She Laughed—Then Cried Begging for Mercy: Nazi Guard Irma Grese D

15 April 1945, Bergen-Belsen, Northern Germany. British soldiers advance through a Nazi   concentration camp where the living and the  dead lie together, where the smell of decay   hangs in the air and silence is broken  only by the weak voices of survivors.   Thousands of unburied bodies cover the ground,  while tens of thousands of starving prisoners   stare in disbelief at the men who have arrived  too late to save most of them.

Disease, hunger,   and neglect have already done their work,  turning Bergen-Belsen into a horrific place   beyond imagination. Among the SS personnel  captured inside this concentration camp   stands one of the most notorious female  guards of the Nazi camp system. She is   known as the Beast of Belsen or Hyena of  Auschwitz, but her real name is Irma Grese.

Irma Ilse Ida Grese was born as the third of  five children on 7 October 1923 in the village   of Wrechen in Northern Germany. Her father  Alfred worked as a milker on a small estate   and her mother Berta managed the household,  cared for the children, and tended a small   garden that helped sustain the family.

The Grese  household lived modestly, but poverty was not   the only hardship. The emotional atmosphere was  tense and unstable, shaped by rigid discipline,   silence, and conflict. Irma’s father Alfred was a  deeply religious, conservative, and authoritarian   man who showed little affection toward his  children but demanded complete obedience.  In January 1936, when Irma was twelve years old,  her mother committed suicide after discovering   her husband’s affair with a younger woman from  the local area.

Young Irma found her mother dead   and this moment shattered what little sense of  security remained in her childhood. The loss   was not followed by comfort or support, instead,  the household became colder and even more rigid.   Raised alone by her father, Irma grew up under  strict control and constant judgment. Alfred   rejected Nazism and despised the Nazi regime,  which was in power in Germany since 1933,   but his opposition did not translate into  emotional protection for his children.

Discipline was enforced with violence,  and fear became part of everyday life.  At school, Irma performed poorly, was bullied  by other children and withdrew further into   herself. According to her sister Helene, Irma  lacked confidence and avoided confrontation,   often running away rather than standing up  for herself.

She appeared isolated, resentful,   and increasingly detached. In 1938, at the age of  fourteen, she left school without qualifications.   Her childhood effectively ended there, and she  began a series of unskilled jobs, first working on   farms and later as a shop assistant, moving from  place to place without stability or prospects.  Around this time, Irma joined the League of  German Girls, the female youth organisation   of the Nazi Party.

For her, membership offered  something her family never had: structure,   belonging, praise, and a sense of importance. The  organisation promoted racial pride, obedience,   and loyalty to state, values that replaced to Irma  the religious authority of her father. Wearing   the uniform and taking part in collective  activities gave her identity and purpose. In 1939, at the age of 15, Irma began working as  a nursing assistant at Hohenlychen Sanatorium near   Berlin, where SS personnel were treated.

The  sanatorium was part of the Nazi medical system   and served elite members of the regime. It was  directed by Karl Gebhardt – the personal physician   of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. Gebhardt  was a prominent Nazi doctor who, during the Second   World War, which began on 1 September 1939, played  a central role in criminal medical experiments on   inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Irma admired him deeply and later described this   war criminal as a saint of the Nazi movement.  Under his influence, she absorbed the idea   that suffering could be justified in the name of  ideology and duty. She hoped to become a trained   nurse, imagining a future of respect and status.  However, she once again failed academically and   lacked the qualifications required and in 1941 she  was dismissed and sent to work at a dairy factory.

Gebhardt, however, took pity on Grese and  since Nazi Germany needed more concentration   camp guards, he gave her the contact of a  colleague at Ravensbrück concentration camp,   located around 8 miles from Hohenlychen. After the outbreak of the Second World War,   German society grew increasingly radicalized.

The  Nazi regime rapidly expanded its camp system and   required thousands of new guards – men and women –  willing to carry out terror without hesitation or   restraint. In July 1942, at the age of eighteen,  Irma Grese entered Ravensbrück as a trainee guard.  Grese completed her training quickly and soon  she was promoted.

