Irma Grese
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Irma Grese (October 7, 1923 Wrechen near Pasewalk (Mecklenburg) – December 13, 1945 Hameln) was a supervisor at the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
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[edit] Childhood
Irma Grese was born to Alfred Grese, a milker and a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party from 1937, and Berta Grese. Irma Grese had four siblings. In 1936, her mother committed suicide, allegedly because of marital problems.
Grese left school in 1938 at the age of 15, due to a combination of a poor scholastic aptitude, being bullied by classmates, and a fanatical preoccupation with the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls, a Nazi female youth organization), of which her father disapproved.
[edit] Casual jobs
Among other casual jobs, she worked as an assistant nurse in the SS sanatorium Hohenlychen for two years and unsuccessfully tried to find an apprenticeship as a nurse, after which she worked as dairy helper. In 1942, at age 18, she volunteered for SS-Helferinnen (Female Helpers) training at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her father did not approve of her new career, and ordered her to stay away from their house.
Having completed the training in March 1943, she was transferred as a Aufseherin to Auschwitz, and by the end of that year she was Oberaufseherin (Senior Supervisor), the second highest ranking woman at the camp, in charge of around 30,000 Jewish female prisoners.
[edit] The Beautiful Beast
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At Auschwitz, she was one of the youngest female guards, and the most cruel, often whipping and kicking felled prisoners. The inmates dubbed the blue-eyed blonde the "Beautiful Beast," while Grese herself became obsessed with the idea of becoming a film star after the war. She also had a reputation as a nymphomaniac, sexually abusing male and female prisoners alike and taking many lovers, including the camp physician Josef Mengele and camp commandant Josef Kramer. In January 1945 she briefly returned to Ravensbrück before ending her wartime career at Bergen-Belsen as an Arbeitsdienstführerin from March to April, being captured by the British April 17, 1945, together with other SS-personnel who did not flee.
[edit] War crimes
Grese was among the 44 accused of war crimes at the Belsen Trial. She was tried over the first period of the trials (September 17 to November 17, 1945) and was represented by Major L. Cranfield.
The trials were conducted under British military law in Lüneburg, and the charges derived from the Geneva Convention of 1929 regarding the treatment of prisoners. The accusations against her centred on her ill treatment and murder of those imprisoned at the camps, including setting dogs on inmates, shootings and sadistic beatings with a whip. After a fifty three day trial she was sentenced to hang. After the war survivors provided extensive details of murders, tortures, cruelties and sexual excesses engaged in by Irma Grese during her years at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. They testified to her acts of pure sadism, beatings and arbitrary shooting of prisoners, savaging of prisoners by her trained and half starved dogs, to her selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. She habitually wore heavy boots and carried a whip and a pistol. She used both physical and emotional methods to torture the camp's inmates and enjoyed shooting prisoners in cold blood. She beat some of the women to death and whipped others mercilessly using a plaited whip.
In her hut was found the skins of three inmates that she had had made into lamp shades.
In January, 1945, she returned to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp before being transferred to Bergen-Belsen in March.
[edit] Irma's Defense
"At 16, I was an apprentice nurse at Hohenluchen, next the Labour Exchange stationed me at a dairy in Fürstenburg. In July, 1942, I was sent to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, which I protested against it. In March, 1943, when I went to Birkenau Camp in Auschwitz, In January, 1945, I was sent to Belsen. I was not SS, women are not allowed to be inducted into the SS. I was a postal clerk in the mail-room, answered telephones, and working in the commandants gardening squad, arranged SS funerals at Belsen. At Auschwitz I took roll call for section C."
[edit] Execution
On 17 November 1945, Irma and 11 others were convicted of crimes committed at both Auschwitz and Belsen and sentenced to death. Her subsequent appeal was rejected. The others included two other women, Juana Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath.
Finally, on 13 December 1945, in Hameln Jail, Grese was led to the gallows and hanged by noted British executioner Albert Pierrepoint, assisted by Regimental Sergeant-Major O'Neill. She was the youngest woman to die judicially under English law in the 20th century.
Her last spoken word: "Schnell!" - ("Quick!")
[edit] The Ghost Legend
A legend persists of Grese's ghost haunting a building on the site of Belsen in the former West Germany. UK Guardian
On Jan 12 1948, Harak Visen, a night watchman, claimed he saw the ghost of Irma Grese in a building on the site of the Krema Three.
