Harald Edelstam

Gustav Harald Edelstam (17 March 1913 – 16 April 1989) was a Swedish diplomat. During World War II he earned the nickname Svarta nejlikan ("the Black Pimpernel," a reference to the Scarlet Pimpernel) for helping hundreds of Norwegian Jews, SOE agents, and saboteurs escape from the Germans. During the early 1970s he was stationed in Santiago, Chile, and became known as the "Raoul Wallenberg of the 1970s" when he helped over 1,200 Chileans, hundreds of Cuban diplomats and civilians, and 67 Uruguayan and Bolivian refugees escape persecution by dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Early life Edelstam was born on 17 March 1913 in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of , a courtier, and his wife Hilma Dickinson. He was the older brother of the diplomat Axel Edelstam and grandson of the lawyer, the civil servant and the politician . Edelstam passed studentexamen in 1933 and earned a Candidate of Law degree in Stockholm in 1939 before becoming employed as an attaché at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm the same year.

Career Harald Edelstam served in Rome in 1939 and the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm in 1940, in Berlin in 1941, and in Oslo in 1942 where Edelstam became acting Second Vice Consul in 1944. On 13 September, the day after the evacuation, the Swedish flag was raised over the Cuban embassy and the embassy remained under Swedish protecting power for 18 years until 1991. In the months that followed, as the Pinochet regime began a campaign of torture and murder, Edelstam worked ceaselessly with embassy staff and volunteers to organize asylum for more than a thousand victims of the regime, including securing the release of at least 60 individuals from the National Stadium detention center.

For helping Cubans escape from Chile, Edelstam was honored by Fidel Castro as a hero. Today, Edelstam is considered as a modern-day hero among millions around Latin America, and particularly so among the hundreds of thousands of Chileans who were forced into exile by the regime.

Edelstam came back to Stockholm and was available for the Foreign Minister during 1974 before being sent as ambassador to Algiers Edelstam married a third time in 1981 with Christine Colmain.

In 1993, following the restoration of Chilean democracy, Edelstam was posthumously awarded the Order of Bernardo O'Higgins. The San Miguel municipal library bears his name.

Officer of the Order of the White Elephant