Elsa Brändström born - March 26, 1888

On this day in 1888, Swedish nurse Elsa Brändström was born in St. Petersburg.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
To stay in History Class. It's a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey everyone, I'm Eaves and welcome to another
episode of This Day in History Class. Today is March.

(00:24):
The day was Mar Swedish nurse and philanthropists Elsa Branstrom
was born. Branstrom became known as the Angel of Siberia
for her work with prisoners of war. Branstrom was born
in St. Petersburg to Edward Branstrom and Anna velamina Eskilson.

(00:46):
Her father was a Swedish military attache to Russia, and
her family went back to Sweden for a while when
she was a child. Her father went back to St.
Petersburg as an envoy in nineteen oh six, but she
stayed in Sweden, where she was training to become a teacher.
She went back to St. Petersburg in nineteen o eight.
Elsa's mother died in nineteen thirteen, just before the outbreak

(01:08):
of World War One. In nineteen fourteen, when the war began,
Elsa and her friend Ethel von hayden Stam were trained
as nurses. Elsa began serving at a military hospital. There,
she cared for wounded Russian soldiers, but she found that
Russia was not providing the necessary support to prisoners of war,

(01:29):
so she and von hayden Stam worked to find private
donations to help care for the POWs. In nineteen fifteen,
the Swedish Red Cross asked her to go to Siberia
to do relief work in the prisoner camps. Conditions were
poor in the camps. They lacked winter clothes, blankets, medical supplies,
and other basic necessities. Many people got sick because of

(01:53):
these conditions, and diseases like typhus killed a lot of
prisoners of war. During these ships, she gave out food, clothing,
and medical supplies to POWs at a Siberian camp calls
three tens. Branstrom's inspections led to changes that helped slow
the typhoid epidemic. When she was in Europe, she met

(02:13):
with families of Russian POWs. Though the Central Powers and
Russia signed a peace treaty in nineteen eighteen, ending Russia's
participation in World War One, the Red Cross continued its
relief work. Elsa was accused of being a spy and arrested.
At one point, she was even threatened with execution, but
her sentence was revoked. Also got typhoid in nineteen nineteen.

(02:38):
The next year, she was imprisoned, but soon released. She
went back to Sweden in July of nineteen twenty. In Sweden,
she continued to support POWs in Siberia. She collected donations
and sent winter clothing to them. In ninete, she even
published a memoir called Among Prisoners of War and Russia
and Siberia. With the money from her book, from a

(03:01):
lecture tour in the US, and from her work at
a relief association, she was able to fund a health resort,
a home for the children of POWs, and a labor
sanatorium to train POWs to work jobs like farming or fishing.
In the children's home, she only accepted kids who would
become quote first class people, and refused those with disabilities

(03:25):
and character traits deemed unacceptable. Elsa married Robert Ulick in
n and they moved to Dresden. They had a daughter
together in nineteen thirty two. Because she worked with prisoners
of war, she was recognized by Hitler, but she and
her husband disapproved of the rise of the Nazis. The
family moved to the US, where Ulick had gotten a

(03:47):
job at Harvard. Elsa helped refugees from Nazi Germany and
occupied Scandinavian countries get residency permits. She died in nineteen
forty eight and Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm Eves Jeff Coote and
hopefully you know a little more about history today than
you did yesterday. And if you want to leave us

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