On the morning of September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and the Second World War began. By the following May, the Germans had established Auschwitz concentration camp, roughly sixty kilometers west of Krakow, because the mass arrests of Poles were overwhelming the capacity of existing local prisons. In October 1941, the Nazis began construction of Birkenau, which would grow into the largest of more than forty camps and subcamps making up the Auschwitz complex. From March 1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau stood at the center of the German effort to murder the Jews of Europe, and approximately one million people — about ninety percent of the camp’s victims — would die there.

From March 1943 until the camp’s evacuation in January 1945, one of the camp’s personnel was a young German woman who would become notorious for her sadism: the beatings, the arbitrary shootings of female inmates, the savaging of women by her trained and half-starved dogs, and her role in selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. After the war, she would become the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals. Her name was Irma Grese. Irma Ida Ilse Grese was born on October 7, 1923, in Wrechen, then part of the Weimar Republic.

She was the third of five children. Both her parents — her mother Berta and her father Alfred — were dairy workers. When Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933, Irma was nine years old. Her father was not a Nazi sympathizer; he despised everything associated with the Nazis and never allowed his children to join the Nazi youth organizations, even though they wanted to.

In January 1936, when Irma was twelve, her thirty-three-year-old mother Berta committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid after discovering her husband’s affair with the local pastor’s daughter. Irma was then raised only by her father. Alfred Grese was a devout Christian, stern and strict with his children, and he often used physical violence to discipline them. At school, Irma performed poorly academically.

According to her sister Helena, Irma was bullied badly: when girls quarreled and fought, Irma never had the courage to fight back but ran away. In 1938, the fourteen-year-old Irma left school and her father’s house, working at the dairy factory in Fürstenberg from the beginning of spring until winter. She then moved to Lychen, where she worked in a retail shop for six months. In 1939, at fifteen, she went to the Hohenlychen sanatorium, where she worked as an assistant nurse for about two years, training under the sanatorium’s medical superintendent, Karl Gebhardt.

The war had begun on the first of September 1939, while Grese was still at Hohenlychen, hoping to become a full-fledged nurse. But she had not done well enough academically. In 1941, at seventeen, she was sent instead to a dairy farm in Fürstenberg, where she operated a butter machine. She remained there until June 1942.

The following month, she was deployed to serve as a guard at Ravensbrück, the only major women’s concentration camp the Nazis had established. Starting in the summer of 1942, SS medical doctors subjected female prisoners at Ravensbrück to unethical medical experiments. The main coordinator was Karl Gebhardt, whom Grese knew from the Hohenlychen sanatorium. His assistants were Doctors Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer.

They often used a hammer to break the legs of female prisoners, then infected the open wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing process with and without various chemical substances such as sulfonamide, an early antibiotic believed useful in treating amputee soldiers. They also tested methods of setting and transplanting bones; such experiments included amputations and were often performed without any anesthesia. It is believed Grese served as an assistant nurse during these experiments and was exposed to those atrocities, which may have had a damaging impact on her personality and turned her into a violent SS overseer. In early 1943, when she came home and told her family she was supervising female prisoners working inside the compound at Ravensbrück, her father gave her a thrashing with a belt or a whip and forbade her from ever coming home again.

In March 1943, Irma Grese was deployed to Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland. Birkenau was the largest of the camps in the Auschwitz complex, opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942 and serving at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. Some Auschwitz survivors remembered Grese as a beautiful young woman. Nina Kesa later recalled their first meeting: “Grese took my little cheek and she said, ‘Ah, they tell me that you look a lot like me, and I wanted to be sure that it was really true.

‘ And I in my total naivety said, ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any resemblance. I’ve never seen anyone more beautiful,’ and I meant it. She was like a vision. ” Dr.

Gisella Perl, also an Auschwitz survivor, later said: “She was one of the most beautiful women I’d 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 could imagine. And yet Grese was the most depraved, cruel, imaginative pervert I ever came across. ”

In her memoir *Five Chimneys*, Auschwitz survivor Olga Lengyel wrote that Grese had affairs not only with Dr.

