LONDON — Irma Grese, the youngest woman ever condemned to death under British law in the twentieth century, was executed by hanging on December 13, 1945, at Hameln prison in Germany, bringing to a close one of the most harrowing chapters of Nazi criminality ever documented in a courtroom.
The 22-year-old former SS guard, known to survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen as “the Hyena of Auschwitz” and “the Beautiful Beast,” was convicted by a British military tribunal on November 17, 1945, following a 54-day trial that 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 atrocities so extreme they shocked even seasoned war crimes investigators.
Her final word, spoken as she walked to the gallows, was “schnell” — German for “quickly.” Executioner Albert Pierrepoint, who carried out the sentence, later recorded that she showed no remorse and offered no final statement beyond that single utterance.
Grese’s capture came on April 17, 1945, two days after the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen, a camp where they found 13,000 unburied corpses and nearly 60,000 prisoners dying of starvation and disease. She was among the SS personnel forced by British troops to bury the dead in mass graves.
Born on October 7, 1923, in Wrechen, then part of the Weimar Republic, Grese was the third of five children of dairy workers. Her mother committed suicide in 1936 after discovering her husband’s 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇. Her father, a devout Christian who despised the Nazi regime, raised her with strict discipline and physical violence.
Despite her father’s anti-Nazi stance, Grese absorbed the ideology taught in German schools, where portraits of Adolf Hitler hung in every classroom and textbooks promoted militarism, racism, and antisemitism. She left school at 14 after being bullied, worked briefly on farms and in retail, and at 15 began training as an assistant nurse at the Hohenlychen Sanatorium.
There she worked under Dr. Karl Gebhardt, a Nazi physician who later conducted grotesque medical experiments on Ravensbrück inmates, including breaking prisoners’ legs with hammers and infecting wounds with aggressive bacteria. Investigators believe Grese assisted in these experiments, exposure that may have hardened her into a violent sadist.
Her career in the camp system began in July 1942 at Ravensbrück, the only major women’s concentration camp established by the Nazis. Some 132,000 women passed through its gates; more than 92,000 perished. Ravensbrück functioned as a training center for approximately 3,500 female SS guards, a “school of violence” where trainees learned to extract maximum labor from prisoners before they died.
When Grese returned home in 1943 and told her family she was supervising prisoners, her father thrashed her with a belt and forbade her from returning. It was the last time she saw her family.
In March 1943, at age 19, Grese was deployed to Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland, the largest of more than 40 camps and sub-camps in the Auschwitz complex. There, according to her sister Helene, the girl who had once run from fights found herself able to strike people who could not strike back — and she reveled in it.
By May 1944, at just 20 years old, Grese had been promoted to senior guard of Birkenau’s Camp C, supervising six or seven female guards and overseeing approximately 30,000 Hungarian Jewish prisoners crowded into 28 blocks designed for a fraction of that number. Some blocks held 1,000 women each. Latrines ceased to function.
Sanitary conditions were catastrophic.
Survivors testified that Grese carried a woven leather whip covered in cellophane so human blood could be easily washed from it. She stood at the camp gate as work parties departed and returned, beating inmates with the whip simply because she enjoyed it. She later said with pride: “It was a very light whip, but if I hit somebody with it, it would hurt.”
Her cruelty extended far beyond beatings. She ordered prisoners to stand for hours holding large stones above their heads, beating those who faltered. She forced women to kneel in snow, ice, and rain during roll calls that stretched from 3 a.
m. to 9 a. m.
She beat women until they bled and collapsed, then kicked them with heavy boots.
Dr. Gisella Perl, a former Auschwitz prisoner and physician, described Grese in testimony: “She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her body was perfect in every line, her face clear and angelic, and her blue eyes the gayest, the most innocent eyes one can imagine.
And yet Irma Grese was the most depraved, cruel, imaginative pervert I ever came across.”
Olga Lengyel, another Auschwitz survivor, wrote in her memoir “Five Chimneys” that Grese selected beautiful female prisoners for the gas chamber out of jealousy and spite. Grese recorded such killings in her books as “special treatment.”
