Irma Grese remains one of the most notorious figures among the women tried for Nazi war crimes after World War II. Born Irmgard Ilse Ida Grese on October 7, 1923, in Wrechen, then part of the Weimar Republic, she was the third of five children. Her mother Berta and father Alfred both worked in the dairy industry.
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933, Irma was nine years old. Her father was not a Nazi sympathizer and despised everything connected with the party, never allowing his children to join Nazi youth organizations even though they wanted to.
In January 1936, when Irma was twelve, her 33-year-old mother Berta committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid. She had discovered her husband's affair with the daughter of a local innkeeper. After that, Irma was raised by her father alone.
Alfred Grese was a devout Christian who was very strict and harsh with his children, often using physical punishment. At school, Irma achieved poor academic results and, according to her sister Helene, was a target of bullying. Helene recalled that when girls argued and pushed each other, Irma never had the courage to fight but ran away.
In 1938, at fourteen, Irma left both school and her father's house. From early spring until winter she worked at a dairy in Fürstenberg, then moved to Lychen, where she worked in retail for half a year. In 1939, at fifteen, she joined the Hohenlychen Sanatorium, working there for about two years as an assistant nurse and training under the supervision of chief physician Karl Gebhardt.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. At that time Irma was still at Hohenlychen, hoping to become a full nurse. Because her academic results were insufficient, she was instead sent in 1941, at seventeen, to a dairy farm in Fürstenberg, where she worked at a butter-making machine until June 1942.
The following month she was placed as a guard at Ravensbrück, the only large women's concentration camp established by the Nazis. From the summer of 1942, SS doctors subjected prisoners at Ravensbrück to unethical medical experiments. The main coordinator was Karl Gebhardt, whom Irma knew from Hohenlychen, assisted by doctors Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer.
These experiments often involved hammering and clamping legs, then infecting open wounds with aggressive bacteria and observing the development of infection and healing under various chemical substances such as sulfanilamide, an early antibiotic. Researchers also tested methods of bone correction and transplantation, including amputations, often performed without any anesthesia, in the belief it might help treat soldiers with amputated limbs.
It is believed that Grese worked as an assisting nurse during these experiments, and that witnessing such cruelties may have had a destructive effect on her personality, turning her into a violent sadist. When she returned home in early 1943 and told her family she was supervising prisoners working at Ravensbrück, her father gave her a whip and forbade her from ever coming home again.
In March 1943, Irma Grese was deployed to Auschwitz-Birkenau, located in German-occupied Poland. Birkenau was the largest of more than 40 camps and subcamps that made up the Auschwitz complex. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942 and also served as an extermination facility for Jews.
Some Auschwitz survivors remembered Irma Grese as a beautiful young woman. Nina Kacew later recalled their first meeting, saying Grese took her by the cheek and told her people said they looked very much alike, and that she wanted to make sure it was true. Kacew said that in her complete naivety she replied that she did not think there was any resemblance, adding that she had never seen anyone more beautiful and meant it, describing Grese as a vision.
Doctor Gisela Perl, who also survived Auschwitz, later said Grese was one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen, with a body perfect in every line, a clean and angelic face, and blue eyes that were the merriest and most innocent one could imagine. Yet, Perl said, Grese was the most depraved, cruel, and inventive perverse person she had ever encountered.
Olga Lengyel, who survived Auschwitz, wrote in her memoir "Five Chimneys" that Grese had affairs not only with doctor Josef Mengele but with many other Nazis. When the time came to select women for the gas chamber, Lengyel noticed that Grese deliberately chose the most beautiful prisoners out of jealousy and spite.
One survivor, Masha, recalled that when people saw Grese they ran, simply ran, because if she met you she knocked you to the ground and then walked over your neck with her boots, killing people just like that. Yet there were also prisoners to whom Grese showed another side of her personality.
That was the case of Karola Stn Steinhart, then a young Jewish woman from Germany. She later recalled that when her sister arrived at the camp, she wanted to know what had happened to their parents and was told they were all dead. Grese witnessed this, saw her talking and embracing her sister, stood there and cried, something no one had ever seen before, and then told her that she did not have to be afraid, that her sister would now stay with her.
