The woman known to history as Irma Grese was born on the 7th of October, 1923 in the village of Wrechen, in Mecklenburg, Germany. Her father was Alfred Grese, the overseer of a local estate and a supervisor of the estate’s dairy. Her mother, Berta Winter, was a homemaker who also managed the family’s own produce garden and domestic animals.
Irma Ilse Ida Grese, as she was christened, grew up in a rural lowland area about fifty miles north of Berlin, a quiet and picturesque region of green fields, scattered forests and many lakes. The people who lived there were predominantly lower-middle-class agricultural workers and the Grese family managed decently well financially, at least as well or perhaps slightly better than many of their neighbors. Irma was the third of five children.
She had an older sister, Lieschen, an older brother, Alfred, and two younger siblings: her sister Helene and a baby brother, Otto. Few details are known about Irma Grese’s early childhood, but it appears to have been fairly unremarkable. She played with her brothers and sisters, helped her mother with domestic chores and attended the local elementary school.
Irma was reportedly a shy, sensitive and anxious child who always ran away from any conflicts with other children, or so her sister Helene said of her many years later. In March of 1933, when Irma was nine years old, her elementary school underwent significant changes in its curriculum, just as every other school in Germany did following the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party just two months prior. The principles and ideals of National Socialism, “Aryan” purity and race pollution were now benchmark educational standards.
Historians and witnesses have differed over the Grese family’s stance on the Nazi party. Some accounts describe Alfred Grese as a stern, conservative and devoutly church-going man who disliked Nazi politics. Others describe him as an opportunistic supporter of Hitler– one who perhaps did not care so much which party was in power as long as they brought back some of the German pride and prosperity previous generations had known under the Kaiser.
It is true that Alfred Grese did not join the Nazi party until 1937, so perhaps this latter supposition is accurate. Grese did, however, become a local group leader for the Nazi party in Wrechen after he joined the organization. Alfred and Berta Grese had a difficult marriage that ultimately ended in tragedy.
The family made decent money compared to others in their community, but with five children to clothe and feed, they must have found it challenging. Some accounts describe Alfred as an excessively heavy drinker and a hard disciplinarian who often employed physical punishment with his children. Oral accounts from the Grese family’s old neighbours and acquaintances however, claim this is not true.
Alfred regularly frequented his local pub - but, they insist, he was quite friendly and jolly, and not a problematic or abusive drinker. What is known for certain is that in December of 1935, Berta learned that Alfred had been having an affair with the daughter of a local pub owner. Berta enlisted her children to help her clean the house from top to bottom.
When everything was clean and neat, she sent her children out to fetch their father from the pub. While they were gone, she tried to take her own life by drinking hydrochloric acid, a commonly-used cleaning product. When the family arrived home and found Berta unconscious on her bed, they rushed her to the hospital.
Berta Grese lived for a few weeks before dying in hospital in January 1936. Irma was twelve years old when her mother died and few if any details are known about how the family coped in the few years after Berta’s death. Oral accounts from old neighbours claim that Irma became quieter, more withdrawn, and tended to isolate herself from others.
While other children were building friendships and experiencing their first romances, Irma reportedly could often be found sitting alone on a hillside whistling softly to herself. Both Irma and her sister Helene soon conceived a desire to join the League of German Girls, the young women’s branch of the Hitler Youth. Apparently, the Nazi indoctrination that the two sisters had been receiving at school for the past five years had had an effect.
The League of German Girls was an organization designed to train young women to be “party comrades,” whether that meant marriage and prolific motherhood, training as a nurse, or “defending the homeland” as a member of one of the women’s auxiliary branches of the SS. One historian has suggested that perhaps the League of German Girls and the Nazi party offered a number of prospects beyond simple ideology that Irma and other young women like her may have found attractive. Nazi rhetoric glorified not only so-called “Aryan” Germans, but also claimed to value rural people and communities as the backbone of German society and the seat of German virtue.
The League of German Girls offered isolated, frustrated or angry young women the means to find identity, affirmation and camaraderie, better career opportunities than could be accessed in their home communities, and the opportunity to meet and mix with many more people their own age. Membership would soon become mandatory for all German girls of “Aryan” ancestry, but initially, Irma’s father flatly refused to let her join the League. It is unclear why Alfred at first forbade his daughter to join the organization, especially since he became an official member of the Nazi party himself in 1937.
One account claims that the local League chapter was too far away and the route too dangerous for Irma to ride her bicycle to and from meetings alone. Whatever the reason, her father’s refusal seems to have been the beginning of a rift between Irma and Alfred. In 1938, when she was fourteen, Irma dropped out of school to sign up for a government-administered youth labour program.
