On the 17th of April, 1945, two days after the British 11th Armored Division had liberated Bergen-Belsen, the young woman who would come to embody the camp’s cruelty stood before her captors. She was twenty-one years old, blonde, and strikingly beautiful. The British had taken her into custody along with Josef Kramer, the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the last commandant of Bergen-Belsen, and a number of other SS personnel who had worked at the camp. When an English journalist asked her why she had committed the crimes she was accused of, she answered without hesitation, “It was our duty to exterminate anti-social elements so that Germany’s future would be assured.

” Her name was Irma Grese. Within eight months, she would be hanged, the youngest woman to die judicially under British law in the twentieth century. But before that, the story of how the daughter of a dairy farmer became one of the most feared women in the Nazi concentration camp system would have to be told. Irma Grese was born on the 7th of October, 1923, in Wrechen, then part of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s government from 1918 to 1933.

She was the third of five children, and both of her parents worked as dairy farmers. Her early childhood was unremarkable, but the political world around her was changing rapidly. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power. The Nazis were skilled propagandists who used sophisticated advertising techniques and the most current technology of the time to spread their messages across the country.

They developed youth organizations—the Hitler Youth for boys and the League of German Girls for girls—to introduce children and juveniles to Nazi ideology and policy, and to prepare Germany’s young people for war. Irma’s father, Alfred Grese, was not a Nazi sympathizer. He despised everything associated with the Nazis and never allowed his children to join the youth organizations, even though they wanted to. But it was impossible to avoid Nazi indoctrination, because schools also played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to German youth.

From their first days at school, German children such as Irma Grese were imbued with the cult of Adolf Hitler, whose portrait was a standard fixture in all classrooms. Censors removed some books from the classrooms, and educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism. In 1936, when Irma was thirteen years old, her mother committed suicide after discovering her husband’s affair with the daughter of a local pub owner. Irma was then raised only by her father, a devout Christian who was stern with his children and often used physical violence to discipline them.

At school, Irma performed poorly academically. According to her sister Helene, Irma was badly bullied at school and dropped out when she was only fourteen. She then spent six months working on a farm, and after that moved to Luchen, where she worked in a retail shop for six months. In 1939, at age fifteen, Grese went to the Hohenlychen Sanatorium, where she worked as an assistant nurse for about two years and trained under the 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 the sanatorium, but she did not do well enough academically. In 1941, at age seventeen, she was instead sent to a dairy farm in Fürstenberg, where she operated a butter machine. Her criminal career in the concentration camps began in July 1942, when she arrived at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis.

In total, about 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. The 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, a sadistically cruel Nazi officer and supervisor who instructed her trainees on how to handle the prisoners they were going to supervise. The prisoners would have to work until they died, and the task of supervisors such as Irma Grese was to get a maximum amount of work out of them whilst they were still alive. Ravensbrück thus became a training center, 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, the same doctor under whom Grese had trained at 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 with and without various chemical substances such as sulfanilamide, 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 eighty women, mostly Polish, for these experiments. Many of them died as a result, and 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 on women who were already seven or eight months pregnant, and were known for beating pregnant women to cause miscarriages and for killing newborns. Irma Grese knew Karl Gebhardt from Hohenlychen Sanatorium, and it is believed that at Ravensbrück, Grese—then eighteen years old—also served as an assistant nurse during the experiments. She was exposed to atrocities that 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 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, located in German-occupied Poland. Birkenau was the largest of the more than forty camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. It was divided into ten sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences and 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 125,000 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, owing her infamous nicknames “the Hyena of Auschwitz” and “the Beautiful Beast” to her cruelty and brutality. She was also reputed to be a sexual deviant, taking lovers from the male and female populations of Birkenau, and was 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.

Doctor Gisella Perl, a 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 wrote 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, Irma Grese would purposely pick out the beautiful female prisoners out of jealousy and spite. However, there were female prisoners that Irma Grese was fond of. Such was the case of Nina Kaleska, then sixteen years old, whom Grese told that she looked like her sister Helene. Kaleska was used by Irma as a messenger and lookout girl when Irma held lesbian orgies in the 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 the gas chamber to be killed. She also beat her sexual subjects. When a handsome Georgian man refused Grese’s advances, 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, 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. 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 she performed telephone duties. Then she was transferred, as a sort of light punishment, to be in charge of the kommando that carried stones from 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 eight weeks, from the 15th of May to the 9th of July 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 age twenty, Grese became the senior guard of Birkenau’s Lager, or Camp “C,” supervising six or seven female guards who changed every week. Camp C 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 100, or a maximum of 300, prisoners, but the camp was so overcrowded that Grese had 1,000 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.

In Grese’s Lager C there were approximately 30,000 prisoners, all of them Hungarian, while the Blockältesten were Czechoslovaks. The Blockältester, or block leader, was an inmate who had to ensure that rules were followed in the individual barracks and was also responsible for the prisoners in them. 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 the whip.

However, she went on using it anyway. The most frequent reasons to whip prisoners were that they stole food because they were hungry, or they showed up late for roll calls. During the roll calls, which often took place from 3 AM until 9 AM, 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 roll calls as difficult as possible was to order prisoners to stand holding a large stone above their heads in each hand, and if they faltered, she would beat them. On one occasion, prisoners cut up their blankets and made shoes or jackets of them. Grese gave strict orders to return all sorts of things produced out of these blankets at once.

But because nothing was returned, she ordered a 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 prisoners with her walking stick. 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. 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 for 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. Female prisoners who 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 a prisoner named Alice Tenenbaum, then fourteen years old, who was sent to the gas chamber by Josef Mengele sixteen times, and every one of those times Grese saved her by going into the gas chamber and taking Tenenbaum out. After the war, Alice learned that 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 the dogs at her side, accompanying the female inmates on their sixteen-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 to 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 a smile on her face.

Sometimes when Grese went out with her working parties, she used to beat women and kick 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. 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 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. ”

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 sub-camps.

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. Those who collapsed or could not keep pace were shot by the SS. The prisoners got almost no food during these marches, and there was no food when they arrived at the camp either.

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. According to 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 three and a half centimeters of bread a day. Sanitary conditions 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, 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 15th of April 1945, southwest of Bergen, the British 11th Armored Division liberated 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 found 13,000 unburied dead bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved. Thousands of other inmates would die of various diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis during the months following the camp’s liberation. The British forces captured the male and female Nazi personnel responsible for these horrors and forced them to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves.

On the 17th of April 1945, Irma Grese was captured by the British forces together with her fellow Nazi criminal colleagues, including Josef Kramer. Grese and the other SS female guards were temporarily imprisoned in a Wehrmacht panzer training academy about three kilometers from Belsen. Justice finally caught up with her when she was tried at the Belsen Trial, which began on the 17th of September 1945. During the trial, when 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 to killing anyone. 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 twenty-two 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 twentieth century. There were no tears shed for Irma Grese.