Irma Grese Beast of Auschwitz

The most notorious SS guard in the history of Auschwitz

© Christopher Eger

Jun 10, 2006

Irma Grese was one the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals. She was one of the relatively small numbers of women who had worked in the concentration camps that was hanged for war crimes by the Allies.

She became the youngest woman executed under British jurisdiction in the 20th century and was also the youngest of the concentration camp guards to be hanged.

Irma Grese was born in a small town named Wrechen; her father was a milker and her mother committed suicide, allegedly because of marital problems, when Irma was nine. A member of the female Hitler youth organization, Grese left school in 1938 by the age of 15, and in 1942, at age 18, volunteered for SS-Helferinnen (Female Helpers') training at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was later transferred to Auschwitz, as a Senior Supervisor and the second highest ranking woman at the camp, in charge of up to 30,000 Jewish female prisoners at any given time. She was in charge of Krema Three briefly, a large crematorium that burned thousands of executed camp residents. In her time there she was considered the cruelest of the guards. She carried a sidearm as did most guards but also a cellophane whip which she used often on exhausted prisoners. The inmates dubbed Grese, the youngest guard at the camp and a striking blue-eyed blonde, the "Beautiful Beast." At her trial it was testified that she set dogs loose on bound prisoners, chose who would go to the gas chamber, beat prisoners with every tool she had including a whip, and ordered the skinning of three inmates. Found in her barracks hut were the skins that she had had made into lamp shades. She and also became something of a sexual fanatic, taking several brief lovers including the camp commandant and the infamous physician Josef Mengele. At her trial it was implied that she seemed to derive sexual pleasure from acts of sadism.

She ended the war at the Bergen Belsen Death Camp, captured by British soldiers on April 17, 1945.

Her trail along with nearly fifty others was in front of a British Military Tribunal with six judges including Field Marshal Montgomery as final the appellate. While imprisoned she sang German folk ballads at night in her cell and was called "Stirb Nicht" or little singer. She plead not guilty and used the defense that she was just following orders. She testified that she regarded the inmates of the concentration camps as subhuman rubbish and saw nothing wrong in her wartime actions. After a fifty three day trial she was convicted of crimes committed at both Auschwitz and Belsen and sentenced to death by hanging. This was translated to her as "Tode durch den Strang", literally death by the rope.

Grese's subsequent appeal to Montgomery was quickly rejected. . Two American MP's Sgt O'Hare and Cpl Rick Smith were court marshaled for refusing to walk her to the gallows. The army hangman also refused to hang Grese and a civilian hangman had to be flown in from Britain for the task. She showed no remorse. She refused a hood and her final word to the executioner was "Snell", which is German for "Quick." At 12:01 on Dec 22, 1945, she was led to the gallows and hung. The hangman miscalculated the drop and Irma's neck didn't snap. She slowly suffocated as she fought the rope for three minutes and her body was removed after twenty.

Irma Grese, was hung in good company. Some thirty minutes apart Albert Pierrepoint, the British hangman who had more than 400 condemned criminals to his credit assisted by British Regimental Sergeant-Major O'Neill, hung Grese along with Elisabeth Volkenrath (a guard from Bergen-Belsen) and Juana Bormann (from Auschwitz). These women took to the gallows only hours behind the Commandant of Bergen-Belsen Josef Kramer.

Florence Nightingale's quote sums up the wartime career of Irma Grese, the worst female outlaw of that conflict. "What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior."

Sources

- Brown, Daniel P "The Beautiful Beast: The Life & Crimes of SS-Aufseherin Irma Grese" June 1996

-Pressac, Jean-Claude "The machinery of mass murder at Auschwitz: The design, construction, use, modifications, and destruction of the crematoria and gas chambers of the Auchwitz-Birkenau concentration camps" 1988

Irma Grese April 1945 ar Belsen

Irma Grese a few days before death

Irma Grese in 'mug shot'

Irma Grese on stand she is #9

SS overseers at Bergen Belsen 1945

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