The 15th of April, 1945, southwest of Bergen, Nazi Germany. The British 11th Armored Division liberates Bergen-Belsen – one of the worst Nazi concentration camps which would epitomize the true bestiality and horrors of the Nazi regime and its death camps. The British forces find 13,000 unburied death bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners who are sick and starved.
Thousands of other inmates will die of various diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis during the months following the camp’s liberation. The British forces capture male and female Nazi personnel responsible for these horrors and force them to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves. One of them, who would become one of the most infamous perpetrators of the criminal Nazi Regime, is Irma Grese.
Irma Grese was born on the 7th of October 1923 in Wrechen then part of the Weimar Republic which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933. Irma was the third of five children, and both her parents were dairy workers. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933.
The Nazis were skilled propagandists who used sophisticated advertising techniques and the most current technology of the time to spread their messages. The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were developed as Nazi Party youth groups to introduce children and juveniles to Nazi ideology and policy. These youth groups also prepared Germany’s young people for war.
Because Irma’s father was not a Nazi sympathizer and despised everything that was associated with the Nazis, he never allowed his children to join the Nazi youth organizations even though they wanted to. However, it was impossible to avoid Nazi indoctrination as schools too played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to the German youth. From their first days at school, German children such as Irma Grese were imbued with the cult of Adolf Hitler and his portrait was a standard fixture in all classrooms.
While censors removed some books from the classroom, German educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism. In 1936, when Irma was 13 years old, her mother committed suicide following the discovery of her husband’s affair with a local pub owner's daughter. She was then raised only by her father Alfred Grese, a devout Christian, who was very stern and strict with his children and would often used physical violence to discipline them.
In school, Irma Grese performed poorly in academics. According to Irma's sister Helene, Irma was bullied badly at school and dropped out when she was only 14. She then stayed for six months on a farm working on agricultural job and then moved to Luchen where she worked in a retail shop for 6 months as well.
In 1939, at the age of 15 Grese went to the Hohenlychen Sanatorium where she worked as an assistant nurse for about 2 years and trainer under sanatorium’s medical Superintendent Karl Gebhardt, a Nazi doctor who would later perform medical experiments on Ravensbrück concentration camp inmates during the Second World War. Grese wanted to become a full-fledged nurse at Hohenlychen Sanatorium but because she did not do well enough academically, in 1941 at the age of 17, she was instead sent to a dairy farm in Fürstenberg where she operated a butter machine. Her criminal career in concentration camps began in July 1942 when she arrived in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis. In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished.
Ravensbrück camp was staffed both by SS men, who served as guards and administrators, and by 150 women, who served as supervisors. These female supervisors were either SS volunteers or women who had taken the job for the good pay and working conditions. Ravensbrück also housed a training camp for female SS guards who were taught by Dorothea Binz - the sadistically cruel German Nazi officer and supervisor - who instructed her trainees on how to handle the prisoners that they were going to supervise.
These prisoners would have to work until they died and the task of their supervisors, such as Irma Grese, was to get a maximum amount of work out of them whilst they were still alive. Ravensbrück thus also became a training center or “a school of violence “ for about 3,500 female guards who went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps. Starting in the summer of 1942, SS medical doctors subjected prisoners at Ravensbrück to unethical medical experiments.
The main coordinator of these experiments was Karl Gebhardt and his assistants became doctors Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer. They often used a hammer to break legs of female prisoners, then infected open wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing with and without various chemical substances such as sulfanilamide, which was an early antibiotic, to prevent infections. Believing it could help in treating amputee soldiers, they also tested various methods of setting and transplanting bones.
Such experiments included amputations and were often performed without any anesthesia. The SS selected nearly 80 women, mostly Polish, for these experiments. Many of the women died as a result.
Those who survived often suffered permanent physical damage. SS doctors also carried out sterilization experiments on women and children, many of them Roma people, in an attempt to develop an efficient method of sterilization. They were also involved in forced abortions of women who were already seven or eight months pregnant.
In addition to these forced abortions, they were also known for the beating of pregnant women to cause miscarriages and the killing of newborns. Irma Grese knew Karl Gebhardt from Hohenlychen Senatorium and it is believed that at Ravensbrück Grese, then 18 years old, also served as an assistant nurse during the experiments and was exposed to atrocities which might have had a damaging impact on her personality turning her into a violent sadist. When she came home in 1943 and told her family that she was supervising the prisoners working inside the compound at Ravensbrück, her father gave her a thrashing with a belt or a whip and forbade her from coming home again.
In March, 1943 Irma Grese was deployed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was located in German occupied Poland. Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. It was divided into ten sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences.
It was patrolled by SS guards, including—after 1942—SS dog handlers. During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war.
It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich. According to Irma’s sister Helene, when Irma was a little girl, she was frightened to stand up for herself, and would run away to avoid a fight.
At Auschwitz however, Grese found herself for the first time in a position to strike people when they could not strike her back. And she enjoyed it. Grese would become one of the most hated and feared guards in the camp and she owed her infamous nicknames "the Hyena of Auschwitz" and "the Beautiful Beast" to her cruelty and brutality.
