On April 15, 1945 the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen – one of the worst Nazi concentration camps which epitomized the true bestiality and horrors of the Nazi regime and its death camps. The British forces found 13,000 unburied death bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved.
Other thousands of inmates died of various diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis during the months following the camp’s liberation. The British forces managed to capture male and female Nazi guards responsible for these horrors and forced them to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves. One of these SS guards was Irma Grese, one of the most notorious Nazi guards.
Irma Grese was born on 7 October 1923 as one of five children. Her father was an agricultural worker and in 1936 when Irma was 13, her mother committed suicide after learning her husband was cheating on her. According to Irma’s sister Helena, Irma was bullied badly at school and dropped out when she was only 15.
Soon after, Irma Grese went to the Hohenlychen Sanatorium when she worked for 2 years as a sort of nurse. The Medical Superintendent of Hohenlychen Sanatorium was Karl Gebhardt, an infamous Nazi doctor who performed evil medical experiments on inmates in Ravensbrück concentration camp during the WW2. After the war, Karl Gebhardt was tried in the Nuremberg the Doctors’ trial which sentenced him to death by hanging.
After Grese left the sanatorium, she worked for about 18 months on a small dairy farm in Fürstenberg. According to her post war testimony, although she wanted to become a nurse, the Labour Exchange did not allow it and sent her to Ravensbrück concentration camp instead. She came to Ravensbrück which was located near to her family home in 1942.
Irma’s father was strongly against her involvement with the SS and when he learned about her job in Ravensbrück, he forbade her from coming home again. Irma Grese remained in Ravensbrück until March 1943 when she was sent to Auschwitz Birkenau. According to Irma’s sister Helene, Irma was a cowardly little girl.
However, in concentration camps, Irma found herself for the first time in a position to strike people when they could not strike her back. And she enjoyed it. At Auschwitz, she became one of the most hated Nazi guards and she owed her infamous nicknames “the Hyena of Auschwitz” and “the Beautiful Beast” to her cruelty and brutality In 1944 she was promoted to senior SS supervisor which was the second highest rank possible for female concentration camp wardens Grese supervised thousands of prisoners in an overcrowded camp and was well known for carrying
her woven leather whip which was covered with cellophane so that human blood could be easily washed from it. Irma Grese beat and ill-treated prisoners to such an extent that the camp’s Kommandant told her to stop using her whip. However, she continued to do so in spite of this. The reasons to whip the starving prisoners were that they stole food because they were hungry, or they showed up late for the roll calls.
During the roll calls which often took from 3 Am until 9 AM, the prisoners had to stand still. When they moved, they were either beaten or had to kneel down for hours. Grese’s explanation was that they were running to and from and she could not count them properly. Her other specialty how to make these roll calls as difficult as possible was to make the prisoners hold stones above their heads for a long time.
Another reason for beating was when the prisoners cut up their blankets and made shoes or jackets of them. Grese gave strict orders to return all sort of things produced of these blankets at once. Because nothing was returned, she ordered the search of the blocks and prisoners who were having these things in their possession, were brutally whipped.
Irma Grese also used to beat the prisoners was a walking stick. On one occasion, Grese was seen beating a female prisoner until that woman was bleeding and fell senseless to the ground. Grese had a habit to beat women until they 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 between two compounds. Grese beat and kicked her so brutally that the prisoner remained lying on the ground. When people were sent to the gas chamber, Grese entered that up in her books as “special treatment”. She was also accused of selections for gas chambers.
Irma Grese was allegedly the lover of the most infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and they often performed these selections together. These prisoners were very often paraded naked and inspected like cattle to be selected either for the gas chamber or for forced work in Germany. During one such selection, when two girls jumped out of the window and were lying on the ground, Grese mercilessly shot them with her always loaded pistol.
She enjoyed starving her dogs, then turning them loose to attack the poor prisoners. She was also accused of amusing herself by sending women outside the wire when they were working so that they would be shot by the guard. And when one guard refused to shoot the women crossing the fire on the grounds that they had been sent over deliberately, Grese gave evidence at an enquiry against this guard.
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When she went out with her working parties, she enjoyed beating women and kicking them with her heavy top-boots. Irma Grese left Auschwitz on 18th January, 1945. She went to Ravensbrück, and in March she came to Bergen Belsen concentration camp along with a large number of Ravensbrück prisoners. She kept mistreating the prisoners who were according to her own words “ so dirty and ill “ until the bitter end.
Even here Grese enjoyed not only beating, kicking and making people kneel but also making people hold stones over their heads. 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. After Bergen Belsen’s liberation, Irma Grese was captured by the British forces together with her fellow Nazi criminal colleagues such Elisabeh Volkenrath, head warden in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen concentration camps and Josef Kramer, the last commandant of Bergen Belsen.
She was tried at the Belsen trial which began on 17 September 1945. During the trial when the witnesses claimed that she was the worst SS woman in the camp, Grese responded that they were all lying and exaggerating. She even said that these witnesses made an elephant out of a small fly.
Grese only admitted beatings, but never killing anyone. However, her lies did not help her. The British Military tribunal sentenced Irma Grese to death by hanging. She was 22 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on 13 December,1945. Walking to the gallows her final and only word was “schnell” meaning quickly. There were no tears shed for Irma Grese.
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