British troops entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany on April 15, 1945, to find a scene of mass death that defied comprehension. Around 13,000 unburied corpses lay scattered across the camp grounds while approximately 60,000 emaciated survivors watched the newcomers in exhausted disbelief. The air was heavy with the stench of death, broken only by faint cries from those still clinging to life. The British forces arrested the Nazi camp staff, men and women alike, and forced them to help bury the dead in mass graves.
Among them was a 21-year-old former guard who would soon become one of the most notorious women associated with the Nazi concentration camp system. Prisoners knew her by two chilling nicknames: the Beast of Belsen and the Hyena of Auschwitz. Her name was Irma Grese. Irma Ilse Ida Grese was born on October 7, 1923, in Wrechen, a small village in Mecklenburg, northern Germany.
She was the third of five children born to a dairy worker employed on a small farm. Money was scarce, but that was not the only hardship inside the family home. Her father, Alfred Grese, was a religious, conservative, and authoritarian man who demanded complete obedience from his children. The family fell apart in January 1936 when Irma’s mother, Bertha, took her own life after discovering her husband’s affair with a younger local woman.
Twelve-year-old Irma found her mother’s body. In the aftermath of the death, life at home became even colder. When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power on January 30, 1933, Irma Grese was nine years old, meaning most of her childhood and adolescence were shaped under the Nazi regime. Her school years were difficult.
She struggled with her lessons and was bullied by other pupils. Her younger sister Helena later said Irma was a shy girl who usually avoided conflict. In 1938, at age fourteen, Grese left school without a qualification and moved through a series of unskilled jobs. She joined the League of German Girls, the female branch of the Hitler Youth.
The Nazi youth movement gave Irma something she had not found at home or school: a uniform, a place within a group, and a belief that a poor girl from Mecklenburg belonged to a superior German race. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. That same year, Grese found work as an untrained nursing assistant at the Hohenlychen sanatorium, about 100 kilometers north of Berlin, where members of the Nazi paramilitary SS organization received treatment. The facility was run by Karl Gebhardt, a senior Nazi doctor who later conducted criminal surgical experiments on female prisoners at the nearby Ravensbrück camp.
Grese admired Gebhardt and hoped to train as a nurse, but having left school without qualifications, she could not meet the admission requirements. Her path into the concentration camp system came through one of Gebhardt’s acquaintances at Ravensbrück. Grese was asked to reapply once she turned eighteen, and in July 1942 she entered Ravensbrück, the main Nazi camp for women, as a trainee. After three weeks of training, she became an Aufseherin, the Nazi term for a female guard.
The female guard uniform completely destroyed whatever remained of her relationship with her family. During a visit home in 1943, her father discovered what she was doing, slapped her, and threw her out of the house. In March 1943, Grese was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland. Birkenau was the largest part of the Auschwitz complex, which consisted of more than forty camps and subcamps.
It was also one of the main centers for the mass murder of European Jews, containing purpose-built gas chambers and crematoria. At first, Grese carried out routine camp duties, but she soon began supervising the Strafkommando, a punitive work unit. She discovered that violence in Auschwitz was not only permitted but actively encouraged. In May 1944, at just twenty years old, Grese was promoted and put in charge of Camp C, a section with 31 barracks holding around 30,000 Jewish women from Poland and Hungary.
While working as a camp guard, Grese made herself a whip at the camp’s textile factory from braided cellophane. During her trial, she described it as almost transparent and resembling white glass. She also admitted it caused tremendous pain when she struck someone with it. Carrying the whip was forbidden, demonstrating that she acted even outside the rules imposed by the men who controlled Birkenau.
Josef Kramer, the SS officer who led Birkenau in 1944 and later held the same position at Bergen-Belsen, ordered the female supervisors not to carry whips. Grese admitted in court that she and the other guards ignored his order. She acknowledged she was never authorized to strike prisoners, that she did so in defiance of orders, and that she instructed the women under her command to do the same without permission. In this respect, she said, their treatment of prisoners was sometimes more brutal than that of the male SS officers, including the camp commandant.
Gertrude Diament, who saw Irma at both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, recalled that Grese’s preferred method with women was to beat them until they fell to the ground, then kick them with full force using her heavy boots. Diament later added that Grese constantly drew blood, and in her opinion, many of those she injured likely died from those wounds. Grese denied these accusations, but other survivors described the same pattern of violence. Masha Greenbaum remembered that when they saw Grese, they would run, just run, because when she met you she would kick you until you fell and then step on your neck with her boot, and that was how she killed people.
Grese also took part in the selections in which SS doctors divided prisoners between those who would continue working and those who would be sent to the gas chambers. She testified that the doctor she accompanied during these operations was Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death. Women were usually forced to stand naked during selection, and Grese and the other guards forcibly returned any woman who tried to escape the process. Before putting them back in line, they would flog and beat them until they bled.
