Execution of Irma Grese - The Hyena of Auschwitz - Nazi Guard at Auschwitz & Bergen-Belsen - WW2

The 15th of April, 1945, southwest of Bergen,  Nazi Germany. The British 11th Armored Division liberates 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 find 13,000 unburied death bodies and almost 60,000  prisoners who are sick and starved.

Thousands of other inmates will die of various diseases  such as typhus and tuberculosis during the months following the camp’s liberation. The  British forces capture male and female Nazi personnel responsible for these horrors and force  them to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves. One of them, who would become one  of the most infamous perpetrators of the criminal Nazi Regime, is Irma Grese.

Irma Grese was born on the 7th of October  1923 in Wrechen then part of the Weimar Republic which was the government  of Germany from 1918 to 1933. Irma was the third of five children, and  both her parents were dairy workers. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into  power in January 1933.

The Nazis were skilled propagandists who used sophisticated  advertising techniques and the most current technology of the time to spread their messages. The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were developed as Nazi Party youth groups to  introduce children and juveniles to Nazi ideology and policy. These youth groups also prepared  Germany’s young people for war.

Because Irma’s father was not a Nazi sympathizer and despised  everything that was associated with the Nazis, he never allowed his children to join the Nazi  youth organizations even though they wanted to. However, it was impossible to avoid Nazi  indoctrination as schools too played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to the  German youth. From their first days at school, German children such as Irma Grese were imbued  with the cult of Adolf Hitler and his portrait was a standard fixture in all classrooms.

While  censors removed some books from the classroom, German educators introduced new textbooks  that taught students love for Hitler, obedience to state authority,  militarism, racism, and antisemitism. In 1936, when Irma was 13 years old, her  mother committed suicide following the discovery of her husband’s affair  with a local pub owner's daughter. She was then raised only by her father Alfred  Grese, a devout Christian, who was very stern and strict with his children and would often  used physical violence to discipline them.

In school, Irma Grese  performed poorly in academics. According to Irma's sister Helene, Irma was  bullied badly at school and dropped out when she was only 14. She then stayed for six months  on a farm working on agricultural job and then moved to Luchen where she worked in  a retail shop for 6 months as well.

In 1939, at the age of 15 Grese went to the  Hohenlychen Sanatorium where she worked as an assistant nurse for about 2 years and trainer  under 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 Hohenlychen Sanatorium but because she did not  do well enough academically, in 1941 at the age of 17, she was instead sent to a dairy farm in  Fürstenberg where she operated a butter machine. Her criminal career in concentration camps began in July 1942 when she arrived in  Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only  major women's camp established by the Nazis. In total, some 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.

Ravensbrück 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 - the sadistically cruel  German Nazi officer and supervisor - who instructed her trainees on how to handle the  prisoners that they were going to supervise.

These prisoners would have to work until  they died and the task of their supervisors, such as Irma Grese, was to get a maximum  amount of work out of them whilst they were still alive. Ravensbrück thus also became  a training center or “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 and his assistants became  doctors Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer. They often used a hammer to break legs of  female prisoners, then infected open wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing  with and without various chemical substances such as sulfanilamide, which was 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 80 women, mostly  Polish, for these experiments. Many of the women died as a result.

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 of women  who were already seven or eight months pregnant.

In addition to these forced  abortions, they were also known for the beating of pregnant women to cause  miscarriages and the killing of newborns. Irma Grese knew Karl Gebhardt from  Hohenlychen Senatorium and it is believed that at Ravensbrück Grese, then 18 years old, also served as an assistant nurse during the  experiments and was exposed to atrocities which 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 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was located in German occupied Poland. Birkenau was the largest of the more than  40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. It was divided into  ten sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences.

It was 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 thousand 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 and she owed her  infamous nicknames "the Hyena of Auschwitz" and "the Beautiful Beast" to her cruelty and  brutality.

Grese was also reputed to be a sexual deviant, taking lovers from the male  and female populace of Birkenau. She was also 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 concentration camp. Doctor Gisella Perl, 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 writes 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 that Irma Grese would purposely pick out the beautiful  female prisoners due to jealousy and spite. However, there were female prisoners  that Irma Grese was fond of. Such was a case of Nina Kaleska, then 16 years  old, whom Grese told her that she looked like her sister Helene.

Kaleska was used by Irma  as a messenger and lookout girl when Irma held lesbian orgies in 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 gas chamber to be killed. She also beat her sexual subjects.

When a handsome Georgian man refused Grese’s  advances toward him, 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 who was 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 and 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 Grese performed telephone duties,  then she was transferred as a sort of light punishment to be in charge of the kommando which  carried stones from the 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 8 weeks from the 15th of May to July  9, 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 the age of 20 Grese would  become the senior guard of Birkenau’s Lager or Camp “ C “ supervising 6 or 7 female guards  who changed every week. Camp C consisted of 28 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 overcrowded, that Grese  had 1000 prisoners in each block.

In some of the blocks there were bunks large enough  for five people to sleep in, but in most of the blocks there were neither beds nor bunks. In Grese’s Lager C there were approximately 30,000 prisoners, all of whom were Hungarians,  whilst the Blockältesten were Czechoslovaks. The Blockältester, block or barracks leader,  was an inmate who had to ensure that rules were followed in the individual barracks  and was also responsible for the prisoners in the barracks.

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 it. 

However, she went on using her whip anyway. The most frequent reasons to whip the 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  for whipping was that they were running to and from and she could not count them properly. Her other specialty in making these roll calls as difficult as possible was to  order the prisoners to stand holding a large stone above their heads in each hand  and if they faltered, she would beat them.

On one occasion the prisoners cut up their  blankets and made shoes or jackets of them. Grese gave strict orders to return  all sort of things produced out of these blankets at once. But because nothing  was returned, she ordered the 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 the prisoners with her walking stick. Grese’s 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 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. The female prisoners that 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 prisoner named  Alice Tenenbaum, then 14 years old, who was sent to the gas chamber by Josef Mengele  16 times and every one of those times Grese would save her by going into the gas chamber and taking  Tenenbaum out. After the war, Alice learned, 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 dogs at her side accompanying  the female inmates on their 16-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, 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 smile on her face.

Sometimes when Grese went  out with her working parties, she used to beat women and kicking  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. And 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’s 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. ” However, 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 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.

Those who collapsed or could not keep pace,  were shot by the SS. The prisoners got almost no food during these death marches and there was  no food when they arrived at the camp either. According to the 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 3 and half centimeters of bread a  day.

Sanitary conditions at Bergen Belsen 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, the 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 17th of April 1945, 2 days after Bergen  Belsen’s liberation, Irma Grese was captured by the British forces together with her fellow  Nazi criminal colleagues such as Josef Kramer, the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and  the last commandant of Bergen Belsen. Grese and other SS female guards were temporarily  imprisoned in a Wehrmacht panzer training academy about three kilometers from Belsen.

At this  time when she was interviewed by an English journalist who asked her why she had committed the  crimes she had, Irma unashamedly replied, “It was our duty to exterminate anti-social elements  so that Germany’s future would be assured. ” Justice finally caught up with Grese  when she was tried at the Belsen Trial which began on the 17th of 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, exaggerating and making an elephant out of a small fly.

Grese only admitted to the beatings, but never killing anyone. However, 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 22 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 20th century.

There were no tears shed for Irma Grese. Thanks for watching the World History  Channel be sure to like And subscribe and click the Bell notification  icon so you don't miss our next episodes we thank you and we'll  see you next time on the channel.