She went to work at a dairy factory in nearby Fürstenberg for six months and then worked at a small shop in Lychen for a further six months. In 1939, less than a year after Irma left school, Alfred Grese married again. His new wife brought four stepchildren from a previous marriage into the Grese family and the couple later had another child together.
Fifteen-year-old Irma, who may not have come home at all throughout her previous year in the labour program, then left home for good. On the strength of a recommendation from her local chapter of the League of German Girls, Irma secured a position as a nurse-apprentice at the Hohenlychen Sanitorium under the supervision and mentorship of the surgeon, Dr Karl Gebhardt, the infamous Nazi physician who would eventually be sentenced to death in 1948 at Nuremburg for medical atrocities. Hohenlychen had once been administered by the International Red Cross as a tuberculosis treatment facility.
Since the establishment of Nazi rule however, the hospital had become a research centre. The Nazi military were especially interested in being able to effectively treat and cure serious battle injuries. Dr Gebhardt was initially charged with determining the uses and effectiveness of “sulfa” drugs to treat gangrenous wounds, but soon moved on to experimentation with bone grafting and nerve repair.
At Hohenlychen, on Karl Gebhardt’s watch, unspeakably hideous and torturous experiments were carried out on Jewish women from the nearby Ravensbrück concentration camp. Irma Grese spent two years as an apprentice and assistant nurse in this hospital. While few if any details are known about her specific experiences there, she no doubt became more and more numb to the cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazi regime in such an environment, or worse, more accepting of it.
She may also have become more and more indoctrinated with Nazi ideology since Hohenlychen was also a convalescent home for ill or injured S. S. officers.
Members of the Nazi high command including Albert Speer, Heinrich Heydrich and Rudolf there throughout the late thirties and in the early years of the Second World War. Gephardt himself, as her supervisor, may have been a particularly intense ideological influence on Irma. Dr Gebhardt was an old campaigner for the Nazi party and had marched with the Brownshirts in the streets of Berlin during the early 1920s.
Irma was eventually “let go” from her position at Hohenlychen hospital. Apparently, after two years, she had not improved sufficiently or shown enough competence at her job to become a full-fledged nurse. Irma later wrote that she was particularly disappointed to have failed her apprenticeship and had sincerely wanted to enter the nursing profession.
Dr Gephardt suggested that she apply for a position as a prison guard at the nearby Ravensbrück concentration camp and referred Irma to a friend of his in the camp’s administration. At the time, seventeen-year-old Irma was too young to be recruited into the S. S.
and was instructed to re-apply after she turned eighteen. Consequently, between the fall of 1941 and the summer of 1942, Irma returned to her previous job at the Fürstenberg dairy factory. In July of 1942, she joined the women’s branch of the S.
S. and began prison guard training at the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. The recruitment of women to military, law enforcement, or manufacturing jobs was quite contrary to the official Nazi stance on women’s roles in German society.
National Socialist ideology praised German women who upheld traditional values, married, and produced as many children as possible. Yet, as the war advanced, Germany was forced, like every other nation engaged in the war at the time, to recruit women in order to replace factory workers who were drafted into the military. They also needed qualified nurses to care for their wounded.
Additionally, as the concentration camps began to shift from forced labour camps to killing centres by 1942, and more satellite camps were established, more and more S. S. matrons were recruited as women’s sections were established in the camps.
Women were not permitted to become full-fledged members of the S. S. , but were designated as “S.
S. Assistants. ” Nonetheless, the women who trained at Ravensbrück to become concentration camp guards between 1942 and 1944 were subject to the same standards and expectations as the men, and received training that was virtually identical to the training undergone by male guards at Dachau’s “model camp.
” Guard training took three weeks – a seemingly brief period of time, but often long enough to produce dramatic behavioural changes and harrowing results. Little is known about Irma’s specific experiences during guard training, but her rapid promotion within little more than a year of completing her training speaks volumes about how effectively she may have absorbed the cruel and brutal lessons of the camps. One of the Senior Matrons at Ravensbrück, Dorothea Binz, may have been a significant influence on Irma, although it is important to note that this is no more than a supposition.
However, Binz exhibited at Ravensbrück many of the same vicious and sadistic behaviours and tactics with which Irma Grese would later come to be associated at Auschwitz. According to the testimony of survivors of the Ravensbrück and Auschwitz concentration camps, Grese resembled Binz in a number of ways. Both kept a loaded gun on their person at all times, frequently using it to summarily execute prisoners or to strike terror.
This weapon was the only one officially issued by the S. S. , but it was not the only one they employed.
Like Binz, Grese also carried a plaited whip at all times, which she used perhaps more frequently than she did the gun. Further, both Binz and Grese sometimes made their rounds throughout the camps leading a trained German shepherd dog which they might command to terrorize, attack, maim or kill prisoners. Finally, according to multiple witnesses, both Binz and Grese engaged in sadistic sexual behaviour toward their victims.
