Beauty and The Beast Within: Irma Grese
- Tammy Lee
- Apr 9
- 7 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
‘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 and imaginative pervert I ever came across.’
(Dr. Gisella Perl)
Irma Ilse Ida Grese was born on 7th October 1923, in the rural village of Wrechen in Mecklenburgische, Seenplatte. Her mother, Berta, was a troubled woman and, in 1935 drank hydrochloric acid in an attempted suicide after discovering her husband Alfred’s affair with the local pub landlord's daughter. A year later, a 12-year-old Grese found her mother dead.
Alfred joined the Nazi party in 1937, although Grese later said that he was ‘very religious and conservative and did not believe in Nazism.’
Around the same time Alfred joined the party, Grese joined the Bund Deutscher Madel, The League of German Girls, the only girls branch of the Nazi Youth. She later told Magda Hellinger she was proud of this as only ‘genuine’ Aryans could join.
At 14, she left school and worked at a dairy factory for 6 months before working in a shop for another 6 months.
In 1939, she began working as an apprentice aide to an assistant nurse at Hohenlychen Sanatorium, a place for the SS to be treated. Her mentor was Karl Gebhardt, who described her as a ‘saint’ of the Nazi party. She was let go in 1941, but Gebhardt, feeling sorry for the young woman, told her to contact someone she knew. The contact worked at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Around 10% of concentration camp guards were women, and in July 1942, Grese became one of them. She completed the training program in just 3 weeks and was given the title Aufscherin.
In March 1943, she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
During this time, Grese visited her father, but he was disgusted with what she was doing, and the relationship became increasingly strained. This upset Grese greatly.
While working at Auschwitz-Birkenau, it didn’t take long for Grese to be promoted to second in command, working in section C. Section C was a prison for between 20,000 and 30,000 female inmates – plenty for Grese to choose from.
‘The beautiful Irma Griese [sic] advanced towards the prisoners with a swinging gait, her hips in play, and the eyes of forty thousand wretched women, mute and motionless, upon her...those who, despite hunger and torture, still evidenced a glimmer of their former beauty were the first to be taken.’
(Five Chimneys: The True Chronicle of a Woman Who Survived Auschwitz by Olga Lengyel.)
Grese would abuse the prisoners for her own pleasure, using her weapons of choice: a pistol, a horsewhip, jackboots and her dogs. She would mercilessly whip the women with a plaited whip. She particularly liked beating their breasts until the skin would split. Gisella Perl, a trained doctor who was a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau, recalled that she was often forced to operate on these women afterwards with an unsterilised knife and no anaesthetic.
She said: ‘Irma Grese invariably arrived to watch the operation, kicking the victim if her screams interfered with her pleasure and giving herself completely to the orgasmic spasms which shook her entire body and made saliva run down from the corner of her mouth. Irma Grese was enjoying the sight of this human suffering. Her tense body swung back and forth in a revealing, rhythmical motion. Her cheeks were flushed, and her wide-open eyes had the rigid, staring look of complete sexual paroxysm. She did this on multiple occasions so she could relive this sadistic moment repeatedly. She always came to watch the operations of these women whose breasts had been slashed open and had become infected with the lice and dirt which pervaded the women’s camp.’
Grese would often force prisoners to kneel or stand holding heavy rocks above their heads for hours on end. Some women were made to stand outside at night, especially in the rain, ice and snow.
Using her dogs to terrify the women was something Grese took immense pleasure in, deliberately starving the creatures to increase their aggression. Judith Strick-Dribben, a former inmate and author of A Girl Called Judith Strick, recalled an event regarding the Strafkommando (punishment detail): ‘We were loading the lorries. Before noon, we had an unexpected visitor: Aufseherin Irma with her two leashed dogs, Frau Aufseherin Irma, blonde, with an angel face and snake eyes, the camp’s chief torturer. We were very careful not to attract her attention. We pushed and pushed. It seemed to take an eternity to roll the car over the hill. The next team was unable to coordinate its efforts. They were completely unnerved by our visitor. They hesitated and lost control of their wagon. It swayed, bowled down the hill, and capsized, scattering stone over the whole area. The prisoners were completely broken in spirit. Aufseherin Irma sicced the two police dogs on them. The girls tried to escape their fangs, but the trained killers easily overtook them. One grabbed a Polish woman who slipped on a rock. The other fell upon a Russian girl. At Irma’s orders, the Kapos’ underlings beat and kicked the girls still untouched by the dogs. The Kapo [an inmate overseer] wrote down the numbers of the delinquent team. The dogs were tearing at the girls’ bodies. Irma came closer to observe what they were doing. Her eyes were bloodshot. The sight of the blood seemed to intoxicate her. She panted. She was sexually excited—everybody could see that. We stood in a trance, as at a gladiatorial combat’
Grese was promiscuous during these times, having various one-night stands as well as a long-running affair with the infamous Joseph Mengele, who performed some of the most horrific experiments on people, men, women and children. One-night stands with SS officers often took place.
