Irma Grese

Irma Ilse Ida Grese was born on 7 October 1923 in the village of Wrechen, part of Feldberg, to Alfred Anton Albert Grese and Berta Wilhelmine Winter. She was the third of five children, with siblings named Helene, Lieschen, Alfred, and Otto. Her father worked as a senior milker at a small dairy farm on the Wrechen Manor estate, which provided a modest living for the family. Her mother, a housewife, tended the family garden and kept a few animals. According to historian Daniel Patrick Brown, Berta was a troubled woman who struggled with the family’s financial insecurity. In late 1935, after discovering Alfred’s affair with the daughter of the local pub owner, she attempted suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid. She died a few months later, in January 1936. Irma, then twelve years old, found her mother’s body.

Accounts of Alfred’s character vary. Irma stated in 1943 that he was very religious and conservative, did not believe in Nazism, enjoyed drinking but was not an alcoholic, and had not physically abused his children. She also noted that he joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and became an Ortsgruppenleiter, though she described him as “not an extremist.” Irma joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel in 1937 or 1938. She later told survivor Magda Hellinger that she was proud of this because the organization was open only to “genuine” Aryans. This membership caused a rift with her father. According to Wrechen residents, Irma’s previously unremarkable personality changed during this time: she became more withdrawn, would stand on a hill and whistle like a boy, and showed no interest in interacting with peers, who allegedly bullied her.

She left school in 1938 at age fourteen and worked for six months at a dairy factory in Fürstenberg, then for another six months as a retail clerk in Lychen. The following year, she became an apprentice aide to an assistant nurse at the Hohenlychen Sanatorium, where SS personnel were treated. She was mentored by the director, Alter Kämpfer Karl Gebhardt, whom she later called a “saint” of the Nazi Party. She was let go in 1941 because she did not meet expectations, though she later claimed the Reichsarbeitsdienst prevented her from becoming a nurse. Gebhardt pitied her and gave her the contact information for a colleague at Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Grese was initially turned away from Ravensbrück’s training program because she was too young. She was told to return when she turned eighteen, six months later. She did not come back within that time because she took a job at another dairy farm from March 1941 to June 1942. In July 1942, she entered Ravensbrück as a trainee, completed the program in three weeks, and was given the title of Aufseherin. During her seven months there, earning fifty-four Reichsmarks per month, she was said to have excelled.

In 1943, she visited her father Alfred, who had remarried in 1939 to a widow with four children. She wore her SS uniform. Alfred was initially impressed, as Irma had not told him about the violence she inflicted on prisoners. His opinion changed when his stepdaughter came to him in tears because Irma had torn the head and limbs off her doll, and his young son playfully aimed Irma’s revolver at him. Alfred took the revolver and struck Irma with it. At the Belsen trial, Irma’s sister Helene said she had not seen their father act violently toward Irma, but she had heard them argue because Irma was in the Schutzstaffel. Irma returned to Ravensbrück immediately after this incident, her final visit home, and spent the rest of her time there overseeing work details until March 1943, when she was transferred to Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

At Birkenau, she was assigned to “Camp B” and worked as a telephone operator in a Blockführer’s office. She allegedly committed a violation while on this assignment, leading to her transfer to oversee a Strafkommando (punishment detail). During the Belsen trial, she claimed she oversaw this section for only two days, but Kapo Helena Kopper argued that Grese was in charge for seven months and was responsible for at least thirty prisoner deaths per day. Over the next few months, she was given various duties. In autumn, she led a gardening squad before taking over as mail censor from Aufseherin Elisabeth Volkenrath in December. At age twenty, she was promoted to Oberaufseherin and performed satisfactorily. In May 1944, she was given authority over “Camp C,” which contained 31 huts and held about 30,000 prisoners.

She became widely known as the “Hyena of Auschwitz” and the “Beast of Belsen” for the atrocities she committed during her service. Following the Allied occupation of Nazi Germany in April 1945, she was found guilty of war crimes involving the torture and murder of Jewish prisoners at the Belsen trial and sentenced to death by hanging. At age 22, she was the youngest woman to be judicially executed under British law in the twentieth century.