History, as we know, is filled with uplifting stories - it's also full of awful stories that are sometimes difficult even to imagine, like his one. Today, Farz tells us about one of the worst concentration camp guards, Irma Grese. Her depravity, often sexually arousing for her, stands out even among the stories of WWII. We discuss how we're sure that even if there hadn't been a war, Irma would have ended up doing something awful with her life.
History, as we know, is filled with uplifting stories - it's also full of awful stories that are sometimes difficult even to imagine, like his one.
Today, Farz tells us about one of the worst concentration camp guards, Irma Grese. Her depravity, often sexually arousing for her, stands out even among the stories of WWII. We discuss how we're sure that even if there hadn't been a war, Irma would have ended up doing something awful with her life.
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
Taylor: We ran out of Thin Mints today. Is that the goal? The goal is to run out of them
>> Taylor: In the matter of the people of State of California vs. Oriental James Simpson, case number BA096.
>> Farz: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. And we're recording live. Taylor, can you believe it? You can't even tell. I just woke up from a nap. I am m so enthused.
>> Taylor: I was not. Whoa, you are. I was not expecting that.
>> Farz: It's literally. That was all my energy from four.
>> Taylor: Seconds ago when you were just telling me how tired you were.
>> Farz: I'm done now. That was it.
>> Taylor: That was very cheerful.
>> Farz: All I have in me. How are you doing?
>> Taylor: I am good. I am. Yeah. We, did hopefully our last cookie booth, maybe our second to last, but we did run out of Thin Mints today, so that was good to be like, you know, things are happening.
>> Farz: Is that the goal? The goal is to run out of them.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: What do the kids win again?
>> Taylor: A bunch of junk. Like, she gets like. Yes. No, because you're not, like, getting other girl people to do it, but you're getting, like, a bunch of crap. So you're getting like. They get like. Well, okay, actually.
Taylor: It's almost the end of Girl Scout cookie season
All right, let me introduce us, since this is going to take me an hour to explain to you. Welcome to Doom to Fail with a podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week. I am Taylor, joined by Fars and. And it is almost the end of Girl Scout cookie season. no. Our boxes are $6. The troop gets, like, a dollar a box, which is, like, not bad. And for, like, troop things to, like, pay for their activities and camp and stuff that gets divided amongst the girls, and then each girl at every level, which is, like, every 100 boxes or so, you get, like, a piece of junk, like a water bottle or a stuffed panda this year. And if you sell, like, more than 875boxes, you get to go to Knott's Berry Farm. And then if you sell 5,000 boxes, you get to go on a cruise to the Mediterranean. Gets progressively better. But selling 5,000 boxes is impossible. No. No one I've ever met.
>> Farz: Wow. Yeah. Have you done the knott'sberry Farm thing?
>> Taylor: We won it one year. We did. It was when they went to Universal. and we did get it once, but we're not going to get it this year, which is fine.
>> Farz: It reminds me a lot of, Cutco. Remember Cutco? Everybody's. Yeah, everybody's, older brother worked there, and it was like, you just sell your friends and friends of friends and.
>> Taylor: Yeah, but it's Cute. They get out there. They're meeting their community with their friends, and, Yeah, it's very sweet.
>> Farz: And they're good. I have the box at, the top of the box. It's open in the kitchen area, so that anytime, you know, someone's over that they want to grab a cookie, they can pop up in a package and grab a cookie. It's, like, very. It's very hospitable of me. It is.
>> Taylor: Look at you.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: If you microwave the adventure foals, you can pretend that you baked them.
>> Farz: Oh, that's good. That's a great idea. If you have any more hacks. If you have cookie hacks, like, you gotta. You gotta tell us.
>> Taylor: Yeah, well, that's one. And then the toast days are good with s'mores. but it's very, very sweet. Not like you wouldn't expect them to be sweet, but it's, like, exceptionally sweet.
>> Farz: Not an everyday treat.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Yeah.
>> Farz: Okay. Sweet. well, let's get to story time. unless there's anything else you have.
Morgan writes in to say flying is safe still
>> Taylor: I, did want to tell you just. I don't know why I felt like telling you this, but did you hear about the Illinois state flag?
>> Farz: No.