Josef Mengele but with many other Nazis as well. When it came time to select women for the gas chamber, Lengyel noted, Grese would purposefully pick out the most beautiful prisoners out of jealousy and spite. Masha Greenbaum remembered: “When we saw her, we used to run, run, just run, because when she met you she kicked you to the floor and then she went to the neck with her boots and she just killed people, people like that. ”

There were, however, female prisoners to whom Grese showed another side of her personality.

Such was the case of Karola Steinhoff, then a young Jewish woman from Germany. She later recalled: “My sister arrived in the camp and I wanted to know what happened to my parents. She said that they were all dead. Grese witnessed this.

She saw me speaking to and hugging my sister and she stood there and cried, something no one had ever seen before. And then she said to me, ‘Karola’ — she heard my sister call Karola, otherwise she wouldn’t have known — she said, ‘you don’t have to worry, your sister is going to stay with you now. ‘ My sister then had to go through all kinds of different routines than I thought. We would be together, but it was just a false promise.

They then sent her to a different camp. ”

There were even some women Grese liked, such as Magda Hellinger, a Jewish woman from Slovakia. Grese, who treated Magda like an elder sister, even asked her opinion of her new boyfriend, whom she introduced to Magda. Towards the other inmates, however, she remained cruel.

After the war, Magda recalled: “One day before roll call, two runners came with four women whose breasts had been split open after Irma Grese had struck them with her whip. After I took care of the women, I told her, ‘Irma, imagine if someone did that to you. Shame on you. ‘ At that moment Grese lifted her whip at me and I said, ‘Strike, strike.

I know you like to see blood. I am offended. ‘ Then I walked away, and Grese came after me. She said quietly, ‘Forgive me.

‘”

At Auschwitz, Grese fell in love with SS man Franz Wolfgang Hatzinger, the chief engineer of the construction department in the main camp. Despite this relationship, Grese had many lovers. Nina Kesa, then sixteen years old, was used by Grese as a messenger and lookout girl when Grese held lesbian orgies in the barracks. Kesa later recalled: “Grese took a liking to me.

Thank God she never did abuse me, but she made me stand guard in front of the barracks while she would make love to the most beautiful Jewish girls there. And when she was making love to another woman, she wanted to be alerted, so I would stay guard to see if maybe, maybe the other guards of her caliber or other Germans would be coming. She had total power. She could do anything she wanted to anyone at any time.

”

Grese had numerous affairs with female inmates, especially pretty Polish women. When she grew bored of them, she would beat them or select them for the gas chamber. She also abused male prisoners. When a handsome Georgian man refused Grese’s advances, he had to watch her drag his naked girlfriend around the camp by the hair and then whip her.

After torturing the woman he loved, she had the man shot and the woman sent to the camp brothel. When Mengele discovered that Grese was having affairs with Jewish inmates, deemed racially inferior, he ended his intimate relationship with her. Grese had so many lovers that in January 1944 she contracted syphilis. She also had numerous abortions; Dr.

Perl performed one of them, and Grese’s only concern was the pain she would feel. Perhaps because of these abortions, Grese hated other pregnant women. At the Birkenau camp, she would tie together the legs of women in childbirth so that they could not deliver and died in great agony. Because of her cruelty, the prisoners nicknamed Irma Grese the “Hyena of Auschwitz.

” Her other nickname was “The Beautiful Beast. ”

At Auschwitz, Grese first performed telephone duties, then was transferred as a sort of light punishment to be in charge of the commando that carried stones from outside into the camp, because she had not worn her cap. She was also placed in charge of the commando making roads inside the camp and the gardening work. Auschwitz survivor Margaret Yasto Clug remembered: “One day I went to work.

Two SS soldiers with dogs were watching us. One soldier put sunglasses on his dog, and the girls told me this and I looked and I thought it was funny. Grese came to me and hit me with such force that I lost three teeth. ”

In May 1944, the extermination of Hungarian Jews was to take place.

During eight weeks, from May 15 to July 9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officials under the guidance of German SS officials deported around 424,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival, after selection, SS functionaries killed the majority of them in the gas chambers. It was in May 1944, at the age of twenty, that Grese became senior guard of the Birkenau women’s camp, supervising six or seven female guards who changed every week. The women’s camp consisted of twenty-eight 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 one hundred, or at most three hundred, prisoners. But the camp was so overcrowded that Grese had one thousand prisoners in each block. In some blocks there were bunks large enough for five people to sleep in, but in most there were neither beds nor bunks. There were approximately thirty thousand prisoners.