According to Germaine Tillion, author of Ravensbrück: ‘Sexual relations between the SS and prisoners were strictly prohibited … but it seemed that liaisons between SS of opposite sexes were encouraged, and they lived in a kind of promiscuity some might call ‘primitive,’ although their situation was anything but primitive. It appeared that all the Aufseherin, married or unmarried, had one or more constant SS lovers. And, so it seemed, they never overlooked an opportunity to talk comparisons with their colleagues. In addition to the lovers and the shop talk, their diversions (especially around solstices and equinoxes) were monstrous eating and drinking bouts, after which they were so far gone that men and women were unable to recall with whom they had spent the rest of the night.’
Her appetite wasn’t sated by consensual sex, often raping male and female prisoners. One male prisoner tried to refuse Grese’s advances. In retaliation, she dragged the woman he loved, naked and by the hair, across the yard before torturing her, all in front of him. This ended with him being shot and the woman forced to work in the brothel that was provided for SS officers.
In March 1945, she was sent to work as command leader at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the same place where Anne Frank died. The British liberated the camp the following month.
The British were horrified at the conditions in the camp. Prisoners were dangerously emaciated, many lying sick and dying. There was even evidence of cannibalism where the starving prisoners had eaten parts of corpses out of desperation.
The female camp officers were forced to bury all of the corpses lying around the camp, an unbelievable 10,000 of them. When searching the officers' living quarters, there were rumours that the soldiers found lamps made from human skin in Grese’s hut (although there is a good chance that this isn’t true).
Grese never once showed any remorse for her terrible crimes. Following her arrest, she said, ‘It was our duty to exterminate anti-social elements so that Germany’s future would be assured.’
Grese pleaded not guilty at the trial, saying, ‘Himmler is responsible for all that has happened, but I suppose I have as much guilt as the others above me.’
War crimes prosecuted, Colonel Backhouse said of Grese, ‘When she was a child, she was a frightened child and a little coward who ran away, and she adopted this doctrine of Nazism which turns the coward into a bully. She went to Ravensbrück and there she found her courage because people did not hit back.’
The only time Grese showed emotion during the trial was when her sister Helene was called as a character witness. As Helene talked about the strained relationship between her sister and father, Grese openly sobbed.
The court heard that Grese was part of the selection process, choosing who went to work at the camps, and who went straight to their death. She was personally responsible for the deaths of around 30 people a day. Grese tried to protect herself, saying she was conscripted to work at the concentration camps and that she had no choice, but records showed otherwise.
On November 17th, 1945, Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang until death.
Famous British hangman Albert Pierrepoint was flown over to carry out the executions on Thursday, 13th December 1945.
Pierrepoint’s biography, he describes the events leading up to Irma’s execution and the hanging itself as follows:
‘At last, we finished noting the details of the men, and RSM O’Neil ordered ‘bring out Irma Grese’. She walked out of her cell and came towards us laughing. She seemed as bonny a girl as one could ever wish to meet. She answered O’Neil’s questions, but when he asked her age, she paused and smiled. I found that we were smiling with her as if we realised the conventional embarrassment of a woman revealing her age. Eventually, she said ‘twenty-one,’ which we knew to be correct. O’Neil asked her to step onto the scales. ‘Schnell!’ she said – the German for quick.’
This beyond cruel woman, who had tortured others for what felt like a lifetime, got her wish of a quick death. It really feels (to me anyway) that justice wasn't served.
Legend says that her ghost still haunts the ground on which Belsen stood. If nothing else, her actions still haunt those who read about them.
Thanks for reading; please let me know what you think in the comments, take care of yourselves, and I will see you soon.
Hi! I spend a lot of time writing for the website, and I basically exist on caffeine and anxiety - if anybody would like to encourage this habit, please feel free to buy me a coffee!
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