>> Taylor: They had a redesign contest, so they had 10, different options, and people got to vote on them, and they voted to keep their flag. Like, they voted to not pick any of the redesigns and pick the ones they already had, which I thought was hilarious.
>> Farz: Yeah. Good, good. You know, it's funny, like, earlier this week, I was watching something about airplane designs and how it was like, there's a reason why they all look the same. Like, people have tried to be creative with airplane designs, and it's like they fall out of the sky. Yeah, like, works. Just keep doing the thing that works.
>> Taylor: Yeah, exactly, exactly. we, The. Oh, Morgan did send a thing about how flying is safe still. how do you feel after your flights? did you clap when the plane landed?
>> Farz: People were. So the guy next to me, he was an older gentleman, and he did do. We didn't talk. I don't know anything about him, but he did do a little prayer thing. The Father.
>> Taylor: The sonic testicles, wallet and watch. Yeah.
>> Farz: Is that what it is? Yeah. Okay.
>> Taylor: It's not really that I can't remember where that's from, but, yes, Father, Son, holy spirit.
>> Farz: But he. But he did do that. So I think that, like, the general sentiment is, like, people are, like, a little bit more anxious than normal.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Especially because I was flying into Reagan and, like, that plane just crashed for some reason there's like something about like the, the ghost of the plane that was there. Like what I was thinking was at some point on this like, descent, trajectory, I'm like right where that plane was.
>> Taylor: Exactly. That's scary. And it's so sad that there are so many ice. So like there's so many ice skaters on that plane. So I'm seeing a lot of like ice skating tributes to it. It's very sad.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. But Morgan, thank you for writing in to help clear up some anxiety.
>> Taylor: cool.
>> Farz: Who is it? Me is me today.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Okay.
Taylor: We're going to cover some horrible women in women's history
I will go first and continue my, my women's, history thing that I forgot I was doing last week when I covered Hachi no nuts. Thank Taylor for always keep me on track. so, yeah, so the whole point of this women's, history call out. There's a lot of like, in my story, it's a lot of like unique women history actually that was going on here, but in like the worst possible way. And we're going to be covering, you know, again, in the, in the spirit of equality. Like women can be just as horrible as men. And as a result, we're going to cover some of those horrible women. In the last two weeks, I covered Elizabeth Bathory and kind of touching on what you started this conversation with before we started recording Taylor, I'm going to be covering Nazi Germany.
>> Taylor: Oh, mine's Nazi Germany too.
>> Farz: Interesting.
Taylor: I'm not covering Elsa Cook, Taylor
Okay, so do you have any guess who might cover,
>> Taylor: I know like all like the women that were in like the concentration camps. Like the bitch of Buchenwald. What's her name? Her.
>> Farz: Elsa Cook.
>> Taylor: Is that her? The of Buchenwald.
>> Farz: That's a bukomal, but I wrote down. Nope, exclamation point. Wrong exclamation point. It's not Elsa Cook, Taylor. Exclamation point. Hahaha. But you didn't say Elsa Cook. I had to tell you. So it doesn't even count. So we'll just get past that. But I'm not covering Elsa Cook.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: I know.
>> Taylor: Wow. Come at me in your notes.
>> Farz: Yeah, really threw it at you. but I want to cover another person who would be called a crazy bitch, who a lot of people didn't hear because they think that Ilsa Cook kind of became super famous and everybody like, kind of like put her at the very top. I mean, she was the one that like would pick prisoners for execution based on tattoos that she thought would look good as like, it's lamps. Yeah, the craziest.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Logic is that, and also timing wise, I realized that Ilsa Cook's story dovetails directly into Ed Gein. And so there's a lot of speculation when Ed Gein popped off in the U.S. that he was inspired by Elsa Cook. Although we don't know for sure if he was or not. But, he did a lot of the same stuff that Ilsa Cook did. And then he became like the most well known serial killer person in the US at that time. So I think that's why we know her so well.
I'm going to cover a woman named Irma Gressa this week
But I'm gonna cover someone different. I'm gonna cover a woman named Irma Gressa. Do you know that name?
>> Taylor: No. I did read Hitler's Furies, but a long time ago.
>> Farz: Was she in there or something?
>> Taylor: Probably. It's a book about, like, the women in. In the Third Reich, so. Ah.
