SPEAKER_00 0:12

This is a story about two girls, both German, both born within a few years of each other in the years between the two world wars. Both of them, at some point in their young lives, wore the uniform of the same Hitler Youth Program, a system built specifically to turn a generation of German children into loyal servants of the Third Reich. And both of them were dead before they turned 23. That's about where the similarities end. Because when it came down to it, these two girls made completely opposite choices with the lives they were handed. One of them became a name history remembers as a symbol of cruelty. The other became a name history remembers as a symbol of courage. To understand how that's even possible, you have to go back further than either of them, to a war that ended five years before either girl was born. When Germany lost the war in 1918, its own citizens were blindsided. Years of military propaganda had told them that they were winning. To save face and explain the sudden defeat without taking accountability, the government simply chose to lie to its citizens. It invented what is now known as the stab in the back myth. The claim was that the German military had never actually been defeated on the battlefield at all, that it had been betrayed from within by a conspiracy of Jewish leaders who signed the peace treaty agreement. The treaty that German officials did sign, that officially ended the war, called the Treaty of Versailles, placed nearly all the blame on Germany. Germany had to accept responsibility for starting the war, surrender territory, drastically shrink its military, and pay staggeringly high reparations to the countries it had fought. Germans felt humiliated, punished far beyond what they believed they deserved. Then the economy collapsed entirely. By 1923, hyperinflation had made German currency almost worthless. Work a full week, and your pay might be a single loaf of bread. People hauled cash around in wheelbarrows because the money itself had stopped meaning anything. Families watched their life savings disappear almost overnight. Just as things began to stabilize, the Great Depression hit in 1929 and swept across the world. German businesses shut down, banks collapsed, and millions of people lost their jobs. Families couldn't afford food or a place to live. People were scared, they were angry, and they were desperate for someone to blame and something to believe in. That desperation is exactly what gave Adolf Hitler his opening. Hitler had served as a German soldier in World War I, and like a lot of veterans, had believed the stab in the back myth completely, so completely that he built an entire political movement around it. He told Germans that they had been betrayed, that the Treaty of Versailles was a disgrace, and that he would rebuild a military and restore the country's pride. He also needed someone to blame. He claimed, Jewish people secretly controlled the banks, the businesses, the newspapers, and the government itself, and he blamed them for both the loss of the war and the collapse of the economy. None of it was true. German Jews made up less than 1% of the population, and they were ordinary people, teachers, doctors, shopkeepers, veterans, parents, children. They hadn't caused Germany's defeat or its economic ruin. But Hitler repeated the lie constantly. In speeches, newspapers, posters, radio broadcasts, and eventually in the schools themselves. And when people hear the same lie enough, especially while they're afraid and struggling, a lot of them start to believe it. As that hatred spread, more and more ordinary Germans came to accept discrimination against Jewish citizens as normal. What started as words and propaganda would eventually grow into one of the worst crimes in human history, the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish men, women, and children were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany. This is the world Hitler built his youth machine in. A generation of German kids grew up surrounded by economic ruin, national humiliation, and a government that needed someone to blame. And into that vacuum, the regime offered belonging, structure, purpose, something to be proud of. For the Hitler youth and its counterpart for girls, the Bond Duscher Medell, that pitch worked on millions of German children, including both girls in this story. One of them leaned all the way in.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

And I'm Melody.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

This is Hard Times and True Crimes. So last week, my co-worker, Lindsay, and I were in Washington, DC. We went for a training. Have you ever heard of the uh seven habits of highly affected people? Yes, I've got that book. Okay, we got to go to that training and it was so good. That's awesome. But what I've been thinking about all week isn't necessarily what we learned in the training.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 6:13

We went to the Holocaust Museum.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

So that trip is my inspiration for telling you the two stories that I'm gonna share today. Okay. Let me just start off by saying that I will probably pronounce multiple words wrong in today's episode. Please forgive me for any errors that I may make. Irma Grease was born on October 7th in 1923 in a tiny farming village in northern Germany called Rutchen. So tell me about the W's and the V's.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Their W's, I think, would be pronounced like R V's.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

Okay, so then it would be Vretchen.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Most likely.

SPEAKER_02 6:56

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

I'm not a German expert. Just when we went over there, I realized how I was butchering a lot of words. And so I tried to learn how to say the things. When we went to the BMW museum, we heard people calling it the BMV museum. Oh wow. Okay. Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_02 7:12

So it's probably definitely Vretchen then. She was the third of five children. Her father, Alfred, was a hardworking dairy farmer. Are you familiar with this story? You're not? Okay. No. Some people who knew him described him as strict and deeply religious, but others said he was a tyrant who cheated on his wife. I honestly I don't know how much I believe the really terrible things about him, only because Irma herself in trial, her and her sister, they just never had anything really negative, too negative to say about their father. And none of the kids ever mentioned the affair. That claim actually came from a man who wrote a book about the family after everyone involved was already dead. So I don't know. I feel like I'd sometimes take those things with a grain of salt. Okay. What we do know for certain is that Irma was born right at the peak of Germany's hyperinflation crisis. So money was essentially worthless. Food was scarce, and her parents were struggling to keep five kids fed. Then in 1936, her mother Bertha reached her breaking point and took her own life by drinking hydrochloric acid.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Wow, that sounds like that would be really painful. Yes. Like a hard way to take your own life. And she did not die immediately. Oh.

SPEAKER_02 8:37

Yeah, it's she lingered for weeks before she passed. Weeks? Weeks.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Oh, I thought you meant hours, weeks. That would be excruciating. That would be a lot of suffering.

