BESTIAL Nazi Collaborator Grethe Bartram -Danish Woman who BETRAYED her Husband and Brother to NAZIS

Grethe Bartram was born on 23 February 1924 in Aarhus, Denmark, as the second of eight children. Her father, Niels Peter Christopher Bartram was from southern Jutland and since it was part of the German Empire from 1864 to 1920, he had therefore participated in World War I on the German side. Throughout the war which began on the 28th of July 1914 and ended on the 11th of November 1918, Denmark was neutral. Though Grethe’s father Niels Bartram suffered from shellshock from the war and found it difficult to work, he managed to operate a small bicycle repair shop in Aarhus. Both Niels and his wife were members of the Communist Party of Denmark as were the social circles of the family.
In 1937, at the age of 13, Grethe Bartram left school and worked for a couple of years at institution for mentally disabled people in Brejning, before finding work in Aarhus.

When the Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939, Grethe was 15 years old.

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The 9th of April 1940. Under the codename  “Operation Weserübung”, Nazi Germany invades   Denmark and Norway. Strategically, Denmark’s  importance to Germany is as a staging area   for operations in Norway where the Third  Reich seeks to secure naval bases for use  

Against the British fleet in the North Sea and to  guarantee vital iron-ore shipments from neutral   Sweden on which Nazi Germany is dependent. While Norway surrenders to Germany only after   2 months on the 10th of June 1940, invasion  of Denmark lasts less than six hours and is  

The shortest military campaign conducted by the  Germans during the war. Though at the beginning   the Germans are eager to cultivate good relations  with a population they perceive as “fellow   Aryans”, by the fall of 1942, Danish attitude of  passive resistance toward their German occupiers  

Undergoes significant transformation and the  Danish resistance movement begins to gain support.   In the Summer of 1943, sabotage activities,  reprisals, strikes and street unrest across   Denmark mount to a high pitch and Germans begin  to rely on collaborating Danish informers. One  

Of them will betray her own brother, husband and  close acquaintances. Her name is Grethe Bartram. Maren Margrethe Bartram also known as Grethe  Bartram was born on 23 February 1924 in Aarhus,   Denmark, as the second of eight children. Her  father, Niels Peter Christopher Bartram was  

From southern Jutland and since it was part of the  German Empire from 1864 to 1920, he had therefore   participated in World War I on the German side.  Throughout the war which began on the 28th of   July 1914 and ended on the 11th of November  1918, Denmark was neutral. Though Grethe’s  

Father Niels Bartram suffered from shellshock  from the war and found it difficult to work,   he managed to operate a small bicycle repair  shop in Aarhus. Both Niels and his wife were   members of the Communist Party of Denmark  as were the social circles of the family.

In 1937, at the age of 13, Grethe Bartram  left school and worked for a couple of years   at institution for mentally disabled people  in Brejning, before finding work in Aarhus. When the Second World War began on the 1st  of September 1939, Grethe was 15 years old.

On 9 April 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded  Denmark, the Royal Danish Army put up scant   resistance and the Royal Navy surrendered  without firing a shot. In the beginning,   whatever negative attitudes the Danes  had about the Germans were expressed   through passive resistance, or giving them the  “cold shoulder,” rather than open defiance,  

Armed resistance, or sabotage. The Danes  were given a degree of autonomy unheard of   in any other German occupied country in Europe.  Although Germany dominated Danish foreign policy,   the Germans permitted the Danish government  complete autonomy in running domestic affairs,   including maintaining control over  the legal system and police forces.