>> Farz: so again, like, there's gonna be a lot of fun women's first here. So in addition, being one of the most sadistic women in history, she also holds a distinction as being the youngest woman Great Britain has ever executed.
>> Taylor: Oh.
>> Farz: Yeah, that.
>> Taylor: That's saying a lot. Yeah, they've executed a lot of young women.
>> Farz: So technically they say judicially executed. So I think that there's also a lot of women that were killed because the king was just like, I don't like you, so cut off your head. But this was like done through courts.
>> Taylor: I saw a thing, it's a. On Instagram, like comedians. And they were like Henry VIII's fifth bachelor party. And they had like, T shirts that were like, fifth time's a charm, you know, and they were like, dude, why are we here again? This is so embarrassing. And like, it was just really funny.
>> Farz: Yeah. No gifts. No gifts after the second wedding.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Unless you're king. Right.
>> Taylor: Right. Henry, if it kill you.
>> Farz: So, yeah, yeah, I will. I will admit, reading about her upbringing in life, I legitimately don't understand how people in Germany turned out the way they did. Like, you remember the opening scene in Inglourious Basterds with Christopher Walls when he walks up that farm?
>> Taylor: Mm.
>> Farz: That's like kind of, Irma's life. It's like these rolling hills, fresh milk, fresh cheese, like freshly baked bread. It just sounds like absolute paradise. That's like what she was brought up in. and again. Well, I'll get into. I guess I'll get into, like, why this ended up happening the way it did. But she was born, in 1923, five years after World War I ended. And, there were some people living this kind of like, idyllic life, in. In Germany at this time, but not everybody. it's funny because I was. I was trying to figure out who said this, but it turns out to be another very famous woman, which, like, again, dovetails into the whole theme of this. It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg quoting a quote that she said, saying that pendulum swings violently from one side of the spectrum to the other side of the spectrum. And that's kind of what ended up happening in Germany around this time, obviously. So basically during the period, during this period, the world was super mad at Germany. So you had reparations which financially devastated them while they were already financially devastated. You had these traumatized soldiers coming home who, due to what they experienced, were basically absolutely useless. You had a blockade on food, and you had hyperinflation, which made the German mark totally worthless. And we just, like, as a society just kept pushing these people further and further into the brink, which happened.
>> Taylor: Yeah, I was. I was reading about it in the book for my. My thing this week. And, yeah, like, inflation was like, Monday, a loaf of bread is 5 marks. On Thursday, it's a trillion marks.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Like, what are you supposed to do? Like, everything's gone.
>> Farz: And I wonder, like, what did the Allied powers think would happen? Like, if you push, there's this quota that the most dangerous person in the world is the one who has nothing to lose. And I think of that too. I'm, Like, you push these people to the point of, like, they can't feed their kids. They can't do, like, of course they're gonna. Like, it's almost shocking that we didn't think Hitler would happen.
>> Taylor: Yeah, no, I. That's a good question. I don't know what, like, the outcome of the Treaty of Versailles was expected to be.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. So. And that's kind of the situation we found ourselves here is that the Germans after World War I had basically nothing to lose. Irma would have been born the same year as the beer hall pushed, which was Hitler's first fail attempt in Munich at a coup, and that resulted him getting sent to prison. the village she was born in, it's called Mecklenburg Scene plot, which, like, if you look it up, it looks again, absolutely idyllic.
>> Taylor: You're totally right that, like, I mean, Germany is gorgeous. Like these, these little towns and like the mountains, they're just like fairy tale beautiful.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. which would make me the opposite of angry. I'd want to go talk to rabbits in the forest. Like, not take people's skins and make lamps out of them. You know, it's the opposite feeling it would give most people, I think.
>> Taylor: I think so, yeah. I mean, I think there's. What is the. What is the path between those two, you know?
>> Farz: So I'm gonna. I'm gonna actually touch on that too, because I do want to discuss that.