She received a regular salary,   better living conditions, and a sense of power  she had never known before. She impressed her   Nazi superiors not only with discipline but also  with harshness and brutality against the inmates.   During a visit home in 1943, while she was  wearing her SS uniform, a violent confrontation   erupted with her father after he realised the  nature of her work.

When he understood that she   had voluntarily joined the Nazi camp system, he  struck her and expelled her from the house. This   was the final break – Irma Grese never returned  home again and severed ties with her family.  In March 1943 she was transferred  to Auschwitz-Birkenau,   located in German-occupied Poland.

Birkenau was the largest of the more   than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up  the Auschwitz complex and served as the   centre of the mass murder of European Jews. Gas  chambers, crematoria, forced labour, starvation,   and terror defined daily life in the camp. Grese  initially worked in administrative roles but   soon took command of punishment and labour  details.

She discovered that in Auschwitz,   violence was not only permitted but encouraged.  By May 1944, at only twenty years old, she was   again promoted and was given authority over Camp  C, a section holding up to 30,000 Jewish women.  Here, Irma Grese’s brutality reached its peak.  Survivors described her as one of the most feared   guards in the camp.

She carried a whip made  of plaited cellophane, translucent like glass,   designed so that blood could be washed off easily.  She beat prisoners daily for minor infractions   or for no reason at all. Hunger, exhaustion, and  sickness offered no protection. She kicked women   until they collapsed, carried a pistol during  selections and shot prisoners who tried to escape.   She forced starving women to stand for hours  during roll calls, often from early morning   until daylight, holding heavy stones above  their heads, and punished those who faltered.

Grese’s favourite habit was to beat women until  they were bleeding and fell to the ground and   then she kicked them as hard as she could with  her heavy boots. Masha Greenbaum remembered:   “When we saw her, we used to run, run, just run.  Because when she met you, she kicked you to the   floor. And then she went to the neck with her  boots, and she just killed people like that.

”  Grese regularly took part in selections for  the gas chambers, often alongside infamous SS   doctor Josef Mengele. Survivors testified that  she sent both sick and healthy women to their   deaths in the gas chambers. These decisions  were arbitrary and cruel. She recorded the   murders bureaucratically as “special treatment”.

Women were paraded naked, inspected like animals,   and beaten if they resisted or attempted to flee.  Prisoners who tried to escape selections were   dragged back, whipped, kicked, and beaten until  they bled, before being sent back into line.  Irma Grese was also widely remembered as a sexual  deviant. Multiple survivors testified that she   engaged in sadistic sexual relationships with both  male SS personnel and female Jewish prisoners.

She abused women sexually and exploited  her absolute power over their bodies   and lives. She treated some as temporary  possessions, and when she grew bored of them,   selected them for death during the next selection.  Grese also abused male prisoners. When a handsome   Georgian man rejected her advances, she publicly  tortured his girlfriend – dragging her by the   hair and whipping her. He was then executed,  and the woman was sent to the camp brothel.

She also had affairs with SS officers, including  infamous Angel of Death – Josef Mengele. When   he discovered that she was having affairs with  Jewish inmates, who were deemed racially inferior,   he ended his intimate relationship with her. One  of her lovers was commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau   Josef Kramer.

Grese had so many lovers that at  one point, she developed sexually transmitted   diseases and according to Olga Lengyel, she  had numerous abortions. Doctor Gisella Perl   performed one of these abortions and Irma’s  only concern was the “pain” she would feel.  Because of her appearance and cruelty, prisoners  gave her nicknames that became infamous:   the “Hyena of Auschwitz” and the “Beautiful  Beast.

” These names reflected the contrast   between her youthful, attractive appearance and  her extreme brutality against the prisoners.  Thanks to the possessions looted from murdered  prisoners, Irma Grese wore elegant clothes from   across Europe. Her favourite outfit was  a sky-blue jacket with a dark blue tie,   tailored by Jewish inmates at Birkenau.