SPEAKER_02 8:48

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And Irma, it's so sad because she was 13. That's I don't know. I just feel like that would be such a hard age to lose your mother. And so now, you know, they're left with a grieving and overwhelmed single father.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

So Alfred Grease refused for years to join the Nazi Party. Like I said, he was a devout church-going man, whether he lived it or not, I guess, in his everyday life. You didn't have to join, I guess. Every German citizen wasn't necessarily legally required to join. It was technically voluntary, but refusing came with very real consequences. You kind of did have to join if you wanted to have work and if you didn't want to be looked at with suspicion.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

It's making me think when we went to the Dachau concentration camp, which was the first one, that's the one that Auschwitz was patterned after. Right. One of the things that we found out there was that the Germans in that town were highly criticized afterward for turning a blind eye because they knew what was going on in that concentration camp. And critics really talked about how they turned this blind eye. But on the flip side of that, was their options were basically go along with it and sin against their conscience. Or take it on and not go against their conscience. Maybe they were for it. Right. Or try to somehow quietly and secretly help the Jews behind the Nazis back.

SPEAKER_02 11:23

Yes, which you find a lot of. Yeah. Alfred Grease refused for years. He saw Nazism as a godless, destructive force. And he did warn his children to stay away from it. But, you know, there was a price to pay, like we were saying, for staying out of it. Anyone who refused to join was labeled politically unreliable. They were blocked from jobs. They were cut off from contracts. So as a single father trying to feed five kids, Alfred finally did give in and join the party in 1937 to keep his job, his rations, and his family together. Irma later plainly said that her father did not believe in Nazism. He compromised under pressure. And even after joining himself, he still refused to let his children join the Hitler youth programs. They were still being indoctrinated every day because it was a law that it was brought into the school.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Right.

SPEAKER_02 12:24

And so even in just elementary school, they were still being indoctrinated.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

That was part of Hitler's plan. He knew if you could get the children early and indoctrinate their minds, then when they were adults, they were going to follow you because that's what they believe. Right. They uh it always starts with indoctrinating the children.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

100%.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

History is important. Oh, yeah. And and if you and if we don't learn it, history repeats itself. Absolutely. That's why we need to know the truth and not have it revised. Because that's what they did. They revised history.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

He he just told his kids, you know, this is a brainwashing machine meant to turn, you know, kids against their parents and the church, and he was not allowing them to have any part of it. By most accounts, Irma at this young age, she was a very sensitive child. When her brother Otto cut his lip one time, she cried for like days over it. She was just very sensitive. She was also bullied pretty hard at school. She was a quiet kid and I guess was an easy target. I would love to know what her personality was like though during school. I do know that she was quiet. Her sister later testified that she would literally have to run away from physical fights if she didn't defend herself. So between the bullying at school and the trauma at home, and I'm sure there was trauma at home, she was kind of primed to look for somewhere she belonged. Okay. So the Bund Deutscher Modell or BDM, which was the League of German Girls, they offered exactly, you know, that sense of belonging that she was looking for a uniform, a sisterhood. Suddenly she wasn't a bullied farm girl anymore. She was an asset to the Reich. Her father forbade it. She did not care. She joined anyway. And the Nazi state held real leverage over kids in her position because if Alfred had tried to punish her or stop her from attending meetings, she could have reported him to her BDM leaders, and that would have cost him his job, his freedom, and possibly his life.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

She did have all the power in that.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Absolutely. Kids did. If they wanted to join, their parents were powerless. It did not matter. And they had to even be careful, really, what they said to their kids sometimes, because their kids could report them and did sometimes report them.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

His hands were tied, and that was the reality for a lot of German parents at the time. Her hometown didn't have its own chapter, and so she would ride a bike to the next town over for meetings. It's not hard to understand the appeal, honestly. Imagine being a poor farm girl and suddenly trading. This would have been appealing to me, I think. You have your everyday plain farm girl clothes, and then all of a sudden you get this crisp white blouse and a navy skirt, and you're going camping, you're going on hikes, you're playing sports that make you feel strong for the first time instead of doing crappy girl tour tours at home. You know, all while being told that you're beautiful, you're elite, and you're part of this, I don't know, glorious Aryan group, club organization.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

Yeah. But underneath the campfires and the friendships, these girls were being fed a genuinely warped worldview for sure. They were taught that life was survival of the fittest, that Aryans were the master race, that Jewish people were parasites, and that showing not only Jewish people, but even like disabled people, other races, but Jews apparently were the worst. They were like the bottom of that totem pole. And showing mercy to the weak wasn't kindness, as we're taught in the Bible, it's cowardice that would literally destroy Germany. And when I tell you they were teaching this stuff in school, I mean, they were literally changing like science. They were telling them their brains were not like ours. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Have you ever seen the show The Man in the High Tower? No, I don't think I have. I believe it's on Amazon. We watched it a few years ago. That is a great TV show. Uh-huh. Of course it's fictional based on truth, but it's what the world would be like today if Germany had won that war. Well. But it goes into a lot of what you're describing. It really portrays that very well. You know, there's this man on there and he's got this disabled son, and he's trying to hide it because he's in the Third Reich and he knows they're gonna kill his son. Different scenarios that showcase exactly what you're talking about that happened for real. But if you ever get a chance, watch it.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

Okay, I definitely will. They were taught that that cowardice would literally destroy Germany and had almost destroyed Germany in the aftermath of World War One. And they knew that all too well. They knew that their people were starving, they knew how their the fatherland, as they call it, was struggling, and um how you know they had watched their own people die of starvation and sickness, and before the war, they were just in a much different place. And so they had something to kind of look back on and be like, oh well, this must be true, especially as a ch as a kid. And this wasn't a fringe message, this wasn't some like off the cuff thing, like this was in schools. History was rewritten, conspiracy theories about Jewish people were taught like it was an established fact. And girls were told, you know, that their bodies and minds they didn't belong to them or their families, they belonged to Hitler and to the fatherland, to Germany.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

It's so creepy to listen to, but yet, like you said, there's so many parallels now.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

