Who Killed Dag Hammarskjöld?

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Between 10 and 15 minutes after midnight on Monday 18th of September 1961, the DC-6B aircraft crashed near the airport of Ndola, a town in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, not far from the Congo border. The plane had flown from Leopoldville, today’s Kinshasa, and was taking Dag Hammarskjold, the second United Nations Secretary-General, and his entourage, on a mission to try to bring peace to the Congo. Only one of the sixteen passengers was found alive – Harold Julien, chief of security, who died six days later (Williams, 2014).

Questions were asked as strange details of the crash emerged. Given that Ndola air traffic control had seen the plane flying overhead and had granted the pilot permission to land, why did the airport manager close down the airport? Why did Lord Alport, the British High Commissioner in Harare, who was at the airport, insist that the secretary-general must have decided “to go elsewhere”? Why did it take until four hours after daybreak to start the search, even though local residents, policemen, and soldiers reported seeing a great flash of light in the sky shortly after midnight? Why was the missing aircraft not found for a full fifteen hours, even though it was just eight miles away from the airport where it had been expected to land (Williams, 2014)?

What about the second plane that had been seen to follow the Secretary-General’s aircraft? Why did the survivor refer to an explosion before the crash? Why did Hammarskjold have no burns, when the other victims were so badly charred? How did he escape the intense blaze, which destroyed 75 to 80 percent of the fuselage (Williams, 2014)?
This is a story of intrigue, of Colonial great power politics, of the Cold War, and of one of the most outstanding mysteries of the 20th century.

This is the story of the mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjold.

References:
Williams, S. (2014, August 15). Who Killed Hammarskjold?: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa, Oxford University Press.

Britannica. (2025, January 3). Dag Hammarskjöld. Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/...

Foreign Policy. (2022, February 15). What really happened to Dag Hammarskjold’s plane. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/15/...

UN News. (2024, October 18). Mystery still surrounds death of revered UN chief Hammarskjöld, 63 years after tragic plane crash. United Nations. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/...

Williams, S. (2025, February 6). Revisiting Dag Hammarskjöld’s mysterious death. The Yale Review. https://yalereview.org/article/susan-...


Music
Sergii Pavkin - Shine
Sergii Pavkin - Road with Trees
Tom Fox - Expat
Cinematic Time Lapse
Dmitrii Kolesnikov - Documentary Ambient
Hugo Dujardin - Hope
Josef Surikov - Documentary 104bpm
Elijah Baley - Idea Space

Timestamps
00:00 Prelude
00:14 Introduction
02:52 Dag Hammarskjöld: Architect of a Modern UN
06:29 The Congo Crisis: A Cold War Tinderbox
09:33 Flight SE-BDY
11:13 Investigations and Cover-Ups
13:16 Cold War Machinations, Racism, and Colonialism
15:39 Modern Revelations and the Fight for Transparency
17:42 Conclusion