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Folke Bernadotte: what Wikipedia removed

Folke Bernadotte was the Swedish diplomat who negotiated the release of thousands of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps before being appointed UN mediator in the 1947 to 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. Through 2015 the opening said he was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by the militant Zionist group Lehi. Today the opening calls Lehi a paramilitary Zionist group instead, and militant does not appear there though it survives five times elsewhere in the article. A reader today learns Lehi was a paramilitary organization, and not that Wikipedia once called the group that assassinated a UN mediator militant.

The word “militant” appeared 1 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 2010. Today the opening carries none; the body carries 5. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.

word20052010201520206 October 20232025
militant011000

Counts are of the opening paragraph only, the part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote.

  • The Swedish-language form of Bernadotte’s title, Greve af Wisborg, was dropped from the opening.
  • A passage noting that the precise number of people Bernadotte rescued is nowhere officially recorded was dropped from the opening.

2005 (revision 15967893):

Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden Count Folke Bernadotte af Wisborg ( January 2 , 1895 - September 17 , 1948 ), was a Swedish diplomat noted for his negotiation of the release of prisoners from the German concentration camps in World War II .

2025 (revision 1297337306):

Swedish diplomat (1895–1948) Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg (2 January 1895 – 17 September 1948) was a Swedish nobleman and diplomat . In World War II , he negotiated the release of about 450 Danish Jews and 30,550 non-Jewish prisoners of many nations from the Nazi German Theresienstadt concentration camp . They were released on 14 April 1945. In 1945 he received a German surrender offer from Heinrich Himmler , though the offer was ultimately rejected by the allies. After the war, Bernadotte was unanimously chosen to be the United Nations Security Council mediator in the Arab–Israeli conflict of 1947–1948. He was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by the paramilitary Zionist group Lehi wh…

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