Oh, yes. It turned children into fanatics, all under the guise of a summer camp club. Wow. In 1938, at just 14, Irma dropped out of school. Under Nazi law, that meant that she had to complete a land year or land year. Actually, it wasn't a whole year, it was about six months. And every young person, once they finished school or dropped out, it was meant to teach them the value of hard work. They would work on a farm. And in practice, it was cheaper labor wrapped in political indoctrination. They would spend six months on a nearby farm. Days were built around flag raisings, Nazi flag flag raisings, field work, and the evenings, you know, they were marching and they had political instruction. To the regime, there was no real difference between work, education, and entertainment. It all served the same purpose. Like they wanted to take up as much of their time as possible, really to keep them, I feel like, away from their families or from anybody who would change their mind about what they were being fed. And as uncomfortable as it is to admit, it was kind of genius, honestly, because you think about community, discipline, a sense of purpose, they're not inherently harmful. They're actually good things. And they're things that people genuinely need. And the Nazis simply used it. They didn't recruit 14-year-olds by telling them, you know, you're gonna help murder millions of people. They offered them like this adventure and meaning, and what those things were actually in service of, you know, became clear.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Because later Satan comes as an angel of light, that's absolutely yeah. And Hitler, you said it was genius. He was an evil genius, he knew how to package that stuff. He for sure did. Because people forget he got elected. Yes, but he didn't just set him up himself up right off the bat, he convinced people to get him elected to begin with. Inch by inch. Yes, right? And then before they realized that it was too late and he had become the tyrant that he was.

SPEAKER_02 20:42

But prior to that, well, at first I don't even think anybody really took him seriously. Then when he did get elected, they were like, but we're gonna keep him, you know, we're gonna like be able to control him. No, it did not go like that. So when her lanyard ended, 15-year-old Irma took a job as an assistant nurse at the Hohenleckan SS Sanatorium in 1939. And this was the first time she really, I guess, left home out on her own. So to a farm girl, Hohenlicken probably felt like another world. It had originally been a tuberculosis clinic and had been converted into a premier sports medicine hospital for the Nazi elite. It was set up in a forest north of Berlin, and it was run by, you'll probably recognize the name, Professor Carl Gebhardt.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

Heinrich Himmler's personal physician, and he was one of the most powerful doctors in the Third Reich. Irma admired him enormously, and years later would call this convicted war criminal a saint.

unknown 21:53

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 21:54

Wow. Under Gebhart, Hohenlecken became a site of horrific medical experiments on female prisoners brought in from nearby Robbinsbruck. Healthy women were deliberately given broken bones. They infected wounds so doctors could test experimental treatments meant for German soldiers. There were so many things there. I'm not going to go into detail, but let me just tell you that was a place of horrific suffering. And we don't know exactly what she probably witnessed firsthand, you know, if she assisted during procedures or if she changed bandages. Nobody really knows for certain, but we do know that she spent formative years of her adolescence in an environment where where Jews were treated as disposable material in service of the master race.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

So she worked as an assistant in that hospital? Okay. One of the most horrific things that I saw over there, and I got to Picture I'm gonna show you. It this picture just tears me up. I can't hardly look at it. This little girl was there. Look at the fear on her face. She was put there because oh my gosh. She entered that sanatorium due to epilepsy, and she was diagnosed with idiocy, and then she was transferred to a state clinic. But basically they murdered her because Oh my gosh. But they just stripped her away from her mother. You you don't have to leave this. That poor baby. I took that picture of that look on her face. That just I cannot even understand how anybody I just don't know. But those that hospital was full of disabled people that they did those experiments and stuff on. It was horrible. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable that so many people allowed it to happen. Allowed it to happen. Yeah. I don't like it.

SPEAKER_02 23:58

That they were really that indoctrinated. Because they had to bel there's no way they didn't believe it. You couldn't live with yourself if you didn't right.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Which is terrible. It's hard to even wrap your mind around it. It does go to show you though how deep down in our hearts we can be truly, truly evil. Yeah. You know. But even you said it before about her dad, compromised on his convictions. Yeah. I think a lot of people, even though they didn't believe it, they compromised on it to save their own skin. That's sad because you're like, Am I gonna turn a blind eye to evil just to protect myself? We're gonna talk a lot about that. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

So I'm gonna tell two very different stories. Okay. Yeah. I definitely want to talk, I definitely want to talk more about that. Imagine seeing all, you know, seeing those things. Well, like what happened with that little girl day in and day out. I feel like that kind of environment would have to change a person. You would have to see them. There's no way that you could do that if you did not see them as subhuman. Oh, I can't even. So, despite loving the work, Irma never became a certified nurse. The hospital and the labor exchange decided that she wasn't qualified. And so at 17, she was reassigned to a dairy in Furstenburg. After finally escaping from farm work one time, it probably felt like a big demotion to have to go back. She did appeal for a different placement. And this time officials saw something they considered useful because she was a physically capable, ideologically, she was a very loyal young woman with some medical experience. And so in July of 1942, at 18 years old, she was assigned to Ravensbrook concentration camp as a female SS guard. She would later claim that she hadn't wanted that job and had tried to refuse it. Whether that's true, it's kind of impossible to verify, but it is kind of one of those things that the labor exchange, they were the ones that you had to appeal to them if you wanted a change in job. They got you your job. When I say the Nazis were in charge of everything, they were literally in charge of everything. You didn't just go make your own decisions. So she was saying, I really wanted to be a nurse, but you know, they had me go there. But also the posting wasn't necessarily technically mandatory either. But wartime job assignments, they kind of did, I feel like, leave little choice. Right. Interestingly, the early accounts, the earliest accounts from prisoners describe somebody very different from who she would become. Several remembered her as polite. One even recalled her apologizing after she accidentally stepped in front of a prisoner. So, you know, that's who she was when she first went in. But then she went through the three-week training. By every account, she excelled. Not long after she returned home in her new SS uniform. According to her own post-war testimony, her father, even though he was a Nazi member himself, he was furious. Because it's one thing to have to have that political affiliation, but being an F an SS guard, he was livid. And reportedly he beat her and told her to never come back. Like that was it. He was done with her. And if that's true, it marked the end of, you know, any real, I guess, connection to her old life. And her sister also did testify and said that she overheard the argument. She couldn't hear exactly what it was about. She knew that he did throw her out and she never returned. So there was probably some truth to that. From that point on, though, the camp system was her home and the SS was, I guess, effectively her family. Over the following months at Ravinsbrook, experienced guards would train her, teach her how to supervise forced labor, how to control prisoners, how to punish disobedience. Most significantly, she learned to stop seeing the people in front of her as people.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Dehumanized her.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

