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Irma Grese
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Irma Grese | |
|---|---|
 SS Helper, Guard and then Senior Supervisor at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen  |
Irma Grese (born October 7, 1923 at Wrechen near Pasewalk, Mecklenburg – died December 13, 1945 Hameln) was employed at the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Dubbed the "Beast of Belsen" by camp inmates for her cruel and perverse behaviour, she is one of the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals.
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Irma Grese was born to Alfred Grese, a dairy worker and a member of the Nazi Party 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 fifteen, due to a combination of a poor scholastic aptitude, being bullied by classmates, and a fanatical preoccupation with the 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 sanatorium of the SS for two years and unsuccessfully tried to find an apprenticeship as a nurse, after which she worked as dairy helper.
In 1942, aged eighteen, Grese volunteered for a position of SS Female Helper, training at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her father did not approve of her new career, and ordered her to stay away from their house.[1]
Having completed the training in March 1943, Grese was transferred as a female guard to Auschwitz, and by the end of that year she was Senior Supervisor, the second highest ranking woman at the camp, in charge of around 30,000 Jewish female prisoners.
In January 1945, Grese briefly returned to Ravensbrück before ending her wartime career at Bergen-Belsen as a Work Service Manager from March to April, being captured by the British April 17, 1945, together with other SS personnel who did not flee. Grese was among the 44 people 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.
Survivors provided extensive details of murders, tortures, cruelties and sexual excesses engaged in by 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, and her selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. After a fifty-three day trial, Grese was sentenced to hang.
Grese 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 women to death and whipped others using a plaited whip.[2]
Grese and eleven others were convicted of crimes committed at both Auschwitz and Belsen and sentenced to die. Her subsequent appeal was rejected. The others included two other women, Juana Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath.
On December 13, 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!" - ("Quickly!").
Ilse Koch, nicknamed the "Bitch of Buchenwald"
- The Belsen Trial, Law-Reports of Trials of War Criminals, The United Nations War Crimes Commission, Volume II, London, HMSO, 1947, retrieved on 22 December 2006.
- Biography in GermanPDF (63.8 KiB)
- SS-Frauen am Galgen (German), max.mmvi.de, retrieved on 22 December, 2006.
- Irma Grese, Punishment U.K., retrieved on 22 December 22, 2006.
- Women guards in Bergen-Belsen, Scrapbookpages.com, retrieved on December 22, 2006.
- Irma Grese, Auschwitz.dk, retrieved on December 22, 2006.
- Auschwitz: Inside The Nazi State; Corruption: Episode 4, PBS.org, retrieved on December 22, 2006.
- Excerpts from The Belsen Trial - Part 5 of 5: Testimony of and concerning Irma Grese,The Nizkor Project, retrieved on December 22, 2006.