Irma Grese, the youngest woman ever to be executed under British law, walked laughing from her cell toward the gallows at Hamelin Prison on the morning of December 13, 1945, less than an hour before the British hangman Albert Pierrepoint placed a white hood over her head and sent her through a seven-foot drop that ended one of the most notorious careers in the history of the Nazi concentration camp system.
Grese, who was 21 years old at the moment of her death, had been convicted nine weeks earlier by a British military court at the Belsen trial of murder and ill-treatment of prisoners at both Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, where she rose to the second-highest rank available to a female guard and earned from the press the nickname “the Beautiful Beast” and from survivors the far harsher title “the Hyena of Auschwitz.”
Her execution closed a chapter of postwar justice that began after the liberation of the camps and ran in parallel with the higher-profile proceedings at Nuremberg, as Allied authorities moved to punish those who had carried out the daily brutality of the Holocaust rather than only those who had planned it from offices in Berlin.
Born on October 7, 1923, into a large German family, Grese endured a chaotic childhood. Her mother killed herself by drinking hydrochloric acid after discovering her husband’s 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 when Irma was about 13. At 15 she left school, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and took work as an assistant nurse at a sanatorium caring for SS soldiers.
She wanted to join the Nazi association of German girls, but her father refused to allow it. She wanted to become a nurse, but the system sent her instead toward Ravensbrück concentration camp before her eighteenth birthday, where she trained at the SS female helpers’ base attached to the all-female camp.
𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to Nazi ideology and to Hitler’s speeches, Grese came to believe that the Nazi way was the best way for Germany, that the Weimar Republic had been corrupt and had bled the country dry, and she absorbed the indoctrination that Ravensbrück was designed to instil. She served there as a volunteer guard, not a conscript, and by 19 she had been promoted to supervisor at a site that functioned as a training ground for female SS personnel.
In March 1943, after impressing her superiors, she was transferred to Auschwitz and posted to the Birkenau complex, the extermination heart of the camp. By then she had already fallen out with her father over her SS career, and he had forced her to leave his house.
At Birkenau, according to testimony later presented in court, Grese took part in the selection of prisoners deemed unfit for work, a process that sent thousands directly to the gas chambers. Witnesses described her deliberately choosing beautiful female prisoners for death out of jealousy, and setting her half-starved dogs, trained to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁, on inmates.
Survivors told the court she whipped prisoners, kicked and beat them with her boots until blood was drawn, and shot working inmates at random for no reason at all. Several accounts stated she took evident pleasure in the killings. One disputed claim held that lampshades made from the skins of dead inmates were found in her quarters.
She also served at Bergen-Belsen, and it was there that the British Army captured her in 1945, along with camp commander Josef Kramer and dozens of other SS men and women who had not fled. In all, 45 defendants were charged in the Belsen trial, which dealt with murder and ill-treatment at both Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.
Grese pleaded not guilty. She was represented by Major L. S.
W. Cranfield of the British Army. The evidence against her was damning and at times almost unbearable to hear: random beatings, arbitrary shootings, savage dogs, selections for the gas chambers, and physical and emotional torture inside the camp.
After a nine-week trial, the sentence was never seriously in doubt. She was condemned to death, one of only three women executed for their role in the camp system, alongside Johanna Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath. When the sentence was read, Grese remained defiant, but her appeal for a retrial was rejected.
The hangings were carried out at Hamelin Jail, where the British Army’s Royal Engineers built the gallows. Eleven condemned prisoners were housed in a row of small cells along a corridor, with the execution chamber at the far end. Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most famous hangman, was flown in to perform the executions, scheduled for Thursday, December 13, 1945, with the women hanged individually and the men in pairs to speed the process.
Pierrepoint’s own account offers a rare window into Grese’s final minutes. He recalled that she walked out of her cell toward the execution party laughing, and that she seemed as bonny a girl as one could ever meet. She answered the questions put to her by Pierrepoint’s assistant, O’Neill, but when asked her age she paused and smiled.