Yes. Yeah. In March of 1943, at 19 years old, she requested a transfer to Auschwitz Birkenau. And that's where her name really enters history. And she had requested that transfer herself. Survivors later described her as having an almost angelic porcelain doll-like appearance. It didn't take long, though, for them to learn what was underneath that exterior. She soon earned the nickname Hyena of Auschwitz. Within months, her fanatical dedication caught the attention of her supervisors. And despite still being a teenager, she was promoted very quickly. I mean, she really rose through those ranks. And by May of 1944, she held power over life and death for nearly 30,000 women in the infamous Camp C. That's a lot of power. Oh, it definitely is. When survivors took the stand after the war, they described her consistently. They weren't lying, in other words. She didn't simply enforce the rules the way that most guards did. She seemed to derive some personal pleasure in inventing new ways to inflict pain on these prisoners. She had made her own whip that was woven from wire and wrapped in cellophane. And multiple witnesses testified that she would use it to beat women across the face, breast, open wounds, and she would deliberately target places that would cause the most pain or leave these women with permanent, you know, disfiguration. A survivor named Abraham Glenovaisky testified about what he witnessed on the platform as a new prisoner arriving by train. So he said that Greece assisted SSS doctors, including Joseph Mengel, which you know all about him. He was a sadist for sure. And she helped select prisoners for the gas chambers. Most of the guards did not want to do that. Very few did that. And she would send healthy Hungarian women to their deaths out of what appeared to just be pure spite or boredom. She would mix them in with the sick and elderly. And he testified that she seemed to specifically target younger, more attractive women, which is sick. Another survivor, Edith Traeger, described the selection parades again. Some of the women would desperately try to survive. So they would hide behind barracks or they would slip into the fit-for-work line. And Traeger said that Grease would hunt these women down herself. She would kick and whip them before dragging them out toward, you know, to the execution queue. And not only that, but she had dogs that she would allow to basically just tear these women apart. She was evil.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

Yeah. And did seem to derive pleasure from doing most the most horrible acts. It's hard to understand.

SPEAKER_02 31:42

Vera Alexander, who was a Jewish bloc leader, testified that Greece would deliberately extend roll call. This was so this, I don't know why this stuck out to me so much, but she would deliberately extend roll call for hours and would force sick, dying, freezing women to stand motionless because if they didn't, she would shoot them or beat them or sick her dogs on them. But if a prisoner collapsed, she would beat her or set the dogs on her rather than allow anybody to help them. Dr. Gazella Pearl, she was a Jewish prisoner, but she was also a doctor. And so she was forced to work in the camps. And she gave some of the most striking testimony, I feel like. She said that Greece was always meticulous about her own appearance. She, you know, had perfume on, it was heavily perfumed. She had her hairstyled. She had this tailored uniform and just a stark contrast to the starved, shaved, mud-covered women around her. Pearl testified that Grease would come to the infirmary specifically to watch painful procedures, that she appeared to just really get some get satisfaction from it. She would intentionally strike prisoners on fresh surgical wounds. Wow. Yeah. Another survivor, Hanka Rosenweg, testified about Greece's use of her dogs. She described an incident where a group of women had collapsed from exhaustion during a work detail and they just could not get up fast enough. And so she kicked them to the ground and set her dogs loose on them. And of course, the dogs tore into the women until they were nearly dead. By this point, the war had already turned against Germany. The Eastern Front had been collapsing for months. The Red Army had been positioned just across the Vistula River. And it actually had been there since the previous summer. And camp leadership knew on some level that time was definitely running out. And so that fall, the SS had already started, you know, destroying evidence that they were dynamiting, you know, putting dynamite on the crematoria at Auschwitz. What nobody anticipated though was, I guess, the speed of what had come next, because on January 12th in 1945, the Soviets launched the Vistila Oder offensive, and it tore through German defenses faster than anybody expected. And so within days, Soviet forces were closing in on Krakow, barely 70 kilometers from Auschwitz. So caught off guard by how quickly the front was moving, the SS they scrambled to evacuate between January 17th and 21st. And then they had roughly 56,000 prisoners that they forced out of Auschwitz and the surrounding camps and marched them west through the freezing cold in January. And that became known as the death marches. Anyone who collapsed from exhaustion or hypothermia, and you know they weren't worried about them being warm.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 35:14

They were had they had shaved heads. I mean, oh anyway, anybody who collapsed was shot on the spot. More than 10,000 prisoners did not survive that march. Grease helped manage that evacuation. She left Auschwitz for good, stopping briefly at Ravensbrook, the camp, you know, where she had started her career. And by March, she'd arrived in Bergen Belsen. By that point, Belsen wasn't really a functioning camp anymore because it was literally falling apart. It hadn't even been built really as an extermination camp. There had never been gas chambers. It was just basically a holding site. But it had become a dumping ground for tens of thousands of prisoners who had evacuated ahead of the Allied advance. So there was overcrowding, there was starvation, and just typhus, you know, running rampant through the camp. And it was pretty much an open air mass grave. People were dying by the hundreds every day, faster than anybody could possibly bury them. Irma remained at her post through the whole thing. On April 15th, 1945, British forces reached Bergenbelsen and opened the gates. What they found, it actually became some of the most widely circulated images of the entire war. Piles of corpses, tens of thousands of survivors that were too sick and starved to even stand up. Soldiers who had fought across Europe for years, they just said nothing could have prepared them for what they found there. And Irma didn't run. She was arrested at the camp within days of liberation. I think she expected to be shot, but she had to go and stand through the Belson trial.