Such acts are beyond any civilized person’s grasp of humanity. While this behaviour may have been even more extreme than that of the average camp guard, the vast majority did absorb the systematic program of beatings, starvation, purposely appalling conditions, and humiliating indignity with which the Nazi regime intended to demoralize, defeat and ultimately kill those they considered “sub-human enemies of the state,” whether they were Jews, Slavs, Roma peoples, homosexual men and women, or religious or ideological dissidents. Few camp guards ultimately proved to be as monstrous as Irma Grese, but on the other hand, those who refused to treat prisoners with cruelty were so rare as to be negligible.
Most guards adapted to seeing prisoners abused without flinching during training, and most would willingly and even viciously beat prisoners when being watched by other guards. S. S.
camp training sought to cultivate above all a hardness or toughness in its guards. Hitler himself spoke of the need to strip away all “weakness and tenderness” from Germany’s youth, to make them “violently active, dominating, brutal,” and “indifferent to pain. ” “I want to see in their eyes,” Hitler once wrote, “the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey.
” S. S. camp guards were trained to watch prisoners constantly for any signs of individual or organized sabotage.
Morning and evening prisoner roll calls were used to model expected guard behaviour and were a major component of training. These sessions could sometimes last for hours, with prisoners standing silently in lines in the baking sun or the numbing frost for inspection and receiving demeaning, cruel and sometimes even fatal punishments for any perceived infraction, however minor or even nonexistent. Guards in training watched their superiors beat and sometimes kill prisoners for supposedly breaking camp rules or for not working hard enough.
Finally, guards in training were instructed never to pursue any personal or human contact with prisoners – even a casual conversation was strictly forbidden and completely taboo. “The beginners usually appeared frightened upon first contact with the camp,” one survivor of Ravensbrück recalled. “It took some time to attain the level of cruelty and debauchery of their seniors.
Some of us made a rather grim little game of measuring the time it took for a new Aufseherin to win her stripes. One little Aufseherin, twenty years old, was at first so ignorant of proper camp “manners” that she said “excuse me” when walking in front of a prisoner. She needed exactly four days to adopt the requisite manner, although it was totally new for her.
” Magda Hellinger, a survivor of Auschwitz, was the prisoner-functionary of Camp C assigned to assist Irma Grese when she first arrived at the women’s camp there. Magda recalled her first meeting with Grese, during which the nineteen-year-old appeared rather juvenile and awkward, her hair in two braids hanging over her shoulders. Magda was shocked to see her again after several months of working in a different part of the camp.
She appeared to have hardened, and to have become more vicious and confident in it; patrolling the camp with her uniform flawlessly tailored, her boots shining, her hair and makeup impeccable, and her weapons at the ready. In the decades since World War II, historians, psychologists and behavioural scientists have proposed a number of theories seeking to explain how so many S. S.
camp staff could have been trained so effectively to adopt and employ such vicious and inhumane treatment on helpless people. Indoctrination is a fairly familiar process to such professionals, but some are quick to point out that particular groups of people can be more easily indoctrinated than others and such groups seem to have been primarily targeted for recruitment to the camp guard division of the S. S.
A sizeable proportion of the nearly thirty thousand S. S men and women who became Nazi concentration camp guards were working-class, minimally-educated young people between eighteen and twenty-six years of age. They largely came from rural or provincial areas with few opportunities, areas which had been hit hardest by Germany’s economic woes since the end of the First World War.
They had the so-called “correct” heritage as Aryan Germans and the Nazis told them they were superior to all non-Aryan peoples. It was in these rural parts of the country, rather than in the cities which the Nazis labeled “decadent” and “subversive,” that Hitler’s message of Aryan supremacy, hate, and murderous racism often landed hardest. These young people had swelled the ranks of the various branches of the Hitler Youth in the years before the war.
Irma Grese fits this description remarkably well – an angry, isolated and bitter “nobody from nowhere. ” She had failed her nursing training and her future as likely no more than a menial labourer stretched predictably before her. The sudden elevation of such people to relatively prestigious government positions with the power of life and death over those they blamed for all the country’s troubles resulted in some of the worst documented crimes of violence and murder in human history.
It is important to remember also that virtually all female S. S. camp guards were not drafted, as women in the war auxiliaries were, but actually volunteered for service in the camps.
A government advertisement seeking the recruitment of S. S. camp guards appeared in newspapers in 1938.
“You only have to watch over prisoners,” the ad read. The advertisement also promised that a “food allotment,” a “well-furnished official residence” and an official uniform would be provided along with an employee salary which would increase on a schedule. Once she finished her guard training, Irma was employed as an S.