During her time in the Nazi concentration camps, Irma Grese had relationships with several SS officers, including Josef Mengele, who ended the relationship after discovering her involvement with Jewish prisoners, whom Nazi ideology considered racially inferior. Among her other lovers was the aforementioned Auschwitz-Birkenau commandant Josef Kramer. According to Auschwitz survivor Olga Lengyel, Grese had many lovers, which led to her contracting sexually transmitted diseases and undergoing several abortions. One of these procedures was performed by Dr.
Gisella Perl, during which the only thing that mattered to Irma was the pain she would feel. Beyond these relationships, survivors remembered Grese as a sexual abuser who carried on sadistic relations with male SS members and female Jewish prisoners. She exploited women sexually, using her absolute power over their bodies and lives, treating some as temporary property. When she grew tired of them, she selected them for death at the next selection.
She also abused male prisoners. When a handsome Georgian man rejected her advances, she publicly tortured his girlfriend, dragging her by the hair and whipping her. The man was later executed, and his girlfriend was sent to the camp brothel. Because of her appearance and cruelty, prisoners gave her nicknames that became infamous: the Hyena of Auschwitz and the Beautiful Beast.
These names reflected the contradiction between her young, attractive appearance and her extreme brutality toward prisoners. However, there was one prisoner whom Grese treated differently: a young Jewish woman from Slovakia named Magda Hellinger. The two simply called each other Magda and Irma. Although Grese was extremely sadistic toward other prisoners, she developed an affection for Magda.
One day, before the morning roll call, two runners arrived with four women whose chests had been torn after Grese whipped them. After Magda tended to the women, she told Grese that she should imagine if someone did that to her, and that she should be ashamed. At that moment, Grese raised her whip at Magda, who told her to strike, saying she knew Grese loved seeing blood and that she was insulted. After Magda walked away, Grese caught up with her and quietly said, forgive me.
Grese, who treated Magda like an older sister, even asked her opinion about a new boyfriend she had introduced her to. Thanks to property stolen from murdered prisoners, Irma Grese dressed elegantly in clothes from across Europe. Her favorite outfit was sky blue with a dark blue tie, designed by Jewish prisoners at Birkenau. She spent long hours styling herself in front of the mirror while dreaming of fame.
She once declared that after the war she would work in films, that people would see her name as a star on the screen, that she knew life and had seen many things, and that she felt her experience would be useful in her career as an artist. That future never came. In January 1945, with the Red Army advancing toward Auschwitz, the SS forced prisoners to march west in what became known as death marches. Grese accompanied a column to Ravensbrück and then continued on in March 1945 to Bergen-Belsen.
Belsen had no gas chambers, but tens of thousands of prisoners died there from typhus and starvation. Dita Kraus, who was liberated at the camp, remembered seeing women sitting around a pot in which they had cooked a human liver. At Bergen-Belsen, Grese continued abusing prisoners, forcing them to perform exhausting exercises she called sport, even when most were too weak to move. Shortly before liberation, she bashed the heads of two starving sisters together because they were eating potato peels.
When later asked about the prisoners, she said without any sign of remorse that they were dirty and sick. Although she served at Bergen-Belsen for only a few weeks, her cruelty was so severe that prisoners immediately gave her the nickname the Beast of Belsen. Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British soldiers on April 15, 1945. Two days later, Irma Grese was arrested and, along with other SS personnel, forced to help bury the dead in mass graves.
They received starvation rations, were forbidden from wearing gloves or protective clothing, and were constantly shouted at and threatened to ensure they did not stop working. Survivors later recalled that angry prisoners pushed her head into a camp toilet, a moment of humiliation that contrasted starkly with the power she had once exercised over prisoners’ lives and deaths. Her trial began in Lüneburg, a town in northern Germany, on September 17, 1945, officially titled the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others. Grese’s behavior during the trial reinforced the image prisoners had painted of her.
She appeared cold, arrogant, and detached. She corrected prosecutors irritably and answered questions in a sharp, defensive tone. When survivors described the beatings, shootings, and selections, she showed no visible remorse and dismissed the accusations as exaggerations, claiming prisoners were punished only because they had disobeyed orders. Worse still, Grese laughed as survivors described their suffering in the camps.
On one occasion, she laughed so hard she had to lean forward in the dock to try to control herself. This happened when Josef Kramer’s wife told the court that her husband wandered around their house at night after returning from Auschwitz, disturbed by the gassings and screaming, why, why, why. As Kramer’s wife left the courtroom, a Polish woman slapped her across the face. Irma Grese’s composure broke only once.
When her sister Helena testified about the conflict with their father, Grese began to cry. Her tears appeared only when the court turned to her childhood, not when people described those who had suffered under her authority. On November 17, 1945, the court sentenced Grese to death by hanging. One observer wrote that after hearing the sentence, she cried continuously, her eyes red and sunken, and she was extremely tense.
She asked for mercy, but in early December, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who commanded British forces in occupied Germany, rejected the appeals. She was hanged by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint at Hamelin Prison on December 13, 1945. She was 22 years old. As she walked to the gallows, her only final word was Schnell, meaning quickly.
Grese was the youngest woman judicially executed under British law in the twentieth century.