Irma's father joined the Nazi Party formally in 1937
So, Irma, back to Irma. She was one of five children, and her father worked at a dairy farm, and her mother was basically. She was a housewife. But she also, like, grow. she had a garden. She grew their food, and she had, like, a mini farm. Like, think goats and chickens around. Like, it was, again, exactly the scenario that we're describing here. But despite the bucolic narrative I'm painting, these will also have their problems. And Irma's father was a philanderer, and he was having an affair with the daughter of a local pub owner. And Irma's mother find it, found out and then attempted suicide. The suicide attempt failed in the moment, but caused enough damage given the fact that she drank hydrochloric acid. Worst way to do it, that she would die months later after the attempt. And unfortunately for Irma, she's the one that found her mother's body. So I'm sure that imprints something in your brain around the utility of life, you know?
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah. It's not great.
>> Farz: Yeah. She would have been 12 years old at this time, which is, like, pretty young to, like, see something like that. So there's some confusion as to the role of Irma's father in influencing her political ideology. On the one hand, it was said that he was not an ideologue or a fanatic, but rather just, like, he was basically a conservative guy at a time when being conservative meant m. You were part of the Nazi Party.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: On the other hand, by most accounts, he joined the party formally in 1937, which is three years after the Nazi Party purged its ranks during the Night of Long Knives and killed anybody who was disloyal to Hitler. And it was two years after the Nuremberg Laws go into effect, which stripped Jews of their German citizenship. But again, I think in a lot of these situations, you're like, I don't know. This doesn't affect me. So who cares? Like, you know, like, until it's, like, in your face. Yeah. I also put down that, like, I don't know this guy's perspective. And he went through World War I and his wife drinking hydrochloric acids. Like, who knows what he perceived as normal or not, right?
>> Taylor: Irma.
>> Farz: and her father's adoption of Nazism occurred around the same time, as right after her father officially joined the party, she would also join the League of German Girls, which was the girls wing of the Hitler Youth Movement.
>> Taylor: I wonder if this was the case.
>> Farz: Hitler invent the Boy Scouts?
>> Taylor: No.
>> Farz: Did he do something like that?
>> Taylor: He had the Hitler Youth, but I don't think that they invented the Boy Scouts. The same idea. Scouting movement founded a night. No. but it's like the, it does fall into the idea of.
>> Farz: It sounded very similar. That's why I was like, wait, of Scouting.
>> Taylor: But okay, it looks, I mean, it looks similar, you know, but no.
>> Farz: so to further add confusion on where her father stood on the matter, he actually hated the fact that his daughter joined the, League of German Girls. he did not want her to be part of the Hitler Youth. So again, we're seeing some indications that he's not like a full blown Nazi, though he's an official Nazi. But then again, like, I think Arnold Schwarzenegger's dad was a Nazi or like he was a part of the party.
>> Taylor: He wasn't.
You know what I'm going to talk about? I'm talking about Nazis as well in my story
You know what I'm going to talk about? I'm talking about Nazis as well in my story. And I think a lot of it is like, it's interesting because everyone's. You can't put an entire country in jail, you know, after this war. So like everyone, A lot of people were Nazis and they never were accountable for art at all, you know, but like Arnold Schwarzenegger, he had that thing. Did you see what he talked about his dad? How his dad came home and it was just like a bunch of broken men and they all became alcoholics and it was terrible, you know.
>> Farz: What do you mean, after the war? After World War II, you mean?
>> Taylor: Yeah, he said like a lot of the, like, like my dad said, like I talked about this is my dad in the episode about polio. You know, when my dad was little, all the dads introduce themselves and be like, oh, hey, I'm. Da, da, da. What were you in the service? Because everyone's dad had been in the war, you know.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: And so that's got to be the same in Germany and Japan and Russia and these places that like, you know, everyone who is my age who's in their 40s, their grandparents were in the war one way or another. You know, if you were, if you're like from the US generations back. If you're in Germany, there's those generations back. Like you can't, I don't know, like they all, it was just part of the thing. So who knows if like Irma's dad was like, go along to get along or like really into it, you know, Like a lot of people. Well, most people were never punished. They were just like not, you know, you can't put everybody in jail.
>> Farz: It seems like a, it's like society is writing off like an entire generation and be like, yeah, you guys just have to like. Because that's like what it was saying about her as well, or her like after World War I was like, like I mentioned the soldiers coming home and being basically useless because like they were like traumatized or like emotionally traumatized by everything that they'd seen and gone through and also being like the bad guys. And so they come home and it's like, nobody gives a shit about you. And you just like sit there and I guess I'm going to drink myself to death. Like, what else?