Grese was also reputed to be a sexual deviant, taking lovers from the male and female populace of Birkenau. She was also alleged to have had affairs with the infamous doctor Josef Mengele, as well as Josef Kramer, the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Doctor Gisella Perl, former Auschwitz prisoner, said about Irma: “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. ” In her memoir Five Chimneys, Auschwitz survivor Olga Lengyel writes that Grese had affairs not only with doctor Mengele but with many other Nazis as well.
When it came time to select women for the gas chamber, Lengyel noted that Irma Grese would purposely pick out the beautiful female prisoners due to jealousy and spite. However, there were female prisoners that Irma Grese was fond of. Such was a case of Nina Kaleska, then 16 years old, whom Grese told her that she looked like her sister Helene.
Kaleska was used by Irma as a messenger and lookout girl when Irma held lesbian orgies in barracks and watched out so that nobody would interrupt them. Grese had numerous affairs with female inmates and when she grew bored of them, she would select them for gas chamber to be killed. She also beat her sexual subjects.
When a handsome Georgian man refused Grese’s advances toward him, he had to watch Irma dragging his naked girlfriend around the camp by the hair and then whipping her. After Grese tortured the woman he loved, she had the man shot and the woman sent to the camp brothel. When Mengele discovered that she was having affairs with Jewish inmates, who were deemed racially inferior, he ended his relationship with her.
At Auschwitz, Grese fell in love with SS man Franz Wolfgang Hatzinger who was the chief engineer of the Auschwitz I construction department. Despite this relationship, Grese had so many lovers that at one point, she developed sexually transmitted diseases and according to Olga Lengyel, she had numerous abortions. Doctor Gisella Perl performed one of these abortions and Irma's only concern was the "pain" she would feel.
Upon her arrival at Auschwitz, Grese held various positions within the camp. At first Grese performed telephone duties, then she was transferred as a sort of light punishment to be in charge of the kommando which carried stones from the outside into the camp. She received this punishment because she did not wear her caps.
She was also in charge of the commando making the roads inside the camp and the gardening work. In May 1944 the extermination of Hungarian Jews was to take place. During 8 weeks from the 15th of May to July 9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officials, under the guidance of German SS officials, deported around 424,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, upon arrival and after selection, SS functionaries killed the majority of them in gas chambers.
The same month, at the age of 20 Grese would become the senior guard of Birkenau’s Lager or Camp “ C “ supervising 6 or 7 female guards who changed every week. Camp C consisted of 28 blocks where prisoners were accommodated as well as other blocks such as a food block, two stores with underwear and clothing, two or three blocks for latrines and two wash-houses. Normally the accommodation would only have been suitable for 100 or a maximum of 300 prisoners, but the camp was overcrowded, that Grese had 1000 prisoners in each block.
In some of the blocks there were bunks large enough for five people to sleep in, but in most of the blocks there were neither beds nor bunks. In Grese’s Lager C there were approximately 30,000 prisoners, all of whom were Hungarians, whilst the Blockältesten were Czechoslovaks. The Blockältester, block or barracks leader, was an inmate who had to ensure that rules were followed in the individual barracks and was also responsible for the prisoners in the barracks.
Because the camp was overcrowded sanitary conditions were horrible. The latrines ceased to function and Grese would later describe how “wherever you went it was just as if the prisoners thought that any place was good enough for a latrine”. In the camp, she was infamous for carrying her woven leather whip which was covered with cellophane so that human blood could be easily washed from it.
She would stand at the gate when the working parties were going out and coming in and regularly beat inmates there with her whip only because she enjoyed it. Later she would proudly say “It was a very light whip, but if I hit somebody with it, it would hurt”. Irma Grese beat and ill-treated prisoners to such an extent that the camp’s Commandant Josef Kramer told her to stop using it.
However, she went on using her whip anyway. The most frequent reasons to whip the prisoners were that they stole food because they were hungry, or they showed up late for the roll calls. During the roll calls which often took from 3 AM until 9 AM, the prisoners had to stand still.
When they moved, they were either beaten or had to kneel down for hours. Grese’s explanation for whipping was that they were running to and from and she could not count them properly. Her other specialty in making these roll calls as difficult as possible was to order the prisoners to stand holding a large stone above their heads in each hand and if they faltered, she would beat them.
On one occasion the prisoners cut up their blankets and made shoes or jackets of them. Grese gave strict orders to return all sort of things produced out of these blankets at once. But because nothing was returned, she ordered the search of the blocks and prisoners who had these things in their possession, were brutally whipped.
In addition to her whip, Irma Grese also used to beat the prisoners with her walking stick. Grese’s favorite habit was to beat women until they were bleeding and fell to the ground and then kick them as hard as she could with her heavy boots. Once she saw a woman who was talking to her daughter over the wire fence between two compounds.
Grese beat and kicked her so brutally that the prisoner remained lying on the ground. She was also accused of selections of veteran female inmates for gas chambers. With her lover, doctor Josef Mengele, they often performed these selections together.
