Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld ( ; ; 29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. As of 2026, he remains the youngest person to have held the post, having been 47 years old when he was elected. He was a son of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, who served as Prime Minister of Sweden from 1914 to 1917.
Hammarskjöld's tenure was characterized by efforts to strengthen the newly-formed UN both internally and externally. He led initiatives to improve morale and organizational efficiency while seeking to make the UN more responsive to global issues. He presided over the creation of the first UN peacekeeping forces in Egypt (the UNEF) and the Congo (the ONUC) and personally intervened to defuse or resolve diplomatic crises. Hammarskjöld's second term was cut short when he died in a plane crash while en route to cease-fire negotiations during the Congo Crisis.
Hammarskjöld was and remains well regarded internationally as a capable diplomat and administrator, and his efforts to resolve various global crises led to him being the only posthumous recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In the Western world, his appointment and tenure were hailed as one of the most notable and successful in UN leadership. U.S. president John F. Kennedy called Hammarskjöld "the greatest statesman of our century". from the original on 22 July 2019. "This is the translated text of the 2007 Dag Hammarskjöld Lecture given by Sture Linnér and Sverker Åström at Uppsala University on 15 October 2007". In the Democratic Republic of Congo and broader Global South, however, his legacy is extremely controversial, given his erratic performance in the Congo Crisis, with consequences to this day.
Early life and education
Dag Hammarskjöld was born in Jönköping to the noble family Hammarskjöld (also spelled Hammarskiöld or Hammarsköld). He spent most of his childhood in Uppsala. His home there, which he considered his childhood home, was Uppsala Castle. He was the fourth and youngest son of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, Prime Minister of Sweden from 1914 to 1917, and Agnes Hammarskjöld.
Hammarskjöld studied first at Katedralskolan and then at Uppsala University. By January 1930, he had obtained Licentiate of Philosophy and Master of Laws degrees. Before he finished his law degree he had already obtained a job as Assistant Secretary of the Unemployment Committee.
Career From 1930 to 1934, Hammarskjöld was secretary of a governmental committee on unemployment. During this time he wrote his economics thesis, ("The Spread of the Business Cycle"), and received a doctorate from Stockholm University. In 1936, he became a secretary in Sweden's central bank, the Riksbank. From 1941 to 1948, he served as chairman of the Riksbank's General Council.
Hammarskjöld quickly developed a successful career as a Swedish public servant. He was state secretary in the Ministry of Finance (1936–1945), Swedish delegate to the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (1947–1953), cabinet secretary for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1949–1951), and minister without portfolio in Tage Erlander's government (1951–1953).
He helped coordinate government plans to alleviate the economic problems of the post-World War II period and was a delegate to the Paris conference that established the Marshall Plan. In 1950, he became head of the Swedish delegation to UNISCAN, a forum to promote economic cooperation between the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries. Although Hammarskjöld served in a cabinet dominated by the Social Democrats, he never officially joined any political party.
In 1951, Hammarskjöld was vice chairman of the Swedish delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in Paris. He became the chairman of the Swedish delegation to the General Assembly in New York in 1952. On 20 December 1954, he was elected to take his father's vacated seat in the Swedish Academy.
United Nations Secretary-General Nomination and election
On 10 November 1952, Trygve Lie announced his resignation as Secretary-General of the United Nations. Several months of negotiations ensued between the Western powers and the Soviet Union without reaching an agreement on his successor. On 13 and 19 March 1953, the Security Council voted on four candidates. Lester B. Pearson of Canada was the only candidate to receive the required majority, but he was vetoed by the Soviet Union. At a consultation of the permanent members on 30 March 1953, French permanent representative Henri Hoppenot suggested four candidates, including Hammarskjöld, whom he had met at the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation.