Throughout the occupation, the Danish Government  insisted there was no “Jewish problem” in Denmark.  They were like all the other citizens of Denmark  and would be treated no differently. In practice,   this meant that Jews were not forced  to wear the Yellow Star of David,  

Were not segregated or isolated, and were not  barred from restaurants, public spaces, schools,   cinemas, or theatres. Their property was not  confiscated, and they were never dismissed from   their jobs. Their movement was not restricted,  by day or night and Jewish communal activities  

Remained undisturbed despite the presence  of German troops. In the end however, on 28   September 1943 the final order for deportation  came to Copenhagen but because an attaché for   Nazi Germany in occupied Denmark Georg Ferdinand  Duckwitz tipped off the Danes about the Germans’  

Intended deportation of the Jewish population  and arranged for their reception in Sweden,   Danish resistance groups subsequently  rescued 95% of Denmark’s Jewish population. Between April 1940 and August 1943, Danish  attitudes toward their German occupiers   underwent significant transformation. German  demands kept escalating until the Danes were  

No longer willing to compromise, to engage in  the “policy of negotiation,” to rely only on   passive resistance and the “cold shoulder”  technique. By the Fall of 1942, the Danish   resistance movement began to gain support and  in the summer of 1943, sabotage activities,  

Reprisals, strikes and street unrest across  Denmark mounted to a high pitch. In addition,   the Danes were unhappy with the Germans  because they were experiencing food shortages. On August 28, 1943, SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Dr.  Werner Best, informed the Danish Government   that it was declaring a “state of emergency.”  Public gatherings of more than five persons were  

Prohibited, as were strikes and financial  support for strikers. An 8:30 p.m. curfew   was imposed. Firearms and explosives were  confiscated, press censorship was imposed,   and Danish special tribunals for dealing  with infringements of these prohibitions   and regulations were to be established.  Sabotage was to be punished by death.

In 1942 when Grethe started to inform on the  members of the Dannish resistance movement,   she was only 18. She was 2 years younger  when she became pregnant and in July 1941,   she married Frode Thomsen, who was 4  years her senior. Their relationship,  

Which produced one son named Benny Gudmund – did  not last long and ended in the summer of 1943. During the German occupation of Denmark, Grethe  Bartram’s family, including her older brother   Christian Bartram, became involved with the  resistance. In September 1942 the Danish  

Police put up a 1000 Dannish kroner reward  for information regarding a sabotage fire in   a shop in Fredericiagade in Aarhus. Through  her brother, who had obtained gasoline from   his father’s workshop for use in the arson,  Grethe learned who had been involved and gave  

The information to the police. The case was  then forwarded to the German authorities. One   of the four arsonists escaped, but on the 2  December 1942 the other three were sentenced   to ten years in prison, while Christian  Bartram was sentenced to one year in prison.

Thereafter, Bartram participated in illegal  activities with people involved with the   resistance movement and in March-April 1944,  she became a permanent informer for the official   secret police of Nazi Germany – the Gestapo in  Aarhus and, according to her own statements,  

Received 500 to 700 kroner a month for her work  as an informer. She was given the name ” Thora”.   She later stated that she had originally  contacted the Gestapo to obtain the release   of her brother Hans Andreas Bartram, who on 25  November 1943 had been sentenced to two years’  

Imprisonment in Germany. At the same time, she  was informed that that Aksel Larsen, chairman of   the Communist Party of Denmark – had passed on a  lot of information during interrogation, which to   her legitimized that she could also do the same.  As a result, in the summer of 1944, the entire  

Local leadership of the communist resistance  was arrested on the basis of her information. However, resistance members still had high  confidence in Bartram at the time and in   August 1944 she was sent to Copenhagen as a  representative to establish new leadership for   the resistance in Aarhus. The resistance  subsequently became suspicious of her,  

So she arranged to be arrested and imprisoned  in Frøslev Prison Camp to allay this. However,   this was not enough to remove the resistance  movement’s suspicions, and when they were   certain of her guilt, they attempted to liquidate  her on several occasions. On 12 December 1944,  

She was shot to the neck, but survived,  as the weapon was of too small a caliber.  She was hospitalized in Aarhus, but for  security reasons was moved to the German   hospital in Fredericia in Denmark where she  wrote a letter to her mother in which she  

Also wrote:” I am not made for poverty, and  I will also show you that I will be rich one   day…” In Fredericia she continued to work as an  informer and provided information to the Gestapo. Though the local resistance movement had tracked  her down and worked to have her liquidated,  

By the time they were ready for another  attempt, she was no longer in Fredericia,   as the Gestapo had sent her to Germany to recover.  After recovering from the assassination attempt,   Grethe Bartram worked in the German town  of Flensburg until March 1945, when she  

Was employed by the Gestapo in Kolding, Denmark,  where she remained until the German surrender. On the 5 May 1945, when Denmark was officially  free of German control, she was in the Gestapo   headquarters in Esbjerg where she was wounded  after the resistance detonated bombs there.  