She conducted selections alongside Dr. Josef Mengele, with whom she was alleged to have had an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇. When Mengele discovered she was also involved with Jewish inmates, deemed racially inferior, he ended the relationship.
Grese had numerous lovers among both male and female prisoners, and when she grew bored with female companions, she would select them for the gas chamber.
Yet her cruelty was not entirely without exception. Fourteen-year-old Alice Tenenbaum was sent to the gas chamber by Mengele 16 times, and each time Grese pulled her out. After the war, Tenenbaum learned the reason: she resembled Grese’s sister Helene.
Similarly, 16-year-old Nina Kaleska was spared because Grese thought she looked like Helene, though Kaleska was used as a lookout during Grese’s orgies in the barracks.
Grese kept two large dogs that she deliberately starved. Survivors recalled her riding a bicycle alongside female inmates during their 16-kilometer march to work, ordering the dogs to attack those who could not keep pace. One survivor testified: “Irma sicced the two police dogs on them.
The girls tried to escape their fangs, but the trained killers easily overtook them. The dogs were tearing at the girls’ bodies. Irma came closer to observe what they were doing.
Her eyes were bloodshot. The sight of blood seemed to intoxicate her.”
She also shot prisoners with her always-loaded pistol. During one selection, when two girls jumped from a window trying to escape, Grese shot them where they lay on the ground.
Commandant Josef Kramer ordered her to stop using her whip. She ignored him and continued.
As Soviet forces approached Auschwitz in January 1945, the SS evacuated the camp, forcing prisoners on death marches under brutal conditions. Grese accompanied a transport to Ravensbrück and then to Bergen-Belsen, where she arrived in March 1945. Prisoners who collapsed or fell behind were shot.
At Bergen-Belsen, conditions were apocalyptic. Daily food consisted of watery turnip soup and three and a half centimeters of bread. There was no water for washing.
Tens of thousands of prisoners shared only 200 blankets, sleeping sitting up on the floor during freezing winter months. Typhus raged. Between 250 and 300 prisoners died each day.
Grese continued her 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 until the very end. She stripped female prisoners and beat them with a rubber truncheon. She forced them to march, run, and perform frog jumps until they collapsed from exhaustion.
About two weeks before liberation, she was seen beating a girl with a riding crop. On the eve of liberation, she knocked together the heads of two sisters caught trying to eat potato peel scraps from the camp kitchen.
Though she worked at Bergen-Belsen for only three and a half weeks, her cruelty earned her yet another nickname: “The Beast of Belsen.”
When interviewed by an English journalist after her capture and asked why she had committed her crimes, Grese replied without shame: “It was our duty to exterminate anti-social elements so that Germany’s future would be assured.”
The Belsen Trial opened on September 17, 1945, in Lüneburg, Germany, with 44 defendants facing charges of war crimes. Witness after witness identified Grese as the worst SS woman in the camps. In her defense, she claimed all witnesses were lying, exaggerating, and “making an elephant out of a small fly.”
She admitted to beatings but denied killing anyone.
Her lies did not save her. On November 17, 1945, the British Military Tribunal sentenced her to death by hanging. She was 22 years old.
On December 13, 1945, Pierrepoint carried out the sentence. Grese was the youngest woman to die judicially under British law in the twentieth century. No tears were shed for her.
Her execution, alongside those of Kramer and other Bergen-Belsen personnel, marked one of the earliest applications of international justice for crimes committed during the Holocaust. The Belsen Trial established precedents that would inform the Nuremberg Trials and subsequent war crimes prosecutions, demonstrating that individuals — regardless of rank, age, or gender — could be held personally accountable for atrocities committed in the name of a criminal state.
For the survivors who testified against her, the verdict offered a measure of justice, though nothing could restore what had been taken. The women who passed through Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen carried the memory of Irma Grese — the beautiful young woman with the innocent blue eyes and the blood-soaked whip — as a permanent reminder of how ordinary people could become instruments of extraordinary evil.