>> Taylor: And those are the dads of these guys, you know.
>> Farz: Damn, you're right.
>> Taylor: So like I didn't think about that many generations of people, you know, being.
>> Farz: Past generation to generation.
>> Taylor: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, your dad was in the trenches in World War I. Now you have, I think you might have a chance now everything's terrible and then you have a chance at something better. So you become a Nazi.
>> Farz: It's funny, like, the more we talk about it, it's probably not a good thing, but the more we talk about, the more I'm like, I kind of get it. Like.
>> Taylor: Well no, when I think that it's not, it's. It's interesting because if everyone's doing it and it's, it's normalized, you know. Yeah, but it wasn't a secret. Like the bad stuff wasn't a secret. So it's not like.
>> Farz: I think the bad stuff was kind of a secret though.
>> Taylor: But not really. I have stuff and. Well, I mean people knew. Not everyone knew, but people knew.
>> Farz: Well, yeah, I think. Yeah.
Irma dropped out of school at 14 to go to work with Nazis
Well, let me circle back to Irma and then we'll, we'll go back into the philosophy of Nazism.
>> Taylor: Great.
>> Farz: So, she would ultimately drop out of school at 14 years old to go to work. And first she worked at a dairy farm, then she would do retail. And then her life with the Nazi movement would be even more formally intertwined. She would land a job at a sanatorium that operate was operated by the Nazis. To rehabilitate, SS personnel. Her, mentor. Mentor there was a Nazi og, someone with rank of being in the party way, way in the early days, like one of the original Nazis, basically. he was a guy named Carl Gephardt. And we're not going to get into a ton of detail about Carl Gephardt, but he was basically the equivalent of Joseph Mengele at, like, other concentration camps. So he was like the chief doctor doing crazy stuff to people.
>> Farz: Basically, like, that's.
>> Taylor: That's such an interesting line to, to go back to it. Like, you're like, yes, I want my economy to be better. But then like, oh, I'm watching them do these terrible human experiments, you know? Like, when does that get too weird for you to stay?
>> Farz: I don't know. I think if it's like, so embedded that you're so much better than everybody else that, like, I don't know. Does it. Why would it ever dawn on you?
>> Taylor: I feel like, yeah, I don't know.
>> Farz: and so this guy Gebhardt, this crazy, crazy guy that was basically her mentor. Eventually, Irma was fired from her job at the sanatorium. But Gebhart, he, referred her to Ravensbrook Concentration Camp to find work. So this is another first which I didn't know about. And that ties into women's stuff. this was unique because it was a woman's only concentration camp. Well, at first it was women's only, but then apparently there were some women who were pregnant when they were put into the concentration camp. So it became a woman in children's concentration camp, which, like, makes it so much more grim. You brought pregnant women into this. Like, it's crazy.
>> Taylor: but of course they did.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're Nazis. yeah, makes sense. So at, 18 years old, Irma became a concentration camp officer in training for about three weeks, which she completed to the satisfaction of her supervisors. There's nothing known as to how or why. During this time, she, like, completely flipped the script from being, like, semi normal to, like, completely and utterly sociopathic. But during the seven months she spent working at Ravensbrook, she was known for whipping prisoners, particularly the ones that were, like, really old and really weak. Like, she liked the fact that they couldn't defend themselves at all. She was known to deny food to women who were, like, already severely malnourished and starving. She volunteered to select women to be sent for experimentation, which, if you recall from the Joseph Mengala episode of, last podcast on Left, that was a job that Nobody wanted. Even the people that did do it would show up m drunk to do it.
>> Taylor: Right. That's a big thing, too. Like, a lot of people were meth and drunk to be able to do these things because they were so bad. But a couple people sounds like Irma's. one of them was, like, cool.
>> Farz: Mengele was one of them too. Mengele also did not drink or do drugs, and he actually wanted to show up and do be part of selection. Nuts. and the prisoners would, say that they thought that she was deriving sexual pleasure from the violence around her. What is going to a pretty big theme about Irma, it's like, the fact that she's, like, super horned up over everything she's seeing. Seven months into her time at Ravenbrook, she was transferred into Poland to Auschwitz, to. Which is Birkenau. her time at Birkenau started out rough. She was supposed to start out as a telephone operator, but apparently she did something that was punished. Like a punishment. And so she ended up having to go on assignment overseeing prisoners who were also on punishment. So these were people who, like, were trying to escape or talk back. They were given, like, the worst. The worst. Like, think, like, the people that would have to clean out the retreat. And your job is you have to supervise them. So nobody wanted that punishment.
