The day the meanest woman in Germany died – Irma Grese

The day the most evil woman in Germany, Irma Grese, died remains a chilling chapter in history. In the context of Western standards of physical beauty, possibly no woman has been at the same time more beautiful and more evil than the Nazi guard Irmagrece. She was described by one of her surviving victims as a girl with a perfect body and angelic face who could show innocent and cheerful eyes.

Despite her outward appearance, she was capable of the most despicable acts against the women and men who fell under her power in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Today we will learn about everything Iragrese was capable of doing in the mere twenty-two years she was in this world before she was hanged on December 13, 1945. Her last word could define her atrocious temperament when they put the noose around her neck.

The imprisoned gynecologist Gisela Perl testified that she whipped young women until their breasts became infected. Gisela Perl was a Romanian Jewish doctor who survived Auschwitz, where she helped hundreds of women in the exercise of her profession with the most precarious resources. Her memoir, I was a Doctor in Auschwitz, published in New York in 1948, was one of the first written testimonies about atrocities committed against Jews and others in Nazi camps.

Pearl left one of the most heartbreaking accounts of the human condition of Irma Grese when she wrote about her stunning appearance. She noted that Grese was one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen, with a body that was perfect in every way. Her clear, angelic face and her blue eyes seemed like the most cheerful and innocent eyes one could imagine.

However, Irma Grese was simultaneously the most depraved, cruel, and imaginative pervert Perl had ever known. According to Pearl’s memoirs, Grese took pleasure in watching her operate on young women whose breasts had been previously opened by the warden with a whip and infected with dirt and lice. The gynecologist did not have anesthesia and could only use a kitchen knife for her surgeries.

When the patient screamed in agony, Grese kicked her so that she would not interrupt her excitement and climax of pleasure. Irma Ilse Ida Grese was born in the rural town of Wrechen in Mecklenburg on October 7, 1923, as the third of five children. Her parents were Alfred Anton Albert Grese and Berta Wilhelmine Winter, and her siblings included Helen, Leander, Alfred, and Otto.

During the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, her father worked as a milkman on a small dairy farm with a few cows at the Wrechen mansion house. This occupation provided a modest subsistence income for the family while her mother managed the household, the family garden, and domestic animals like chickens, geese, and pigs.

According to the writer Daniel Patrick Brown, the marriage was poor and troubled, burdened by a violently tempered father and a mother overwhelmed by economic difficulties. The hard life, her timidity as a child, and the family abuse at a young age fostered an early brutal character in Irma Grese. Over time, she would transform into one of the cruelest women of the entire Nazi era.

As a child, she grew up withdrawn and timid, becoming an easy target for school bullying that deeply affected her formative years. This constant mistreatment contributed to the hatred she would later manifest toward many other groups of people. She harbored intense prejudices, especially against those labeled as unworthy of living by the rapidly rising National Socialist movement.

These targeted groups included Jews, Slavs, communists, racial minorities, and individuals with orientations different from those considered normal by the regime. In the early 1930s, the Nazi party was already a powerful organization permeating all strata of German society. They successfully exploited the lingering resentment over the defeat in the First World War.

The Nazis skillfully sowed the idea that the military defeat and the humiliation of paying high war reparations were the product of treachery by bad Germans. This simplistic view was widely embraced by many German families, including that of Irma Grese, who viewed the Nazis as saviors. They believed the party would rescue Germany and avenge the ignominious humiliations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.

Taking national regeneration and extreme nationalism as their banner, the Nazis laid the foundations for the total control of German society. Alfred Grese and his daughter Irma eventually became two of the countless cogs in this massive totalitarian machine. At the end of 1935, her mother Berta decided to end her life by drinking hydrochloric acid after years of deep despair.

Irma, who was only twelve years old at the time, was the one who tragically found the lifeless body. The Nazis had come to power in 1933, beginning the dictatorial regime of Adolf Hitler, and Berta’s suicide added immense tragedy to the household. She did not die immediately, but instead suffered a horrendous agony for several months before passing away in January 1936.

Suddenly, a young Irma Grese had to face a life without a mother, with a father entirely unable to provide for his family with dignity, and with four starving siblings. Irma also suffered severe psychological trauma from discovering her mother after the ingestion of the acid. To help put food on the table, she took a job as a milkmaid’s helper at a very young age.

There are conflicting accounts regarding the conduct of Alfred Grese Senior as a father during these difficult years. Irma stated in 1943 that he was very religious and conservative and did not originally believe in Nazism. She also stated that Alfred consumed alcohol, although she did not call him an alcoholic, and added that he had not physically abused his children.

Alfred Grese joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1937, though without much initial conviction according to his daughter, and became a local group leader. However, some of Alfred’s subsequent behaviors cast doubt on this benevolent view presented by his daughter. Around 1937 and 1938, Irma joined the League of German Girls in direct defiance of her father’s wishes.

Toward the end of 1937 or the beginning of 1938, Irma joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female branch of the Hitler Youth organization. This organization was founded by the Nazi party to indoctrinate German boys and girls in national socialist ideology. It is claimed that Alfred Grese did not agree with his daughter’s decision, but Irma defied him and joined anyway.