Her sister then had to undergo various procedures, and Karola thought they would be together, but it was only a false promise, and Grese sent her sister to another camp. There were even women whom Irma Grese liked, such as Magda Hellinger, a Jewish woman from Slovakia. Grese treated Magda like an older sister and even asked her what she thought of her new boyfriend, whom she introduced to Magda.
Toward other prisoners, however, she remained cruel. After the war, Magda recalled that one day before roll call two assistants came with four women whose breasts had been torn open by a blow from Irma Grese's whip. After Magda cared for the women, she told Irma to imagine if someone did that to her and to be ashamed. At that moment Irma raised her whip, and Magda said: strike, strike, I know you like to see blood. Magda said she was offended, then left, and Irma followed her and quietly said: forgive me.
In Auschwitz, Grese fell in love with SS member Wolfgang Hatzinger, who was the chief engineer of the construction department of the main Auschwitz camp. Despite this relationship, Grese had many other sexual partners. Nina Kacew, then sixteen, was used by Irma as a messenger and lookout when Irma held lesbian orgies in the barracks.
Kacew later recalled that Grese took a liking to her and, thank God, never abused her, but forced her to guard in front of the barracks while she made love with the most beautiful Jewish girls. When she made love with another woman, she wanted someone to keep watch, so Kacew stayed on guard to see whether other guards of her caliber or other Germans might come.
She had absolute power and could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, with whomever she wanted. Irma Grese had numerous affairs with prisoners, especially with pretty Polish women, and when she grew bored with them she either abandoned them or selected them for the gas chamber to die.
She also abused male prisoners. When a handsome Georgian refused Irma's advances, he had to watch as Irma dragged his naked girlfriend by the hair through the camp and then whipped her. After Grese finished torturing the woman he loved, she had the man shot and sent the woman to the camp brothel.
When Mengele discovered that she had affairs with Jewish prisoners, who were considered racially inferior, he ended his intimate relationship with her. Grese had so many lovers that in January 1944 she contracted syphilis. She also underwent a number of abortions, one of them performed by doctor Gisela Perl, and Irma's only concern was reportedly the pain she might feel.
Perhaps because of these abortions, Grese felt hatred toward other pregnant women, and at Auschwitz-Birkenau she tied the legs of women giving birth so they could not deliver and died in great pain. For her cruelty and brutality, prisoners nicknamed her the Hyena of Auschwitz. Her other nickname was the Beautiful Beast.
At Auschwitz, Grese first served at the telephone exchange, then was transferred, because of a minor infraction, to the position of commander of a work detail that carried stones into the camp from outside. She received this mild punishment for not wearing a cap. She also commanded a detail that built roads inside the camp and was responsible for gardening work.
Margaret Jastr Kluk, who survived Auschwitz, recalled that one day she was going to work, guarded by two SS members with dogs. One soldier put sunglasses on his dog, and the girls told her about it, and when she looked it seemed funny to her. Irma Grese came up to her and struck her with such force that she lost three teeth.
In May 1944, the extermination of Hungarian Jews was to take place. During eight weeks, from May 15 to July 9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmes under the direction of German SS members deported about 424,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where after arrival and selection SS officials killed most of them in the gas chambers.
It was in May 1944 that Grese, at the age of twenty, became a senior guard at Camp C in Birkenau, where she supervised six or seven female guards who rotated weekly. Camp C consisted of 28 blocks in which prisoners were housed, plus other blocks such as a food block, two warehouses for underwear and clothing, two or three blocks for latrines, and two washrooms.
Under normal circumstances, only 100 or at most 300 prisoners should have been housed there, but the camp was so overcrowded that Grese had 1,000 prisoners in each of her blocks. In some blocks the beds were large enough for five people to sleep, but in most blocks there were neither beds nor bunks.
There were approximately 30,000 prisoners in the camp, and because it was overcrowded, hygienic conditions were appalling. The latrines stopped working, and Grese later described that wherever you went it looked as if the prisoners thought every place was good enough to be a latrine.
In the camp, Grese wore her woven leather whip, which was covered in cellophane so that human blood could easily be wiped off it. Grese later described her whip as cellophane paper braided like a plait, transparent as white glass. She stood at the gate when work groups left and returned and regularly beat prisoners with the whip there purely for her sadistic pleasure.