The superpowers hoped to seat a Secretary-General who would focus on administrative issues and refrain from participating in political discussion. Hammarskjöld's reputation at the time was, in the words of biographer Emery Kelèn, "that of a brilliant economist, an unobtrusive technician, and an aristo-bureaucrat". As a result, there was little to no controversy in his selection; the Soviet permanent representative, Valerian Zorin, found Hammarskjöld "harmless". Zorin declared that he would be voting for Hammarskjöld, surprising the Western powers. The announcement set off a flurry of diplomatic activity. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was strongly in favor of Hammarskjöld and asked the United States to "take any appropriate action to induce the [Nationalist] Chinese to abstain".: Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, by the Deputy Director of the Office of United Nations Political and Security Affairs (Popper), 31 March 1953. (Sweden recognized the People's Republic of China and faced a potential veto from the Republic of China.) At the U.S. State Department, the nomination "came as a complete surprise to everyone here and we started scrambling around to find out who Mr. Hammarskjold was and what his qualifications were".: Memorandum of Conversation, by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for United Nations Affairs (Sandifer), 30 April 1953. The State Department authorized Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the US Ambassador, to vote in favor after he told them that Hammarskjöld "may be as good as we can get".: The United States Representative at the United Nations (Lodge) to the Department of State, 30 March 1953—1:38 pm: Memorandum for the Files by the Assistant Secretary of State for United Nations Affairs (Hickerson), 30 March 1953.
On 31 March 1953, the Security Council voted 10–0–1 to recommend Hammarskjöld to the General Assembly, with an abstention from Nationalist China. The vote was conducted in secret, and Hammarskjöld was unaware his name had been put forward for the position. Shortly after midnight on 1 April 1953, Hammarskjöld was awakened by a telephone call from a journalist with the news, which he dismissed as an April Fool's Day joke. He finally believed the news after the third phone call. The Swedish mission in New York confirmed the nomination at 03:00 and a communique from the Security Council was soon thereafter delivered to him. After consulting with the Swedish cabinet and his father, Hammarskjöld decided to accept the nomination. He sent a wire to the Security Council:
With strong feeling personal insufficiency I hesitate to accept candidature but I do not feel I could refuse to assume the task imposed on me should the [UN General] Assembly follow the recommendation of the Security Council by which I feel deeply honoured.
Later in the day, Hammarskjöld held a press conference at the Swedish Foreign Ministry. According to diplomat Sverker Åström, he displayed an intense interest and knowledge in the affairs of the UN, which he had never shown any indication of before.
The UN General Assembly voted 57–1–1 (the lone vote against came from Nationalist China) on 7 April 1953 to appoint Dag Hammarskjöld as Secretary-General of the United Nations. Hammarskjöld was sworn in as Secretary-General on 10 April 1953. He was unanimously reelected on 26 September 1957 for another term, taking effect on 10 April 1958.
Tenure
Immediately following the assumption of the Secretariat, Hammarskjöld attempted to establish a good rapport with his staff. He made a point of visiting as every UN department to shake hands with as many workers as possible, eating in the cafeteria as often as possible, and relinquishing the Secretary-General's private elevator for general use. He began his term by establishing his own secretariat of 4,000 administrators and setting up regulations that defined their responsibilities. He was also actively engaged in smaller projects relating to the UN working environment; for example, he spearheaded the building of a meditation room at the UN headquarters, where people can withdraw into themselves in silence, regardless of their faith, creed, or religion.
During his term, Hammarskjöld tried to improve relations between Israel and the Arab states, frequently playing the role of a mediator between David Ben-Gurion and Gamal Abdel Nasser. Other highlights include a 1955 visit to China to negotiate the release of 11 captured US pilots who had served in the Korean War, the 1956 establishment of the United Nations Emergency Force, and his intervention in the 1956 Suez Crisis. He is given credit by some historians for allowing participation of the Holy See within the UN that year.
In 1960, the newly independent Congo asked for UN aid in defusing the Congo Crisis. In July of that year, the UN established its first peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Operation in the Congo (known by its French abbreviation ONUC), which peaked at nearly 20,000 military personnel primarily from India, Ireland and Sweden and remains among the UN's largest operations in size and scope. ONUC's mandate sought to restore order in Congo-Kinshasa and to keep other nations, namely Belgium, out of the crisis. During this time Hammarskjöld made four trips to Congo, but his efforts toward the decolonisation of Africa were considered insufficient by the Soviet Union. Hammarskjöld publicly justified the UN’s refusal to act decisively against the Katanga secession on the ground of non-intervention, arguing that the issue was an internal Congolese political conflict. However, this position was widely disputed, especially because Katanga’s secession was closely linked to Belgian official and private interests from the beginning. Later UN documents themselves noted the extensive Belgian influence in Katanga’s civilian and security administration. In September 1960, the Soviet government denounced his decision to send a UN emergency force to keep the peace. They demanded his resignation and the replacement of the office of Secretary-General by a three-man directorate with a built-in veto, the "troika". The objective was, citing the memoirs of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, to "equally represent interests of three groups of countries: capitalist, socialist and recently independent".