Later, she told Jewish survivor Magda Hellinger that she was quite proud of her membership because the organization was exclusively open to genuine Aryans. Magda Hellinger, a prisoner of Auschwitz-Birkenau, survived until the age of ninety and passed away in 2006 after saving numerous women from certain death. She must have been one of the few Jewish women to whom Irma Grese ever confided.

From the moment she joined the League of German Girls, Irma Grese’s personality began to change noticeably. According to residents of her home village, she became much more reserved and would often stand on a hill and whistle like a child. She also showed no interest in interacting with local boys her own age who were supposedly interested in her romantic attention.

She left school at the age of fourteen and eventually took up a position as a nursing assistant at the SS sanatorium in Hohenlychen under Dr. Karl Gebhardt. Irma left school in 1938 and was initially employed for six months in a dairy company in the town of Fürstenberg. Later, she worked another semester as a nursing apprentice at the Hohenlychen sanatorium.

In Hohenlychen, she fell under the direct orders of Dr. Karl Franz Gebhardt, whom Irma Grese would later describe with profound admiration. This holy man, as Grese viewed him, was later hanged on June 2, 1948, as a war criminal for coordinating horrific medical atrocities. These experiments were perpetrated against captives of the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps to test surgical management of wounds.

Finally, Grese was dismissed from her job as a nursing assistant in 1941 for failing to meet professional expectations. Although she claimed years later that the compulsory labor service prevented her from continuing, Dr. Gebhardt helped his admirer. He provided her with the contact information of a colleague who worked at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Meanwhile, her father Alfred had shown little grief over his wife’s tragic death and remarried in 1939. Irma Grese was not very well received at Ravensbrück despite the recommendation of Dr. Gebhardt and was initially denied entry to the SS guard training program. She received the recommendation that she return six months later when she had finally turned eighteen.

Irma was completely penniless and could not afford to spend half a year without any income, so she found employment again at a dairy company. Taking advantage of her previous experience, this new occupation lasted for fifteen months between March 1941 and July 1942. World War II was in full swing, with the German army advancing deep into Soviet territory.

In July 1942, Irma Grese finally returned to Ravensbrück as an apprentice with the strong aspiration of becoming a guard at the all-women concentration camp. Located in Fürstenberg, Brandenburg, ninety kilometers north of Berlin, Ravensbrück was the second largest camp intended solely for women, second only to Auschwitz in occupied Poland.

In July 1942, having just turned eighteen, she successfully completed her rigorous SS guard training program in three weeks. That same summer, she received her title of Aufseherin at the Ravensbrück camp, where she was on duty for seven months earning a salary of fifty-four Reichsmarks per month. Her evaluations reported that she did her job with immense zeal.

Throughout the war, the Ravensbrück concentration camp housed approximately 132,000 women of various nationalities and backgrounds. This population included 48,500 Polish women, 28,000 Soviet women, 24,000 German and Austrian women, 8,000 French women, and thousands of others. Many prisoners were forced into brutal slave labor for the Siemens & Halske industrial corporation, manufacturing field telephones.

Between 1942 and 1945, severe medical experiments were carried out at Ravensbrück using the captives as human guinea pigs for testing sulfonamides. In 1943, during a rare military leave, her father hit her with his own pistol after discovering that she had brutally mutilated her stepsister’s wrist. Alfred Grese had also enlisted in the SS and married a widow with four children.

When the warden of Ravensbrück obtained permission to visit her family, Alfred Grese was extremely impressed by the drastic transformation his daughter had undergone. He witnessed the extreme violence she described as commonplace in the camp, in which she actively participated and seemingly enjoyed. The family visit almost ended in a violent brawl.

During the argument, Irma fought with one of her stepsisters and cruelly decapitated and tore off the arms and legs of one of her dolls. When the little girl cried to her father, one of Alfred’s stepchildren playfully pointed Irma’s gun at him. Alfred snatched the weapon away and struck his twenty-year-old daughter with the heavy butt of the gun.

This disturbing episode confirmed to Alfred Grese that his daughter had transformed into a truly malevolent being. Helen, Irma’s full sister, recalled this shocking episode during the Belsen trial, noting she had never seen their father act so violently before. Irma immediately returned to the Ravensbrück camp after the incident and never returned to her family home.

In March 1943, she continued her horrendous work until she was promoted and transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland. Upon arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Irma Grese was initially assigned to Camp B, where she worked as a telephone switchboard operator in an administrative office. However, she reportedly committed an infraction and was reassigned as a supervisor of a punishment detachment.

Although during the Belsen trials she claimed she was only in this punitive section for two days, the kapo Elena Copper testified that Grese was in charge for seven months. During this time, she was held responsible for the brutal deaths of at least thirty prisoners every day. A kapo was an inmate who worked for the captors by force or by volunteering.