>> Taylor: What does she do? What could you do that gets you in trouble?
>> Farz: I. I don't know what she did, but given the nature of Nazis, it probably wasn't that bad.
>> Taylor: Or like, it was so bad that Nazis think it's bad.
>> Farz: I, think it's kind of strict on everything. Aren't they, like, they're not like, a nice people. I mean, I love Germans. I'm Germans. But, like, you know, yeah, y'all. Y'all are stern people. You. You don't take lightly to things not going the way you want them to go. Yeah.
>> Taylor: Ah.
So this part of the story is the part that I also picture from Schindler's List
>> Farz: So this part of the story is the part that I also picture from Schindler's List. Where. Do you remember, Taylor? Where, like, there was that scene where they're burning this giant pile of bodies. In this one, SS officer is, like, screaming and laughing, but also crying. M hm. This scene, I think so it stuck out of my mind. I was like. That was like. That's like. It was a great scene capturing, like, somebody's sanity just leaving. It's like, you know, what you're doing is wrong. Nothing is right. The world is upside down, but you can't do anything about it. You're kind of part of it. Like, I think that that's where, where she's at, and it's like where her psyche just, just broke, which I think happens to anybody if you're exposed to so much crazy dark stuff.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: This is why, like, I remember. Okay, so this is a. Sound bad, but, like, when I was like, younger, like 18, 19, actually, we all did this. We were kids and we'd. We like go on Ron.com.
>> Taylor: Oh, sure.
>> Farz: I don't think that's good for your brain. I don't think exposure to stuff like that does anything but create, like, these cracks and fissures in your, in your psyche that, like, worse she can get into.
>> Taylor: Yeah, I agree.
>> Farz: Yeah. So I think that's what was going on here.
Irma Grisse engaged in forced sexual conduct with male and female prisoners
Her next assignment was in Camp c, which contained 30,000 women. and like I said, more than anybody else I heard about during Nazi Germany. Irma Grisse had some strange connections between violence and sexuality, which I'm pretty sure is like, kind of a rarity for women. She would engage in forced sexual conduct with male and female prisoners under her ward. The male ones were there. Given that Campsie was a women's ward, they'd have men there as like prison commando units. Like, these are like. They're like narcs, basically. the female prisoners she would use in this capacity until she was bored with them sexually and then send them to the gas chamber and move on to someone new. Yeah, she was crazy. A Jewish doctor and prisoner in Irma's section of the camp named, Gisela Pearl. She wrote a book called, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. And in it she would talk about how every now and then she'd have to operate on women that were beaten really badly by Irma. And she would have to do it without anesthesia in that Irma would always be there nearby watching her do it. So she would take pleasure and moan at the screaming sounds the women were making during this, like, these operations. She also had affairs with other officers within the camp, including Joseph Mengele and a guy named Joseph Kramer, which was an SS officer known as the Beast of Belson. I lost count of how many people she either had consensual or non consensual sex with. but it was a lot. It was like in normal. Listen, workplace romances, they happen. It is a thing. This was like you're in the middle of the Holocaust. Your grounds. You're a holocaust. So the corpses burning next to you. Yeah, I mean, how are you warmed up right now?
>> Taylor: I only laugh because, like a workplace romance, that Like, Dacao is different than at, like, Google. True.
>> Farz: It's true. Very, very different.
>> Taylor: Like, yeah, no, it doesn't. It's not a sexy environment where you're, like, excited to be at work. Like, that's not. That's bad.
>> Farz: Also, it's like. It's funny because that last guy, he broke up. People are so weird. The last guy, Joseph Kramer, that officer, he broke up with her because he found out that she was having sexual relations with women because he was. He was homophobic. And it's just.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: It's like, okay, I guess.
>> Taylor: Of course they were also homophobic. But, like. I know, but then, like, why was she doing that? Like, that doesn't make sense either. But I'm sure there was plenty of, like. Of all sorts of gender on gender on gender on gender rape in these places, you know?