S. Aufseherin or “Matron” for nearly seven months at Ravensbrück, where she promptly passed her probation and reportedly impressed and even surpassed her superiors with her easy adjustment to the camp’s vicious and violent regime. In February of 1943, Irma went home to Wrechen for a visit.
While it cannot be confirmed for certain, this may have been the first time in nearly four years that she was received in her family’s house. Irma was due to travel to Poland within a few weeks to take up her new post in the women’s section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. According to accounts from three Grese family members, including Irma herself, this meeting initially went well.
Alfred and Irma behaved amicably with each other despite their previous clashes and he apparently seemed proud of her for the position she had secured, as well as impressed with her smart uniform and above-average compensation package. The household calm did not last long. Allegedly, just a few days after Irma arrived, one of her younger stepsisters went crying to Alfred that Irma had torn the head and limbs off one of her dolls.
This reportedly led to a confrontation between Alfred and Irma which dissolved what little goodwill still remained between them. It is unclear whether Alfred fully understood just what his daughter’s job as a prison guard entailed, or if that played any role in his rejection of her. According to Helene Grese, Irma had been immediately angry and insolent with her father when he confronted her.
Helene claimed Alfred was also upset about Irma’s involvement with the S. S. and the prison camps, but this statement should be treated with skepticism since many Nazi-supporting families sought to hide their support and acceptance of the party after the War.
Irma herself stated that during the course of this confrontation with her father, one of her younger brothers had run into the room carrying Irma’s pistol, which he had found among her personal belongings, and playfully took aim at his father. Alfred, Irma said, had quickly and carefully taken the gun away from his son and struck Irma across the face with it. Irma reportedly collected her belongings and departed her family’s home immediately, never to return.
In March of 1943, nineteen-year-old Irma travelled to Poland to take up her new post in the women’s section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. There were more than thirty-thousand women imprisoned there and Irma spent the next two years oppressing, terrifying, torturing and murdering untold thousands of them. Within seven months, she was promoted to Senior Matron, a position in which she began regularly selecting victims for the gas chambers, often in partnership with Chief Matron, Maria Mandl, or with Dr Josef Mengele, whose grisly medical atrocities had earned him the reputation among camp inmates as the “white angel of death.
” Irma herself earned the nickname “the Hyena of Auschwitz” during her tenure at the infamous camp. The roll calls, parades and inspections Irma Grese carried out provided opportunities for “making sport,” one example of the grim and hideous vocabulary that evolved among Nazi camp guards. “Making sport” referred to the regular practice of targeting and punishing prisoners for any real or imagined infraction, sometimes fatally, with the level of severity often depending upon the disposition and mood of the guard.
Numerous camp survivors testified that Grese was particularly vicious at “sportmachen,” furiously whipping, caning, or kicking with her jackboots those attempting to avoid her, or to shield others such as children from her during roll call or parade. The enforced exposure of prisoners to filthy and inhumane living conditions contrasted sharply with the impossible expectations the guards imposed on prisoners to keep their barracks clean and neat. Setting such impossible tasks was part of the systematic regime of abuse and demoralization.
Surviving prisoners of Bergen-Belsen recalled Irma Grese squealing in exaggerated horror over the smallest spot or smudge during inspections of prisoner barracks, and the humiliating punishment or denial of food rations that might follow. While many guards were known to treat prisoners in such ways in the presence of other guards or prisoner-functionaries, there were few who did so more arbitrarily or with less obvious pleasure than Irma Grese. On account of her particular viciousness, historians have often compared her to Amon Goeth, the infamous and murderous Commandant of the Plaszow labour camp in Poland.
A former inmate of Auschwitz testified that she had once seen Irma riding by one of the barracks on a bicycle and yelling at a Hungarian woman, who happened to be standing out front, to get back inside. Reportedly, without waiting to see whether or not her order would be obeyed, Grese drew her pistol and shot the woman dead before riding away as if nothing at all had happened. She could also be highly manipulative, purposely luring prisoners into situations for which she could justify inflicting punishment.
One female inmate testified that Grese had once purposely started a rumour that potato peels were regularly dumped outside the door of the camp kitchen. When the inmate and her sister, both of them starving, finally mustered the courage to look for the food scraps under the cover of darkness, Irma was lying in wait for them not far from where she had carefully planted the potato peels. The inmate testified that Irma sprang at them out of the darkness and knocked the two sisters’ heads together so hard and so violently that the inmate said she felt dizzy and nauseated for days afterwards.
It should come as no surprise that by age twenty, Grese had attained the second-highest rank any S. S. woman could achieve, and for her noted and well-established reputation for the degradation and murder of countless so-called untermenschen, or sub-humans, she was awarded a medal for meritorious war service to the Reich.