SPEAKER_01 37:10

Okay. I was gonna ask if her trial was one of the Nuremberg trials. It was in Belsen? Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 37:15

It opened on September 17th, 1945, in Lundberg, and it ran 54 days. There were 45 defendants in total, including camp commander Joseph Kramer, camp doctor Fritz Klein, and Irma. Now she was 21 years old. Yeah, I didn't realize she was that young. 21. Wow. It was a race against the calendar because the Nuremberg trials were set to begin in mid-November, and the British wanted Belsum resolved before they would start the Nuremberg trials. So Greece testified in her own defense on October 17th, the trial's 27th day, and she denied the worst parts of the accusations. At first, she denied any of it. She said she didn't beat anybody. She never, you know, did any of this the selections, but eventually she actually did say that it was on her conscience. She felt like she should tell the truth. And she admitted to beating the prisoners. Like I read a lot of her testimony. But of course, the worst, the worst of the accusations she downplayed. Of the 45 defendants, 14 were acquitted, 30 were found guilty, and only 11 were sentenced to death, and she was one of them.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

Good.

SPEAKER_02 38:38

Irma Grease was hanged on December 13th in 1945 at Hamlin Prison by British executioner Albert Pairpoint. She was 21 years old, the youngest woman executed under British law in the 20th century. According to PairPoint's own account, she walked to the gallows. She and all of the other, well, the ones who were gonna who were sentenced to death, they had sang German like hymns or anthems all the night before. She had walked to the gallows with almost a smile on her face. The only thing that she said when she was standing on the gallows was schnell, and that means quickly. I will say she didn't try to blame her upbringing or her father or anything like that, which I was really surprised about. She, I don't think she genuinely believed she did anything wrong.

SPEAKER_01 39:56

That was the thing. I think she it sounds like she went to her death feeling like she was dying for a just cause.

SPEAKER_02 40:04

Yeah, I really think she believed that. Which is so warped. Yes. She really believed she had only she said it over and over. They were like, Why did you do these things? Even the soldiers, they were like, Why did you do this? I mean, they were just mortified at what they were seeing, and she was like, I was commanded to. But some of the stuff she did, she was not commanded to. They had to take her whip away from her because she got so this is other SS guards having to tame her.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

Yeah, that's just, I mean, that's evil. It's just evil.

SPEAKER_02 40:37

She left us though with a substantial record of testimony from the people who survived her. And the question that I guess has followed her story ever since is how how does somebody become what she became?

SPEAKER_01 40:55

And I just I don't think there's any other answer other than just evil.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:00

Just evil. I don't I just don't have any other answer.

SPEAKER_02 41:04

Because like I said, I do believe there are people who did terrible things during that time who weren't inherently evil. Maybe they did evil things. I think that out of cowardice. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 41:19

Yes. And but yeah, maybe her motivation, she didn't seem like a coward. No. She seemed like she truly was passionate about what she was doing and felt like she was right.

SPEAKER_02 41:31

But then again, you're like, man, that indoctrination really took hold. And it does to people. It does. But then you're also like, but was there something in her? Was it the indoctrination, or was there something in her? So we'll talk about that in a minute because now I'm gonna go on to the next story. I'm gonna introduce you to the other girl who was born less than two years before Irma. She grew up under the same regime, wore the same exact uniform as a kid, and died almost exactly as young. Actually, she was the they were the same age. Because Irma was 21. Yeah, they died at the same age. But where Irma's story is a warning about what happens when a person lets an ideology think for her, the next story is the opposite. It's about a girl who was handed the same indoctrination and you know was under just the same amount of pressure, but she found her way back from it. And her name is Sophie Scholl. Are you familiar with her? No, I'm not. Okay. So Schophie Magdalena Scholl was born on May 9th, 1921, in a small town called Forchtenburg in southern Germany. She was the fourth of six children born to Robert and Magdalena Scholl. They were a very close family, seemed like a fun family that you would want to be a part of. Her father, Robert, was the town's mayor. He was an idealistic, progressive man who made a real difference in his town while he was in office. He was also, by nature, just a real independent thinker, which would actually matter a great deal, I think, later. And I think it had, you know, he had a great, that had a great influence on his children. Her mother, Magdalena, had worked as a deaconess in the church before she married. She'd been a devout Lutheran and she had a very deep faith. And that would also shape Sophie's entire worldview. The Scholl children were Inga, Hans, Elizabeth, Sophie, Werner, and they had a younger sister named Tilda who died as an infant. By most accounts, this was a warm, fun, intellectually engaged household. You know, the kind of home where ideas are discussed openly at the dinner table. And even if there are disagreements, you know, there was just a strong sense of everybody was allowed to have their individual ideas and consciences, and it was treated as healthy, I guess, and important. That was more important to her family than for their kids to fall in line.

SPEAKER_01 44:20

Instead of teaching them what to think, they taught them how to think. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 44:25

Which I really respect because I think that type of parenting takes a lot of faith. When you see your kids having ideas outside of what you believe, that's tough.

SPEAKER_01 44:36

Mm-hmm. Definitely.

SPEAKER_02 44:37

And so I do I really respect that, especially the more I dove into this family. I was like, man, I was just really inspired by them. In 1930, Robert, Sophie's father, lost his position as mayor because he was seen as too progressive for the town. And that it was made up of mostly conservatives. But I do want to pause real quick because I don't want you picking. During progressive in today's terms, because it's not at all the same thing. So in 1930, Germany had just become a democracy for the first time. And it was called the Weimar Republic. Before that, they'd had an emperor. And so, you know, back then being progressive basically just meant you believed in voting, you believed in free press, you believed in rights for women because, you know, they only just got to vote for the first time in 1919. And that's pretty much it. That's what made you a progressive. And then being conservative in a small town like Fortinberg or Fortinberg meant the opposite of that. It just meant you miss the old days. You miss having the emperor. You know, you um like things the way that they used to be, and you weren't so sure about this whole democracy thing. I know Nazis are remembered as being right-wingers, but most conservative Germans in 1930 were not Nazis, and plenty hated Hitler. But that mindset missing the old days and mistrust in the new democracy, that is part of what Hitler was later able to take advantage of. But I just don't want you, I guess, to I'm probably going too far with this, but don't line any of that up with left and right in America today, because it just does not match. Here in America, when we say somebody's right wing, we mean that they want less government and that they champion, you know, individual freedoms, but the Nazis were the total opposite of that. They were, you know, totalitarian. No free press, no other political parties were even allowed. The government controlled almost everything. So again, when I say Robert Scholl was too progressive, it just means that he believed in the new democracy. And his neighbors, you know, they missed the old days.