Because the camp was overcrowded, the sanitary conditions were horrible; the latrines ceased to function. Grese would later describe how “wherever you went, it was just as if the prisoners thought any place was good enough for a latrine. ”

In the camp, Grese carried a woven leather whip covered with cellophane so that human blood could easily be washed from it. One witness described the whip: “It was a cellophane paper platted like a pigtail.

It was translucent like white glass. ” She would stand at the gate when the working parties were going out and coming in, and regularly beat inmates with her whip, all for her sadistic pleasure. Later she would proudly say: “It was a very light whip, but if I hit someone with it, it would hurt. ”

Grese beat and ill-treated prisoners to such an extent that Josef Kramer, the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, who was also her lover, told her to stop using it.

She went on using it anyway. But Kramer also abused prisoners. As Nina Kesa said: “Grese and Kramer, they were a different breed of people. They looked human, but these were not human beings, because normal people cannot possibly behave in that manner.

”

For Grese, the most frequent reasons to whip prisoners were that they stole food because they were hungry, or that they showed up late for roll calls, during which they were counted. Nina Kesa recalled: “She would make us stand for hours at a time in freezing horrible weather or very hot weather. People would sometimes faint. She would tread on them, she would beat them, she would unleash her dog.

She would punish people very badly. She was very cruel. She was extremely cruel and tortured thousands of people. ”

After the war, Grese’s explanation for whipping prisoners during roll calls was that they were running to and from, and she could not count them properly.

Her other specialty in making roll calls as difficult as possible was to order prisoners to stand holding a large stone above their heads in each hand; if they faltered, she would beat them. Her 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. Grese also participated in selections of veteran female inmates for the gas chambers, together with her lover Dr. Josef Mengele.

They often performed these selections together. Holocaust survivor Alice Gahana later recalled: “When Grese and Mengele appeared, it was terror and fear. It always meant death. The way Grese looked and walked made us all feel that we were less than animals.

”

Auschwitz survivors remembered how, during the selections, the female prisoners were very often paraded naked and inspected like cattle, to determine whether they were fit enough to work or only fit to die. Grese would be there keeping order. If some women ran away, she would bring them back and give them a beating. The female prisoners knew what those selections meant, and sometimes they tried to escape; but they were brought back terribly beaten until they bled all over the place, then put back in their lines again.

A former Auschwitz prisoner named Zaffran recalled what happened during one selection: “Two selected girls jumped out of the window trying to escape. Grese approached them as they were lying on the ground and shot them twice. ”

At Auschwitz, Grese had two huge dogs that she starved. Survivors recalled her riding a bicycle with the dogs at her side, accompanying the female inmates on their sixteen-kilometer track to work.

Those who could not keep up with the column, she ordered the dogs to attack. On one occasion, when the female commando was carrying stones from outside into the camp, the 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: “Grese sicked 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. Grese 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 a smile on her face. ”

Another of her specialties was sending women outside the wire fence while they were working, to make it appear they were attempting to escape. Helena Kopper later recalled: “Whilst Grese was in charge of the working party, she always carried a rubber truncheon.

She was responsible for at least thirty deaths a day resulting from her orders to cross the wire, but sometimes this number was even higher. It was always my job, ordered by Grese, to count the dead, and I, together with some other women, used to load the bodies into one of the railway wagons after working hours. ”

Thanks to the plunder from murdered victims, Grese also had her choice of the finest clothing from all over Europe. She had her dresses tailored by the best Jewish dressmakers who had become prisoners at Birkenau.

She was particularly fond of a sky-blue jacket with a dark blue tie. Grese would spend hours in front of her dressing mirror styling her hair, imagining herself as a movie star. She once declared after the war: “I’m 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. ” But that vulgar display of arrogance could not have been further from the truth. Grese left Auschwitz on January 18, 1945, as Soviet forces approached the 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. When they arrived at Bergen-Belsen, there was almost no food. The daily portion consisted of a watery soup made from a variety of turnips cooked in water, and three and a half centimeters of bread a day.

