manya Moszkowicz. In the last days of the war, the Germans wanted to cover up the atrocities of the concentration camps, evacuating prisoners or killing them. Manya was taken on a forced march to Ravensbruck. And one morning she was in a group taken to the gate and told to board a white truck with red crosses. It didn't seem real. The women were given CARE packages, and that night they slept in real beds, clean and warmly clothed. Manya learned she had been rescued because of Count Folke Bernadotte.Folke was related to Swedish royalty and made a career in the army. He became a volunteer for the Boy Scouts. He took on the leadership of the International Red Cross. Sweden was neutral during WWII, a choice made to preserve their freedom while Norway fell to the Germans and Finland to the Russians. Folke used this neutrality to gain access to Himmler. He wanted to rescue all the prisoners, but played his hand carefully, first asking to repatriate Swedish nationalists. The Gestapo head Himmler had vowed to remain loyal to Hitler but knew his country was losing the war; over time he allowed Folke access to more prisoners.Folke's courage and faith were limitless as he bused the women out of the camp, coming under fire by Allied planes. He was able to secret out several thousand Jews, but his rapport with the Nazis and unwillingness to overplay his hand made him suspect by some Jewish groups. After the war, Folke was asked to mediate between the emerging country of Isreal and the dispossessed Palestinians. Radical Jewish group marked him for assassination.For decades, Folke's legacy was forgotten by a chagrined Israel who buried the incident of his death.Sixty years after his death Folke has reemerged from the shadows. I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.