SPEAKER_01 46:59

That's a good explanation, though. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 47:02

Anyway, it's not our modern political parties, it's a totally different argument.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

It's a different place and a different time.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

100. That's exactly what I had written next to. You're exactly right. Yes. But anyway, the family moved first to Ludwigsburg, then two years later, they settled in Yom. ULM. Um, where Sophie would spend the rest of her childhood and her teenage years. And here's where her story starts to run parallel to Ermis for a while. Sophie was 11 years old, and like many others, she was excited about the Nazis, about the Nazi party, and she was excited about Hitler. She thought he had great ideas, as did her most of her older siblings. And of course, she really admired her older siblings, and so her older siblings started to join the League of German Girls, the same exact one. The Bund Deutschster. Deutschster Model Model. This anyway, it was that we'll just say the BDM. That was the same exact organization that Irma would join a few years later, a few hundred miles north. Her parents were extremely disappointed. But again, they were not allowed to prohibit them from joining. And so her dad, she was saying that when she came to the table to tell him that she too had joined, it was an argument because he's like, you too, you know, and kind of made her just stand up for herself. And her siblings were kind of standing up for her too. And they're like, Dad, you know, this is a new time, and you know, all of those things. But she had her reasons, and one reason was because it offered girls like her and Irma something that they rarely had an opportunity to experience before, you know, and that was the independence. Instead of being told that her only future was staying home, getting married, and raising children, which there's nothing wrong with, but she had this opportunity now that she could go hike and she could camp and she could compete and lead groups and take on responsibilities outside the home.

SPEAKER_01 49:22

That just sounded more appealing to her.

SPEAKER_02 49:24

Yeah, it did. And that felt exciting and empowering. Even as a young girl, Sophie just always believed that girls were capable of a lot more than what society had expected of them. She was definitely a free thinker. Not only that, but she had older siblings and particularly an older brother, Hans. He was her hero. She admired his confidence, his leadership, and she wanted those opportunities for herself. So when he joined the Nazi youth movement, that pretty much sealed the deal for her. Like Irma, being a part of it did make her feel like she mattered. It gave her purpose, adventure, friendships.

SPEAKER_01 50:06

And yeah, it makes me think of Lily following your Elijah.

SPEAKER_02 50:11

I thought the same thing. She was taking the eyes vibe the next week. But it gave her purpose, you know, and a sense that her life had value. And you know, for teenagers trying to figure that stuff out, that's I feel like that's pretty powerful stuff. And Sophie rose quickly through the ranks and she became a group leader. If you'd met 11 or 12-year-old Sophie, you would have met a very enthusiastic, proud young member of that Nazi youth organization. I think that's an important detail in this story because Sophie believed the same things that Irma believed at that point. She was totally subscribing to everything that Irma was subscribing to. But I think a big part of what made Sophie's story different is that unlike Irma, Sophie had a family who had free discussions. So at night, when they sat around the dinner table, her parents would challenge her and what she had learned. Not just her, but like all of them, they would be challenged on their new beliefs and what they were being taught. And over time, Hans started to, he did start to get a little bit frustrated because the Hitler youth wanted everybody to think and dress and act and believe the exact same way. And before joining the Hitler youth, he belonged to a different youth group where kids were encouraged to think for themselves. And they read books that they wanted to read, and they all enjoyed music, they all liked dancing, and they discussed and debated their own ideas. But I'm telling you, Nazis, like I said, they controlled everything. Like Sophie loved to dance. She loved certain types of music that was not allowed. You know, you're allowed to do like folk music. Sophie was she was a good girl, but she was smoker cigarettes and she would sneak and like drink at her friends' well, her friends' parents would let them drink alcohol and let them smoke cigarettes.

SPEAKER_01 52:34

And so Well, even now in Germany, the drinking age is like exactly 16. Yeah, it's very very different culture. Yeah. There. And then but the Nazi, the communism and the Nazi party, that's all about conformity.

SPEAKER_02 52:48

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Before, like I said, he had been in the other groups, but the Nazis banned those independent groups and pretty much made it so that if you wanted to be in an organization, it had to be the Hitler youth. But Hans kept meeting secretly with friends from those outlawed youth groups. And in 1937, he was arrested by the Gestapo for participating in illegal youth activities and for violating Nazi laws that were against those organizations. And so even though he was eventually released, that experience definitely changed the way he looked at the Nazi government. And as you can imagine, her brother's arrest and growing doubts had a profound influence on Sophie. Because for the first time, the danger wasn't abstract. You know what I mean? It was happening to her own brother. Around the same time, she also started noticing other things that wouldn't necessarily register as a child. But as a teenager, when you naturally do start to think for yourself, she couldn't read what she wanted to read anymore. She couldn't listen to people that she wanted to listen to on the radio. Certain programs and songs were banned. And then came the racial laws. The Jewish classmates that she'd grown up sitting next to in school weren't allowed to attend anymore. The BDM, where she thought that she was going to find freedom and belonging, it started to feel like what it actually was, which was a machine designed to produce conformity. And Sophie's faith was very important to her. She'd been religious, but as she was getting older, she started leaning harder into that faith. And she started reading theologians like Augustine and wrestling with, you know, serious questions of what it actually means to live as a Christian. And she started thinking, what does it mean to live as a Christian inside a dictatorship? So when Sophie was 16, she fell in love with a guy named Fritz Hartnagel in 1937. She was 16 and he was about 20. Fritz was an ambitious officer in the Nazi army. And at first, he was fairly patriotic. Like many young Germans, he believed he was serving his country honorably. As their relationship developed, they would write hundreds of letters to each other. Those letters, though, were a lot deeper than typical love letters. They discussed their Christian faith, the morality of war, whether soldiers should obey every order, the value of every human life, what God expected of them. They actually influenced each other. At first, Fritz would defend Germany and tried to justify the war, but Sophie challenged him and she really encouraged him to think beyond his country and ask whether something could be legal but still morally wrong. But then while serving on the Eastern Front, he saw the brutality of the war firsthand. He witnessed terrible suffering and realized the reality of what Nazi Germany was doing. Those experiences, I guess, probably combined with Sophie's influence, gradually, you know, just transformed his thinking. But I do want to share a couple of powerful lines from their letters to each other. This, I do not know why, but this just makes me want to cry. Because she's so young, she's 16, and she wrote a letter to Fritz that said, I'm still so remote from God that I don't even sense his presence when I pray. Sometimes when I utter God's name, in fact, I feel like sinking into a void. But prayer is the only remedy for it. And however many devils scurry around inside me, I shall cling to the rope God has thrown me in Jesus Christ, even if my numb hands can no longer feel it.