Historians, psychologists and behavioural scientists have for years wondered to what extent the camp system itself could be blamed for Irma Grese’s unspeakable crimes. There is no doubt that the Nazis sought to mold the S. S.
guards into murderers, especially after 1942, but the question remains: Just how much malice was innate in Irma Grese to begin with and how much was molded by her indoctrination and training? Considering the particular savagery and horrifying frequency of her crimes against camp inmates and the obvious lack of any compassion or guilt for these actions, it is understandable that most Holocaust survivors who remembered Grese or experienced her cruelty cared very little if at all about why she did what she did. Almost all refused to view her as a victim despite her age and vulnerability to easy indoctrination.
The vast majority of guards, they insisted, were cruel and abusive, but not nearly as brutal or sadistic as Irma Grese proved to be. Although the exact number of her victims will probably never be known, some have estimated that the number may be as much or more than eighteen thousand. Some historians have speculated that Grese may be among the most prolific female murderers of the entire twentieth century.
All this being said, some scholars still consider the question of how she became the sadistic individual that she did to be important – not to vindicate or excuse Grese’s crimes which of course, nothing ever could, but to comprehend. Some continue to insist that it is important to understand how an environment that molds people into mass killers might be cultivated, if only to prevent such systems from ever again being created. According to one chain of analysis, the nourishing of violent tendencies was partly made possible by a carefully-cultivated S.
S. culture of rough camaraderie which punished so-called “weakness,” rewarded aggression, and incentivized internal corruption, exploitation, and theft. Guards in training were conditioned to view quote-unquote “weakness” in any one guard as a weakness for all and trainees were roughly exhorted by senior guards to abuse prisoners, as well as praised for it.
It is worth noting that some guards could be brutally punished themselves for taking it too easy on prisoners. Irma herself was ordered by Auschwitz’s commandant, Rudolf Höss, to deliver the last two of twenty-five strikes with a cudgel to the head of a fellow Matron who had been judged to be too lenient with inmates. Despite the seemingly ironclad rules governing all aspects of life in Nazi concentration camps, in reality, rules were broken all the time.
In fact, the systemic program that the camps sought to produce could not function without the encouragement of all kinds of behaviour on the part of the guards that would be unthinkable and horrifying in virtually any other professional or official environment. Although there were strict prohibitions against interaction of any kind with inmates, many guards did establish relationships with inmates, most of them exploitative. It is worth noting that the concentration camps could not run without prisoner-functionaries, whose supervisory or administrative work meant that camps could function with fewer S.
S. personnel. These individuals were assigned to supervise barracks, work details, and punishments, and sometimes reported on their fellow prisoners to ensure their own safety and preferment.
Despite the strict rules to the contrary, many prisoners ended up in exploitative personal and working relationships with the S. S. Magda Hellinger was one example of a prisoner-functionary who managed to use her position and influence with the guards and administrators to quietly save thousands of her fellow women prisoners from the gas chambers.
Hellinger wrote that having to work with Irma Grese in Auschwitz’s Camp C was deeply disturbing, not least because of her conduct toward prisoners, but also because Magda was forced to glimpse Grese’s humanity. Irma, Magda recalled, often seemed to forget that she was a Jewish prisoner, talking to Hellinger as if trying to impress an older sister. Irma had no friends among the other female guards and while Magda could not deny that Irma was undoubtedly evil and sadistic, she also came across as highly impressionable and vulnerable.
Irma told Magda about her family and the terrible break she had experienced with them, especially her father, who, she claimed, had not wanted her to join the League of German Girls and disapproved of her career in the S. S. She told Magda of her disappointment at failing her nursing apprenticeship and expressed her admiration for Dr Karl Gebhardt’s tutelage, calling him, of all things, a “saint.
” Magda Hellinger is one of the few, or perhaps the only prisoner of the camps who stood up to Irma Grese and lived. Magda recalled that four women had been brought to her at roll call one morning with hideous wounds from Irma’s whip. Magda sent them to the infirmary to be treated by a prisoner-physician and then privately confronted Irma.
“What did you do to those poor women? ” she demanded. “They are in great pain.
Their wounds will likely become infected and they will die. Shame on you! ” Irma then raised her whip as if to strike Magda also.
“Go on! I dare you to strike me too. I know you like to see blood,” she told Grese defiantly.
Irma then lowered the whip and Magda walked away. She was flabbergasted when Irma came to her later and asked her forgiveness. Another prisoner who worked closely with Irma Grese was Lilika Salzer, a survivor of Auschwitz and a seamstress.
She provided her services to Irma in return for regular visits with her younger twin sisters, who were being kept in another part of the camp. In exchange for these visits, Lilika regularly tailored Irma’s uniform and any other clothing Irma brought to her. S.
S. officers placed a marked emphasis on presenting a neat, clean and well-tailored appearance. Since guards were issued only one uniform, a practice known as “organizing” was necessary for a guard to present the kind of appearance their superiors expected and approved of.
