stamp featuring the White Buses, Denmark, 1945

The "white buses" were buses painted white with red crosses to avoid confusion with military vehicles and used in a program undertaken by the Swedish Red Cross and the Danish government in the spring of 1945 to rescue Nazi concentration camp inmates and transport them to neutral Sweden. Although the program was initially targeted at saving citizens of the Scandinavian countries, it rapidly expanded to include citizens of other countries.

The program removed 15,345 prisoners from mortal peril in concentration camps; of these 7,795 were Scandinavian and 7,550 were non-Scandinavian (Polish, French, etc.). These included 423 Danish Jews saved from the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, contributing significantly to the fact that the number of Danish Jews who perished during the Holocaust was less than 100.