SPEAKER_01 56:59

Wow, that is powerful. Yes. She's got a spiritual understanding that a lot of people never get to. Right. For a 16-year-old, that's very deep. It's a real, it's a true understanding of the human condition. Yes. Why we need the gospel and Jesus. Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:18

I love that so much. And then in a letter from Fritz, he was writing her responding to sermon notes that she had sent to him before he shipped out. And he said, conscience gives us the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. We know by whom we were created, and that we stand in a relationship of moral obligation to our creator. The two wrote each other for the rest of Sophie's life, and they dreamed of getting married and making a real difference together in the world. They never married like they dreamed about, but the letters they exchanged did survive the war. And today they give us one of the clearest windows into Sophie's thoughts. Through those letters, you can actually watch the two of them wrestle with their faith, with their patriotism, and right versus wrong as Nazi Germany descended deeper and deeper into evil. Where can you read those? I have a book, but you can read them online as well.

SPEAKER_01 58:20

Okay. Yeah, I want to borrow that book.

SPEAKER_02 58:22

Yes, definitely. In August of 1942, her father, Robert Scholl, was arrested by the Gestapo after a young woman in his office reported something he'd said about the war. He said that the war had already been lost and that Hitler was God's scourge on mankind. And that if the fighting didn't end soon, the Russians would be sitting in Berlin. He was charged under a law the Nazis invented and used to prosecute called the malicious gossip law. That was, of course, designed to criminalize any criticism of the regime. He was sentenced to four months in prison, and he's really lucky that he wasn't sentenced to more than that. Think about where that left Sophie, though. The person who'd always taught her to think for herself, you know, was now sitting in prison just for saying what he believed to be true. This is why freedom of speech is so important. I have a lot of thoughts on that. By this point, Sophie had already finished school and trained as a kindergarten teacher in Yulm. She'd also gone through Germany's mandatory national labor service. Remember the six-month land year? She had her six months of hard farm labor under the supervision of fanatically devoted Nazi women, followed by another six-month working in a kindergarten attached to a munitions factory. But far from radicalizing her the way that it did, Irma, and the way that it was designed to, that year away from home triggered a real personal crisis. She was cut off from her family, cut off from books, her faith community, and forced into the regime's machinery day after day. And she came out on the other side, more certain than ever, that this entire system was rotten to the core. When she returned in 1942, she enrolled at the University of Munich to study biology and philosophy. Her brother Hans was already a student there and had a circle of friends. It was kind of a club or like a study group. It was made up of Alexander Schmorel, Christopher Probst, Willie Graf, and a philosophy professor named Kurt Huber, who taught all of them. They read books together, they talked late into the night, they took long walks arguing about God, ethics, about what a person actually owes their own conscience when the government they live under has gone this far off the rails. One of the people who had the biggest influence on the group's thinking was a Catholic philosopher named Theodore Hacker. Hacker had converted to Catholicism after translating the writings of an English theologian named John Henry Newman. Newman believed that your conscience is God's voice speaking directly to you. In other words, if your conscience tells you something is wrong, you have a responsibility to listen to it, even if the government is telling you to do the opposite. And so Hans read Newman's writings aloud during a lot of their meetings, and Sophie really took those ideas to heart. Her whole theology was kind of built around that. And it became the foundation of what she really believed with her whole heart. By the summer of 1942, this group of friends had given themselves a name. They were the White Rose. And their mission was surprisingly simple. They wrote leaflets. They used typewriters and mimograph machines, and they made these anonymous copies secretly and mailed them to people all over Germany. In those leaflets, they told the truth about what the Nazi government was doing. They openly condemned Hitler and wrote about the mass murder of Jewish people and others in Eastern Europe, things the government was trying to keep hidden. Her brother, he was privy to some of that information because he had served also. And he was a soldier. But he had also, you know, been away at war for a time. They hoped, though, that if ordinary German citizens learned the truth, that they would find the courage to stand up and say, you know, this is wrong. They believed that every person answers to God and not just the government. One leaflet said that without God, people are defenseless against evil. Another ended with the words that people still remember today, we will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The white rose will not leave you in peace. Wow. By early 1943, Germany had just suffered a devastating loss at the Battle of Stalingrad. It was the first time a lot of Germans were starting to realize maybe we aren't going to win this war after all. The Nazi government tried to cover that up and make it sound like everything was fine, but people were really starting to see through it. And after that defeat, Professor Kurt Huber wrote the White Roses sixth leaflet. And on February 18th, 1943, Hans and Sophie walked into the University of Munich carrying hundreds of copies. They quietly laid stacks of leaflets outside the classroom while the students were, you know, still inside. The idea was that when class let out, people would walk into the hallways and find them. But when they got ready to leave, Sophie made this spontaneous decision and she realized she still had a pile left. And so she ran up to the top floor, walked over to the railing, and tossed the rest of the leaflets over the balcony. And they just floated down through the middle of the building, landing all over the floor just you know, minutes before the students came out of class. I can picture it. I know I was thinking it's like a movie with all these leaflets, you know, flying around. It probably looked incredible. Unfortunately, though, somebody saw her do that. A university caretaker named Jacob Smid watched the whole thing. Sophie and Hans were taken in for interrogation on the spot. When they searched Hans, he was actually carrying a rough draft for the seventh leaflet written by their friend Christopher Probst. Hans tried to actually swallow that whole page. Oh wow. But he couldn't get it down in time. At first, Sophie was like, we're just gonna deny it. They don't really have any proof, so we're just gonna deny it. But Hans actually broke. And like that was her brother. And so she then tried to take responsibility for the whole thing. And she was very matter-of-factly like, Okay, I'm I'm gonna tell you the truth. I'm doing this because, and she told him what what's happening is wrong. I believe that the Russians are gonna win. Like, she just kind of went in. How old was she then? She was 21. Okay. Four days later, on February 22nd in 1943, Hans, Christopher, and Sophie were brought before the People's Court, and it was kind of a show trial, and it was presided over a judge named Roland Fre uh Freisler, who was famous for he just liked to have a stage to basically humiliate and scream at the defendants. He wasn't really trying to weigh any evidence. All three were convicted of treason and sentenced to death. And it was to be carried out that very same afternoon. Wow. They didn't waste any time. No. Robert and Magdalena, Scholl, Sophie, and Hans's parents rushed to Munich as soon as they heard about the trial. They got there just right around the time that the verdict came down. They tried to rush into the courtroom, but of course they weren't allowed. Afterwards, the judge told them basically like they should have done a better job at parenting. After they heard about the sentence, of course, they're crazy. Crushed. Prison rules did not allow for them to even see their children. But there were these Nazi guards who they were impressed by the bravery of those kids. And they put them in a room with their parents and they let them visit with them. They only got about 10 minutes, but it was a blessing. I'm surprised by that actually. Yeah, it was a big blessing. Robert held his two children for the last time and told him how proud he was of both of them. Magdalena's last words to Sophie were halt Deitch fest Jesus. Hold fast to Jesus. You're killing me here. Sophie looked back at her and said, But you too, mother. After their parents left, the guards gave the three of them a cigarette to share. And somehow they weren't frantic. Sophie read her Bible. She prayed out loud. When a prison chaplain came to her, she asked for his blessing and received it. The morning of her trial and execution, of course, she didn't know that she was going to be executed that day, but she told her cellmate, Elsie Gabal, about a dream that she'd had the night before. She said that she was climbing the steep mountain, carrying a baby in a white christening gown. And this is very important that you remember this. So she was climbing up a steep mountain. She was carrying a baby in a white christening gown. Right as she reached a break in the path, she managed to get the child safely across to the other side just before she herself fell into the abyss below. She said that the child in the dream, she believed that was our idea. That everything that was everything that the white rose had stood for. And she was like smiling when she was telling her cellmate this dream. At five o'clock that afternoon, Sophie was led to the guillotine at Stadelheim prison. Witnesses said she walked in without being forced. She was calm, and by every account, she was unshaken, and she had made up her mind to be. She said they were not going to see her in a frenzy. Wow. Her reported last words were, God, you are my refuge into eternity. Oof. Almost a direct echo of Psalm 71. Homs went to the same blade minutes later, and his last words shouted loud enough for the guards to hear were long live freedom. Wow. Sophie was 21 years old and Hans was 24. Fritz was devastated to learn about the death of Sophie. He was still serving in the army. After the war, though, he carried her memory with him for the rest of his life. He actually became a judge in West Germany and spent decades speaking publicly about her and preserving her legacy. He also was the one that helped publish those letters, which are one of the reasons historians know so much about her and her thoughts and her faith. Wow. I just wanted to add that, you know, there were these two German girls who ended up on completely opposite ends of what a person is capable of. Irma, she let this ideology move into the place in her heart where her conscience was, well, really where God was supposed to live. And Sophie had that same empty space and the same lies being poured into her, but she filled it with God. She wrestled with the questions, but she held on to her faith and let it shape her conscience and let that conscience overrule the lies that her country was telling her to believe. And she gave up her life for it. There's that verse that keeps coming to my mind. You know, Jesus says, whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. And I don't think, you know, she set out to be a martyr, but I do think she understood somewhere deep down that there are things worth losing your life for. And that losing it that way isn't really losing it at all. And there's one more really cool part to this story because remember I told you about the dream.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:34