“Organizing” was another example of a grim camp guard euphemism, referring to the practice of requisitioning resources from prisoners, prisoner-functionaries, or any easily-bullied fellow guards for one’s own benefit. The brutal conditions of the camps encouraged and rewarded the most aggressive and victimizing behaviour, ensuring the survival and prosperity of the most vicious. According to numerous survivors, Irma Grese appeared to “strut” about the camp in her perfectly tailored and spotless uniform, her whip and silver-plated pistol prominently displayed at her hip with her blond hair artfully styled and her makeup flawless.
Besides her sadistic cruelty, Irma’s appearance was one of the things that prisoners remembered most about her, and it was also one of the things that most captured the attention of journalists and photographers who attended the Bergen-Belsen war crimes trial. Dr Gisella Perl, who survived Auschwitz as one of the few doctors imprisoned at the camp, said of 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, and imaginative pervert I ever came across. ” Another deeply disturbing aspect of camp guard culture was its debauchery. While not explicitly stated, there was a permissiveness and even tacit encouragement of sexual relationships between guards.
Concentration camp survivors recalled that for many guards, there seemed to be a clear connection between the violence or death they inflicted, and their frequent sexual escapades which seemed to provide some sort of outlet. Guards would engage in the most horrific treatment of prisoners day in and day out, and then retire to staff parties and banquets which invariably turned into alcohol-soaked affairs after which not everyone would recall whom they’d gone to bed with. Irma Grese is believed to have had affairs with Auschwitz’s Commandant, Rudolph Hess, as well as with Dr Josef Mengele, although Grese’s relationship with Mengele reportedly ended abruptly when he discovered that she conducted sexual relationships with women as well as men.
In terms of Irma Grese’s conduct as a concentration camp guard, the connection between sex and death was particularly pronounced. Multiple Holocaust survivors testified that they witnessed Grese sexually assault and torture numerous women under her charge. Dr Gisela Perl recalled that Grese even became visibly aroused watching her tend to these poor women’s wounds while they screamed in pain.
Several former inmates of Auschwitz remembered that Grese discreetly had sexual relationships with numerous female prisoners. This was a serious violation of the Race and Resettlement Act, and probably the only crime other than refusing to mistreat prisoners which might have carried any real punishment for a guard. In order to protect herself from discovery, Irma Grese sent the women to the gas chambers.
Sometime between the late fall of 1943 and the early spring of 1944, believing that she might be pregnant, Irma quietly sought a medical examination from Dr Gisela Perl. As it turned out, the easy sexuality of guard culture had caught up with her and Dr Perl informed her that she was indeed pregnant. Irma instructed the doctor to return to the clinic the following day and prepare for surgery.
She promised to get Dr Perl a coat in exchange for ending her pregnancy, a procedure which Irma could not access through the S. S. clinic since both contraception and termination of pregnancy were both illegal for Aryan women in Nazi Germany.
The next day, when Dr Perl had completed the procedure and Irma was dressed and preparing to depart, she said: “What a pity that you are a good doctor…What a pity that you have to die. Germany needs good doctors. ” Irma then threatened Dr Perl, promising she would kill her if she told anyone about the operation.
Irma never delivered the coat she had promised. Perhaps as alarming to Irma as her pregnancy was the suspicion that she might have contracted syphilis, which was rife among the guards at Auschwitz by 1944. The records of the S.
S. medical clinic at the camp show that Irma was tested for syphilis in late January of 1944 and her diagnosis came back negative. Witness accounts and documentary evidence give contradictory details about Irma Grese’s movements and whereabouts between January and April of 1945.
At her trial, she claimed that she was transferred from Auschwitz back to Ravensbrück in January before being sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp in March, but no records remain of her initial transfer. Accounts from the Grese family’s old neighbours in Wrechen stated that Irma had accompanied thousands of Ravensbrück prisoners on a forced march west in April 1945. As the Russian Allied forces advanced into Poland and began to encroach from the east, Nazi concentration camps began to evacuate as many prisoners and staff as possible to camps further west.
According to Wrechen residents, Irma encountered her family quite by chance during this march, who were also fleeing the advancing Soviet army. Irma’s father, stepmother and siblings, perhaps certain that she would be arrested when the Allies overran Germany, reportedly urged Irma to come with them, which she allegedly refused to do, insisting that she would remain loyal to the Nazi cause and her duty. The veracity of this story cannot be ascertained for certain, since it does not appear in any testimony from the Grese family.
Additionally, it conflicts with reports from the British Second Army, who arrested Irma Grese at the Belsen camp in mid-April 1945. Despite the fact that she was dubbed the “the Beautiful Beast” by reporters and journalists who observed and wrote about her trial, Irma actually spent less than a month at the prison before the arrival of the British Army and camp Commandant Josef Kramer’s surrender. She did not seem to alter her behaviour much however, continuing to exhibit the same kinds of vicious behaviour she had shown towards inmates at Auschwitz.