In December 1943, at just twenty years old, she rose to the rank of Oberaufseherin, performing various tasks including postal duties. In May 1944, Irma Grese was put in charge of Camp C at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which consisted of thirty-one barracks where nearly 30,000 Jewish women were crammed together. Most of these prisoners were Polish and Hungarian women facing horrific daily conditions.

In her testimony given in 1945, the surviving prisoner Helen Spitzer-Tschuder stated that Grese was severely underqualified to run a camp of such magnitude. She was assigned to work alongside Luis Danz, a supervisor of guards transferred from the Płaszów concentration camp. In her role as commandant of Camp C, Grese committed most of her violent acts using a whip, a rubber truncheon, her dogs, and her pistol.

Irmagrese constantly harassed women who could not endure the grueling marches to which they were subjected daily. According to the testimony of survivor Luba Triszinska, two large and ferocious dogs were among the key accomplices Irma used to torment the prisoners. She kept these animals deliberately hungry so they would viciously attack prisoners who lagged behind.

These attacks occurred during long walks of more than fifteen kilometers that Grese forced the women to take to and from their slave labor sites. Triszinska, known as the Angel of Belsen for her kindness, testified that Grese used to ride a bicycle accompanied by these large dogs. Many women were too weak to keep up with the main column and suffered fatal wounds from the dogs.

During the Hungarian Jewish selections in 1944, Grese indiscriminately sent both healthy and sick individuals directly to the gas chambers. Male prisoners were also in the camp, and survivor Abraham Glinoviewevski testified that Grese sent both sick and healthy Hungarian Jews to their deaths. Survivor Ed Treg also noted that Irma would punch and kick inmates who tried to escape during selection parades.

Polish survivor Daniel Safran testified that Grese personally shot two young women who jumped out of a window at Camp A. According to investigator Wendy Sarahy, Grese felt a strong psychological compulsion to beat female prisoners and enjoyed having others witness her brutal assaults. Sarahy also noted that Grese delighted in inciting her dogs against inmates and kicking them with heavy boots until they bled.

Olga Lengel, from Hungary, was the only member of her family to survive imprisonment in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. In 1946, she published the book Five Chimneys, which recorded numerous testimonies about Grese’s cruel depravities with prisoners and SS staff. Grese liked to cultivate relationships with prisoners who seemed to be favorites, only to betray them by choosing them for the gas chambers.

An unconfirmed rumor also claims that Grese included among her numerous lovers the doctor Josef Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death of Auschwitz. Apparently, this relationship ended when Mengele learned of Grese’s scandalous promiscuity with both male and female staff members. When she became pregnant by one of her lovers, she forced the gynecologist Gisela Perl at gunpoint to perform a clandestine abortion.

Pregnant prisoners were routinely executed or sent to Dr. Mengele for his horrific medical experiments. On January 18, 1945, Grese accompanied the forced evacuation march from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück, and by March she arrived at Bergen-Belsen. She fought fiercely to stay there so as not to be separated from her SS lover, Franz Staudegger.

Grese remained at Auschwitz until the Soviet Red Army advanced westward, forcing the massive evacuation. Wanting to stay close to her lover, SS officer Franz Staudegger, she secured a transfer to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Lower Saxony. This assignment would be Irma Grese’s final posting within the SS administrative system, where she was appointed labor service leader.

In Belsen, a deadly typhus epidemic was already ravaging the camp population while Grese continued ordering punitive exercises until prisoners collapsed. British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, and Grese was arrested two days later on April 17. British officers and soldiers could not believe the catastrophic human suffering they witnessed upon entering the gates.

Thousands of human skeletons wandered around the compound with the last reserves of energy, destroyed by extreme hunger, mistreatment, and rampant disease. To impress upon the local German population the reality of the atrocities, British officers forced civilians from nearby towns to witness the horrific conditions. Meanwhile, the typhus epidemic claimed the life of Franz Staudegger on April 23, just days after Grese’s arrest.

Grese was reportedly arrogant and hostile when British forces arrived, even attempting to attack an allied officer during her initial apprehension. She was placed under arrest at a German army tank training school near the camp and later transferred to face justice. Her trial began in the city of Lüneburg on September 17, 1945, alongside forty-four other defendants in what became known as the Belsen trial.

Identified as defendant number nine, survivors referred to her as the hyena of Auschwitz, while the international press dubbed her the beautiful beast. Throughout the lengthy trial, she appeared remarkably cold, defiant, and completely devoid of remorse. When facing war crimes charges, she remarked that while Hitler was responsible, she was just as guilty as those above her.

The only moment of vulnerability she showed during the entire proceeding was when her sister Helen recounted the violent family altercation from 1943. On November 17, 1945, the military court sentenced Irma Grese to death by hanging. She spent her final weeks awaiting the verdict on her clemency appeal, which was ultimately denied by the authorities.

On the morning of December 13, 1945, she was led to the execution chamber at Hamelin prison by the famous British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. At 10:03 a.m., the noose was placed around her neck, and her final recorded word before her death was the German word for fast. Her execution was swiftly carried out, and her body was buried in an unmarked grave to prevent the site from becoming a shrine for neo-Nazis.