She recovered quickly and went by bicycle  to Kolding to get help but the Gestapo had   already evacuated. She wanted to try to get out  of the country disguised as a Red Cross sister,   but the Germans did not help with this. Instead,  she was given 25 extra cartridges for the pistol  

She had received when she was hired by the  Gestapo in Kolding. She then fled to Brejning,   where she was arrested on May 10,  1945 by the local resistance movement. While Bartram was in Aarhus Prison awaiting  trial, the Aarhus newspaper reported in March  

1946 that a 35-year-old married prison officer  had been in a long-term love affair with Bartram. During the trial, it was revealed that Grethe  Bartram had informed on as many as 53 people,   including her brother, husband and close  acquaintances. Of those, her information  

Directly resulted in 15 being tortured during  interrogation as well as 35 being transported   to Nazi concentration camps in Germany, where  eight ultimately died or were reported missing. Bartram pleaded guilty to the majority of  counts she faced and was sentenced to death  

On 29 October 1946 by the Criminal  Court of Aarhus, later affirmed by   the High Court on 22 February 1947 and the  Danish Supreme Court on 4 September 1947. During the hearing in the Supreme Court, three of  the 11 judges wanted to impose life imprisonment,  

As they emphasized that she had not immediately  seen the consequences of her actions as a person   who had been subjected to torture, and that  she was quite young at the time of the crime. Bartram stated that if she had known that  the case of 1942 sabotage fire in a shop in  

Fredericiagade in Aarhus would have been handed  over to the German authorities, she would not   have denounced the persons. However, on the same  occasion, she also stated that she wanted to earn   the money as her husband had suffered a serious  accident at work in the summer of 1942, after  

Which he spent a long time in hospital, which put  the young family’s finances under pressure. When   they divorced on the following year, their son  was put into foster care with her mother-in-law. During the trial in 1946, a mental health  report was prepared. The county doctor  

Concluded that Bartram was gifted but had to be  described as a psychopath of the amoral type,   who is self-assertive and boastful and  prone to imaginative and mendacious whims   that are carried out without restraint.  Moreover, she had to be considered a   “somewhat emotionless individual”. When  Bartram became aware of the declaration,  

She protested. What was particularly  upsetting to her was the term “emotionless”. As with Anna Lund Lorenzen, the only other  Danish woman sentenced to death after 1945   for war crimes, on 9 December 1947 her sentence  was commuted to life imprisonment by Minister of  

Justice Niels Busch-Jensen who gave as his  reasons Bartram’s young age at the time,   that she had been raised in an “anti-religious,   communist and materialistic spirit”,  and that she had had financial troubles. In the end, Bartram spent only ten years in  prison and was released on 26 October 1956. She  

Then moved to Sweden, where she lived under her  married name Maren Margrethe Thomsen, though she   had already divorced her husband in 1943. Grethe  spoke fluent Swedish with a Danish accent and   lived with her Swedish friend from 1956. In the  late 1960s she was granted Swedish citizenship.

In an interview in 2010 Bartram said  that she regretted her actions and a   maturing process had taken place during  the period she was in prison. Thus,   when she moved to Sweden,  she was a different person. When Bartram died on the 23 January 2017 in  Norwegian Vessigebro, she was 92 years old.

There were no tears shed for Grethe Bartram. thanks for watching the World History Channel   be sure to like And subscribe and click  the Bell notification icon so you don’t   miss our next episodes we thank you  and we’ll see you next time on the channel