While quite a few Nazi prison guards quietly fled their posts prior to the arrival of the Allied armies, many others stayed in the camps, perhaps as convinced as some military officials that there was still hope for a grand German counter-attack that might stem the inevitable Allied victory. Irma later testified that she requested to be posted at Belsen because a certain Franz Hatzinger, an older married man with whom she had formed a relationship at Auschwitz, was stationed there. Kramer, Grese and others who remained at Belsen appeared defiant to the occupying British authorities, perhaps certain that they would suffer no repercussions for simply having “followed orders.
” Josef Kramer even effected a courteous magnanimity toward to his British conquerors, standing with several other administrators in neat formation at the camp’s entrance and cheerfully welcoming the army to the camp as the army rolled in. The British troops were utterly sickened and horrified at what they found at Bergen-Belsen. Approximately one hundred thousand prisoners had been crammed into a camp originally built for eight thousand.
Barracks built for one hundred housed one thousand prisoners. Belsen had no gas chambers, but thousands nonetheless died every week from enforced starvation, widespread typhus, or wanton murder by the guards. Even after the British troops arrived, they were shocked to hear continuous gunfire throughout the camp and realized that the S.
S. were still trying to carry out their orders to kill as many of the camp’s population as possible. The thousands upon thousands of bodies in various stages of decomposition were stacked in massive sickening piles throughout the camp, “like cardboard,” one British soldier remembered.
After the arrest of the camp administration and S. S. personnel, Irma Grese was imprisoned at Celle pending trial, which took place in the nearby city of Lüneburg.
Grese and forty-four of her fellow S. S. defendants were tried according to English law.
Five military officers and one civilian judge formed a tribunal to hear and judge each defendant and attorneys were appointed from among the British and Polish Allied forces to defend them. Irma Grese proved singularly unhelpful to her lawyer or to her S. S.
co-defendants with her behaviour in court. Rather than appearing contrite or ashamed of the horrifying testimony made against her and other S. S.
officers, she instead maintained a haughty and derisive attitude toward her accusers and the court’s officers. She often laughed out loud during the testimony of former prisoners or simply looked disdainful and unrepentant. When the utterly hideous footage of the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps were shown in court, she effected the posture of someone supremely bored, turning away periodically to blow her nose or fix her hair.
There was little that her lawyer, Major L. S. W.
Cranfield could do to forestall the inevitable verdict besides insist that his client had only followed the orders of her superiors, a defence which Irma herself seemed to believe was quite sufficient. The sheer volume of testimony against her however, was unbelievably damning, with far too many interviews with similar details and claims between them. Irma Grese’s mask of disdain crumbled only once, when Helene Grese came to court to testify in her sister’s defense as a character witness.
Her testimony changed little. Helene’s insistence that she could never imagine Irma beating or otherwise mistreating prisoners because she had always run from conflict as a child made no difference. The prosecutor easily weaponized this claim against Grese, conjecturing that this petty coward had perhaps never stood up to anybody with strength or confidence, but had found it easy to vent her rage upon helpless victims as soon as she was given the power and the permission to do so.
When Helene described for the court the domestic incident that had led to Irma being exiled from her home and family, Irma’s defiant façade finally cracked. She broke into tears and sobbed openly before the court. Because of the enormous volume of testimony and evidence to be presented, the Belsen trial did not begin until 17th September 1945.
The proceedings took two months. On 17th November, the defendants were called before the court for sentencing. Irma Grese was found guilty of war crimes for the ill-treatment and murder of prisoners at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Besides Juana Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath, she was the only other woman out of the nineteen Nazi matrons tried at Belsen to be sentenced to death. Major Cranfield paid a visit to his young client in her cell following her sentencing. Her composure had completely collapsed, he remembered.
Her face was tear-streaked, her hair an unaccustomed mess, as if she had run her fingers through it again and again. He quietly informed her that she would soon be transferred to Hamelin prison to await her execution. Over the next few weeks, Irma wrote several letters to members of her family to say her goodbyes.
She sent her love and urged them to remember her as they had last seen her. She exhorted them to hold their heads up and be proud Germans. “Even in the worst of trouble, I am loyal to my fatherland to the death,” she wrote.
On the night before their execution, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Juana Bormann and Irma Grese stayed up late, the three of them defiantly singing Nazi songs together in their respective cells until well into the night. The next morning, Volkenrath was the first Belsen defendant to be executed, just after 9:30 am. At 10:00 am, Irma was brought into the prison courtyard where Britain’s official executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, stood waiting at the scaffold.
