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Irma Grese

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File:Grese Irma.jpg
Irma Grese, in Celle awaiting trial, August 1945.

Irma Grese (October 7, 1923 Wrechen near Pasewalk (Mecklenburg) – December 13, 1945 Hameln) was a supervisor at the Nazi concentration camps at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Dubbed the "Bitch of Belsen" by camp inmates for her cruel and perverse behaviour, she is one of the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals.

Background

Irma Grese was born to Alfred Grese, a milker and a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) from 1937, and Berta Grese. Irma Grese had four siblings. In 1936, her mother committed suicide.

Grese left school in 1938 at the age of 15, due to a combination of a poor scholastic aptitude, being bullied by classmates, and a fanatical preoccupation with the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls, a Nazi female youth organization), of which her father disapproved. Among other casual jobs, she worked as an assistant nurse in the SS sanatorium for two years and unsuccessfully tried to find an apprenticeship as a nurse, after which she worked as dairy helper.

In 1942, at age 18, she volunteered for SS-Helferinnen (Female Helpers) training at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her father did not approve of her new career, and ordered her to stay away from their house.[1]

War crimes

Having completed the training in March 1943, she was transferred as a Aufseherin to Auschwitz, and by the end of that year she was Oberaufseherin (Senior Supervisor), the second highest ranking woman at the camp, in charge of around 30,000 Jewish female prisoners.

In January 1945 she briefly returned to Ravensbrück before ending her wartime career at Bergen-Belsen as an Arbeitsdienstführerin from March to April, being captured by the British April 17, 1945, together with other SS-personnel who did not flee. Miss Grese was among the 44 accused of war crimes at the Belsen Trial. She was tried over the first period of the trials (September 17 to November 17, 1945) and was represented by Major L. Cranfield.

The trials were conducted under British military law in Lüneburg, and the charges derived from the Geneva Convention of 1929 regarding the treatment of prisoners. The accusations against her centred on her ill-treatment and murder of those imprisoned at the camps, including setting dogs on inmates, shootings and sadistic beatings with a whip.

After a fifty-three day trial she was sentenced to hang. Survivors provided extensive details of murders, tortures, cruelties and sexual excesses engaged in by Irma Grese during her years at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. They testified to her acts of sadism, beatings and arbitrary shooting of prisoners, savaging of prisoners by her trained and half starved dogs, to her selecting prisoners for the gas chambers.

She was reported to have habitually worn heavy boots and carried a whip and a pistol. She used both physical and emotional methods to torture the camp's inmates and allegedly enjoyed shooting prisoners in cold blood. She beat some of the women to death and whipped others using a plaited whip.[2]

Execution

Grese and eleven others were convicted of crimes committed at both Auschwitz and Belsen and sentenced to death. Her subsequent appeal was rejected. The others included two other women, Juana Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath.

On 13 December 1945, in Hameln Jail, Grese was led to the gallows and hanged by noted British executioner Albert Pierrepoint, assisted by Regimental Sergeant-Major O'Neill, as the youngest woman to die judicially under English law in the 20th century. Her last spoken word was, "Schnell!" - ("Quick!").

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