She later proudly declared that it was a very light little whip, but that when she struck someone with it, it hurt. Irma Grese beat and tortured prisoners to such an extent that Josef Kramer, the commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau, who was also her lover, told her to stop. She nevertheless continued to use the whip.
Kramer also tortured prisoners, as Nina Kacew later stated that Grese and Kramer were a different sort of people who looked like humans but were not, because normal people cannot behave that way. According to Grese, the most common reasons for whipping prisoners were stealing food because of hunger or arriving late to roll calls, where prisoners were counted.
Nina Kacew recalled that Grese left them standing for several hours in terrible frost or great heat, and people sometimes fainted. She stepped on them, set her dog on them, and punished people very badly. She was extremely cruel and tortured thousands of people.
After the war, Grese explained the whipping of prisoners at roll calls by saying they ran back and forth and she could not count them properly. Another of her specialties, to make these roll calls as difficult as possible, was ordering prisoners to stand holding a large stone above their heads in each hand, and if anyone faltered, Grese was in the habit of beating the women until they fell to the ground and bled, using heavy boots as hard as she could.
Grese also took part in selecting long-term prisoners for the gas chambers together with her lover, doctor Josef Mengele. These selections were often carried out jointly. Alice Cahana, who survived the Holocaust, later recalled that when Grese and Mengele appeared, horror and fear reigned, and it always meant death.
Irma Grese looked and strutted in a way that made them all feel they were less than animals. Auschwitz survivors recalled how during selections female prisoners often had to present themselves naked and were examined like cattle to determine whether they were capable of work or fit only for death.
Grese supervised order there, and if some women fled she brought them back and beat them. Prisoners knew what these selections meant and sometimes tried to disappear, but they were brought back, terribly beaten until they bled, and returned to their ranks.
A former Auschwitz prisoner, Shafran, recalled what happened during one such selection: two selected girls jumped from a window in an attempt to escape, and Grese approached them as they lay on the ground and shot them twice. At Auschwitz, Grese had two huge dogs that she kept hungry.
Survivors stated that she rode a bicycle with the dogs at her side and accompanied female prisoners on their 16-kilometer journey to work. Those who could not keep pace with the others she had the dogs attack. Once, when a women's detail was bringing stones into the camp from outside, the prisoners hesitated and lost control of the cart, which swayed, rolled down a hill, overturned, and scattered stones all around.
One survivor later testified about what happened next: Irma set two police dogs on them. The girls tried to escape their fangs, but the trained killers easily caught them, and the dogs tore at the girls' bodies. Irma came closer to watch what they were doing, her eyes bloodshot, and the sight of blood seemed to intoxicate her. Throughout, Irma Grese had a smile on her face.
Another of her specialties was sending women beyond the barbed-wire fence while they worked so that it looked as if they were attempting to escape. Helene Koper later recalled that when Grese led a work group she always carried a rubber truncheon and was responsible for at least 30 deaths a day as a result of orders to cross the wires, sometimes even more.
Koper said her task was always, on Grese's orders, to count the dead, and after working hours she and several other women loaded the bodies into one of the railway cars. Thanks to enriching herself from murdered victims, Irma Grese could also choose from the best clothing from all over Europe.
She had dresses made for her by the best Jewish seamstresses who had become prisoners at Birkenau, and she was especially fond of a sky-blue jacket with a dark blue tie. Irma spent hours in front of the mirror arranging her hair and imagining herself as a film star.
Grese once declared that after the war she would act in films, and that her star name would be seen on the screen. She said she knew life and had seen many things, and felt her experiences would be useful in an artistic career. This vulgar display of arrogance, of course, could not have been further from the truth.
Irma Grese left Auschwitz on January 18, 1945, when Soviet troops approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as death marches. Prisoners had to march long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.
Grese accompanied one such forced transport from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück and from there to Bergen-Belsen, where she arrived along with a large number of prisoners from Ravensbrück in March 1945. When they arrived at the camp there was almost no food. The daily food ration consisted of watery soup made from various kinds of turnips boiled in water and 3.5 centimeters of bread per day.
