On April 15, 1945, British soldiers entered a Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany and confronted scenes few of them could have imagined. Roughly 13,000 bodies lay unburied across the grounds, while 60,000 emaciated survivors watched the arrivals with exhaustion and disbelief. The air was heavy with the smell of death, broken only by the faint cries of those still clinging to life.
The British forces arrested the Nazi staff, both men and women, 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 camp system. The prisoners knew her as 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 of a dairy worker employed on a small farm. Money was scarce, but it was not the only misfortune inside the family home. Her father, Alfred Grese, was a religious, conservative and domineering man who demanded complete obedience from his children.
The family fell apart in January 1936 when Irma's mother, Berta, took her own life after discovering her husband's affair with a younger local woman. Irma, then 12 years old, found her mother's body. In the aftermath of the death, life at home grew 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 harassed by other pupils. Her younger sister Helene later said Irma was a shy girl who usually avoided conflict.
In 1938, at the age of 14, she left school without a certificate and moved between 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 at school: a uniform, a place within a group, and a belief that a poor girl from Mecklenburg belonged to the supposedly 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 a sanatorium in Hohenlychen, about 100 kilometers north of Berlin, where members of the Nazi paramilitary SS received treatment. The institution was run by Karl Gebhardt, a senior Nazi doctor who during the war carried out criminal surgical experiments on female prisoners at the nearby Ravensbrück camp.
Grese admired Gebhardt and hoped to train as a nurse, but because she had left school without qualifications, she could not meet the admission requirements. Her path into the concentration camp system began through one of Gebhardt's acquaintances at Ravensbrück. Grese was told to apply again after turning 18, and in July 1942 she entered Ravensbrück, the main Nazi camp for women, as a trainee. Her training lasted three weeks, after which she became an "Aufseherin," the Nazi term for a female guard. The guard's uniform erased what 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 40 camps and subcamps. It was also one of the main centers for the mass murder of European Jews, containing specially built gas chambers and crematoria.
At first, Grese carried out ordinary camp duties, but she soon began supervising a "Strafkommando," a penal work unit. She discovered that violence at Auschwitz was not only permitted but encouraged. In May 1944, at just 20 years old, she was promoted and took charge of Camp C, a section of 31 barracks holding about 30,000 Jewish women from Poland and Hungary.
While serving as a camp guard, Grese made herself a whip in the camp's weaving factory from braided cellophane. During her trial, she described it as semi-transparent and resembling white glass. She also admitted it caused enormous pain when she struck someone with it. Carrying a whip was forbidden, which showed she acted even outside the rules imposed by the men who controlled Birkenau. Josef Kramer, the SS officer who commanded Birkenau in 1944 and later held the same post 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 that she was never authorized to beat prisoners, that she did so in defiance of orders, and that she directed 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 of dealing with women was to beat them until they fell to the ground, then kick them with all her strength with her heavy shoes. Diament later added that she caused constant bleeding and that, in her view, many of those she injured would likely have died from those wounds. Grese denied these accusations, but other survivors described the same pattern of violence.
Masha Greenbaum recalled: "When we saw her, we ran, ran, just ran." She explained that when Grese met you, she kicked you until you fell, then stepped on your neck with her shoe, 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 the selections, and Grese and other guards forcibly returned any woman who tried to flee the process. Before being returned to the line, they were whipped and beaten until they bled.
During her time in the Nazi camps, Irma Grese had relationships with several SS officers, including Josef Mengele, who ended his relationship with her after discovering her involvement with Jewish prisoners, whom Nazi ideology considered racially inferior. Among her other lovers was the aforementioned commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, 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 the doctor Gisella Perl, during which, according to the account, all Irma cared about was the pain she would feel.
Beyond these relationships, survivors remembered Grese as a sexual abuser who engaged in sadistic relations with male SS members and Jewish female prisoners. She exploited women sexually, using her absolute power over their bodies and lives, treating some of them as temporary property, and when she tired of them, she selected them for death in the next selection. She also committed abuses against 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, while 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.
Yet there was one prisoner Irma treated differently. She was 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 morning roll call, two runners brought in four women whose breasts had been torn after Irma Grese struck them with her whip. After Magda cared for the women, she told Irma: "Imagine if someone did that to you. Shame on you." At that moment, Irma raised her whip at Magda, who told her: "Hit me, hit me. I know you love seeing blood. I am disgusted." After Magda walked away, Irma followed her and said quietly: "Forgive me."
Irma Grese, who treated Magda like an older sister, even asked her opinion of a new boyfriend she introduced to her. Thanks to property stolen from murdered prisoners, Irma Grese wore elegant clothes from all over Europe. Her favorite uniform was sky blue with a dark blue tie, made by Jewish prisoners at Birkenau. She spent long hours grooming herself in front of a mirror while dreaming of fame.
At one point she declared: "After the war, I will work 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 experience will be useful in my career as an artist." That future never came.
In January 1945, as the Red Army advanced toward Auschwitz, the SS forced prisoners to march west in what became known as the 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 hunger. Dita Kraus, who was liberated at the camp, recalled seeing women sitting around a cooking pot containing human liver.
At Bergen-Belsen, Grese continued to abuse prisoners, forcing them to perform exhausting exercises she called "sport," even when most were too weak to move. Shortly before liberation, Grese banged the heads of two starving sisters together because they were eating potato peels. When later asked about the prisoners, she said without showing any 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 called her 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 members, forced to help bury the dead in mass graves. They received starvation rations, were forbidden to wear 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 the camp latrine. It was 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, under the official title of the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others. Grese's behavior during the trial reinforced the image that had been drawn of her; she appeared cold, arrogant and isolated. She corrected prosecutors irritably and answered questions in a sharp, defensive tone. When survivors described the beatings, shootings and selections, she showed no clear remorse and rejected the accusations as exaggerations, claiming prisoners were punished only because they disobeyed orders.
Worse still, Grese laughed while survivors described their suffering in the camps. At one point, she laughed so hard that 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 had paced around their home at night after returning from Auschwitz, disturbed by the gas operations and shouting: "Why? Why? Why?" As Kramer's wife was leaving the courtroom, a Polish woman slapped her across the face.
Irma Grese's composure broke only once. When her sister Helene testified about the conflict with their father, Grese began to cry. Her tears appeared only when the court returned to her childhood, not when the people who suffered under her authority were described.
On November 17, 1945, the court sentenced Grese to death by hanging. One observer wrote that after hearing the verdict, she cried continuously. Her eyes were 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 the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint at Hameln prison on December 13, 1945. She was 22 years old. As she walked to the gallows, her last and only word was "Schnell," meaning "quickly." Grese was the youngest woman to be judicially executed under British law in the twentieth century.