LONDON — The woman British prosecutors branded the “Beast of Belsen” went to the gallows without a tremor, speaking only a single word as she walked to her death.
Irma Grese, the 22-year-old former SS guard whose name became synonymous with the most sadistic cruelty of the Nazi concentration camp system, was hanged at Hameln prison on December 13, 1945, by Britain’s official executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Her final utterance, according to execution records, was “schnell” — German for “quickly.”
Her execution closed one of the darkest chapters in modern history and marked the youngest judicial death of a woman under British law in the twentieth century. No tears were shed for her.
Grese’s crimes were catalogued in horrifying detail during the Belsen Trial, which opened on September 17, 1945, in Lüneburg, Germany. The British Military Tribunal heard testimony from dozens of survivors who described a young woman who beat prisoners with a cellophane-wrapped leather whip, set starved dogs on exhausted women, and personally selected thousands for the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Born on October 7, 1923, in Wrechen, then part of the Weimar Republic, Grese was the third of five children of dairy workers. Her mother committed suicide in 1936 after discovering her husband’s 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇. Raised by a strict, devout Christian father who despised the Nazi Party, she nonetheless absorbed the regime’s ideology through the German school system, where Hitler’s portrait hung in every classroom.
She dropped out of school at 14 after being bullied, worked briefly on a farm and in a retail shop, then trained as an assistant nurse at the Hohenlychen Sanatorium under Dr. Karl Gebhardt — a Nazi doctor who later conducted grotesque medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.
Her career in the camp system began in July 1942 at Ravensbrück, the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis. There, some 132,000 women passed through its gates; more than 92,000 perished. Ravensbrück functioned as a training center for approximately 3,500 female SS guards, a “school of violence” where trainees learned to extract maximum labor from prisoners before they died.
It was at Ravensbrück that Grese, then 18, is believed to have assisted during medical experiments. When she returned home in 1943 and told her family she was supervising prisoners, her father thrashed her with a belt and forbade her from returning.
In March 1943, Grese was deployed to Auschwitz-Birkenau. According to her sister Helene, the young Irma had once been frightened to stand up for herself and would run from fights. At Auschwitz, she found herself for the first time able to strike people who could not strike back.
She enjoyed it.
By May 1944, at age 20, she had become senior guard of Birkenau’s Camp C, supervising six or seven female guards and overseeing approximately 30,000 Hungarian Jewish prisoners crammed into 28 blocks designed for a fraction of that number. Sanitary conditions were catastrophic; latrines ceased to function entirely.
Survivors testified that Grese carried a woven leather whip covered with cellophane so human blood could be easily washed from it. She would stand at the camp gate as work parties departed and returned, beating inmates simply because she enjoyed it. She later said with pride: “It was a very light whip, but if I hit somebody with it, it would hurt.”
Her cruelty extended beyond beatings. She ordered prisoners to stand for hours holding large stones above their heads. She forced women to kneel in snow, ice, and rain during roll calls that stretched from 3 a.
m. to 9 a. m.
She kicked prisoners with heavy boots until they bled and collapsed.
Dr. Gisella Perl, a former Auschwitz prisoner, described her in chilling terms: “She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her body was perfect in every line, her face clear and angelic, and her blue eyes the gayest, the most innocent eyes one can imagine.
And yet Irma Grese was the most depraved, cruel, imaginative pervert I ever came across.”
Olga Lengyel, another survivor, wrote in her memoir “Five Chimneys” that Grese selected beautiful female prisoners for the gas chamber out of jealousy and spite. She had numerous affairs with both male and female inmates; when she grew bored of her female lovers, she would select them for extermination.
When a handsome Georgian man refused her advances, Grese dragged his naked girlfriend around the camp by the hair and whipped her, then had the man shot and the woman sent to the camp brothel. She was alleged to have had affairs with Dr. Josef Mengele and Commandant Josef Kramer.
One survivor testified about an incident when a wagon of stones capsized: “Irma sicced the two police dogs on them. The girls tried to escape their fangs, but the trained killers easily overtook them. The dogs were tearing at the girls’ bodies.
Irma came closer to observe what they were doing. Her eyes were bloodshot. The sight of blood seemed to intoxicate her.”
Yet Grese’s behavior was not uniformly monstrous. She saved 14-year-old Alice Tenenbaum from the gas chamber 16 times, pulling the girl out each time Mengele sent her to die. After the war, Tenenbaum learned the reason: she resembled Grese’s sister Helene.
As Soviet forces approached Auschwitz in January 1945, Grese evacuated with prisoners on a forced death march to Ravensbrück, then to Bergen-Belsen, arriving in March 1945. Even there, amid typhus epidemics and a daily mortality rate of 250 to 300 prisoners, she continued her brutality.
She forced starving prisoners to kneel holding stones, stripped women and beat them with a rubber truncheon, and subjected them to punitive exercises until they collapsed. About a fortnight before liberation, she was seen beating a girl with a riding crop. On the eve of liberation, she knocked together the heads of two sisters caught eating potato peel scraps.
Although she worked at Bergen-Belsen for only three and a half weeks, prisoners dubbed her “The Beast of Belsen.”
When British forces liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, they found 13,000 unburied bodies and nearly 60,000 sick and starved prisoners. Grese was captured two days later. Asked by an English journalist why she had committed her crimes, she replied without shame: “It was our duty to exterminate anti-social elements so that Germany’s future would be assured.”
At trial, when witnesses called her the worst SS woman in the camp, Grese dismissed them as liars exaggerating and “making an elephant out of a small fly.” She admitted only to beatings, never to killing. The tribunal was unconvinced.
On November 17, 1945, she was sentenced to death. Less than a month later, she was hanged. She was 22 years old.
Grese once declared: “After the war, I am going to be in films. You will see my name as a star on the screen. I know life and I have seen many things.
I feel my experiences will be useful in my career as an artist.”
She was wrong. Her name is remembered not as a star, but as a warning — a testament to how ordinary people, shaped by ideology and given absolute power, can descend into extraordinary evil.