>> Farz: Of course, of course. I guess you're right. I guess I didn't think about that. The way I was thinking about is more like, wait, so you have, like, some sort of moral distinctions between right and wrong, which I, guess. Yeah, I guess they do.
>> Taylor: Yeah, I guess they do.
>> Farz: So after this, she was transferred briefly to Bergen Belsen. And she only stayed there for about four weeks because pretty soon after she arrived, but if British forces liberated the camp, and Irma was apparently defiant till the very end. She tried attacking British soldiers and she had to be forcibly, restrained. Actually, I didn't mention this, but like, that woman I mentioned earlier, the doctor, Giselle Pearl, she would talk about how stunningly beautiful Irma was. And you look at her pictures and, like, she looks. She looks like Winston Churchill, if Winston Churchill had long one hair.
>> Taylor: I think I'm, looking at her pictures. I feel like part of it is this, like, skirt that she's wearing that goes up to her boobs. Like, that's not giving her any. Showing her any favors.
>> Farz: but yeah, her face is like. It's so sour.
>> Taylor: I mean, her face. When she's in this. She's clearly on trial. She. She doesn't look remorseful.
>> Farz: She's very. Yeah, she's, But she described at length her angelic beauty and long blonde hair and beautiful blue eyes. I was like, she looks like. But I guess, sure. also, beauty stands were different, so there's that.
>> Taylor: I don't think she's ugly. I think that, you know. Yeah, I think it's the outfit.
>> Farz: I think her personality makes her ugly, if I'm being honest.
>> Taylor: Personality absolutely makes her ugly. Yes, yes, correct.
>> Farz: So the camps are Liberated. She would ultimately get arrested and interrogated while incarcerated. And her argument was that Heinrich Himmler, who is widely considered the architect of the Holocaust, he is a responsible party and that she was just following orders. and I'm just following orders. That was basically the argument for any Nazi war criminal. And it wouldn't work because it's long been established that taking orders that are patently illegal or following them when they're patently illegal is not a legal defense. So on that basis, she was found guilty of committing crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. One thing I learned, one thing I learned is that in these cases, the tribunal preemptively rejected any appeals for clemency. Like their appeals were over. It was like, nope, you're guilty. This is it. There's no further appeals past this.
Irma Gressa was sentenced to death for working as a Nazi guard
Yeah, about a month after the conviction, sorry, about a month after the conviction, and after the trial, some other guards had wrapped up and they too were sentenced to death. They transferred Irma and these prisoners to their last prison before execution. Irma and the two other women who were about, she was going to be executed with, they spent their last night hanging out, singing songs and telling jokes. The next morning at 9:34am, the first one woman was hanged. Then half an hour later, Irma was hanged with her final words being schnell. Do you know what that means Best? I said, yeah, well, yeah, I wrote, I wrote quick. But like, yeah, yeah, same thing. She apparently went to her fate pretty stoically. Like she was not remorseful. She didn't seem scared. because the last woman, apparently when she went, she was like losing her, it was like terrified. And she was like a 45 year old woman just like scared shitless. And I, 22, was like, yeah, it's fine. But again, I think your brain's broke at some point. Like you don't understand anything. What's going on.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: and that's hurt her. That's the story of Irma Gressa. And she was the most horned up guard at, Ravensbrook, Birkenau and Belson.
>> Taylor: Man, what a monster.
>> Farz: Yeah. but the psychology of it is kind of interesting. I've actually never, until we had this conversation been like, oh, yeah, you know what? When you stack this and this and this and this and this and this, like, oh, yeah, okay. People break. Like people, people will turn into monsters. and that's, probably.
>> Taylor: But also I feel like she was never going to be like, like some people could have been normal. It doesn't sound like she could have been. Like, she enjoyed it to a degree that I think was like, yeah, she,
>> Farz: It's something. Also in the Mangle episode last podcast, they say, which was like, there's some people that, like, they wouldn't. They were made to be the perfect Nazi. Like, like, they. They were brought up in a time period where, like, their unique skill sets and interests completely dovetailed in the Nazi ideology. Falls. Falls in line with one of those. And actually, there's another story I didn't bring up, and I didn't actually write down here either, which is, like, the fight that she gets into with her dad that comes out during her trial where her sisters are providing testimony, where Irma goes home in her Nazi outfit at some point during her employment at Ravensbrook, and her dad's, like, pissed, and he's like, get. Like, this isn't who we are. Like, get out of my house. Like, get into a fight. Like, it's like, a pretty violent fight, apparently. And the only time that she showed emotion during her trial was when her sister was retelling this story about how her dad was like, this is disgusting. I don't want any of this. Romney and, like, kicked her out of the house, which is, like, kind of cool of him, because I'm pretty sure she could have gone to somebody and, like, reported him in animation.
