Elsa Brändström

Elsa Brändström was a Swedish nurse and philanthropist, born in Saint Petersburg on 26 March 1888 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 4 March 1948. She became known as the Angel of Siberia. Volunteering as a nurse in the Imperial Russian Army at the start of World War I, she went to Siberia in 1915 with the Swedish Red Cross to bring basic medical treatment to German and Austrian prisoners of war, up to 80 percent of whom died of cold, hunger and disease, and she dedicated her life to them. She was arrested in Omsk in 1920, sentenced to death as a spy, and then had the sentence revoked. Afterwards she raised funds for former prisoners and their families, ran a rehabilitation sanatorium and a children's home in Germany, and wrote Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia. She moved to the United States in 1933, where she helped refugees and, after World War II, relief for women and children in Germany.