BERNADOTTE (AF WISBORG), FOLKE, GREVE

(Count) born Jan. 2, 1895, Stockholm died Sept. 17, 1948, Jerusalem Swedish soldier, humanitarian, and diplomat who was assassinated while serving the United Nations as mediator between the Arabs and the Israelis. A nephew of King Gustav V of Sweden, Bernadotte was commissioned in the Swedish Army in 1918. He became an official of the Boy Scout movement and during World War II he headed the Swedish Red Cross, securing the exchange of many prisoners of war and being credited with saving some 20,000 inmates of German concentration camps. His excellent reputation among all the combatant nations in Europe led the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler to employ him to transmit a fruitless offer (April 24, 1945) that Germany surrender unconditionally to the United Kingdom and the United States but not to the Soviet Union. Appointed mediator in Palestine by the United Nations Security Council on May 20, 1948, Bernadotte obtained the grudging acceptance by the Arab states and Israel of a UN cease-fire order, effective June 11. He soon made enemies by his proposal that Arab refugees be allowed to return to their homes in what had become the nation of Israel. Following a number of threats against his life, he and Andr-Pierre Serot, a French Air Force colonel and UN observer, were murdered by Jewish extremists.