With no hesitation, she briskly climbed the steps and without requiring any prodding, she promptly positioned herself upon the trapdoor marked in the centre with an “X. ” The executioner quietly murmured his requisite “forgive me,” as he placed a white hood over Irma’s face and the carefully-knotted noose around her neck. “Schnell,” Irma whispered to him – “Quickly!
” It was the last word she spoke. The trap opened, her body dropped into it, there was a muted crack. A few minutes later, the body of Irma Grese was removed for the execution of Juana Bormann and the ten men who followed the three women to the grave.
All were buried just outside the prison grounds. At twenty-two years old, Irma Grese remains the youngest woman ever to be formally executed by British authorities. More than one historian has since remarked on a few odd coincidences involving the Belsen executions: On Friday the 13th of December 1945, thirteen criminals were hanged before a crowd of thirteen spectators.
Most academic study, discussion and writing on the Holocaust has focused on the leaders, the so-called “desk murderers” who consigned millions to their deaths with the stroke of a pen. Far less attention was paid to those who did most of the actual killing until the last three or four decades. During the period in between, Irma Grese and other brutal S.
S. women like her were largely forgotten, except for those few truly avid World War II history buffs. Irma Grese’s passage into the dark, seedy underbelly of popular history is deeply unsettling.
First, the image that was cultivated of her in the media during the Belsen trial as the “Beautiful Beast,” had the effect of highlighting her appearance and femininity alongside her crimes. No other Belsen defendant was photographed more frequently or had more print dedicated to her than Irma Grese. Her youth and beauty combined with her singularly vicious behaviour encouraged what many would characterize as an unhealthy fetishization of her.
Another factor which makes Irma Grese problematic as a historical figure lies in the fact that the brutality and murder she committed contrasts sharply with stereotypical notions of femininity, which often characterizes women as inherently less aggressive than men. Twentieth and twenty-first-century scholars, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, published in 1949, have asserted that any gendered characteristics unrelated to physiology are entirely socially-constructed, and are a function of where, when and under what conditions people live and learn. Historians point out that the genocide in Nazi Germany was a function of the aggressive and nationalist culture of “hyper-militarized hegemonic masculinity,” one which would seem to automatically exclude women as oppressors.
Yet, women like Maria Mandl, Ilse Koch, Dorothea Binz and of course, Irma Grese, committed atrocities every bit as terrible and in many cases more so than their male counterparts. Anyone who subscribed to traditional feminine ideals would be inspired to view them as deviants and aberrations. It is true, women were rare in the S.
S. and guards as sadistic as Irma Grese were even more rare, but considering how few German women served in such roles during the war, how can we ever hope to have any basis for comparison? Nearly four thousand women served as S.
S. Matrons in the concentration camps compared to roughly twenty-four thousand men, but those women underwent the same training, navigated the same environments and in a matter of weeks, became accustomed to committing acts of violence of which traditionalists could not believe women were capable. Historians like Christopher Browning and Hanna Arendt posited that one of the darkest truths about World War II was that the Nazis who carried out those terrible crimes were, quote, “ordinary men” to begin with.
However, a similar perspective on Nazi women has not yet fully evolved. The danger in this lies in how we have viewed and prosecuted genocide in the years since World War II, and how we will continue to do so in future. A tiny minority of Nazi women were called to account for their crimes compared to Nazi men and virtually no women from the Japanese military faced a tribunal at the end of World War II.
In the more recent genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, women as well as men were involved in the programs of hyper-nationalism and mass murder, but yet again, only a tiny handful were considered for indictment by the International Criminal Court and even fewer were prosecuted and convicted. Part of the issue also stems from the fact that women make up less than 5% of the world’s militaries, and still represent a group most frequently targeted in war crimes, especially sexual crimes, rather than perpetrating them. And yet a British soldier who liberated Belsen recalled that partly in retribution for their crimes, the British had forced the S.
S. guards to bury the body of every prisoner who had died in the camp. While many of the male guards were visibly sickened by the task, literally tried to run away from it, or even took their own lives rather than lay hands on those they had murdered, not one of the S.
S. women shirked the task or showed revulsion while handling, one after another, the mountain of decomposing bodies left behind at Belsen. The life of Irma Grese was so dark that some might be led to question whether anything useful can be gained at all from studying it.
Are her life and crimes still a valuable cautionary tale we need to preserve? Some might say that the recounting of her crimes serves more to titillate or awaken a gross fascination with violence which can only be destructive. Would we do ourselves a favour or a disservice by consigning her to the dustheap of history?
What do you think of Irma Grese? Have historians, psychologists and behavioural scientists managed to sufficiently contextualize and comprehend Grese’s viciousness and cruelty, the environment in which it flourished, or indeed, Grese herself or is there still more to understand? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
