Irma Grese

Irma Ilse Ida Grese was born on 7 October 1923, in , a rural village in Feldberger Seenlandschaft, to parents Alfred Anton Albert Grese and Berta Wilhelmine Winter. She was the third of five children, the others being Helene, Lieschen, Alfred, and Otto. Alfred worked as a senior milker at the , a small dairy farm with two farmhands and a few cows that provided a modest income for the Grese family. Berta, a housewife, cared for the family garden and the few animals they had, including pigs, geese, and chickens. According to professor and author Daniel Patrick Brown, Berta was a "troubled woman" who struggled with the family's financial instability. In late 1935, she attempted suicide by ingesting hydrochloric acid after discovering Alfred's affair with the daughter of the local pub owner. Berta died months later, in January 1936. Grese, who was twelve years old at the time, found her mother dead. There are conflicting accounts of Alfred's personality and role as a father in Grese's life. Irma stated in 1943 that he was "very religious and conservative and did not believe in Nazism". She also noted that Alfred enjoyed drinking but did not have alcoholism, had not physically abused his children, had joined the Nazi Party in 1937, and had become an (though he was "not an extremist"). Grese left school in 1938 at the age of fourteen and worked at a dairy factory in Fürstenberg for six months before moving on to work as a retail clerk in a small shop in Lychen for another six. Grese was hired the following year as an apprentice aide to an assistant nurse at the Hohenlychen Sanatorium, where SS personnel received treatment. She was mentored by director Karl Gebhardt, whom Grese later described as a "saint" of the Nazi Party. ==Work as a ==

KZ Ravensbrück (1942–1943) Grese was initially denied entry into Ravensbrück's training program. She met with Gebhardt's colleague and was instructed to come back when she turned eighteen, which was six months away. She did not return within the expected time frame; however, this was because she was hired to work at another dairy farm from March 1941 to June 1942. She completed the program in three weeks, after which she was given the title of . During her seven-month employment at the camp, where she received fifty-four Reichsmarks per month, she was claimed to have excelled her superiors. Grese went to see her father Alfred in 1943, who had remarried in 1939 to a widow with four children of her own, Grese returned to Ravensbrück immediately following the incident (her final return home), and spent the rest of her time at the concentration camp overseeing work details until March 1943, when she was transferred to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. KZ Auschwitz II-Birkenau (1943–1945) Grese was assigned to "Camp B" after arriving at Birkenau in March 1943, where she worked as a telephone operator in the office of a . She allegedly committed a violation while working on this assignment, prompting her to be transferred to oversee a (punishment detail). While she would claim during the Belsen trial that she only oversaw this section for two days, argued that Grese was in charge for seven months and was responsible for the deaths of at least thirty prisoners per day. Grese was assigned various duties within the camp over the next few months. In the autumn, she led a gardening squad before taking over as mail censor from Elisabeth Volkenrath in December. Grese, who was 20 years old at the time, was promoted to , performing satisfactorily. In May 1944, Grese was given the authority to oversee "Camp C", which consisted of 31 huts and held approximately 30,000 Jewish women from Poland and Hungary. However, survivor Helen Spitzer Tichauer revealed in her 1945 testimony that Grese was insufficiently qualified to command this section of Birkenau alone. She was assigned to work alongside Luise Danz, a new transfer from the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. Survivor Edith Trieger also claimed Grese punched and kicked prisoners who attempted to flee the selection parades. Grese frequently ordered prisoners to "make sport", which referred to strenuous punitive exercises. Survivor Olga Lengyel made numerous claims about Grese's sexual relations with SS personnel and both male and female Jewish prisoners while at Birkenau. Grese allegedly had affairs with married physician Josef Mengele and Josef Kramer, but her relationship with the former ended when he discovered her illicit liaisons with women. Grese's sexual interactions with imprisoned Jewish women were sadistic in nature and frequent, according to a prisoner who had been appointed as her maid. Survivor Gisella Perl, who worked as a doctor at Birkenau, wrote in her own memoir that Grese experienced orgasmic pleasure while watching her operate on young women's breasts that had been cut open by Grese's whip and infected with lice or dirt, using only a knife and no anesthesia. Perl also stated that Grese would kick the young woman being operated on if her screams interfered with her arousal. Grese remained at Birkenau's "Camp C" until her brief transfer back to Ravensbrück on 18 January 1945, when all personnel were ordered to move westward due to the advance of Soviet forces. KZ Bergen-Belsen (1945) Grese's final assignment was to Bergen-Belsen in early March 1945. During her three-and-a-half week tenure, she served as (labor service leader) and (commander of ). She was not supposed to be assigned to Bergen-Belsen because Kramer planned to transfer her to another camp once she arrived. During the Belsen trial, Johanna Bormann testified that Grese and Hatzinger "were very close and regularly sneaked off secretly to have sex". Grese repeated the torturous and sadistic acts she committed at Birkenau in Bergen-Belsen. This included forcing prisoners to "make sport", which she justified during her trial because she believed the prisoners were "capable of partaking in such physical torment". ==Arrest and the Belsen trial==

British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. Grese and some other high-ranking SS officers chose to remain at the camp while Kramer issued the official call to surrender. Grese was said to have appeared arrogant when the British arrived at the camp and became hostile when she attempted to attack a British officer who entered one of the huts, causing her to be immediately restrained. Hatzinger died of typhus on 23 April 1945. Grese was arrested and imprisoned at the Wehrmacht Tank Training School, three kilometers from the camp, where she was interrogated for two days. Grese's trial in Lüneburg began on 17 September 1945, alongside 44 other defendants, and became known as the Belsen trials, even though the majority of the atrocities were committed at Birkenau. Grese faced two separate charges for war crimes committed at Bergen-Belsen and Birkenau between 1 October 1942 and 30 April 1945. Grese defended herself against these charges, saying, "Himmler is responsible for everything that has happened, but I suppose I am as much to blame as the others above me". Grese's cold, arrogant, and unremorseful demeanor persisted throughout the trial, with terse answers to questions such as "I should know better than you whether or not I had a dog, don't you think?" and "I wish you would stop repeating the word 'regularly'", alluding to the numerous accusations made against her for her repeated violent acts against the prisoners. Grese remained in the Lüneburg prison until 8 December, when she and the other ten guards sentenced to death were transferred to the Hamelin Prison. ==Execution==

Grese and two other SS women, Elisabeth Volkenrath and Johanna Bormann, were sentenced to death. Grese was heard sobbing in her cell before the execution. On the morning of 13 December 1945, she was the second woman to be hanged by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Her final word was "" ("Quick"). Another source claims she had to be dragged "kicking" to the gallows. She was said to have been hanged first, as Pierrepoint wanted to "[spare] her any kind of trauma" because she was the youngest prisoner on the list to be executed, at 22 years old, but this was not the case. The original, dated and timed witnessed statements of the returned death warrants record that Volkenrath was the first to be executed at 09:34, Grese was the second at 10:03, and Bormann at 10:38. To prevent people from turning Grese—and the rest of the men and women executed that day—into martyrs, the President of the Court ordered that her body and all the others be buried in the courtyard of Hamelin Prison rather than the cemetery. It was in 1954 when the British vacated the site that all the remains were reburied in a single grave at Friedhof Am Wehl cemetery. The grave is unmarked to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. ==See also==