Seventy-five years ago, in the late winter and early spring of 1945, most of western Europe had been liberated from Nazi occupation. But the war was far from over. The Western Allies and the Red Army were driving towards Berlin and the USAAF and RAF were bombing Germany around the clock.

The Nazis, however, were not willing to give up, nor were they willing to leave their human captives behind when they retreated. There were millions of non-Germans trapped in the Third Reich as political prisoners, racial prisoners. POWs, and forced laborers of various statuses. Rather than leave prisoners in concentration camps when they retreated, the SS either killed inmates or set them on the notorious Death Marches towards the German heartland.

In an exception to this standard operating procedure, the Swedish Red Cross was able to bargain for the release of Scandinavian prisoners if they came to transport the prisoners through the battle zone themselves. They did so in the famous white buses, so called because they were painted white in hopes that the combatants would leave them alone.

A convoy of white buses arrived at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück the day before it was to be evacuated. The humanitarians expected to pick up Scandinavian women, but were unexpectedly told that they could also take all the French, Belgian, Dutch and Polish women prisoners in the camp, approximately 15,000 women. They included a number of French, Dutch and Belgian women who belonged to Dutch-Paris.

Although unprepared to escort so many released prisoners through the active battle zone north of Berlin, the commander of the humanitarian column seized the opportunity. They cobbled together 3 columns of rescue buses that arrived in Ravensbrück on April 25 and 26. One of them was attacked by Allied fighter planes, leading to 25 or so deaths. They also commandeered a goods train that took almost 4,000 women from Ravensbrück to the Denmark. It’s hard to guess what the women thought about being crammed into another freight train, but the transport surely saved many of their lives. With the train and the columns of white buses, the Red Cross was able to rescue about 7,000 women from that concentration camp.

When they reached Denmark and Sweden, the women were given medical care and adequate food. When they were strong enough to travel back to their home countries, they were given special documents attesting to their identities and their status as former political prisoners. The Dutch-Paris prisoners who were in the main camp of Ravensbrück on the day that the Swedish Red Cross arrived, returned to Paris in July 1945.