So Sophie's last words on that leaflet, the one that she was arrested for handing out, did not die with her. Within months, the allies had somehow gotten a hold of it and had printed it by the millions, and they dropped it out of airplanes all over Germany. Yes. And so, you know, the country that executed her for writing it. And today there are schools named after her, there are streets, a whole institution in her own university. German kids still get taught her story as the answer to the question, what does courage look like? Irma Greese's life didn't leave the world with anything worth celebrating. The only good that came from her story came from, you know, like the courage of the people who survived her. They testified and they made sure that she paid for her crimes, but that's not a credit to her. That's a credit to her survivors. And so I just keep thinking about Sophie's last words on her way to the guillotine. God, you are my refuge into eternity. And she wasn't just being brave in that moment. She actually believed that there was something on the other side of that blade worth walking toward. Heaven to her was the whole reason that she could face what she was about to face without falling apart. Irma's last words were, you know, hurry up. And by every account we have, she walked on to the gallows with no remorse. And it's just sad because grace was available to her too. Yeah. The same as it was to Sophie, to any of us, but it has to be reached for. And from everything we know, she never did. And so I just trying to figure out what I was going to say at the end. I guess a good question we can all ask ourselves is what is sitting in that space inside of us right now? Because something is. And whatever it is decides who we're going to be when everything falls apart and where we're going to go when it's all over. And as long as we have breath, you know, it's never too late to reach for Jesus.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:57

Wow. Sophie talking about her conscience and stuff, you know, I wouldn't I would consider that the Holy Spirit. Yes. And the fact is, we all do have to come to a point where we get to choose if we're going to listen to the Holy Spirit and follow or or not or reject it. One did, one obviously did not. It's very sobering. It's like this really happened. Yeah. This really happened. Yes. Those were some hard times. Yes, they were.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:29

Here at Hard Times and True Crimes, we appreciate your listeners' support. And I just want to remind you that you can support the program through the Buy a Coffee link in the website. You like, share, and subscribe every episode, and tell everybody you know, unless they're Nazis, to check us out. Till next time, goodbye.