Hygienic conditions were terrible, and in March 1945, as a result of hunger, thirst, and a typhus epidemic, the average daily death rate among prisoners ranged between 250 and 300 people. Dita Kraus, who survived the Holocaust and was among the prisoners liberated at Bergen-Belsen, saw a group of women squatting around a pot in which they were cooking human liver.
After arriving at Bergen-Belsen, Grese asked to be allowed to stay at the camp because her lover, Oberscharführer Franz Wolfgang Hatzinger, was also deployed there. Even at Bergen-Belsen, Grese tortured prisoners until the bitter end, prisoners who were, in their own words, so dirty and sick.
She also forced female prisoners into strenuous physical exercise, which she called sport. She later added that she herself exercised with the prisoners, but while she received food, the starving women received almost no rations. The previously mentioned prisoner named Shafran recalled that about 14 days before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen, she saw her beating one girl.
In the camp she had a pistol but used a riding whip. The beating was very hard, and if it did not cause death, it was not hard. On the eve of liberation, when it was already clear that Germany had lost the war, Grese beat the heads of two sisters whom she caught trying to eat leftover potato peels from the camp kitchen.
Although she worked at the camp for only about two and a half weeks, she was so cruel that prisoners began to call her the Beast of Belsen. Eda Treforest, who survived the Holocaust, told how after liberation enraged prisoners pushed Irma Grese's head into a toilet.
On April 17, 1945, two days after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Irma Grese was captured by British soldiers, who forced former SS camp personnel to help bury 13,000 dead bodies in mass graves. The camp workers received insufficient food rations, were not allowed to use gloves or other protective clothing, and were constantly shouted at and threatened not to stop working.
Within two months, 17 of them died of typhus as a result of being forced to handle bodies without any protection. Among them was Oberscharführer Franz Wolfgang Hatzinger, Irma's lover, who died of typhus on April 23, 1945. Grese and other SS members were temporarily imprisoned in a Wehrmacht tank training academy about 3 kilometers from Belsen.
When an English journalist interviewed her at that time and asked why she had committed the crimes she had, Irma answered without shame that it was their duty to exterminate anti-social elements so that Germany's future would be secured. Justice eventually caught up with Irma Grese when she was tried at the Belsen trial, which began on September 17, 1945.
During the trial, Irma Grese laughed twice so hard that she had to lean forward in the dock to control herself. When Peter Weingartner, another Nazi guard, testified that when he beat a girl with a piece of rubber hose it was the first time he had beaten anyone, she held her hand over her mouth. While next to her Elze Lotte, her Nazi colleague, tried to cover her giggling with a handkerchief, Grese also laughed uncontrollably.
Grese also laughed during the testimony of the wife of Josef Kramer, her former lover and former commander of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Kramer's wife said that when her husband returned home from work at Auschwitz he paced the room at night and, tormented by the fact that Nazi commanders were having people killed in gas chambers, shouted: Why, why, why.
For other women, however, it was less amusing. When Kramer's wife left the court, she received a slap from a Polish woman. When during the trial witnesses claimed that Grese was the worst SS member in the camp, she responded that they were all lying, exaggerating, and making a mountain out of a molehill.
In the end, however, she gave up and said she admitted to mistreating prisoners, since she had that on her conscience. Grese admitted this, but claimed she never killed anyone, adding that if prisoners were slapped it was their fault, and that if they had been more intelligent they would have obeyed orders.
When she collapsed and cried during the trial, it was never because she regretted the crimes she had committed. Once Irma Grese cried when she heard her sister Helene telling the court about their home life, and then when she saw her 23-year-old brother Alfred, who had been wounded twice fighting on the Eastern Front.
On November 17, the British military tribunal sentenced Irma Grese to death. After the verdict was announced she looked terrible and cried constantly, her eyes red and sunken, and she was extremely nervous. Irma Grese, who had never shown a shred of mercy to the prisoners she supervised, then filed a request for clemency.
In early December, Field Marshal Montgomery rejected all requests and ordered Grese, Kramer, and others to be hanged. When the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint hanged her on December 13, 1945, at Hamelin prison, she was 22 years old. Her last and only word on the way to the gallows was "schnell," which translates as "quickly."
Grese was the youngest woman executed in the 20th century on the basis of a decision by a British court. No tears were shed for Irma Grese.