When the women were sent to the gas chamber, Grese entered that up in her books as "special treatment". Survivors later remembered how these female prisoners were very often paraded naked and inspected like cattle to be selected whether they were fit enough to work in Germany or only fit to die. Grese would be there keeping order and if some women ran away, she would bring her back to give her a beating.
When she saw relations trying to get together in selections for forced work, she would beat them until they were unconscious and leave them lying on the ground. The female prisoners that tried to escape such selections and were brought back, were terribly beaten until they bled all over the place and were put back in their lines again. During one such selection, when two girls trying to escape jumped out of the window and were lying on the ground, Grese mercilessly shot them with her always loaded pistol.
However, Grese also helped some prisoners. This was the case of prisoner named Alice Tenenbaum, then 14 years old, who was sent to the gas chamber by Josef Mengele 16 times and every one of those times Grese would save her by going into the gas chamber and taking Tenenbaum out. After the war, Alice learned, the reason Grese saved her so many times was because she looked like Irma’s sister, Helene.
At Auschwitz, Grese had two huge dogs that she starved. Survivors recalled her riding around camp on a bicycle with dogs at her side accompanying the female inmates on their 16-kilometer trek to work. Those who could not keep up with the column, she ordered the dogs to attack.
On one occasion when the female kommando was carrying stones from outside into the camp, the female prisoners hesitated and lost control of their wagon. It swayed, bowled down the hill, and capsized, scattering stones over the whole area. One survivor later testified, what happened afterward: “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. ” All this time Irma Grese had smile on her face.
Sometimes when Grese went out with her working parties, she used to beat women and kicking them with her heavy top-boots. Another of her specialties was sending women outside the wire fence when they were working to make it appear they were attempting to escape. And when one guard refused to shoot the women crossing the fire fence on the grounds that they had been sent over deliberately, Grese gave evidence at an enquiry against this guard.
Thanks to the plunder from the murdered victims in Birkenau, Irma also had her choice of the finest clothing from all over Europe. Grese had her dresses tailored by the best Jewish dressmakers who would become camp’s prisoners and she was particularly fond of a sky-blue jacket with a dark blue tie. Irma would spend hours in front of her dressing mirror styling her hair and imagining herself as a movie star.
Grese 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. ” However, she was wrong. Irma Grese left Auschwitz on the 18th of January 1945 when Soviet forces 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 the death marches. The prisoners had to march over 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 Ravensbrück prisoners in March 1945.
Those who collapsed or could not keep pace, were shot by the SS. The prisoners got almost no food during these death marches and there was no food when they arrived at the camp either. According to the inmates, who were lucky enough to survive the war at Bergen-Belsen, the daily portion of food consisted of watery soup made from a variety of turnips cooked in water and 3 and half centimeters of bread a day.
Sanitary conditions at Bergen Belsen were terrible and there was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. The camp was so overcrowded that during the winter months when it was freezing cold, the prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor and somehow try to share only 200 blankets in a camp of tens of thousands of prisoners. In March 1945, due to starvation, thirst and the outbreak of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate of the prisoners was between 250 and 300.
At Bergen-Belsen, Grese kept mistreating the prisoners who according to her own words “were so dirty and ill “ until the bitter end. Even here she enjoyed not only beating and kicking starved prisoners but also making them kneel and hold stones over their heads. They were also often forced to stand for hours in snow, ice, and rain from 3:00 to 9:00 AM.
Despite the fact that people were dying all around at Bergen-Belsen, Grese would not only keep stripping female prisoners and beating them with a rubber truncheon, but she would also submit them to punitive physical exercises in which the women would have to march, run or do frog jumps until they collapsed from exhaustion. About a fortnight before the British troops arrived, when it was apparent that the war was over, she was seen beating a girl with a riding crop. Upon the eve of liberation Grese knocked together the heads of two sisters when she caught them trying to eat potato peel scraps from the camp kitchen.
Even though she worked at the camp for only three and a half weeks, she was so cruel that the prisoners dubbed her “The Beast of Belsen. ” On the 17th of April 1945, 2 days after Bergen Belsen’s liberation, Irma Grese was captured by the British forces together with her fellow Nazi criminal colleagues such as Josef Kramer, the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the last commandant of Bergen Belsen. Grese and other SS female guards were temporarily imprisoned in a Wehrmacht panzer training academy about three kilometers from Belsen.
At this time when she was interviewed by an English journalist who asked her why she had committed the crimes she had, Irma unashamedly replied, “It was our duty to exterminate anti-social elements so that Germany’s future would be assured. ” Justice finally caught up with Grese when she was tried at the Belsen Trial which began on the 17th of September 1945. During the trial when the witnesses claimed that she was the worst SS woman in the camp, Grese responded that they were all lying, exaggerating and making an elephant out of a small fly.
Grese only admitted to the beatings, but never killing anyone. However, her lies did not help her escape justice. On the 17th of November, The British Military tribunal sentenced Irma Grese to death by hanging.
She was 22 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on the 13th of December,1945. 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.
There were no tears shed for Irma Grese. Thanks for watching the World History Channel be sure to like And subscribe and click the Bell notification icon so you don't miss our next episodes we thank you and we'll see you next time on the channel.