“I found we were both smiling with her, as if we realized the embarrassment of a woman revealing her age,” Pierrepoint wrote. Eventually she said, “21.” O’Neill asked her to step on the scales, and she replied “Schnell,” German for quick.
She stood five feet four and a quarter inches tall and weighed 150 pounds, and was given a drop of seven feet four inches.
Because she was the youngest of the three women, it was decided that Grese would die first. The women’s executions took place at 9:34 a. m.
, 10:04 a. m. , and finally Johanna Bormann at 10:38 a.
m.
Pierrepoint described the following morning in detail. He and his assistant climbed the stairs to the cells where the condemned were waiting. A German officer at the door leading to the corridor flung it open, and the execution party walked past and into the chamber.
Officers stood at attention while Brigadier Paton-Walsh stood with his wristwatch raised and gave the signal.
Pierrepoint walked into the corridor and called Grese’s name. German guards quickly closed the grills on the inspection holes and opened one door. Grese stepped out.
The cell was too small for Pierrepoint to enter, so he had to pinion her in the corridor. “Follow me,” he said in English, and O’Neill repeated the instruction in German.
At 9:34 a. m. she walked into the execution chamber, gazed for a moment at the officials standing around it, then walked to the centre of the trap where Pierrepoint had made a chalk mark.
She stood on the mark very firmly. As he placed the white cap over her head, she said in a languid voice, “Schnell.”
The drop crashed down. The doctor followed Pierrepoint into the pit and pronounced her dead. After 20 minutes the body was taken down and placed in a coffin for burial.
What happened to her possessions afterward underlined the privileges her position had carried. Her belongings were given to her sister, and among them were almost 440 Reichsmarks in cash and a bank book showing a balance of roughly 4,400 Reichsmarks, a fortune compared with the 76 Reichsmarks a month earned by an ordinary textile worker.
Grese’s crimes were vast, and her cruelty inside some of the worst places on earth stands as a measure of how brutal the Holocaust truly was. She was the youngest woman of the twentieth century to die under British law, executed in her early twenties after displaying a degree of barbarism that survivors never forgot.
Historians note that her case remains one of the most closely studied of the postwar trials, not only because of the savagery of the acts described in court but because of what her youth and her gender revealed about the machinery of the camps. She was not a conscript forced into service; she volunteered, advanced quickly, and, according to the testimony of those who survived her, appeared to enjoy what she did.
The Belsen trial itself became a landmark in international justice, establishing that individuals who carried out atrocities inside the camp system could be held personally accountable, even when they claimed to be following orders. Grese’s conviction rested on the testimony of survivors who had watched her beat, whip, and shoot prisoners, and who had seen her choose who would live and who would die.
When the sentence was carried out, the British authorities moved quickly, in part to demonstrate that justice would not be delayed. The executions at Hamelin were conducted with the same clinical efficiency that Pierrepoint had perfected over hundreds of hangings in Britain, a stark contrast to the chaotic and sadistic violence that had defined Grese’s career.
Pierrepoint, who hanged more than 400 people in his lifetime, later reflected on the case with a detachment that has unsettled readers for decades. His description of Grese smiling on the scales, of the two of them sharing a moment of embarrassment over her age, has become one of the most quoted passages in the literature of the executions.
Yet the same account records her final word: “Schnell.” It was the same impatience she had shown toward prisoners, now turned on her own executioners as she stood on the chalk mark in the centre of the trap. Minutes later she was dead, and the body that had terrified thousands was carried away in a coffin.
Her sister received the cash and the bank book, the material residue of a career built on the suffering of others. The gallows at Hamelin were dismantled afterward, but the record of what Grese did at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen remains, preserved in court transcripts and in the memories of those who survived her.
For the survivors who testified, the execution offered no restoration, only the knowledge that one of the most feared figures in the camp system had been held to account. For the British authorities, it was a demonstration that the rule of law could reach even the youngest and most notorious of the Nazi guards.
Irma Grese died at 21, laughing on her way to the gallows, defiant to the end, and remembered as the Hyena of Auschwitz, a woman whose brief life left a stain that the verdict of a military court and the drop of a hangman’s rope could never fully erase.