>> Taylor: Oh, absolutely. Right. Because also, she's young, so she's at that age where they're like, the government's like, you should tell on your parents if they have any. If they have any leanings towards not Nazism. You should, make sure that you tell us.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: You know, so she probably was. She probably. She was definitely, like, one of the. Of the generation that was set up to do that, for sure.
>> Farz: Yeah. Which, yeah, is another point for the dab, which is like, yeah, he probably had a Nazi card but wasn't, like, into it. Into it, you know?
>> Taylor: Yeah, he did. Maybe because he has had to. I mean, doesn't, like, he was, like, a great dad, but, like, you said the ptsd, you know, and, like, the everything.
>> Farz: Yeah, I think that's, like, a big takeaway for me is, like, there's a lot of reasons why people are the way they are. God, who was I. What was I reading? Where it was like, dude, if Kanye West's mom was still alive, he'd never be the way he is.
>> Taylor: That is 1,000% true.
>> Farz: Because, like, he loved his mom, so he named his albums after her. And, like, I think her death, like, just completely Ruptured something in his brain. So.
>> Taylor: Interesting. But, yeah, I don't, I don't think he was in therapy.
>> Farz: I guess the point is, like, we can be empathetic and understand that we don't have the perspectives that other people have.
>> Taylor: Right. Not as an excuse, but it's like a. Trying to understand it.
>> Farz: But also there's a category. Like, you're all. There's also, Irma Bristas that are not that. Like, they're nuts. Like.
>> Taylor: Right. Like, she would have been.
>> Farz: Like, she would have been this way anyways.
>> Taylor: Yes. Like, she would have been, like, a terrible mother who abused the shit of her children at the least, you know, like that. Yes. Yes.
>> Farz: She would have been Rosemary West.
>> Taylor: Yes. She wasn't gonna be, like, a. A good person.
>> Farz: No.
Taylor: I have tons of mail. Um, anything we want to read out
She wouldn't take her kids to cookies. And she was not gonna coach softball. No. No. So that's my story. That's part two of three women who are crazy. And my one next week is going to be a long one. You know who it is already, so I'm not going to restate it, but it's going to be a very popular one that, is us based, which is going to be exciting.
>> Taylor: Cool, excited, sweet.
>> Farz: anything we want to read out?
>> Taylor: Yes, I have tons of mail. I have a little bit of mail. I mailed out two more stickers, which is super, super exciting. I also got three people who agreed with me on the dog situation. and we're not here to argue. I'm just here to say that some people just don't want dogs. And thank you, Ben, Justin, and Nadine, for writing in, letting me know that I'm not alone.
>> Farz: But did anybody say they want dogs?
>> Taylor: No.
>> Farz: so we're the silent majority.
>> Taylor: You're the very loud majority. That's. That's what that is.
>> Farz: Fair. I'll take it. You're not wrong.
>> Taylor: yeah. So thank you, everyone. Thank you for emailing us and hopefully you got the stickers I sent out. If you don't get them, let me know. but I did see them go directly to our mail lady, so they should get to you soon. And, yeah, thanks, Everybody. We're at DoomedToFailPod gmail.com and Doomed To Fail pod on all social media and just Google Doom to fail podcast. You'll find us. That's what I've been telling people to do on TikTok, because it's like, some people don't know how to find podcasts. And if everybody listening to this, obviously has already found it. But if you have a friend and they're like, I haven't found it, just doomed to fail, Podcast will come up on the top. I checked it on my browsers. Should work.
>> Farz: Sweet. cool. Is there anything else, Taylor?
>> Taylor: that is it. Thank you. Thank you forz.
>> Farz: Thank you all. Have a great rest of your day. Bye, all.