The sanitary conditions were terrible, and in March 1945, due to starvation and the outbreak of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate of the prisoners was between 250 and 300. Holocaust survivor Dora Krauss, who was among the prisoners liberated at Bergen-Belsen, described seeing a group of women squatting around a pot in which they had cooked a human liver. After her arrival at Bergen-Belsen, Grese requested to remain at the camp, because her lover, Franz Wolfgang Hatzinger, was deployed there as well. Even at Bergen-Belsen, Grese kept mistreating the prisoners, who, according to her own words, were “so dirty and ill,” until the bitter end.

She compelled the female inmates to perform exhausting physical exercises, which she called “making sport. ” She later added that she herself had made sport with the prisoners; but while she received food, the women were starving and receiving almost no rations. The prisoner named Zaffran recalled: “About a fortnight before the British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen, I saw her beat a girl in the camp. She had a pistol, but she was using a riding crop.

The beatings were very severe. If they were not the cause of death, they were not called severe. ”

On the eve of liberation, when it was clear that the war was lost for Germany, 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 had worked at the camp for only three and a half weeks, she was so cruel that the prisoners dubbed her the “Beast of Belsen.

”

Holocaust survivor Eda Dorest recalled how, after the liberation, the enraged prisoners pushed Grese’s head into a toilet. On April 17, 1945, two days after Bergen-Belsen’s liberation, Grese was captured by British forces. The British forced the former SS camp personnel to help bury the thirteen thousand dead bodies in mass graves. The personnel were given starvation rations, were not allowed to use gloves or other protective clothing, and were continuously shouted at and threatened to make sure they did not stop working.

Within two months, seventeen staff members had died of typhus due to being forced to handle the bodies without protection. Among them was Franz Wolfgang Hatzinger, Grese’s lover, who died of typhus on April 23, 1945. Grese and the other SS female guards were temporarily imprisoned in a Wehrmacht panzer training academy about three kilometers from Belsen. There, an English journalist interviewed her and asked why she had committed the crimes she had.

Irma unashamedly replied: “It was our duty to exterminate antisocial elements, so that Germany’s future would be assured. ”

Justice finally caught up with her at the Belsen trial, which began on September 17, 1945. During the trial, Grese twice laughed so hard that she had to lean forward in the prisoner’s box to try to control herself, holding her hand to her mouth. Alongside her, Ilse Lothe, her fellow Nazi colleague, tried to conceal her giggles with her handkerchief.

Grese laughed when the thirty-two-year-old P. Vine Gardner, another Nazi guard, said that when he had beaten one girl with a piece of rubber tubing, it was the only time he had beaten anyone. She also laughed uncontrollably when the wife of Josef Kramer, her former lover and once commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, said that when her husband used to come home from his day’s work at Auschwitz, he used to pace the floor at night, tormented by the fact that the Nazi commanders were having people put to death in gas chambers. He cried: “Why, why, why?

” Other women were less amused: when Kramer’s wife left the court, she was slapped in the face by a Polish woman. During the trial, when witnesses claimed that Grese was the worst SS woman in the camp, she responded that they were all lying, exaggerating, and “making an elephant out of a small fly. ” In the end, however, she gave up and said: “I confess to the ill treatment of prisoners, because it has been on my conscience. ” Grese admitted to beating but never to killing anyone, and added: “If prisoners had their faces slapped, it was only their fault.

If they were more intelligent, they obeyed orders. ”

When she broke down and wept during the trial, it was never because she was sorry for the crimes she had committed. Once, Grese cried when she heard her sister Helena telling the story of their home life to the court, and again when she saw her twenty-three-year-old brother Alfred, who had twice been wounded while fighting on the Eastern Front. On November 17 and 18, the British Military Tribunal sentenced Irma Grese to death.

After the sentence was pronounced, she looked awful and cried continuously; her eyes were red and sunken, and she was extremely nervous. Grese, who had never shown an ounce of mercy to the prisoners she supervised, asked for clemency. But in early December, Field Marshal Montgomery rejected all appeals and ordered Grese, Kramer, and others to be hanged. She was hanged by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint at Hamelin prison on December 13, 1945.

She was twenty-two years old. Walking to the gallows, her final and only word was “Schnell” — “quickly. ” Grese was the youngest woman to die judicially under British law in the twentieth century.

There were no tears shed for Irma Grese.