On 15 April 1945, British soldiers entered Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany and found a concentration camp where the living and the dead lay together. Thousands of unburied bodies covered the ground while tens of thousands of starving prisoners stared in disbelief. Disease, hunger, and neglect had turned the camp into a place beyond imagination.
Among the SS personnel captured inside the camp stood one of the most notorious female guards of the Nazi camp system. Known as the Beast of Belsen or the Hyena of Auschwitz, her real name was Irma Grese.
Irma Ilse Ida Grese was born on 7 October 1923 in the village of Wrechen in northern Germany. She was the third of five children. Her father, Alfred, worked as a milker on a small estate, and her mother, Bertha, managed the household and cared for the children.
The family lived modestly, but poverty was not the only hardship. The emotional atmosphere at home was tense and unstable, shaped by rigid discipline and conflict. Alfred was a deeply religious, conservative, and authoritarian man who demanded complete obedience and showed little affection.
In January 1936, when Irma was 12 years old, her mother committed suicide after discovering her husband’s affair with a younger woman. Young Irma found her mother dead. The loss was not followed by comfort or support, and the household became colder and even more rigid.
Alfred rejected Nazism and despised the Nazi regime, but his opposition did not translate into emotional protection for his children. Discipline was enforced with violence, and fear became part of everyday life.
At school, Irma performed poorly, was bullied by other children, and withdrew into herself. According to her sister Helena, Irma lacked confidence and avoided confrontation, often running away rather than standing up for herself. In 1938, at age 14, she left school without qualifications.
She began a series of unskilled jobs, first on farms and later as a shop assistant. Around this time, she joined the League of German Girls, the female youth organization of the Nazi Party. For her, membership offered structure, belonging, praise, and a sense of importance.
In 1939, at age 15, Irma began working as a nursing assistant at Hohenlychen Sanatorium near Berlin, where SS personnel were treated. The sanatorium was directed by Karl Gebhardt, the personal physician of Heinrich Himmler. Gebhardt later played a central role in criminal medical experiments on inmates of Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Irma admired him deeply and later described him as a saint of the Nazi movement. She hoped to become a trained nurse, but she failed academically and was dismissed in 1941. Gebhardt, however, gave her the contact of a colleague at Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In July 1942, at age 18, Irma Grese entered Ravensbrück as a trainee guard. She completed her training quickly and was promoted. She impressed her superiors not only with discipline but also with harshness and brutality against inmates.
During a visit home in 1943, while wearing her SS uniform, a violent confrontation erupted with her father. When he understood that she had voluntarily joined the Nazi camp system, he struck her and expelled her from the house. Irma Grese never returned home again.
In March 1943, she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland. Birkenau was the largest of more than 40 camps and subcamps that made up the Auschwitz complex and served as the center of the mass murder of European Jews.
Grese initially worked in administrative roles but soon took command of punishment and labor details. By May 1944, at only 20 years old, she was promoted and given authority over camp C, a section holding up to 30,000 Jewish women.
Survivors described her as one of the most feared guards in the camp. She carried a whip made of plaited cellophane, translucent like glass, designed so that blood could be washed off easily. She beat prisoners daily for minor infractions or for no reason at all.
She kicked women until they collapsed, carried a pistol during selections, and shot prisoners who tried to escape. She forced starving women to stand for hours during roll calls, often holding heavy stones above their heads, and punished those who faltered.
Her favorite habit was to beat women until they were bleeding and fell to the ground, then kick them as hard as she could with her heavy boots. Survivor Masha Greenbaum remembered: “When we saw her, we used to run, run, just run. Because when she met you, she kicked you to the floor. And then she went to the neck with her boots, and she just killed people like that.”
Grese regularly took part in selections for the gas chambers, often alongside SS doctor Josef Mengele. Survivors testified that she sent both sick and healthy women to their deaths. These decisions were arbitrary and cruel.
Irma Grese was also widely remembered as a sexual deviant. Multiple survivors testified that she engaged in sadistic sexual relationships with both male SS personnel and female Jewish prisoners. She abused women sexually and exploited her absolute power over their bodies and lives.
She treated some prisoners as temporary possessions, and when she grew bored of them, selected them for death during the next selection. She also had affairs with SS officers, including Josef Mengele. One of her lovers was Josef Kramer, commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Because of her appearance and cruelty, prisoners gave her nicknames that became infamous: the Hyena of Auschwitz and the Beautiful Beast. She wore elegant clothes looted from murdered prisoners and often spent hours styling herself in front of a mirror.
She 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.”
In January 1945, as Soviet forces approached Auschwitz, Grese took part in the evacuation of the camp, escorting prisoners on death marches westward. Those who collapsed from exhaustion were shot on the spot.
In March 1945, she arrived at Bergen-Belsen, a camp overwhelmed by starvation, disease, and mass death. Even there, she kept mistreating prisoners until the bitter end. Survivors recalled her beating emaciated prisoners and forcing them to perform exhausting exercises she called “making sport.”
Despite serving there only three and a half weeks, her cruelty was so intense that inmates immediately named her the Beast of Belsen.
On 15 April 1945, British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen. Grese was arrested two days later and forced, together with other SS personnel, to help bury the dead in mass graves. They were given starvation rations and not allowed to use gloves or protective clothing.
Justice caught up with Irma Grese at the Belsen trial, which began on 17 September 1945. During the proceedings, Grese sometimes laughed so hard that she had to lean forward in the prisoner’s box to control herself.
This occurred during the testimony of the wife of Josef Kramer. Kramer’s wife said that when her husband came home from his work at Auschwitz, he paced the floor at night and cried: “Why? Why? Why?” Grese responded to this emotional account with uncontrollable laughter.
Throughout the rest of the proceedings, Grese appeared cold, arrogant, and detached. She laughed during testimonies of survivors, corrected prosecutors with irritation, and answered questions in a sharp defensive tone. She showed no visible remorse.
Only once did her composure break. When her sister Helena testified about their family life and described the violent conflict between Irma and their father, Grese collapsed into tears and sobbed uncontrollably.
On 17 November 1945, the British military tribunal sentenced Irma Grese to death. After the verdict was pronounced, she cried continuously. She begged for mercy and asked for clemency, but in early December, Field Marshal Montgomery rejected all appeals.
She was hanged by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint at Hameln Prison on 13 December 1945. She was 22 years old. Walking to the gallows, her final and only word was “schnell,” meaning quickly.
Grese was the youngest woman to die judicially under British law in the 20th century.