She often  spent hours styling herself in front of a mirror,   dreaming of fame. She once declared, “After  the war, I am going to be in films. You will   see my name as a star on the screen. I  know life and I have seen many things.   I feel my experiences will be useful in my  career as an artist.” But she was wrong! In January 1945, as Soviet forces approached  Auschwitz, Grese took part in the evacuation   of the camp, escorting prisoners on death marches  westward.

Those who collapsed from exhaustion were   shot on the spot. In March 1945 she arrived at  Bergen-Belsen, a camp overwhelmed by starvation,   disease, and mass death as tens of thousands  of prisoners were dying from typhus, hunger,   and neglect. Holocaust survivor Dita Kraus, who  was among the prisoners liberated at Bergen-Belsen   described seeing a group of women squatting around  a pot in which they had cooked a human liver.

Even   there, Grese kept mistreating the prisoners who  according to her own words “were so dirty and   ill“ until the bitter end. Survivors  recalled her beating emaciated prisoners,   forcing them to perform exhausting exercises she  called “making sport”, and punishing women only   days before liberation.

Prisoners remembered  that shortly before the Allied forces arrived,   Grese knocked the heads of two starving sisters  together for trying to eat potato peels. Despite   serving there only three and a half weeks,  her cruelty was so intense that inmates   immediately named her the “Beast of Belsen”. On 15 April 1945, British forces liberated   Bergen-Belsen. 13,000 corpses lay unburied  among the living.

Grese was arrested two   days later and forced, together with other SS  personnel, to help bury the dead in mass graves.   They were given starvation rations, not allowed to  use gloves or other protective clothing, and were   continuously shouted at and threatened to make  sure that they did not stop working. Survivors   later recalled that enraged prisoners pushed her  head into a camp toilet, a moment of humiliation   that starkly contrasted with the power she had  once exercised over prisoners’ life and death.

Justice finally caught up with Irma Grese  when she was tried at the Belsen Trial   which began on 17 September 1945. During  the proceedings, Grese sometimes laughed   so hard that she had to lean forward in the  prisoners’ box to try to control herself.   This also occurred during the testimony of the  wife of Josef Kramer – Irma‘s former lover and   once camp commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and  Bergen-Belsen.

Kramer‘s wife said that when her   husband used to come home from his day’s work at  Auschwitz, he used to pace the floor at night,   and tormented by the fact that the Nazi commanders  were having people put to death in gas chambers,   he cried “Why, Why, Why.“ Grese responded to this  emotional account with uncontrollable laughter,   and as Kramer’s wife left the courtroom, she  was slapped in the face by a Polish woman.

Throughout the rest of the proceedings,  Irma Grese appeared cold, arrogant, and   detached. She laughed during testimonies of the  survivors, corrected prosecutors with irritation,   and answered questions in a sharp, defensive tone.  When survivors described beatings, shootings,   and selections, she showed no visible remorse  and dismissed accusations as exaggerations,   claiming that prisoners were disciplined only  because they disobeyed orders.

Her lack of   empathy shocked observers and drew intense  attention from the international press,   which focused on the contrast between her youth,  appearance, and her crimes. Only once did her   composure break. When her sister Helene testified  about their family life and described the violent   conflict between Irma and their father, Grese  collapsed into tears and sobbed uncontrollably.

This moment revealed that her emotional  vulnerability was reserved not for her victims,   but only for her own past and family. On 17 November 1945, the British Military   tribunal sentenced Irma Grese to death. After the  verdict was pronounced, she cried continuously,   her eyes were red and sunken and she was extremely  nervous.

Irma Grese, however, decided to fight for   her life and begged for mercy asking for clemency  but in early December field marshal Montgomery   rejected all appeals and ordered Grese, Kramer  and others to be hanged. When she was hanged by   British executioner Albert Pierrepoint at Hameln  prison on 13 December,1945, she was 22 years old. Walking to the gallows her final and only  word was “schnell” meaning quickly.

Grese   was the youngest woman to die judicially  under British law in the 20th century. Thanks for watching the World History  Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe   and click the bell notification  icon so you don’t miss our next   episodes. We thank you and we’ll  see you next time on the channel.